Dermot Hope-Simpson - Travels in My Eighties: An Account of Twelve Travels Abroad During the Years of 2009–2012

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Published by AuthorHouse 07/29/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-8332-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-8333-6 (e)

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CONTENTS

This book is dedicated to my late wife, Jacynth,

with whom I spent so much time travelling.

My thanks are also due to the following individuals and groups:

Anne and Alan Dollery of Kingswood Books, without whose help and encouragement this volume would never have seen the light of day.

My daughter, Elinor, who has always encouraged me to continue with my journeys.

The staff of the Sherborne branch of Bath Travel, who have spent so much time discovering the travel agents who were able to satisfy my requirements.

Those agents, listed in alphabetical order, who made the arrangements for these various journeys: Anatolian Sky, Cox & Kings, Eastern Approaches, Kirker, Regent, and Saga.

The many guides and drivers who have cheerfully put up with my requests.

Most of all, I would like to thank the citizens of the many countries I have visited who, regardless of the views of their respective governments or religions, welcomed me as a guest with such cheerful hospitality.

In the Siq, Petra, Jordan.

Travels in My Eighties

Statue of King Timur, Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

When my wife, Jacynth, died in July 2008, I was seventy-nine years old. We had been married for nearly fifty-three years, and it was obvious that my whole way of life would change. I determined that I would remain active as long as possible and immediately set about looking at the different ways in which I could occupy myself.

I started by becoming a room guide, for one day a week, at Montacute House, a lovely National Trust property in Somerset, UK, near Yeovil. I busied myself in church matters and soon found myself a member of our Diocesan Synod and then of the Diocesan Board of Education. I also became a member of the Standing Committee of our Deanery Synod. But above all, I determined to continue to travel abroad.

Due to the Second World War, I had not travelled abroad until after I had just left school and before my National Service, when an aunt took me to Ascona in Switzerland on Lake Majiore. As an undergraduate at Oxford, a college friend and I hitchhiked round France, and later I took a skiing holiday with the rest of my family at Lech in Austria. Otherwise, apart from several trips to Ireland, which I hardly count as going abroad, I did no more travelling until our honeymoon in 1955, and it was this trip which gave both Jacynth and me a real love of travelling.

It was well before the time that air travel for holidays became the norm, and so we travelled by train to Rijeka, on the Adriatic, with the customary stop at Basle, in Switzerland, for a breakfast of croissants and black cherry jam. We then travelled by boat down the coast of what was then Yugoslavia (there was no proper coastal road), stopping off for two nights at Split and then on past Hvar and Korcula to Dubrovnik, where we spent a few days.

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Mostar, Bosnia.

We next travelled by a wood-burning train, via Mostar, to Sarajevo, where we changed onto a more modern form of rail transport to get to Belgrade. We arrived starving, since the promised restaurant car had not arrived, and we had only eaten a few lumps of sugar soaked in the local plum brandy since breakfast twenty-four hours before. We were greeted at our hotel with tall glasses each containing two raw eggs, which went down a treat.

After our stop at Belgrade, we were due to travel to Athens. Unfortunately, the train was so crowded that we literally could not squeeze onto it, and our pre-booked sleepers were not due to be attached till shortly before the Greek frontier. When the next train, much slower though labelled the Tauern Express, arrived, the authorities, who felt they had lost face, turned some of their own unfortunate citizens out of their compartment for us. One must remember that tourists there were still rare; indeed, there were only about five thousand British visitors to Yugoslavia that year.

An hour before we reached the Greek frontier, all the lights in the train were switched off, and armed police with powerful torches entered our compartment several times, searching under the seats and on the luggage racks to make sure we were not trying to hide anyone wishing to escape the country. As a result of our late arrival, we only had one full day in Athens before taking a boat to Naples, due to travel through the Corinth Canal. However, naval manoeuvres meant that the canal was closed, and we had to sail right round the Peloponnese, arriving in Naples just in time to catch the last train to Rome, so we were not able to make our planned trip to Pompeii. After two days in Rome, we returned by train back to England.

Despite, or even because of, our difficulties, we both decided that travel was for us, when finances permitted.

The next year, we accompanied Jacynths parents on a trip to the Baltic states in their Dormobile. Since this was in the days before roll-on and roll-off ferries, we several times had the sight of our vehicle being loaded or unloaded by crane, a long and rather hazardous-looking procedure.

The airplane was to make travelling a lot easier. Our first air tour was in the early 1960s, and it really was an air tour, for all our travelling was in the same ancient plane, with its crew, for the whole of the trip. We flew first to Athens, with refuelling stops at Nice and Brindisi. After a few days, we moved on for three nights in Rhodes and then three more nights in Crete, which still only had a very few made-up roads outside the capital. We finally spent two nights in Rome, with only one refuelling stop required from there on our way back to England.

During our married life, we visited most of the countries in the European Union as well as Yugoslavia, Armenia, Georgia, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Cyprus. Turkey became our great stamping ground.

Sbeitla, Tunisia.