Mr Pelling, who is now 83, has no plans to stop his intrepid travels
By Jolyon AttwoollLast Updated: 2:00PM BST 26/04/2012
Bus rides in Albania? Motorbiking in the desert? At 83, this is the way to travel, a Telegraph reader tells Jolyon Attwooll.
People in Midhurst, a busy county town beneath the South Downs, know where to find Doug Pelling in the summer. He is often swinging a tennis or badminton racquet at the local club, where he is an honorary member. If he’s not there, you’ll find him in a match on the greens of Midhurst Bowling Club.
The rest of the year, he is harder to pin down. You may need to venture some way beyond West Sussex: to isolated bandit territory in eastern Europe, perhaps; or the desert camps of the Berbers of Morocco; or even the refuges of rhinos in the wilder fringes of Nepal, all intrepid destinations, whatever your age. And Mr Pelling is 83.
He is a snowy-haired challenge to those who view independent travel as the domain of gap-year students and privileged twentysomethings. In the past year, he has written in to The Daily Telegraph Travel desk with impressions of a few of his journeys. Last March it was Morocco. The most recent letter was about Albania; just a few weeks before I met him at his home of 50 years, he was bouncing around the potholed roads of a place he describes as “the last unexplored country in Europe”.
He travels alone, but he is one of a growing band of adventurous pensioners. Saga Holidays, which specialises in trips for the over-fifties, has reported a huge increase in inquiries for places such as Madagascar, which once might have been seen as too “difficult”. In these pages, Matthew and Vivienne Lewin, a retired couple, have filed updates from far-flung parts of the world for our “Grown-up Gappers” column; Joan Bakewell has written about multi-generational holidays; and John Bowring, a 79-year-old reader from Gloucestershire, won admirers for his thrifty travels to Naples. Mr Pelling, however, is more advanced in years than them all – and, without a doubt, even more adventurous.
As he welcomes me into his home, I wonder if he feels like easing off a little. The stack of guidebooks on his living-room table – an Insight guide to Oman, Bradt and Lonely Planet guides to Sri Lanka – indicates otherwise.
In fact, he suggests age often works in his favour. “It can be an advantage; you do get spoiled,” he says. “You’re with all these kids in their early twenties, who always look on me as ‘a senior on board’; they make a tremendous fuss of me. They say, ‘I hope I’m [backpacking] at your age’. Hopefully, they accept me as one of them.”
Mr Pelling is a particular fan of Morocco
He admits to a few constraints: following a heart bypass operation a decade ago and a pacemaker fitting more recently, he needs to take eight pills a day – “a damn nuisance,” he says. But it’s not holding him back. He tells me flights are booked for the Middle East; Morocco – one of his favourite places – is in the diary, and he reels off another half a dozen far-flung places he wants to get to soon.
He had to wait some time before he could exercise his itchy feet. Having been an avid geography student as a boy, he entered National Service in the late Forties, keen to head off on an overseas posting. Nothing came his way. Once he had married and settled down, he went away on package holidays, usually to “one of the Costas in Spain… as my wife wanted to be in a hotel and certain of her bed”.
Remarkably, it wasn’t until his mid-fifties, when he took early retirement from his career in local journalism, that he started backpacking. His first solo trip was to Israel and Egypt, inspired by his daughter’s visit to the region. Since then he has been embracing what he calls “the sheer freedom” of life on the road whenever he can, between an annual summertime hiatus of tennis and bowls.
“As soon as I come home, I think about where I should go to next. My wife would say, ‘You go, and I’ll have a holiday from you’.” Sadly Mr Pelling has lost his wife to a terminal illness – two years ago he spent an extended stretch looking after her.
For all the travelling he has done, Mr Pelling has a curious regret: “I made a mistake in the early days in that I went to so much of Europe – I’ve been to virtually every country – and I should have gone to more remote areas when I was younger.”
Yet travelling in Europe, especially post-Iron Curtain, still offered plenty of scope for adventure – mostly, although not always, in a good way. He recalls a trip in the early Nineties to Poland, when he hitched a lift on a workman’s lorry to Auschwitz, as no tourist service existed at the time. “That was very special to me,” he says.
On the same trip, he was kicked in the head by would-be muggers in Warsaw (“not very pleasant, really”). But that didn’t dampen his enthusiasm. Since then, he has crisscrossed Asia, visited eight Arabic countries and travelled down North America to the Central America isthmus; trips that he thinks have broadened his perspective. “I think I’m a better person for travelling because I understand how a lot of the people of the world have to live,” he says. “I always think I’m lucky because I am my age and doing these things.”
Travels through 62 different countries have also helped him refine his backpacking technique. He reads guidebooks to prepare, doesn’t bother with travel literature and is largely unimpressed with high-profile travellers (“Michael Palin? Complete hypocrite… all that baggage”).
Mr Pelling doesn’t even carry a camera, documenting his travels only with a diary. “I think cameras diminish the experience,” he declares. “I always travel very lightly – you just don’t need a lot of things.”
Then there is the all-important art of using public transport: “I’ve learnt things like to avoid the back axle when you’re going through potholes, and to be near a window.”
In fact, experiences and connections made on decrepit trains and buses are a thread running through many of Mr Pelling’s tales. On a bus in rural Bali he befriended an artist who offered him board and lodging and took him to a Hindu tooth-filing ceremony that had then been seen by few foreigners.
A picture taken by Michael Kerr, the Telegraph’s deputy Travel editor, who met Mr Pelling in Guatemala in the 1990s
In the late Nineties, he bumped into Michael Kerr, the Telegraph‘s deputy travel editor, while on a chicken bus in Central America. Mr Pelling’s age was already raising eyebrows, as Kerr’s write-up suggested: “[He] was not a typical backpacker. Doug’s T-shirt and shorts were frumpy, his shoes sensible, his hair silver… at an age when his neighbours… were admiring their early daffs, he was bouncing over potholes in the western highlands of Guatemala.”
Thirteen years later he is playing the same game, still budget-minded in his approach. “If I won the football pools, I don’t know if I’d want to go tremendously upmarket,” he says. “I’ve stayed in five-star places and it doesn’t really appeal.”
But don’t his family – a son, daughter, and two grandchildren – fret when the tennis season draws to a close, and the next trip beckons?
“They always wonder,” he says. “But they accept that I do it. I think I am sufficiently streetwise now, so I’ll be OK.”
Doug Pelling in his own words
On Morocco
I have been to Morocco for the eighth time – it is just wonderful. You think of the Atlantic with the waves bashing against that coast – it’s really beautiful – and the Atlas Mountains – those spectacular views – and you have all those wonderful interior cities. I’ve been going since 1996 and I revisit places where I still pay virtually the same for food and accommodation now.
If you go to the desert, where the Berbers live, it is a totally different Morocco. Last time, I went to Morocco’s only genuine Saharan area, taking local buses to Merzouga. Instead of hiring a camel or a four-wheel-drive to go out into the dunes, I found a youth with a small motorcycle and paid him £5 to let me ride pillion. It was a little dangerous as the wheels slipped on the soft sand, but great fun for me as an 82 year-old. You can do all this in less than four hours’ travel time from London – it should be the place to visit for real escapism.
On Guatemala
It’s always difficult to decide which is your favourite country. Years ago it was Egypt, then it changed to Nepal, then to Guatemala, and I’ve never really beaten Guatemala. I always talk about it and it really is my top of the world. I went in from the States, down through Mexico.
You have the jungle and the beautiful beaches, and the Mayans are so nice. However, they have this history of violence. I was there just after 36 years of civil war. America had forbidden people to go, because there were so many bandits, and lots of guns about. If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you’d have a problem.
On Albania
I was very struck by Albania. Tourists just aren’t there and I went days without seeing anybody. It is a great adventure for anyone prepared to spend uncomfortable hours on the broken potholed roads among majestic mountains. The roads are often shared with sheep, goats and donkey-drawn carts. Buses are reasonably frequent. You can also make journeys through the countryside on the slow, broken-down trains, but at only £1 for 54 miles over four hours I could not complain.
The mountains of Albania
Everything is so cheap, particularly the food and wine, and a spotlessly clean bedroom can be found in a hotel from £12 to £15. Albanians are so friendly and welcoming to their few tourists, who will surely increase in numbers in the coming years. This has already happened in other countries bordering the Adriatic.
At some time in the future, the beautiful, peaceful riviera of Albania will change. My advice is to visit the country soon and enjoy all it has to offer.
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