Short Stint in Scotland

Hello Everyone

We have gone from England to Scotland and back now.  Our first stop in Scotland was Edinburgh where we stayed for 5 nights.  It is a really beautiful city with many things for tourists to do.  So unfortunately many things we didn’t get to so would definitely return.  The things we did manage during our time were.

Scottish Parliament building

Edinburgh Castle (lot’s to see but we took even longer in Stirling Castle 5.5hrs)

3hr guided walking tour around the city

camera obscura

ate my first Haggis (I have 3 times now YUM)

Hairy Coos Highlands Bus tour (9hrs) which amongst other things visited Doune Castle which was used as the set for Monty Pythons the search for the holy grail.

Botanic Gardens (which included seeing a Sparrow Hawk nest on a video link)

Holyrood Park (but not Arthurs Seat, it looked really high!!!

Georgian House

And believe it or not we did get some rest during these 4 days.

After Edinburgh we took a bus to Stirling our next destination (very good value campsite called Witches Graig just a bit out of town)  from which we took a train on Saturday to Linlithgow Palace to see a Jousting Tournament show.  Checked out the Palace for about 1.5hrs then the Jousting event for about 3 hrs.  Second day we went to Stirling Castle. They have just done up the royal apartments and the Queen had been there about 4 days prior to open them.  They were very spectacular and the whole place was excellent value and as I mentioned above it took us 5.5hrs. Day 3 in Stirling we took the bus to St Andrews (the Home of Golf) Yay!  It was freezing cold so we quickly walked around the town checking out the ruins of the Cathedral and the Castle before heading down to check out the St Andrews Old Course and the British Golf Museum.  At the Golf Museum they give you a very nice guidebook with your entry fee.  Nicky enjoyed although I did take a little longer so she went for a walk around more of the town.

Yesterday we caught a bus from Stirling to Dundee and on route it passed a music festival called T in the Park Scotland’s answer to Glastonbury, and as is traditional it had rained very heavily so was a bit messy.  Gumboots were the order of the day.

There really is very little to do in Dundee, hence i have time to blog J.  With our full day in Dundee we went for a walk around the riverside area, then we caught a bus to an area called Broughty Ferry where we visited the ‘Castle’ which has a Free museum and took a walk along the beachside esplanade, killed some time on the main street before getting a meal deal at 3pm that was our lunch and tea at the same time.  Dundee was not at all a tourist destination and a bit rough in general, noisy on the streets until the early hours on a weekday.

Pleased to get on from there.  Fortunately or unfortunately depending on the way you look at it we have now stopped for a bit to do some work over the school holidays.  We have gone back down to Hadrian’s Wall.  We are wardens at the Hadrian’s Wall Caravan and Camping Site.  Which means long hours and very little money but we are being put up in a caravan for nothing.  The main reason for doing this is to avoid paying extreme high season rates and stops us chewing through our money and give me more time to find suitable work.

Hope everyone is doing well.

Bottom to Top, Kent to Northumberland in a month.

It has been one month since I wrote due to us being so busy with travelling and planning and writing job applications.

Before leaving we had pretty much planned our first month in the UK so for the last month we have been trying to keep ahead of ourselves which is not always easy.

Anyway, last time I wrote we had been to a heavy horse show in West Sussex.

Next on our way to Ashford in Kent we stopped off in Brighton for a couple of hours, walking to the Royal Pavilion and Brighton Pier.  We based ourselves in Ashford to visit various locations in Kent over 3 days.

The first was made up of visiting Sandwich, Deal & Walmer.  We visited Sandwich to see the Richborough Roman Fort, which turned out to be a pretty significant walk and after getting some dodgy advice trying to find a shortcut back we ended up running for our train.  A few minute train journey along the coast tool us to Deal where we visited Deal Castle (former artillery fort), then another short train ride to Walmer to visit Walmer Castle (former artillery fort and royal residence).  The Queen Mother was apparently very fond of Walmer Castle and stayed a week very year, there was a special Queen Mothers Garden.

We went to Dover on our second day, first visiting the Roman Painted House, then Dover Castle which included a tour of the underground WWII hospital.  After finishing at the Castle we walked to the National Trust site at White Cliffs of Dover where we went on a 1.5hr guided walk with National trust ranger and I got to ask a lot questions about conservation.  Canterbury was the main destination for our third day where we visited the Canterbury Cathedral & St Augustine’s Abbey.  With our extra time we took a train to the Northern Kent coastal town of Faversham for a very quick look around.

After this stint in Kent we returned to London visiting my friend Matty and his girlfriend Amy.  We took the highspeed train which only took 30mins.  Matty and Amy showed us the Olympic Village area, took us to Greenwich Park and the planetarium.  Other things we visited in London where Apsley House (Duke of Wellington’s residence), Churchills War Rooms, British Museum, Florence Nightingale museum, HMS Belfast, Titanic exhibition at the O2 arena.

Cambridge was our next destination on 16^th June.  We were staying in a campground in a nearby village called Comberton.  Here is was able to get a haircut and beard trim as it was getting a bit excessive.  While in Cambridge we punted twice, once during the day to see the colleges and once at night for a bat safari.  Unfortunately it rained hard during the bat safari and when it rains the insects aren’t as active so the bats don’t come out so much.  I saw a couple of glimpses and Nicky sort of saw one.  We also visited the Duxford Imperial War Museum which is very large (lots of aircraft).  We also caught a few overs of a local cricket match, after which Nicky visited the Polar research museum and I did the Fitzwilliam Museum.  On the Sunday with no bus service we stayed in the local area, walking to Barton on town over where we visited a farm open day being run by the Countryside restoration trust, where we saw and farrier demonstration and discussed traditional sheep breeds.  We also visited Burwash Manor which had boutique shops and tearooms where I had a Devonshire tea.

Peterborough (Cambridgeshire) was our next destination; unfortunately we found it was closed.  I’m being facetious of course but what I mean is that pretty much the only reason to go to Peterborough is to visit Flag Fen, unfortunately when we went to the visitor centre to find something else to do they explained the Flag Fen was actually closed for a few weeks, and also Longthorpe Tower our second thing was also closed.  Further discussion with the visitor centre staff found that the local museum was also closed and that the greyhound racing although advertising Tuesday was also not on.  Even when we tried to go to the Peterborough Cathedral we found it was closed until 2pm, so it was a running joke for a few days that Peterborough was just closed.  We did end up visiting the Cathedral and then we walked to the Movie Cinema where we watch the documentary SENNA on Ayrton Senna 3 times formula one Champion who was killed in a F1 accident while leading the 1994 San Marino GP.  This was an excellent movie.

Our next destination was York where we spent 3 nights.  We visited Jorvik (Viking centre) and Merchant Adventurers Hall (video on youtube) http://dalenickyoe.blogspot.com/ link through the blog to my youtube and flickr.  We also visited Cliffords Tower, York Minister, Castle Howard and took a free walking guided tour through the town.  York was a very interesting and beautiful city.

Our next plan was to visit Hadrians Wall area.  We decided to base ourselves at Hexham.  Along Hadrians Wall we visited, Birdoswald Roman Fort, Housesteads Roman Fort, Chesters Roman Fort and Tullie House Museum & Carlisle Castle in Carlisle.  In Hexham we visited the Hexham Abbey, Old Gaol and went ten pin bowling.

We had been given a tip that we should visit the Northumberland coast so we decided to base ourselves at Berwick-upon-tweed for 4 nights stopping for a short walk in Newcastle on the way.  On my birthday the 30^th we had planned to go to Dunstanburgh Castle, take a walk along the coast then visit Bamburgh Castle, however the bus ne needed for some reason drove past without coming down to the town we were waiting in so were forced to go in the opposite direction to Alnwick and go to their castle (Where harry potter was filmed), that didn’t mean anything to me as I’ve never seen any of the movies and they have no information about this at the Castle.

Day two went took a boat from Seahouses to Inner Farne island to see the nesting seabirds.  There were Puffins, Guillemots, Razorbills, Arctic Terns, Sandwich Terns, Black-headed Gulls & Eider Ducks.  I will be uploading some very cool videos to youtube soon.  After the seabirds we stopped at Bamburgh to see the Castle from the outside as it was closed by the time we got there.

Our final day in England took us to Holy Island where we visited Lindisfarne Castle and Lindisfarne Priory and we also checked out Berwick including the Berwick Castle ruins.

So we leave England and arrived in Edinburgh on the 3^rd, so far very impressive city but will leave it for later.  Hope to update more regularly so they can be briefer for you in future.

Please do visit http://dalenickyoe.blogspot.com/ where you can link through to photos and videos of things we have done.  So cool seabird videos to come soon.

Devon, Dorset, Hampshire and West Sussex

This latest update covers from the 28^th of May to the 4^th of June (today).

We left off having just finished with Cornwall and off to Devon.  We took a train and then bus to Dartmouth.  A change on our original plan which was to go to Plymouth.  It had been suggested to us that Plymouth was no good and we had a tip about the Dartmouth area.

We stayed at a place called Little Cotton caravan park for three nights, are some twisting their arm after they said they were full! We ended up having a very large area to ourselves. Another observation about the camps so far is that the sites are large, so it generally seems quite spacious ever this week which has been school holidays here.  Not like somewhere like Kaiteriteri which gets packed for example.

The day we arrived in Dartmouth we walked to Dartmouth Castle and back.

The second day we took the Paignton and Dartmouth Steam Railway because they were having special heritage displays.  These displays included a spitfire, US WII vehicles, history of railway in the area and model railways.  We had our first Sunday Carvery on this day.

On the 30^th be bussed to Totnes to visit Totnes Castle and came across some cycle racing.  They were doing it in the centre of town, doing laps around a small area.  We saw a mens race that was an hour long (we caught the last twenty), then we watch the kids up to 14 who had a 20min race.  Nicky thought they were very cute, there was some very young ones.  One was helped around by his Dad, he may not have even been at school yet (starting them young).  The race looked like it could have been a recipe for disaster but only one spill which ended in tears as one young kid took out 2 of the 14 year olds.  Who were very resilient and got going again ASAP.  This afternoon we had our first Devonshire tea, very enjoyable.

The next day we visited Gran’s pen friend Dorren in Dawlish.  Talked to them and they very kindly took us out for a carvery lunch at their local, ice cream in the town and out to the Dawlish Warren.  They also very handily drove us up to Exeter where we caught our bus to Lyme Regis.

Here we were taking a risk as we had identified the camp we wanted to stay at the night before, a couple of miles out of Lyme Regis but didn’t ring ahead as we suspected we would be told they were full.  So we trudged out there massive bags and all and sure enough they said they were full but found a spot for us because we had walked with our bags.  Calculated risk which came off really.

In the morning we took a scenic walk down to Lyme Regis, looked around quickly at the beach, town & museum before rushing back to pack the gear and run/stagger (heavy packs) for a bus to take us to Dorchester where we visited a fully excavated Roman House and the Tutankhamun exhibition before catching a train to Bournemouth, were we took a walk down to the pier and around the main shopping district.

While in Bournemouth we visited Poole and went on the ferry to Brownsea Island, a nature reserve which has endangered red squirrels (yay we saw one) and is the founding home of the boy scouts, needless to say as it was school holidays it was busy and there was lots of scouts.  We also checked out Poole Pottery and the old town area.

Our second day at Bournemouth took us to Christchurch, bought some lovely strawberries at the farmers market, checked out the priory which was very impressive I took lots of photos, saw the river Avon, then went to the museum of electricity before returning to Bournemouth to catch a coach to Chichester.  The coach ran about 45mins late which was a pain as it was getting late by the time we got to the Chichester Lakeside Holiday Park where we are staying until Sunita returns home on Monday.

I had on our schedule to go to the Heavy Horse and Working Animal show which is on at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum at Singleton nearby and that is what we did today.  Very interesting kept us busy for about 5 hours, I’ll be posting at least a couple of youtube videos for this event, so check them out via the youtube bar on our blog at http://dalenickyoe.blogspot.com/

Tonight is dedicated to writing this, processing videos and pics and trying to plan ahead.

Hope this finds you all well and we look forward to updating you again soon.

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.

May 6 is the big day

Hi Everyone

Good news we have our 2 year working holiday Visa for the UK, have booked tickets via Hong Kong and are packing up our things.  The countdown is on.  I have finished work with HDC and will finish with Greening Waipara just before we leave.  Nicky still very busy, hopefully she will get a chance to rest later in the week.

Look forward to keeping you all up to date on our progress.