The one hundred twenty-mile trip was through difficult country, and Modestine proved to be less than agreeable, too. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson, read by Billy Hartman, Naxos, 2hr 38min, 2 CDs £10. Stevenson History In 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson set out on a walking tour of the Cevennes behind Modestine, the donkey that carried his baggage.
It inspired John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, which became, to my mind, the best travel audiobook yet.
The result is a romantic, funny classic of travel literature that Billy Hartman’s soft Edinburgh accent suits very well. His 120-mile journey took him a dozen days, much of it spent cursing and goading the recalcitrant Modestine. To carry it he acquired Modestine, a “she-ass not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a kindly eye and a determined under-jaw a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance”. Like all novice travellers, he took too much with him, stuffed into a sheepskin-lined sleeping bag of his own design. Buy a discounted Paperback of Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes online. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go,” he says in his opening chapter. Booktopia has Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert-Louis Stevenson. So in that year he set off for his next foray - touring the mountainous Cévennes region in the Midi, sleeping under the stars and wandering at will. In 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson had published only one book, An Inland Voyage, the tale of a canoeing trip through France. Saturday March 10 2018, 12.01am, The Times
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