Though the hotel is now a faded shell she is very proud of the guest book which contains

Though the hotel is now a faded shell, she is very proud of the guest book, which contains the names of a legion of former residents from the time when Aleppo was a stop-off for that most Thirties of phenomena - air races. TE Lawrence, Agatha Christie and the Lindberghs are in there, plus a whole load of people you've never heard of but who were real big shots in their day. The hotel is now run by Sally Malzoumian, an English nurse who married its Armenian owner in 1949. While I was filming my Great Railway Journeys of the World trip for the BBC in Syria, one of the items was about the legendary Baron Hotel in Aleppo. Surfing, he said, was to him like "multiple orgasms without foreplay".Andy Martin's book, 'Walking on Water', is published by Mandarin at pounds 5.99.. But he modestly admits that 14ft is the biggest he has ever surfed "At six foot, you start to think about it a bit.

When it gets to over 12, they're not cracking jokes in the line-up any more. If you're in the wrong spot, you can get annihilated."What drives the dedicated wave-chasers; what makes them brave wave, blizzard and iceberg? I asked PJ what surfing meant to him, and his answer revealed something of the passion involved here. You've got your work cut out coping with the drop without hunks of frozen concrete landing on your head."Kieran dreams of the monster wave he has seen only in a photograph in the local museum taken in the early years of the century in which the two breaks, Thurso East and the colourfully named Sewage Pipe, merge to beget a mega-wave that stretches all the way across the bay and tips the scales at 20 feet-plus. "I was taking off and there were these bloody great slabs of ice all round us They were pitching over with the lip One of them could take you out. If you had a wave like this in California, there'd be 150 guys out. Here, if there's more than three or four in the water, it's a crowd.Even Kieran's iron nerve gives out at the sight of icebergs and he slides out of the water with his board between his legs.

They float down the river from the highlands, the size of cattle trucks, and steam through the line-up heading out to sea, looking for a Titanic to sink but ready to settle for a surfer or two. "After surfing up here," he said, "I don't really need to go anywhere else. He began surfing while a student at Liverpool Poly and came up north in the Seventies Now there's no going back. But the pride and glory of Thurso is its cylindrical perfection, the product of Icelandic swells wrapping round the coast, barging into the bay, and capable of producing waves of 20 feet or more.Pat Kieran is one of the pioneers and regulars at Thurso. Having stripped off in a reeking farmyard and picked your way across frozen cowpats, you paddle out in the shadow of a ruined castle straight out of Macbeth. Red ink is reserved for only a handful of supreme five-star spots: Hawaii, Tahiti, Fiji, Bali - and the tip of north-east Scotland.A few miles west of John O'Groats, and only a few degrees south of the Arctic Circle, Thurso's right-hand reef-break is one of the most classical, epic waves in the world, a purist's wave.