The East of England

I've been working my way up the east side of England, a couple of days in each of Cambridge, and Nottingham and four days in each of York and Newcastle. I've stayed with servas hosts in Cambridge (5th+6th), a PBI friend in Nottingham (7th+8th), a youth hostel in York (9th+10th), servas hosts in York (11th + 12th), Newcastle (13th-17th) and Peebles (in the south of Scotland, 18th+19th) and it looks like I'll have the next two nights with someone from the couch surfing network in Edinburgh.

Highlights have been:
The Round Church in Cambridge (Wed 6th) with one of the best historical displays I've seen so far tracing Roman times until now for Europe, Britain and Cambridge in parallel with some depth but still able to get through in under 45mins. They did then reflect on the decline of chistianity which they saw as an important part of the development of western culture and were concerned abouts it's decline, but I guess that's their perogative.

My last morning in Cambridge was also that of the London bombings, July 7th but trains were still running away from London (towards Nottingham) so I wasn't really affected.

Friday 8th July - A great ride through Sherwood forest (of Robin Hood fame) exploring the numerous tracks and bike paths without a map and came upon a magnificent decorative gothic church next to a lake in the middle of the forest at the end of it. A real adventure with some other intriguing finds in the middle of the woods that you can't really capture in words.

Sunday 10th - Yorkshire Museum which had a good history of the various invasions in the area, Roman, Saxon, Viking, and Norman and their various influences and a great exhibition on the ice ages (where were largely responsible for shaping Britain). It really put global warming into perspective, explaining the way the earth's orbit alters in three different ways combining to bring about natural ice ages every 21,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years and various warm periods in between and the the effects of these iceages on animal life and humans. This doesn't mean that humans are not warming up the planet but perhaps leads me to the view that global changes in temperature are not as life threatening as maybe I previously thought. There certainly would be extinctions but this is natural and I think humans are resourceful enough to survive. So for me this means that global warming is probably not as important an issue as peace and conflict resolution becuase if we can learn to get along then we can survive anything. But this does not mean I'm going back to using CO2s or anything like that. I also wonder if a lot of the hype is humans just being afraid of change?

Also in York I ran into the local Dragon Boat Festival, a charity event where all races ran to the tune of Hawaii Five O which was really cool. They had a six boat Grand Final (with no lane markers and all boats finished within about 1.9 seconds! An amazing race. Another great thing in York was doing a walking tour of the city. Our guide had been a former sherriff of the town (an honorary role (but he did have to 'admit' the queen into the city and have lunch with her!), we got a personal perspective on the town's history - for free! The next day I had a great ride out to the Yorkshire Dales, loving rolling hills and explored the Bringham Rock formations, a large area of odd rock formations - great for climbing. There was a school group there doing some climbing and there teacher was giving them a briefing on a particular rock they were about to attempt and was asking 'Have you seen the matrix where they walk up walls? well this one's a bit like that' just at that exact moment I popped my head over the top having climbed it from the back and you could see all these young high school students head turn at the same time towards me and some kid said, 'wow, he's pretty good at climbing walls'. I wasn't trying to show off, really. Actually I was being reasonably cautious for me as I was climbing on my own and had an encounter with a small cliff a couple of years back. Alos on my ride I saw some interesting pub names, the Drovers Inn (I had thought the word Drovers was unique to Australia - obviously not) and weirdest of all The Malt Shovel actually I've since seen a pub of the same name in Edinburgh.

That brings me to Newcastle, Wed 13th- Sun 17th. Newcastle is a great city, very different from anything else I've visisted in England. One of the first thing I noticed is that church towers have four small spires instead of one large one. But the main difference is in the sense of history you get in Newcastel or rather the lack of it. I guess the contrast is more stark having come from York which used to be Englands number 2 city after London, capital of the north and all but is still small so makes a big thing out of it's history for the tourists. Newcastle on the other hand seems to be a city trying to forget it's past (and it's reputation for drunken parties). The main attractions in the city are associated with contempory art - The Angel of the North and the Baltic Museum of Contemporary Art, both quite interesting. The old city wall only remains in a few out of the way places where as Yorks is still standing almost in it's entirity, you can walk all round the top of it, and there was a public campaign to prevent new road ways being put through it. Even the Castle in Newcastle (it was new in the 12th century anyway) is not made a big thing of (and thus quite cheap,) even though it's one of the more intact castles I've been to. So it was very refreshing to be in a city that was not burdened by it's sense of history (and didn't shove it down your throat). It has a vibrant youthful feel to it and would be a great place to live if it wasn't for the climate (although the weather was pretty good while I was there).

Of course the main historic attraction in the area is Hadrian's Wall, built by the Roman's to keep the Scots/Picts out. I made a day's ride out to it (friday 15th) and the best thing was I had company! My host had another Servas traveller staying Miriana from Italy and she decided to hire a bike and join me for the day, which was great. She also has a real spirit of adventure and enjoys exploring the countryside. The wall is pretty amazing, 2-3m thick and still quite high in places. I guess you can't realy compare it with the great wall of China as it's mostly broken into small sections but the landscape it runs through is pretty impressive. You can see why Emporer Hadrian built it where he did, the series of hills it runs along the top of are like steep crags falling away to the north. It looks as if it's the edge of the tetonic plate which is being pushed up, and the earth has just fallen away. (Actually england and Scotland where originally two separate islands pushed together so this is possibly true.) We stopped along the way at the remains of a Roman fort. It is the one place I've seen so far that accepted both English Heritage and National Trust so I was able to get Miriana in for free as well. It was a long hilly ride, about 25miles (40kms), Miriana was pretty saw by the end of it but didn't complain and seemed to bounce back the next day. It was also dissappointing that we couldn't really ride that close to the wall. The best way to do it would actually be to walk it but this would be a couple of days hike along a track which runs right alongside the wall but we weren't prepared for that. Great to see the scenery though, some great views, the country is definately getting hillier further north.

So now i'm in Scotland - hillier again and windier, I'll write more when I've seen more it.

Pugsworth in Sweden

Another little bonus addition to my trip. This was something I was hoping to do to visit friends I met in Japan earlier this year and when someone mentioned that Ryan Air had some 2 pound flights to Stockholm, I was on it like a shot. The tickets cost me fifty pounds return, cause I only got a 2 pound ticket one way plus tax but that’s still a great deal. So I’ve just had a marvelous week in Sweden.

A short interlude though just to say that I had five nights in London between the GA and going to Sweden, this was to find the best time to fit in with my Swedish friends. this was a nice relaxed time to have some space and a few days to do some last things in London, mostly museums (and a bit of catching up on the internet and with my journal which was two weeks behind). I finished off Tate Modern and the Science Museum, did the Museum of London which was quite interesting and started on the Museum of Natural History which looks fascinating. I also saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace and the Guildhall. Then I spent my last day suddenly realising I needed to get ready for Sweden, including finding accommodation close to Stansted (for my early flight) and also preferably close to a bike shop as I planned to put my bike for a service, which would also solve the problem of storing it for a week. After taking ages trying to decide what would be best, I rang two hostels who had no free beds. I ended up with a bed n Cambridge half an hour by train from Stansted and could arrive there by 4:30 with half an hour to find a bikeshop somewhere! When I arrived I left the train station and headed for town, within 2 minutes I saw a sign to the youth hostel I had booked so went there and asked where the nearest bikeshop was – next door!!! It couldn’t have worked better, a hostel next to a bikeshop five minutes walk from the station, half an hour from the airport. And the guy at the bikeshop even let me leave some excess baggage within him instead of paying seven pounds to leave it at the hostel. With that all organised I then I had a beautiful evening walking around Cambridge. I had a real feeling of excitement of being in this historic place and then flying to Stockholm in the morning, I love Europe.

And I really love Stockholm! a beautiful city with lots of water and fantastic architecture. After all of England’s impressive but grey and boring churches and gothic buildings Sweden’s red, orange, yellow and even pink buildings are a delight to the eye, so much colour! And the spires are all interesting and unique, with all sorts of curved onion type tops and other features (imagine a bit of Russian influence I think – or maybe the other way around as apparently St Petersburg was originally built by the Swedes, or something). Stephan is studying to be a history teacher and was full of interesting bits of information like this and made a great guide for a couple of days.

Mostly though I spent time with my friends, we had a great time catching up and reliving and deepening our experiences from Japan which all felt noone else could really understand without having been there with us. This was the first time they had all seen each other too as they were all from different parts of Sweden, Pernilla from Stockholm, who I stayed with, Stephan from Uppsala, Josefine from Orebro and Kristina from Borlange in Darlana. We really only had one lunchtime with all five of us as that was all we could get everyone’s calendars to align for but it was amazing to all be together again.

I spent most of my time in Stockholm seeing different things and just hanging out with the others but managed to have a day in Uppsala with Stephan, and a day in Darlana, the heart of Sweden with Kristina as well as a day in the Archipeligos of Sweden. Five out of seven days were absolutely perfect weather, blue sky, sunshine about mid to high 20s with a cool breeze, fairly typical for Stockholm this time of year apparently and perfect for sitting in the park, exploring the islands of the Archipeligos or the lakes and forests of Darlana. There was a lot to see and this became my focus after Stephan and Josefine had gone for their holidays in Germany and Denmark respectively. I could easily spend a couple of weeks exploring Darlana and at least a month enjoying the summer in the islands of the archipeligos.

I also enjoyed some snapshots of the local music scene. For maybe the first time ever I bought a CD completely impromptually off some buskers on the street. Four guys, Double bass, violin, guitar and vocals playing some funky jazz stuff, dressed very bohemian and just oozing fun. We couldn’t stop and listen but I knew instantly it would sound great on CD as well as live. Then on Saturday night Pernilla and I went out to see one of her friends playing trombone as a guest with a group who played what they called African Jazz. the gig was at an outdoor restaurant on a waterfront where you bought the food and then BBQ’d it yourself. It was a feast of the senses, a fantastic view of the sun shining on forest over water, great BBQ smells, great tasting food, great service and best of all – the music. A 9 piece group, vocals, sax (alto and baritone alternated), trombone, guitar, keyboard, bass, bongos x2 and kit. They were all very talented individuals, unique personalities but worked so well together. We heard solos from everyone except the bass player and they were al capable of playing strong supporting roles as well. At times the music bordered on the edge of complete chaos but still held together, so many different sounds in one. I always love brass to the trombone was my favourite and also was great when mixed with the Baritone Sax, but the keyboardist and guitarist were also notable. I could not stop moving all night, lost in the music and was exhausted by the end of it just from riding this long buzz or emotional high, definitely the best night of my trip so far and one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to.

There was so much to see. I felt on the go nonstop for the whole week, continually having a great time but I couldn’t do everything this trip and will clearly have to come back for another visit and a longer stay.

Thanks Sweden!