The conscientious traveller - Module 6

C2 Proficiency · Gapped Text · Expert Proficiency Resource Book, Pearson Education

You are going to read an article about a journey. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap (1–7). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Step this way for an alternative economy

I remember the day I met an idealistic pilgrim

After two weeks of solid walking from his starting point in Bristol at a rate of around twenty-five miles a day, his discomfort was readily apparent, despite the sensible footwear. 'It's all right,' he said. 'I've got blisters but the boots are rubbing in some places.'

For Saoirse, both his pilgrimage and this website were only the first steps. His long-term vision was to nurture a money-free community where people would live and work and care for each other. Perhaps that was why when I first met him that day, he struck me as an idealist who was going to come unstuck somewhere along the way.

Was there a back-up plan if anything failed to materialise? He said he didn't really have one because that would be 'contrary to the spirit of the thing.' Was he prepared to be lonely, scared, threatened? He said he had spent the previous few months trying to work through the fear, but that he 'just had to do it.'

The Mahatma's exhortation to 'be the change you want to see in the world' had particular meaning for him. Then, a few years later, he was sitting with a couple of friends talking about world problems – overpopulation, war, famine etc – when it struck him that the root of all those things was the fear, insecurity and greed that manifests itself in our quest for money. He wondered what would happen if you just got rid of it.

Indeed, his faith in human kindness, rather surprisingly, seemed to know no bounds. I convinced myself, however, that ordinary folk he'd meet along the way would mostly see that he was sincere, if a little eccentric, and would respond to that.

I wondered if his mother at least shared some of these anxieties. All I learnt though was that she was, like his father, thoroughly supportive and was following his progress keenly through the website.

Perhaps it is, in fact, only in the contemporary western world of the selfish gene, that extreme altruism is, according to Richard Dawkins at least, 'misfiring'. Because, for all I'd heard there before me on a pavement in Brighton, I felt I still hadn't got to the bottom of what drove Saoirse on, however.

He was undertaking that extraordinary pilgrimage to promote the idea of 'Freeconomy', a web-based money-free community. What's more, he'd be relying just on the kindness and generosity of strangers and contacts that he'd made through the site. I pressed him for deeper reasons.

Mark Boyle, or Saoirse as he preferred to be called, had set out to walk 12,000 kilometres from his home in the UK to Gandhi's birthplace in India. His mission was to prove that his dream of living in a money-free community really did have legs. I met him in Brighton soon after the start of his epic journey. Obviously, I'd no sooner caught sight of him approaching than I'd started peering downwards, because he'd obligingly stuck out a sandal-clad foot to give me a closer look. 'The boys', as he called them on his blog, had become famous in their own right.

There was indeed plenty more in the world to worry about, yet something about this man – his gentleness, his over-active conscience, his poor feet – brought out all my maternal instincts. Saoirse, then twenty-eight, still had another two and a half years of walking ahead of him, carrying no money and very few possessions along a hair-raising route through Europe and central Asia, to his ultimate destination in India.

It had all begun, it transpired, when Saoirse (Gaelic for 'freedom' and pronounced 'seer-sha') was studying business and economics at Galway University. 'One day, I watched the film Gandhi, and it just changed the whole course of my life. I took the next day off lectures to start reading about him, and after that I just couldn't read enough, it made me see the whole world in a different way.'

The idea behind the website grew out of that seemingly simple proposition. You signed up and listed all the available skills and abilities and tools you had, and donated them to others. In return, you might make use of other people's skills: for example, people might borrow power tools, have haircuts or get help with their vegetable plots.

I asked anxiously about his planning for the journey, and he said that he was leaving it all in the hands of fate. So far, he had been to places where his friends and fellow Freeconomists could help him, so mainly he'd had help arranging for places to sleep and eat. Otherwise, he'd tried to talk to people, to explain what he was doing and hope that they would give him a hand. His T-shirt said, in big letters, 'Community Pilgrim'.

His itinerary was certainly challenging, and he didn't even have a single visa lined up. 'They don't give visas more than about three months in advance in a lot of countries,' he'd said, 'so I thought I would just go for it.' But I had my doubts whether some of the countries involved would let a westerner – even a gentle hippy such as Saoirse – in for free.

Once I had suppressed my concerns for his welfare, I found myself thinking that, actually, it is only our cynical, secular age that finds the notion of a pilgrimage odd. The idea of spiritual voyages seems to be built into almost every religion and, for many believers, Saoirse's faith that he'd be looked after, that everything would turn out OK, that what he was doing was a good thing to do for humanity – would not be odd at all. Most cultures accept the idea of a good person, a saint or a prophet.

After nearly an hour's talking, he was starting to look tired, but made one final attempt to explain. 'Look, if I've got £100 in the bank, and somebody in India dies because they needed some money, then, in a way, the responsibility of that person's death is on me. That's very extreme, I know, but I've got more than I need and that person needed it. And if you know that, then you've either got to do something about it, or you have to wake up every morning and look at yourself in the mirror.' His eyes were now red-rimmed, I think with emotion and exhaustion. We said our goodbyes. And I couldn't help noticing that he was limping. Those poor, poor feet.

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