DO YOU LIKE UNUSUAL TRAVEL STORIES?

Martin Kyrle was at Agincourt – not the battle, but at the official opening of the museum.  His travel anecdotes spanning seven decades will take you off the beaten track even if you’re familiar with the countries where they take place.

Islands off the coasts of France, Holland or in Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, castles in Estonia and Latvia, lakes in Lapland, Lithuania and Siberia, Roman amphitheatres in Libya, neolithic dolmens in Brittany or monastic ruins 8 miles out in the Atlantic off far SW Ireland.

Then being hospitalised in intensive care in the Canary Islands or facing a Force 8 gale on the ferry from Hong Kong to Macau.

Finding soldiers bivouacking in his hack garden prior to embarking for the Normandy Landings (but who hadn’t been told!), then trying to get to school during the ‘great freeze’ of 1947 contrast with exploring Mycenaean tombs in Cyprus or volunteering in a refugee camp in Austria and a workcamp in Poland.  Hitchhiking round North Cape at the top of Norway was quite tricky, too.  [Why go?  Well, it’s the northern limit of Europe and if you go any further you fall off…].

He had to mind his manners when, as a midshipman in the Special Branch stationed in Malta to decode top secret communications, the Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Lord Mountbatten, invited him to dinner.  At university in Southampton a contrasting challenge was singing a duet from La Bohème in front of a couple of hundred disbelieving fellow students who’d sneered that although he and his fellow artistes could sing Gilbert & Sullivan they couldn’t sing ‘real’ opera.  After that, getting lost on a train in Western Bosnia, being locked in a church in rural Devon or standing with your school party watching your train from Germany into Denmark depart without you were minor misadventures you took in your stride.

He ascribes his good fortune and possibly survival to having been blessed by the Pope in St Peter’s Square in the Vatican in Rome, by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Kremlin in Moscow and by an indigenous Buryat shaman in Siberia who gave him a lucky charm, which you might think is hedging your bets for someone who’s a life-long atheist.  But perhaps they saved him when he had to overcome vertigo when standing on the top of the leaning tower of Pisa and when, 10,000 feet above the South China Sea on a flight to Beijing with his wife, the pilot announced that one of his engines was showing signs of failure.

Martin Kyrle’s Little Green Nightbook and his Little Blue Nightbook each contains 25 stories to intrigue you for a month, with flags, maps, colour photos and cartoons. 

Good value for money @ £17.99 each.  That’s 72p a story and it’ll take you a month to read them, one per night in bed (aloud if your partner wants to share).  The heavy lifting’s already been done!   Cash, or pay using your mobile phone: a/c no.0458 2160 sort code 77-49-26

Jottings from the Trans-Siberian Railway chronicles a month crossing Russia and Mongolia in 2012.  In Jottings from Russia and the Baltic States.  Part 1: Russia and Estonia he explores St Petersburg, Novgorod and Estonia on public transport.  Full colour photos.  Happy to sign your copy on request.

[Contact details: martinkyrletraveller@gmail.com.  T: (023) 80.26.50.35      16 Park Road, Chandler’s Ford SO53 2EU   Enquiries welcome about Illustrated talks for groups and societies (1 hr or ½ hr)].

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