On Wednesday February 2nd 2000, in the drizzle and the gloom of a wintry Dutch dawn, Neil Robinson stepped off a P&O ferry in Rotterdam and took the first, confident steps of a journey that was supposed to take him all the way to Istanbul on foot. It was at this point that things began to go seriously wrong. Recurrent tendinitis, a severely strained achilles, the worst 'flu epidemic to hit the Odenwald in living memory and more blisters than a warehouse full of bubble-wrap all played their part in a journey which was destined, as most great journeys are, never to go quite according to plan.