The Traveller’s Book

A picture manual

A traveller’s book will be your mate. It will share anything you’ll encounter: passport control, storms on sea, that sickening feeling, sandstorms in the desert, rain and hail, blood pudding as well as sauerkraut, midges, crocodiles ... Famous people are known to have used them, e.g. Ernest Hemingway and Egon Erwin Kisch. Whether you are famous or not: if you have a traveller’s book and use it you know, it builds up in worth the longer you have it. What is written down there never fades - as long as you’ve followed a few rules.

Here we go.

It comes in handy if there is space in the book to stick things in - like in an album. Thus, when visiting Ben Nevis, which will quite certainly hide in fog when you are there, you can stick in a postcard somebody took during these 3 seconds in the year, when there is no fog around that hill, or that postcard of Eillian Donnan Cstle without 27 coaches spoiling the site. And you can stick in business cards of restaurants, tickets and bills ... you find nice to have for a memory.

If you really want to use your travel book during travelling, have a genuine handmade one with a cloth cover. Paper and even leather covers are thanksfull for a plastic bag giving them shelter  and during every journey there will come this one moment when you forget to pack your book away and it will face with water and suffer. With cloth covers you can choose freely a pattern that fits your journey: shells for going on a beach holiday, wine for your trip to the south of France or to the vinyards of Australia, or ...

... roses for travelling around English gardens and parks, a tartan for your trip to the Highlands (this is Ramsey Red) and fish if you take out your rod to meet the highland midges during the trout season or get on a trawler and try your luck out there on the rough sea off the cost of Norway.

Make your choice for a book with pages of a qood quality paper. A strong drawing paper will be best as it will not easily rip (even if you have glued a postcard onto it) it recovers after becoming damp or even a little wet, and you can write and draw and even paint with watercolours on it.

It is water that can affect a book most. If you, your backpack and you book get soaked, you need not worry, if your book is handsawn and of good quality - and if you used a pencil for writing. The pencil writing will withstand the damp and wet, the sawn pages will keep together, instead of separating into single sheets, and even if  the book itself might become wavy in the first instance, once you get to our room and put the book on a flat surface and pack some wheight on it - it will have recovered by next morning.

If you are on an outdoor trip which means being right in the middle of nowhere or very near to it, you might find lovely colourful earth. The region around Siena in Italy is famous for its colours. You can rub some of it with your finger on the page of your book and it will stay there for ages unaltered. The shades on the right are from the north of Sweden and they have not changed since 1986, when I collected them.

There are places for writing down what you have seen and survived everywhere you can think of: on a ferry gliding into the sunrise, in the café with a pot of tea, besides the open fire in the B&B lounge, in your bed in the campervan, out on the cliffs with the cries of the seagulls around you ...

And: what is least important is the quality of your handwriting. What counts is that you can read what you have written, that you catch and keep the fleeing moments, which otherwise might go lost.

If you take up that book years after the journey you wont’t care about whether or not you you ‘ve written neatly. You’ll be glad about all those little stories you find and that will revive your memories. Remember that heavy rain that drenched everything when walking home from Balnkeil Beach? Where did you pick up that bunch of wool - oh, it was on the way out to Strathy Point, one of the Stevensons’ lighthouses.

This is Balsporran Bed&Breakfast run by Ann and Phil Nickson. You find it just on Drummochter Pass near Dalwhinnie with its Whisky destillery. Ann cooks the most wonderful Scottish breakfast with a lovely vegetarian haggis and a very nice whisky marmalade.

This is Maltby B&B on the Isle of Skye run by Barbara Poyser. There are times when the house is right in between the double rainbow. Mrs Poyser knows a lot of places of interest around Skye and you should stay a couple of days otherwise you will miss most of Skye’s beauties.

This is Clynelish Farm in Brora not far from the east coast of Scotland, where you can see dolphins in the sea if you are lucky. When taking breakfast in the room downstairs on the right you might be able to watch the rabbits on the lawn.

The open fire (further up this page) is in Cruachan Guesthouse near Stoer. Formerly it was the minister’s house but now it is a nice B&B with a wonderful genuine Scottish cooked breakfast. Not far is the picturesque Loch Assynt.

All shown B&B’s are on visitscotland

This is Gairloch Lodge Hotel, with a wonderful open fire in the lounge, a big chess play in the entrance, nice old furniture and a Jack Russel dog fit for a circus. Taking a bath you can look over the bay and sailing boats watching the dark closing in on everything.

This is one of Martin McKays sheepdogs. They all live at Glengolly B&B, Durness. Martin offers his guests to watch him working the dogs which is fascinating. Around Durness you can go on a boat’n bus trip to Cape Wrath, the most northwesterly lighthouse on Scottish mainland, take lovely walks on the cliffs, go for a swim at Balnakeil Bay, and visit Balnakeil village with all its crafts people including the makers of fine chocolates ...

All the traveller’s books shown are made at bleikloetzle’s.

The penstand and the beaker are made by Maggie Zerafa at her Bay Pottery on Armadale Pier, Isle of Skye.

... at Cocoa Mountain, where you can get the most northwesterly made chocolates of british mainland. And: These chocolates are oustandingly delicious and you can order them on the internet and have them sent to yourself and to the ones you love ALL OVER THE WORLD!