Natural World: A Turtle’s Guide To The Pacific (BBC2, 8pm); Travellers’ Century (BBC4, 9pm),p> THE loggerhead turtle has been travelling for the best part of a year. She arrives on a beach in Japan after a 9,100 mile journey from the west coast of Mexico that’s taken 307 days. That gives her an average speed of 1mph, which hardly puts her in the Lewis Hamilton class.

The turtle digs a hole, lays 100 or so eggs, covers them up and then heads back into the Pacific. Not much of a holiday really, but then she’s making the trip because of the urge to lay eggs where she was born.

Natural World follows a turtle across the Pacific as she encounters intelligent predators and terrified prey. She probably feels like a celebrity being followed by the paparazzi.

Along the way we learn more things about turtles – the oldest sea creatures that still have to breathe air – than can possibly be of use in a lifetime.

Turtles have survived because they can travel. But a warning note is sounded.

There are only a quarter of the turtles that existed 50 years ago when efforts to save them began.

It’s not just ecological changes that threaten them, but those creatures who want to greet-and-eat them along the way. The idea is to keep a step ahead of anything that might have you for dinner.

PATRICK Leigh Fermor has done a bit of travelling in his time, too. At 92, he has settled in Greece – in a house he built without power tools – and is getting on with writing the third and final volume about his travels.

“I am doing my best,” he tells explorer Benedict Allen of his writing endeavours in the last of the Travellers’ Century series following in the footsteps of the defining travel writers of the 20th Century.

Fermor began documenting his journey across Europe, on which he set out when he was 18, in his books, A Time Of Gifts and Between The Woods And The Water.

No one could accuse him of being a speedy writer. A Time Of Gifts wasn’t published until 1975, making it some 40 years late. The second volume followed a speedy (for Fermor) nine years later.

Allen broaches the subject of the new book with trepidation, knowing it’s the one question that Fermor doesn’t like being asked.

It might never have happened if he hadn’t been reunited with the journal that he left in Romania many years ago.

It triggered memories of the travels of his youth, enabling him to write his account 40 years later.

He’s been unlucky with losing his possessions.

His rucksack, containing all his belongings and, seemingly more important in his eyes, an edition of Horace, was stolen in Munich during his youthful travels. Later, during the Second World War, he mislaid his precious journals.

Fermor’s story is the stuff of fiction.

Not long after being expelled from school, this young “handsome, debonair and utterly charming” Englishman set off on foot across pre-war Europe. A cross between Graham Greene and James Bond is one description of him. The accidental superstar of travel writing is another.

LONG WAY HOME: The loggerhead turtle swims over 9,000 miles to lay her eggs THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 2008 The Northern Echo northernecho.co.uk TELEVISION 25 He set off in December 1933 and “it turned out to be the longest gap year in history”, explains Allen.

His war exploits with the Special Operations Executive included a mission in the Balkans to kidnap a German general that became a movie, with Dirk Bogarde playing Fermor.

It also led to an extraordinary appearance on Greek TV in 1960 in a version of This Is Your Life that reunited resistance workers and the general in front of the cameras.

The show also allowed Fermor to show off his skill at languages as he translated the general’s comments in German into Greek and then back again.

He resumed his travels after the war with a photographic tour of the Caribbean. That’s when he wasn’t indulging in heavy drinking sessions with Hollywood star Errol Flynn.

It can only be a matter of time before Fermor’s life story, not just his wartime exploits, is made into a movie.