Dover - Day Dos

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Today we got up, checked out of the hostel (which turned out to have really crappy beds, besides the really slow internet that cost £5/$10 an hour, which is ridiculous, and they charged us an extra £3 since we weren't HI members, which was really lame) and started walking to the White Cliffs park. We walked for about 35 minutes around the castle from the city along a really sketchy road with no sidewalks (a little dangerous for a road with tight turns and what seemed to be little enforcement of speeding laws), and then wound up at the cliffs above the harbor (turned out it wasn't even close to 4 miles away, it pretty much starts right outside the city of Dover). We walked along those cliffs for a while before stumbling upon a stairway leading down to the beach and water. The tide was low at the time, so we got to walk around the pebble beach and climb some rocks. We discovered some old World War II artillery turrets built into the cliff face, which were really cool and wide open for us to explore. Since we had nothing better to do until our bus picked us up in Dover at 6:15, we hung out on the stony beach for a while and watched the tide fall farther back out to sea. We finally headed back up after a bit of exploring, walked along the cliffs some more (the interesting thing is how shear the cliffs are at the edge; you can walk right up to the edge, and its a straight down cut off, no gentle slope down, in fact, in some places it actually slopes up before cutting off to the cliff, like it broke off in the middle of a hill). We found a lighthouse, and only walked a bit further ahead before turning around. The park is really awesome, and a lot nicer to visit than most man made stuff you get tours off (monuments, museums, etc), and also a lot more free. On the way back, I wanted to go back a different way than we came, instead of going all the way around the castle again. There was a path leading up towards the castle (with a sign that said 'foot path') and another one that looked a lot more exciting that sloped down slightly towards the docks and harbor. It went straight through this rough bit of high weeds and small trees we had to climb through (there was still a path through them) and then straight up part of the cliff. This is where the path pretty much ended, but I made it up to prove that we didn't actually come to a dead end after walking for a long time, but it was really hard, and there weren't any really means to climbing up - just grabbing hold of branches and lifting yourself up vertical sandstone, then jumping up to the top ledge. We climbed over the fence, then followed a real path down to Dover and back home. We tried to go find this hot dog vender again, but we figured out that he is only open during lunch, which sucked since hot dogs were the only thing that kept us going. So we had donuts, ice cream Snickers bars and chocolate milk for dinner, grabbed a pint at a pub, and headed for the bus stop.

Tomorrow we are going to try to see Live 8 (we highly doubt we are even going to be able to see it on the big screens, since we just discovered you need tickets for that too), maybe get some t-shirts, and then probably head back home to watch it on TV.

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