Cornwall

Tuesday 17 May

Today we left Newquay and started our first day on the coastal path.  We left at 10.30am and arrived at Perranporth at 5pm.  The track was reasonably up and down, and went through bays and round headlands.  It was exposed in parts, and quite windy and cold. The weather was pretty miserable once we got to Perranporth. Dale had sprained his foot that day, and we were both feeling weary after carrying our packs, so we organised for luggage transfer for the following day.

Wednesday 18 May

Today we headed towards Portreath.  We walked 2 hours to St Agnes.  It started raining quite hard whilst we were on the track, so we waited in a pub while we waited for the bus.  To get to Portreath we had to go via Truro, which is the main city in Cornwall. We stayed at a lovely B&B called Dolphin House.  We walked down to the beach for dinner and had a lovely meal at a restaurant called the Atlantic.  Visit our blog to view photos from the trail and these beautiful towns.

Thursday 19 May

This morning we had a great cooked breakfast at the B&B and then headed towards Hayle where we had decided to stay at Beachside Holiday Park for 3 nights and visit St Ives from there.  It’s a lovely camp right on the beach, one of many in the area.

Friday 20 and Saturday 21 May

We caught the train to St Ives.  We went on a boat which took us out to a seal colony, 3 nautical miles along the coast.  Visit the blog to get to a youtube video of the seals. We were lucky as there were a lot of seals out on the rocks that day.  We then looked at the museum which was dominated by local maritime history, very good value really we also tried some Cornish ice-cream on this day, tasty but expensive.  On Saturday we returned to St Ives and went to the Tate art gallery and to the Food and Wine festival, which included a local producer market and professional cooking demonstrations.

Sunday 22 and Monday23 May

We caught the train to Penzance.  We stayed 2 nights at penzance backpackers.  We went to St Michaels Mount the day we arrived.  It was extremely busy that day, because entry was free.  On monday we rented a car.  We went to Crysauster  ancient village, Minack Theatre and Lands End.  That night we saw a play called ‘Surfing Tommies’ at the Minack theatre.  The play was based around Cornwall Miners that served in World War I and was very entertaining and thought provoking.  All parts were played by a total of 5 actors.

Tuesday 24 to Friday 27 May

Train to Falmouth where we went to Pendennis Castle, and on the ferry to St Mawes Castle.  Both castles were built by Henry VIII and used to protect Falmouth harbour.  Late in the day we took the train to St Austell, where we stayed at the Seven Stars Inn for 4 nights.  Around St Austell we went to the Eden Project, Lost gardens of Heligan, the Charlestown shipwreck and heritage centre and St Austell Brewery.  St Austell is the main Cornwall brewery by far you seen the name everywhere.  William Hicks the founder of St Austell Brewery first started brewing beers at Seven Stars Inn before starting the brewery.

We have come to the end of our time in Cornwall and will be going to Dartmouth in Devon tomorrow.  We had about 11 days going right round from Bude to St Austell.  Anyone that has our schedule will see where we have made changes on the fly as circumstances demanded.  Overall it has been pretty successful, we were caught out I little by the wind, it seems Cornwall has very frequent strong bitterly cold westerly winds.

Funny Thing so far = Fanta is yellow here

Annoying Thing = The camps don’t have kitchens!!

Good Thing = Yum yums so yummy.

London to Newquay in Cornwall

Our flight to heathrow was overnight and we managed only a little sleep.  We ended up being about the last people from our flight through customs but that was okay because we still had to wait on our bags.  We had a long walk to the tube but could take a trolley most of the way.  The firstcash machine I tried didn’t like my travelcard which increased the stress but the second one worked and it has been fine ever since.  We were able to purchase an oyster card (public transport pass for London) each from the machine.  It is a royal wedding commemorative one apparently they have huge excess of them.  Followed Gunam’s instructions and arrived at his house about 8.30am about 3 hours after landing.  It was a pretty nice sunny day in London, spent the morning with Gunam then he went to work and we got organised to go shopping and pick up our introductory pack from 1^st Contact.

We went to Tottenham Court Road which has a dazzling array of electronics shops.  Including Micro Anvika which has 3 shops of that street, one of which we ended up getting our Netbook (which I’m writing on) from, a Toshiba NB520, one of the models I had investigated in NZ.  It is good for sound compared to most netbooks, in fact I’m playing music now while typing in our tent.  Also went along Oxford street and visited a show called John Lewis that Gunam had recommended where we saw the camera I would end up getting, a Panasonic lumix TZ8.  Crashed at about 7pm, which meant I woke very early, a trend which has continued, I’m just getting in schedule now.

Our second day in London involved a lot of walking, we visited places like Trafalgar Square, NZ House, Buckingham Palace (where something special was happening we still don’t know what, see my photos via the blog), London eye, big ben, parliament, Westminster abbey. All this on the way to our HSBC bank appointment near London Bridge at 3pm.  The appointment went well and got an account sorted took 1.5hrs.  Then went and picked up the netbook they had to get the right colour in overnight.  Alseep very early again.  Much of the third morning was spent setting up the netbook.  In the afternoon we visited Regents Park, had all you can eat Pizza Hut for lunch, this was highly recommended by Amy.  In the evening we took the tube out to Stratford to see my friend Matty and Amy.  We had a great time comparing notes on travel strategies and general catch up.  So much so that we left after 11pm and it was a bit of a rush to make sure we didn’t miss the tube.  Despite it being a straight line to the station we managed to go the wrong way and had to consult the A to Z which got us back on track.

Midnight packing and 4 hours sleep was followed by a 2 ¾ train journey to Exeter in Devon.  A very pretty city.  We walked up the hill into town to the Cathedral and we found where the free walking tours go from.  The adjacent hotel was very good and held our bags free on charge for about 2 hours while we did the Exeter Old and New tour.  After this we went to the bus station to get the bus to Bude and had a long wait as we were 25mins early and the bus was 45mins late.  We had to hike about25 mins to our camp called cerenety which was a little hard to find.  It was very small with only 2 others there when we arrived and 4 others when we left.  However it had an excellent view of Bude and it was a pleasant canal side walk into town for 25 mins but we were a bit sick of it by the time we left.  Again check the flickr stream on the blog for pictures of the view.

While in Bude we visited Stratton to see the civil war re-enactment, you can see a video I put together on my youtube account again my checking through the blog http://dalenickyoe.blogspot.com/ .

After 2 nights in Bude we bused to Port Issac which is where DOC MARTIN is filmed.  Lots of people around like us except without the house like packs.  We were all there to see the DOC Martin place.  The locals didn’t really ham it up though, if you didn’t know before you could visit and leave without realising what it was.

Then bussing from Port Issac to Newquay was a mission it took ages.  First buses only leave Port Issac on a Sunday once every three hours so big wait there.  Then when we reached Wadebridge the driver explained the next bus to Newquay was about 1.5hrs away, in fact it was about to arrive to do another route, so since it was cold and we had a day pass we decided to take it out to Bodmin and back to Wadebridge before it set off for Newquay which is only about 15 miles away.  Now we had been warned but this 15 miles took about 1.5hrs because this bus went to about every backwater and dead end in the area.  So must have travelled 40 miles to go 15.  So having spent almost all day on buses and the rest hauling our packs up and down dale we finally arrived at Pentire Hotel around 6.15pm, quick freshen up and down for dinner.  Stayed 2 nights at the Pentire and we did the Newquay Zoo and checked out the town.

It’s late now so to be continued tomorrow.

Stopovers in Auckland & Hong Kong

Hopefully from now on we will be able to write more regularly.  However as you’re probably aware most of our time till now has been spent travelling.  So we are now in Newquay Cornwall and I finally have both the combination of being awake enough and have the time to type.

So from the Start. – I’ll cover Hong Kong in this post and then do England separately.

May 6th we flew to Auckland (staying at Citylodge) and spent the day with my friend Greg, who took us to a cafe in Northcote which was excellent and we visited the Auckland Museum, very impressive.  Our visit coincided with Greg having a group of friends over for dinner, very nice people, good time had by all.  Greg certainly seems to be doing well and we hope to see him in the UK soon.

May 7th we flew to Hong Kong (with Cathy Pacific) arriving at hotel (Royal Plaza) midnight local time (4am for us).  This included the stressful incident of our itinerary not matching with our airport transfer ticket and booking.  I had requested Park Hotel but the transfers had Royal Plaza not yet sure who got this wrong.  Unfortunately due to the transfer ticket taking so long to arrive at travel adjacent Nicky had to pick it up from the travel agent at the last minute and we didn’t pick up this error.  So the Park Hotel staff helped us get a taxi and $10 NZD later we at least had somewhere to sleep if not the hotel I expected.  This turned ended out ok as the Royal Plaza turned out to be attached to a mall which was very helpful to acclimatise and get food.

As the Royal Plaza was in an area called Mongkok just North of the main Kowloon area they run a free shuttle downtown.  So each day we took advantage of this.  Our first day included a walk through the avenue of stars, a sandwich in Kowloon Park, and star ferry across to Hong Kong Island.  Then a Rickshaw sightseeing bus tour of about 30-40mins on the heritage route.  Which most of the time felt like the slums tour of Hong Kong Island, several areas where we would not have liked to be on foot.  At 5pm we took a free walking tour through Mongkok (offered by the Hotel), this included the bird garden/market, flower garden, goldfish market and finished at the ladies market.

Day 2 was all about Ocean Park, this was a bit of a hike from the hotel, (shuttle, walk, ferry, bus).  The park was rather spread out and the map wasn’t always that helpful so this was a very tough day in 32+ degrees and 90% humidity.  Highlight was the Giant Pandas and Nicky got a very close up look and a few great photos, check out our flickr.  Bit of a panic when our bus back didn’t return to the ferry but stopped somewhere called admiralty west apparently 25mins walk from the ferry.  So we had to get another bus and despite running we just missed a ferry which meant we missed our shuttle by about 5mins and had to take the MTR train and walk to get back to the hotel to check-out.

Hong Kong security must be a bit better than Auckland because as we went through the scanner they pulled my little terrorist Nicky aside and started asking to see things they had seen on the scan!!!!  Turns out she had scissors and they were a bit concerned about something else which turned out to be the tent pegs.  Oops, the Chinese security guy wasn’t very impressed however we were allowed through with a warning that the tent should be in checked baggage next time.

So despite some minors hiccups we arrived sleep-deprived but otherwise fine in Heathrow at 5.30am on the 10th of May.