Of all the titles Brandon Wilson has held in his 51 years, he's proudest to be called a pilgrim.

		On the Internet Brandon Wilson's adventures are detailed on his Web site, www.yakbutterblues.com, where his book can be ordered as well. The book also is available through major bookstores and book-selling Web sites.

The native of Moon is a writer and photographer, journalist, hiker, adventurer and compulsive traveler.

And in the past 20 years or so he's become a travel trendsetter of sorts, walking forgotten trails blazed over many centuries by religious pilgrims of several faiths.

"I call it 'ultra-light travel,' " he said. "Since 1992, when we walked the old path from Lhasa, Tibet, to Katmandu, Nepal, I've found pilgrimage is the most total immersion in the local languages, food, families and cultures you can experience. When you're walking, you see and hear and taste things you'd miss if you travel any other way."

Wilson's travel experience, like that of many Americans, dates from summertime cross-country auto trips wedged in the back seat between his two sisters.

"It got me going," he said. "We went to Canada, California, Florida, bickering over who had to sit in the middle."

During spring breaks from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, he holed up in fishing villages in Mexico and Jamaica.

He wrote about it all.

"It's always been writing for me, in one form or another," he said. As a freelance writer, consultant or head of his own business, he's written newspaper and magazine articles, ads, public relations copy, and TV and movie scripts. He has lived in Vail, Colo., San Diego, Alaska, and since 1985, Hawaii.

As a rule, freelance writers don't make much money, but their schedules are endlessly flexible. That's how Wilson developed his travel philosophy: Don't take anything you can't fit into a backpack. Stay a while. Keep to the inexpensive places where the locals sleep, eat, party and worship. Learn a few key words in the native language. Take good notes.

Wilson and his wife, Cheryl, have circled the world together. A 1989 stay in Eastern Europe landed them in Berlin in time for "the massive wall-falling party." In 1990, the pair booked a London-based group safari across Africa.

"It was our first time traveling with a group, and it was a terrible mistake," Wilson said. "From Morocco to Capetown, six months in a four-wheel drive, it sounded great. Until the truck broke down outside Timbuktu [in Mali]. We waited 10 days in the desert for a gearbox. We left them in Nairobi [in Kenya]. And just the two of us, we managed to raft the Zambesi River, and do the "gun run" in Mozambique. We learned some real survival skills, people skills. And we learned that once you leave that safe, secure bubble of organized travel, you get a totally different experience."

In other words: The lighter you travel, the fewer barriers stand between you and the country you're visiting.

Factor in Wilson's Quaker spirituality and bred-in-the-bone frugality, and taking pilgrimages is not that great a leap. "I read about an ancient Buddhist pilgrimage trail from Lhasa to Katmandu, 650 miles across the Himalayan plain," he said. "But in 1950 the Chinese invaded Tibet and closed the border to all but state-sponsored trips. Everyone told me that pilgrimage was impossible: the Chinese visa people used every excuse from avalanches to language barriers to water quality. But I knew I had to try. It seemed like such a great adventure. So we just flew to Katmandu. We were ready to just start walking, and sneak over the border if we had to."

He spins that hair-raising yarn in "Yak Butter Blues," a high-altitude tale of synchronicity, divine providence, begging monks, trigger-happy Chinese soldiers and dehydration. Wilson is now touring the United States promoting the book.

"Any Western sense of toughing things out, of muscling our way across a land as complex as utter darkness, soon fell by the wayside like exhausted matchsticks," he writes. "As time went on and vital supplies were lost or consumed, survival somehow became mysteriously linked with the uneasy idea of letting go. Perhaps it always has been. But leaps of faith have never given me much personal comfort. ... When life is bleakest, magic appears. It's a strange, exhilarating force, a peace. Obstacles vanish and hurdles disappear. We find water where there is none. Someone arrives out of nowhere offering shelter. Another shares his meager food. Another, his love."

The same sharing and kindness prevailed on other pilgrim trails Wilson discovered since: In 1999 he hiked the Camino de Santiago, a medieval Christian trek across Spain. In 2000 and 2002 he walked the Via Francigena, an almost-forgotten pilgrim path from England to Rome. In 2004 he walked St. Olav's Way, a 500-mile trek to a Norwegian holy shrine.

Holy journeys show pilgrims more than just their limits, he said. Pilgrims often travel without pre-planned accommodations or food supplies, living on faith, believing that daily needs somehow will be met. Telephones and day-planners have no place there. The silence and solitude turn the mind inward.

"It becomes a walking meditation," Wilson said. "You realize your life is fragile. You find deep meanings and connections to others, to the world around you. You get in touch with your physical, mental and spiritual self. It can sometimes become transcendent -- your blisters don't hurt anymore."

Wilson's interest in "holy walks" parallels a trend. The past 20 years have seen an upsurge in pilgrimage travel, most notably on the 550-mile Spanish Camino route.

According to statistics compiled by the cathedral shrine at Santiago de Compostela, 2,491 pilgrims made the 1,000-year-old trek in 1986. In 2003, they numbered 74,614. Their numbers outstrip the capacity of local hostels and monasteries to house them all, but the pilgrimage has proved a boon to rural economies. The Camino's success prompted the retracing of several other routes to Santiago, as well as other long-neglected pilgrim paths to Rome and even Jerusalem.

Today, Wilson is considered a latter-day pioneer of the Via Francigena. His contributions to online discussion groups have spurred other hardy souls to undertake the 1,000-mile-plus trek across five countries; the European Union has since designated it a treasure of Europe's cultural heritage and undertaken a program to mark the path for easier navigation.

What's next for Wilson?

"I have always wanted to walk to Jerusalem, but with Middle Eastern politics what they are, I have to question the wisdom of that," he said. "Just within the past two weeks, I've been asked by five people when I plan to walk the Shinto pilgrim path through Japan. So maybe I'll look into that. It sounds fascinating, doesn't it?"