Honorary Life Member

What's your earliest memory of travel?
Flying to Germany in a BEA Viscount when I was six years old. My father was a physicist on a six month assignment in Nürnberg, and my mother, brother and I joined him for the last three months.

How did you get involved with travel professionally?
By accident. I was happily reviewing backpacking kit for The Great Outdoors when the editor started passing me press trip offers complete with commissions because he couldn't spare the time to do them himself. My first trip was to Iceland, and I guess I must have liked it - I've been back around 20 times since then. When did you join the Guild and what's the best thing about it? 1989. Best thing without a doubt is the number of friends I've made.

What's your best travel experience/funniest?
Best: Bringing Spirit of Cardiff into Portsmouth harbour on August 9th 2003 after transatlantic number two and effectively circumnavigating the world. We were accompanied by a flotilla of some 30 boats, had hundreds of people waiting to welcome us at Gunwharf Quays, and a six-gun salute fired by the Portsmouth Field Gun Crew. How could you top that?

What's your worst / most bizarre?
Worst: Trying to batter through a storm force 11 off Cape Farewell (Greenland) on my second transatlantic. Huge waves were breaking over the boat, and the sea was full of growlers - lumps of ice the size of cars. Having one of those through the windscreen would have definitely spoiled my day. Most bizarre: Sleeping (not in the biblical sense) in a barn in the Scottish Highlands with a couple of donkeys.

What do you never leave home without?
My super-duper Swiss Army knife complete with attachment for getting boy scouts out of horses' hooves. Packed securely in my hold luggage, of course.

What's the best thing about being professionally involved in travel?
I've visited 65 countries worldwide, have rubbed shoulders with people who have achieved incredibly impressive things (including more than a dozen Everest summiteers), nearly killed myself in a variety of spectacular ways, and done some pretty amazing things - not least avoiding what they said when I left my boring office job 23 years ago (“you’ll be back in six months”).

What is the place you haven't been to yet which you would most like to visit?
I would love to go to Patagonia and trek around the Torres del Paine. I suspect I won't get the chance to go into space, but the next best thing is achievable - I'd like to go to Russia for a flight to over 80,000 feet in a Mig-25 Foxbat.

Who or what would you like to be in the next life?
Doing what I do now would be fine by me, but perhaps next time with a bit more money…

Clive Tully This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

October 2006