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.