Bøker av Richard Parkes

Life expectancy for a British fighter pilot in the summer of 1940 is short. Shorter still if your name's Jerome Jessup and you're still in training, then posted to a front line operational squadron. War in the air is a strange, often deadly business; routine patrol sorties interspersed with sudden scramble intercepts to confront German bombers and their Messerschmitt escorts.Jerome's sister, Bell, joins the Air Transport Auxiliary ferrying warplanes. Supposedly an altogether safer occupation, but as Bell makes her landing approach to Hornchurch in a delivery plane, she's unaware there's a German Junkers 88 raider right on her tail. So... survival isn't a given. With luck, Jerome and Bell might see it through the duration, but meantime, getting on with things, just plain getting on with things, seems for the best. With loves on the ground to cherish and life in the tilting air to live, both these young pilots hang on the very cusp of their existence.

This is a story of my Overland trips from London to Kathmandu in the early seventies. This was an interesting time with many changes going on, many of the travelers being born at the end of the Second World War and others post war baby boomers. We had moved through rock and roll, Dylan, Beatles, Hippies, the racial changes in the US, cold war, and still had the war in Vietnam, which most of us were against. What made us take an overland journey from Europe to Kathmandu? For many of us it was travel to the unknown, an adventure, plus an escape from conformity. It could be said it was the fore runner of the backpacker travel movement now a rite of passage for young people today. We in fact were following Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Monguls and Mughal invaders, Muslim Arab armies, as well as trading caravans which gave some of our route the romantic name of the Silk Road.

After surgery and surviving prostate cancer, I decided to embark on my "Camino" and also bring awareness of this nasty cancer to others. This disease kills many men across the World every year some 270,000. This journey lets you rethink your life and looks to change the future; it is a spiritual engagement with life and people without the trappings of our modern society. I found that most pilgrims whatever colour, creed or nationality wanted the violence in the world to stop. Maybe a Pilgrims walk is what the world should be. Any returns from this book will be donated to prostate cancer research.

The Camino del Norte follows the coast from Irun, on the French Border, to Ribadeo then going south on the inland route to Santiago some 817km. The full route takes some 5 weeks to complete. Our route split off onto the Primitivo near Villaviciosa and passed through Oviedo and Lugo onto Melide where we joined the Camino Francis then onto Compostela. Passing though the regions of Basque Country, Cantabria Asturias and Galicia. The Northern caminos are less crowded and include great coastal walking and some low mountain climbing. They have good facilities and are well waymarked and one does not have hordes of Pilgrims, though enough to make the meeting of people a pleasant experience. There is evidence that the coastal caminos existed in the ninth and tenth centuries, and Primitivo does not suggest a lack of civilization but the fact that some people believe it was the first route as expressed by David at the Bodenaya albergue. In 2018 19,040 pilgrims travelled the Norte and 15,038 the Primitivo.