[...] he once walked from Munich to Paris because he thought doing so would save the life of Lotte Eisner, the German film historian and critic, who was ill at the time. Herzog completed that journey, Eisner lived another nine years, and Herzog published a diary of his cross-continent trek, called Of Walking in Ice. When he’d passed through the town of Sontheim, Germany, Herzog wrote, “Spending the night is going to be difficult, the area is bad. Industry, smells of sewage, silo fodder, and cow dung.” A German Romantic but also a realist to the core, Herzog knows that epic journeys stink. He makes them because, as he told Les Blank in Burden of Dreams, “We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.” The sentiment calls to mind the sights and smells of his earlier trip more than what he found in the Amazon. In his films, as in his life, Herzog has crisscrossed vast distances to avoid bovine complacency and its associated stench.