Pugsworth in Paris

Taking the Eurostar train to Paris was not as exciting as most of the locals thought it would be, it´s just another train. Finding my way through the freezing dark maze of Paris´ one way streets got the adrenalin pumping though. I made it without too much trouble to my hosts place where I enjoyed a warm meal.

I ended up having two days in Paris. After one I decided it was too cold and that I´d be better to come and see it in the spring time when I could enjoy it. In that time though I did manage to see the Eiffel tower, the Arc de Triomph, rode down the Champs de Ellysee, Notre Dame, the latin and old quarters and best of all, the Louvre. The Louvre was actually my last stop, I´d left my hosts that morning expecting to get pretty much on a train to Barcelona but the only train there was a sleeper leaving at 10:30pm, so I filled in the day seeing a few more of the sights with a view to doing the Louvre late in the day when it was coldest. I even went and sat in the foyer of one of the other museums to avoid a light snow fall and fell asleep. I really felt like the homeless bum that I am, waiting for someone to kick me out.

arrived at the Louvre at 5:30 to find that admission was free for under 25s after 6pm on Friday, and today was Friday. After all the bloody expensive museums in the UK I could not believe I was going to get into the Louvre for free! More amazing things were still to come though. I spent three hours there and would stayed longer it was so exhilarating. The art work was great but the building itself was the best bit for me. I spent most of my time walking around with my mouth open staring at ceiling. I hadn´t realised before that the Louvre is not just a Museum, its a palace of the old Monarchy preserved and turned over to the people for a museum. It even has a several rooms preserved in the way Napoleon used them (well supposedly anyway). So the building was very ornate, the ceilings were unbelievable, at one point my eyes were so glued to them I tripped over a marble seat placed across the middle of the room. I quickly got up and moved on pretending nothing had happened and hoping no one had noticed but a girl came in from the next room laughing ´I saw that´ she said imitating me. It was a great experience, just the feeling of wandering around inside one of the world´s greatest buildings was exhilarating – and for free!

From there I rode to the station and went to get on the train but had some difficulty with my bike. I´d anticipated this and arrived early but it was still an anxious moment as I went back and forth between the guard and the ticket seller who told me different things, (luckily with some English). I finally got them to talk to each other with the result that I had to buy a more expensive cabin ticket instead of just a seat. This came with the bonus though of a six person cabin to myself and a place to lie down. I slept like a log and woke up near the Spanish border to enjoy the early morning ride along the beautiful scenery of the French and Spanish coast. I had to change trains (and interestingly still have my passport checked, but not stamped) at the border. This meant waiting a couple of hours because bikes are not allowed on the fast train I was booked on and I had to catch the slower regional train. Thankfully, the early Spanish morning was not too cold, much warmer than midday Paris or London, that´s for sure and best of all, I was in Spain!

Back in London

I spent most of a day on the train back to London, caught up with some friends I met while mountain walking in Windemere for a party and ended up shacking up with one of the girls for the week. The party was actually a farewell for Mark who was going to Australia for a few months. There were a couple more parties that week too, at one of which I learnt beerpong – a cross between table tennis and tenpin bowling. Two teams of two arrange 10 large beer glasses like tenpins at each end of a table tennis table and pour in what ever amount of beer is desired. Then each team takes it in turns to throw a ping pong ball into one of the glasses at the other end. If you get the ball to land in a glass then the opposing team has to drink it. For some time Mark and I were reigning champions, but as I discovered, a string of victories often ends in throwing up.

A week in London also gave me the chance to finish of a few thing there I hadn´t seen. I finished off the Natural History Museum and also went to St Pauls, which was just magnificent. The atmosphere, the paintings and that domed roof, just awesome. Of St Pauls and Westminster Abber, skip the abbey, go to St Pauls. I also took the train up to Great Missenden (towards Oxford) the home of Roald Dahl for much of his latter life where a museum has recently been set up in his honour. I didn´t learn a lot that I didn´t already know about him but there were a few little things which rounded out my picture of him and there was quite a bit of audio of him talking about this and that which was interesting to hear. I also went and visited his grave which was nearby and paid tribute to a man who has had much influence on the person I have become, something which I am well thankful for.

London was also time for some practicalities like a hair cut, collecting my new cashcard and drivers licence as well as Servas books for France and Morocco which I´ve added to my itinery. Plus when I collected my ticket for the Eurostar to Paris I was told that my bike had to go in a bag. After visiting some bike shops I established that normal bike bags cost £100 (A$250) and cheap ones came at £40 (A$100) but even this was too much for a one off use. So I tested the theory of being able to find anything in London and went out to find a cheap bag big enough for a bike. Where would you go if not a bike shop? First I went to a tourist store for one of those red, blue and white bags tourists buy when they can´t fit in all their shopping but they didn´t have one big enough. I tried a carpet shop, a hardware store, a travel bag shop, and someone even suggested a place where they will wrap anything but not a bike it turns out. After half a day I found a builders merchant who sold me a 1 tonne bag (normally for a tonne of sand) for five quid, what a saving! It was a bit awkward and I got lots of weird looks in the train terminal but it was very convenient.

My last night in London I took Sarah (who I´d been staying with) to see Stomp. I´d not yet managed to see a show on the west end and had always wanted to see Stomp, so this was perfect, and even better than I expected. The things those people can make music with, it was just awesome. I just sat there dancing away in my seat having the best time, marvelling at the co-ordination and sense of rhythm the eight performers had. It really is amazing and if you ever get the chance, go and see it. Apparently there are about eight different Stomp troupes touring the world, they must come near you sometime.

Devon and Cornwall

The final leg of my UK tour was through Devon and Cornwall. It began with one of the best train trips in Britain. Getting on the train at Tauton I first had a great ride through the hills of Somerset and Devon. For some reason, (it might just have been the bright sunshine), I found something really appealing about this landscape. It seemed strangely irregular in a very beautiful way. As often happened I got on a train looking forward to a snooze but didn´t feel I could justify sleeping through the scenery. Beyond Exeter though there was no question of sleeping. Between Exeter and Totnes the train line runs down the river Exeter, along the coast and up the river Teign. For much of the journey it runs right beside the sea, sometimes you literally can´t see the ground under the train, only water. The coast there is very rocky and has some great sea cliffs but the train runs along the bottom, so you have an excellent view. It was really quite exhilarating, even on a calm day. I heard one story later of how a train was forced to stop in a storm due to the waves breaking over the train and track, now that would be exciting!

Totnes was another great servas visit, clicking easily with my host Pamela who took me walking from Hay Tor to Hough Tor (Tor means peak) on Dartmoor. Its beautiful rugged landscape is supposed to be the setting for Conan Doyle´s ´The hound of the Baskervilles´
From Totnes I trained to Plymouth where I had a couple of hours to look around the magnificent harbour where one my great grandfathers had first departed from for the then colony of New Zealand. The rest of Plymouth seemed pretty ugly to me, although I was fascinated to find an old bombed out church left standing in the middle of a roundabout as a reminder of WWII. From Plymouth a train took me as far as Par, where I had to change for Newquay but the next connection was not for another five hours! It was too cold to sit and wait so I cycled into the village where after talking to a couple of locals I discovered it was only 20 miles to Newquay. So I just rode and arrived just before sunset, and what a sunset it was, one of the best I´ve ever seen. Half the sky was a brilliant bright pink and lasted for sometime. The receptionist at the surfers hostel was out on the balcony watching it when I arrived and said, ´I´ll be with you in a minute mate, I´m just watching the sunset´ ´me too` I replied, so we stood watching for at least 10 minutes and then I introduced myself.

The rest of Newquay didn´t seem of much interest, a nice beach sure, but it was too cold too swim. I rode on to St Ives the following day, a nice stretch of coast line, similar to Pembrokeshire but not quite as good. St Ives is a little maze of a town, with old cobled streets on some steep hills (not a good place for riding) but a nice atmosphere for a walk touring the incredible number of art galleries. I did a night walk as well and was enjoying life and travelling so much I pondered spending my whole life just trotting ´round the globe.
My last long day on the bike in the UK took me from St Ives around the coast to Lands end and back to Penzance. Nothing very spectacular and it was getting pretty cold so I was happy to be on the final leg. Land´s End is not much, just a tourist sinkhole but it´s easy enough to avoid the hole and there are still some great cliffs to explore and it seemed a fitting place to get to on my last UK bike day.

Stratford, Oxford and Bath

The train trip from Abergaveny in Wales to Stratford in England took three trains, while waiting for a connection in Hereford I went to withdraw some cash but the machine rejected my card. I assumed I typed in the wrong pin so tried again but with the same result. My thoughts of ‘ah bugger’ turned to ´Oh Shit!’ when I worked out my card had expired and had the nightmare realisation that I had no back up plan for getting cash. Looking through my wallet for ideas I decided to try my credit card, and hey presto – cash! (at a small fee or course). Later I wrote to the people staying in our house in Melbourne who looked through the mail and found the new card the bank had automatically sent out and they posted it to London where I picked it up a few weeks later.

Stratford was a nice town, with several ‘Birthplace of Shakespeare’ tourist attractions, none of which seemed worth paying to enter. The many timber frame houses though did provide a fitting atmosphere for the town’s heritage. I stayed with Servas hosts who owned one of the town’s many B+Bs and thus had two nights free B+B style accommodation, including two cooked breakfasts, one full English and one vegetarian. Better yet their son Steve and his mate Ed (a quintessential English bloke) took me out to celebrate Guy Fawkes night in style – down at the park with the dangerous combination of a few beers, some magic mushrooms and a box of fireworks. It was a great atmosphere, people letting of fireworks all over the city, at any moment there could be a bang and some pretty lights. This brought back childhood memories of Guy Fawkes celebrations in New Zealand. I hadn’t set of fireworks for over ten years thanks to them being illegal in Fascist Australia.

Next stop was Oxford featuring some beautiful old buildings, but not the same feeling as I felt in Cambridge. The unusual highlight was some Chinese art in the Ashmolean museum. In traditional Chinese art the notion of empty space, where the canvas is left blank/white is very important. This represents qi (chi), life-force and a lot of meaning is conveyed by the juxtaposition of objects with empty space or by whether the qi is allowed flow through the picture in large or small quantities. This was just something totally new to me and quite different from other notions of art I´ve experienced.

From Oxford I rode through the Cotswolds (can’t see what everyone raves about there) to Bath and then along the Avon bike path to a servas host at Saltford. This last 6kms was in pitch black, another of my great cycling adventures. The days by now were getting shorter and shorter and I’d been caught in the dark a couple of times but mostly in built up areas with street lights. This path though had no lights at all and while I had a rear light and head lamp I could see the ground immediately in front but not where the path ahead took a turn or what sort of surface/puddles I was approaching. The path ran right beside the river and the danger was brought home to me when the path turned right following a bend in the river and I only avoided the two metre drop into the freezing cold river by about half a metre. From then I on adrenalin pumped fast through my veins as I concentrated on reacting quickly to the little could see, but I rode much slower. Shortly after, another cyclist, obviously quite familiar with the path, came flying past me. I tried to speed up in order to follow behind where he/she would show the way but was now going so slow that by the time I got my speed up she was way ahead and I couldn’t catch up. Luckily though I could still see his flashing light way in the distance which showed the path was straight for some distance. A while further on and a bright light appeared ahead, and I wondered weather a car was approaching. I heard no engine but kept well to the left as I had no idea how wide the path was. When it was only the brightest bike light I’ve ever seen that temporarily blinded me, I called out ‘you need a dimmer on that thing’ but gotno response. In the end I got there safely without any problems and when I rode back the same way the next day I saw one of the best bike paths in England – a disused railway line, very straight, nice surface and about 3m wide!

It turned out to be one of my best servas stays, one of those ones where you just click with the person, so Gill and I had some great conversations. The other highlight of Bath was the old Roman Baths, still largely in working order and just amazing in terms of the level of construction for 2000 years ago. Certainly the most sophisticated ancient construction I´ve ever seen and one of the few places well worth the £10 entry fee. Gill also recommended that I check out Glastonbury (which I´d decided to skip) and on the way ride through Cheddar Gorge (which I´d never heard of). Glastonbury was okay, a nice little alternative town, but the highlight was searching the bookshops for Steiner´s ´Philosophy of Freedom´, they all knew it but didn´t have it. Cheddar Gorge though was a great discovery. I rode towards it from the north and had been riding for a couple of hours through some fairly ordinary country and seen no signs to it when as I began my decent down a river valley it suddenly turned into these magnificent cliffs - known as Cheddar Gorge. It was incredible! Again partly due to the means of discovery, a tip from a friend and then just finding myself in it. However it is also spectacular in its own right and it just kept going and going as I descended around corner after corner and the cliffs just kept getting higher and higher. To my mind the best gorge in all of the UK and Ireland. Then suddenly it finished and I came out into the little tourist town of Cheddar, milking the gorge and its status as the home of cheddar cheese for all its worth. As I passed the huge bus parking areas I appreciated even more the direction I had approached from. Not to mention that I had ridden down the steep hill that with all its twists and turns would be a great ride at full pace even without the cliffs.

Pugsworth in Wales

My time in Wales began with another riding adventure, I arrived by train in Rhyll on the north coast at about 5:30 with about 10 miles to ride to my host for the next two nights. It took ages though to find a phone that worked so by the time I set off it was already beginning to get dark. After a couple of wrong turns it was completely dark when I got to Denby and I still had to find my way through the town and another three miles beyond. This took a few more wrong turns and by the time I was on the right road out of town I was well overdue and now riding in small country lanes with no street lights in the pitch black, an erie feeling when you´re riding off the beaten track where you´ve never been before. Ultimately it´s a recipe for getting completely lost, which is what happened. After riding around for about three quarters of an hour looking for the right turning, and going through the same very steep valley a few times I started knocking on doors to ask for directions, but no one was home. When I did find someone they had no idea of the address I was looking for. They only remaining thing for me to do was to keep going, so I did and just when I thought I´d run out of options a car pulled up beside me. It was my host Ron, so I accepted the lift and all was well in the end.

The adventure of getting there proved to be well worth it though and I had a great couple of days again enjoying a family environment, this time in the context of a small farm holding. There wasn’t much to see in the local area so I spent my time learning about there way of life raising two young boys and managing the farm. Ron also works as a traditional timber framer, building houses etc without nails and it was interesting to see how this was done and help him apply limestone plaster to the wall of a garden shed. The ride back to Rhyll was much more enjoyable, leaving in daylight. From there I rode along the north coast of Wales to Conway Bay (a great bit of bike track along the coast on a fine day), caught a train to Bangor and then another nice bit of riding across a spectacular channel to the isle of Anglesey, the northwest tip of Wales and a world of its own.

On Anglesey I stayed with some old family friends from our time in Papua New Guinea who I had not seen for 13 years! It was great to catch up on old times and Chris who had always been a fan of animals took me to work with him at the local rubbish dump. His job is to prevent the seagulls from landing on the tip – using a hawk and a peregrine falcon! So that was a bit of fun watching and helping him train and exercise the birds, including one kill which the hawk made towards the end of the day. Apparently it is mandatory for all tips in Britain to have some sort of seagull deterrent and employing a couple of falconers is a pretty effective way of doing it. The seagulls are never far away but it was actually a matter of hiding for while so they would come close enough for the hawk to get a kill where we could collect it afterwards.

From Anglesey I rode south past Caernarfon’s impressive castle and into Snowdonia National Park. I’d heard many good things about Snowdonia but there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself. The mountains are beautiful, rugged and green with streaks of purple, red, orange, yellow etc. There were little mountain towns like Beddgelert that reminded me of Bright. It was getting a bit cold on the bike but the beauty of the valleys still made for some great riding and I did a couple of walks with one of my hosts.

Between Snowdonia and Pembrokeshire the scenery was not so spectacular. Wales is hilly all the way but in a steeply boring way. It’s a really bad place to ride a bike because the roads still mostly follow the pre-car walking routes which simply took a straight line up and down over all the hills, no matter how steep. One person even told me they used to bring early model cars here to test the power of the engine on some of the steepest slopes. I still enjoyed myself though, gaining a great sense of the more simple laid back life of people in rural Wales. I was also blessed to find a string of good books on rainy days. My reading ranged from ‘The story of language’, to a fascinating book called ‘the wisdom of crowds’ where the author put forward the theory that if you take a broad and diverse enough number of people and ask them to solve the same problem independently, the mean average of their solutions will be the best one. On the fiction side of things I spent a wet day reading the complete series of Tintin and found a book of short stories, called ‘Ah sweet mystery of life’ by one of my favourite authors Roald Dahl which turned out to be a sort of third part to his autobiography, telling odd stories from his latter life settled in Oxfordshire. I even picked a up copy of the New Internationalist and found an article on Gandhi written by two of my friends back home! So travel brings a diverse range of experiences, even on top of scenery and people. In fact browsing my hosts book shelves has become one of my favourite activities.

My time in Pembrokeshire though was definitely dominated by scenery though. The coastline is amazing, rugged rocks and cliffs for miles but changing all the time with different types of rocks and cliff formations. I also had a couple of nights in hostels, the first since Dublin after a string of four weeks staying with my family and then various hosts. From Pembrokeshire I skipped the south coast by train for a night in Cardiff. By this stage in the trip I’m well over castles and while, like Caenarfon, this was impressive, I didn’t bother paying to go in. The bay was nice though. Like many other old harbours it has undergone a recent ‘docklands’ development. I’ve now seen these in Melbourne, Tokyo, London, Edingurgh, Dublin, Cardiff, Barcelona and Alicante and can definitely say that Cardiff is the best one, the only one I’ve really liked actually. All the rest have gone completely overboard with fancy new apartment and office buildings and turned the place into another modern concrete jungle. Cardiff has new apartments and offices too and is not exactly a natural green area, but it has left a lot more open space, with pleasant paving stone designs that, like the new buildings retain some of the historical character of the area, with an effect that – well I liked it anyway, renovation without completely starting over.

And that was pretty much it for Wales. From Cardiff I spent a couple of days in the Brecon Becon Mountains, but was hampered from seeing much by weather and the highlight was joining my hosts at the local cinema club to see Hotel Rwanda, a film I highly recommend. Then it was back to England…