England

---

hi every one , sorry we still havent managed to get any photos on, internet access for tourists here sux!! Heres an update on the England part of our trip anyway.

We arrived in London feeling pretty jet lagged and took the underground into town to find our hostel which we had for once been organized enough to book from Buenos Aries. We got set up in our dorm room, (this was going to take a bit of getting used to) and had a walk around the city. London was great, seemed so green and spacious, full of parks and big red buses and London taxis. We stood in a pretty big queue and went on the London eye which is like a big ferris wheel with big space age looking capsules that about 20 people ride in. The view was really cool. We also had a look at Westminster Abbey and peered through the gates at Buckingham palace.

The underground was cool, so easy to use but a bit more rickety than in Santiago cos the trains are older, some of the lines are over 100 years old. We went to my cousin Nigel's place and caught up with him and Murray and met Sasha and their flatmates and got to see the cool apartment they are living in. The backpackers was OK but we were in a room full of Argentinian boys so it was great that we could spend the next night at Nigel's place.

On our second day in London we went to Harrods. An amazing experience. I cant believe the ridiculously expensive, incredibly showy things that some people want to have. That Shop has everything, from designer clothes the fanciest dishwashers,old maps, amazing chandelier type lights, pieces of amazing fossils, and lamps to designer dog clothes. The Decor was elaborate including two big statues of Dianna and Dodi. The kids section was the best, though there must be some pretty spoilt kids out there, apart from designer kids wear and a designer kids hair dresser there was rooms full of toys, Just in case the toys didn't attract attention there was clowns on Uni cycles and other people doing demonstrations.

We spent the rest of the day at the Kew gardens and trying to find them. We caught the underground out there which was easy but managed to walk in completely the wrong direction after that while looking for the Marianne North paintings. After a bit of walking we got there. The gardens are amazing!! Went to the building full of the Marianne North paintings which is full from the ceiling to the floor of the botanical paintings she did while traveling around the world. Very cool, especially seeing ones of the dracaphylims from Arthur's pass area. The gardens have such an amazing amount of plants from all over the world including many from new Zealand. It also has a native English area with open grass under oak trees where native wild flowers are growing. We just missed the height of the bloom but could still see some blue bells.

Time to leave London so we got a Brit explorer pass which in theory would have been a great way to travel but turned out to have few problems. The theory is with the pass you can get on any bus as long as there are seats, but they also sell vouchers to reserve seats. After we had bought the vouchers we found out that they don't work on the Internet and when you ring the help line they say you have to go to an office and in an office that you have to call the help line then they tell you to use the internet. No one claimed to know anything about these vouchers but with a hassle and after filling the phone box up with coins each time we managed to use them. When we asked who we could complain to we were given an email address. Its amazing having this huge faceless company that even the people that work for it can never talk to the top and there are so many mixed messages coming from different levels of employment. Any way we managed to catch our first bus to Salisbury.

All the hostels in Salisbury were full so we were told to try a place called Jennies, which turned out to be a lovely (if finicky) old lady's house who seemed to sometimes let backpackers stay. We tiptoed round her house trying not to do anything wrong. We got our first meal of Fish and Chips in England. The next day we went to Stone Henge. We almost joined the ques to pay for it with out thinking but realized that you could see it just as well over the fence and the people who payed were about 2 steps closer than us so Steven looked over the fence and i looked through it. Wasn't too exciting, really just a bunch of big stones in a paddock, imagining who put them there and how is interesting but that is just as easy to do when you are not actually there. We went back to Salisbury and caught up with Jacinta which was really cool. We sat by the river and talked for ages then had a Cornish pastie and a hot chocolate thanks to Jacinta and it felt like that was the first good food we had had in weeks.
We had planned to go further south but with the bus timetables and the limited time we had it didn't make sense do we caught an overnight bus up to Edinburgh instead. The seats were so tiny and uncomfortable after the awesome south American buses we were used to. The other annoying thing was that they seemed to have to stop every two or three hours, turn all the lights on, wake you up with the loud speaker and let everyone get out for takeaways from the petrol station, even at 4am. We were getting quite a long way north so the sky was light most the night. We finally got to Edinburgh, a horrible bus trip. We went looking for backpackers but they were all full and some said come back at 11am then we can tell you. We decide to wait by the reception until 11 which was lucky cos while we were there there was a constant stream of people coming in asking for rooms and being told to come back at 11. We got two bunks in a huge dorm, then went out to explore Edinburgh. Well first we decided to book the next nights accommodation which took us most of the day, and a lot of money on the Internet. Then finally we went for a walk through the cool old streets, across the bridge saw the castle from a distance, wandered past the parliament buildings and climbed up a hill where we could see the whole city, very cool.
One day when we have more time it would be cool to come back and go further north in Scotland, but again all the bus timetables didn't suit and we found a camping barn in a little country town near Carlyle and Hadrian's wall. Getting there was a bit of a challenge cos it was Sunday and the local buses weren't running. Luckily the couple from the camping barn said they could pick us up. We met the English farmer type of guy who said that he had to pick us up cos his wife told him he had to. They were both really lovely and funny. The barn was joined to the house with a yard in front of it. It looks just like in the movies, and inside had been done up with rows of bunks, a shower and a toilet and a little gas cooker. We had the whole place to ourselves. We went for a walk across the marsh where all the cows grazed and which went down to the estuary.

From there you could see Scotland across the water and sometimes you could walk across. We found the slight hill in the ground which is the remnant of Hadrian's wall, down this end it was only made of dirt not stone so there is not much left of it. That night we walked into town, through paddocks edged by green hedges and with tractors making silage that caught Steven attention, then found the local pub and went in to have a beer.

We were recommended John Smith, which even I liked and after a while we finally got talking to two of the locals which was really cool and got the next beer on the house cos the bar guy was talking tractors with Steven. We ended up walking home through the marsh in the dark at 2 in the morning on a Sunday night.
The next day we caught the local bus into Carlyle and then straight out again to York. York is a really touristy town but it was still really cool. We stayed there two nights. The first dorm really smelled and there were no windows that opened so the next night we changed hostels. Met lots of other backpackers there. We went walking around the medieval town and saw the York Minster Cathedral, which was amazing and while we were there all the bells were ringing which just added to it (though Steven had his hands over his ears), we walked down a narrow medieval street called the Shambels which used to be a butchers street and has hooks still hanging off the walls which the used to hang meat on hundreds of years ago. We wandered into a public garden and sat down on the grass and then realised we were sitting in the middle of an amazing old ruined church. We went to the museum there which was cool, all about Celts and Anglo Saxons and vikings in the area, and they had a special exhibition on Romans and the emperor Constantine. Then we walked around the old wall that used to protect the city and now runs around the middle of it with holes cut occasionally for big roads. There were even slits in the walls shaped so bow men could fire arrows through it.

The next trip was down near Oxford to a town called Bicester where Stevens cousin Kerri and Jeremy live. We spend a lovely relaxing week with Kerri and Jeremy and they gave us a great break from travelling and from youth hostels. We spend lots of time relaxing in the sun. They took the time to take us to Warwick castle which was really cool. It is a real old castle where they have displays of cool things like archery and flaming shooter thing, and a falconry show. The bird show was the best, apparently wasn't really falconry because they weren't hunting just flying around for show, but they had sea eagles and golden eagles that would swoop low over the crowd and land on the falconers gloved hand. They also had a vulture. Inside the castle was a display of wax figurines of people that had lived here or spent time here including Winston Churchill and down stairs there was a gruesome display of torture machines and also of the castle getting ready to go to war.

We also did a day trip to Oxford where it rained but we caught one of those tourist buses that shows you all the sites and had a look at part of the Uni. Then I wanted to find out where the first oxford dictionary was written which turned out to be difficult because its not really famous at all( which made me feel like a real nerd for wanting to know even though this town is famous for its university and the oxford dictionary) and all we ended up finding was the current oxford press building which we looked at for a few seconds in the rain.

We spend the last day in England at Nigel's place and he helped us get a good deal on an awesome tent and sleeping mats. Because we had decided that we couldn't handle the rest of Europe in hostel dorm rooms. We had booked a cheap flight with Ryan Air into Milan which left at 6:00 am. We ended up having to get up around two in the morning and caught 3 buses and walked for ages in between to find the bus stops and finally made it out to the Stansted airport in time to check in and get on the plane, to fly to Milan in Itlay to start the next leg of your adventures.

---

Comments

[Ngaire and Dave]

Gidday There
Hi There Casey and Steven While I was reading your England blog I felt like I knew exactly what you were talking about and knew alot of the places you had talked about and understood some of the underlying frustrations as well. :-) Looking forward to speaking to you about it face to face when you come home. Well hope that you next leg in Europe is going really well Take care love Dave and Ngaire