This is my last post about out UK travels and I hope you have enjoyed their irreverent and un-geeIsawTowerBridgeanditwasreallycool nature.
To get anywhere in Australia you often drive a long way. To get to the UK it means two to four very long trips, hurtling through thin air very, very fast. We flew with Singapore Airlines and we can thoroughly recommend them, but this does not mean the trips themselves were particularly pleasant. Fourteen hours trapped in a small seat, bolted inside a large aluminium can is a long time. Christine is not known for being a keen traveller, whereas I have always been busting for an overseas adventure. So it is probably a little strange for you to read that Christine handled the travel really well, whilst I handled it rather badly, having to recuperate at a transit hotel in Singapore in both directions. To prove what a travelling stalwart I am, I managed to suffer a vasovagal syncope (women faint, tough Tulloch men have a vasovagal syncope) on the very first leg to Singapore. Christine woke me after a couple of hours sleep and I managed to get my head off the backrest about 20cm before I passed out. A combination of a stressful few weeks beforehand, dehydration, an overly warm/stuffy atmosphere, and rising too quickly, was probably to blame. I felt like lukewarm death for the rest of the trip, despite Christine's wonderful attentions. A note to those who wish to attempt long air travel: dress lightly (they supply blankets if you get cold), take an empty water bottle with you (they serve you water in thimble-sized glasses), try to exercise regularly whilst on board, and don't accept hot towels from well-meaning cabin staff after you've passed out.
Our metropolitan train travels were far more fun. The London Underground, or The Tube to the locals, is an antique Victorian system that has carried over a billion passengers in its life. The demands of a
populous of around 8 million people and the haphazard design of an ancient to modern city morph should spell disaster for this vintage public transport system. I believe that the individual lines have their moments, but in the four days we were in London we used the trains around two dozen times and it went like clockwork. Only once did we wait more than two minutes for a train (and that was a suburban line), within a half a day we'd worked out the system, and the Oyster card system (a version of Melbourne's bloated white elephant ticketing system, Myki) was a dream to use. Connex please take note, it is possible to provide good public transport in a big city.
Different again was the nightmarish bus system the English have delicately designed to be the bane of London commuters. We only travelled on the bus twice and the London trip was once too often. To be fair the trips themselves were fine, although a little stressful (the double-deckers get bumper-rubbingly close to just about anything on, and next to, the road). The system itself is a complexity of alphabetised stops, inconsistent timetables, confusing routes, and coloured maps that seem to, chameleon-like, change colours from stop to stop ("I thought we were on the blue line, now it's green"). I doff my lid to the bus drivers in London. I have no idea how they do it, but please excuse me if I take the train.
London cabs and a single rickshaw ride finished off our vehicular travels in London, but they were an expensive alternative to public transport.
Of all forms of transportation I think I most enjoyed what the Scots call shanks-naig, the English shank's mare, and us Aussies shank's pony (quite simply: walking). This allowed us to experience the UK like locals. Although we didn't really look the part with Christine snapping photos (around 5,000) of anything that moved (and many things that didn't), and me with a stupid leather bushman's hat and lairy backpack. Somebody asked us what part of Australia we came from and when I wondered later about this, Christine returned with, "well if you continue to say g'day mate to everybody they will probably get a hint about where you come from".
We hired a car for the Wales and Southern England part of our journey. It was a wonderful Volkswagon Passat with so many buttons and gadgets that we managed to work out a full 10% of them by the time we returned it. The one gadget it didn't have was a GPS. It was offered as a £10 per day option that I chose not to take, thinking I would rely on a road atlas and street signs. Which, with 20/20 hindsight would have been fine for the motorways, but a different matter in the cities/towns we visited.
Our friends Michael and Libby joined us on our way to Cardiff and Michael brought Ken with him. The only Australian voice on his TomTom portable GPS is titled Ken, hence the name (I was disappointed that wry English humour hadn't been employed and TomTom used the name Bruce instead). With Michael and Ken's help I managed to navigate through some reasonably tricky roads and roundabouts (some roundabouts have traffic lights, for goodness sake!) We were so impressed with Ken's expertise, and polite nature when I failed to take his directions, that we bought our own TomTom unit before we left Cardiff. We chose the pleasant female English voice TomTom calls Jane and, after several weeks of using her voice in the UK and Australia, it would be unfair to use any other (we even like the cute way she refers to Aussie freeways as motorways). Michael e-mailed me the other day a told me he had downloaded a Dalek voice for his TomTom, but I bet he's taken it off already.
Putting together my stalling of the car on more than one occasion (trying to get used to a ridiculous 6-speed manual gearbox) and the fact that I set off the windscreen wipers every time I tried to indicate (they are on the other side of the column from ours), I managed to keep Michael entertained in the front seat for the whole weekend.
Jane, the new love of my life, didn't once put us wrong, and she saved my sanity in the towns and cities. On the other hand, when I second-guessed her or misunderstood her directions, I wound up in hot water. None warmer, than in Eastbourne when I failed to take her left and took my left (in my defence there were two lefts). I ended up driving up a 'bus only' street, in peak hour, with several double-deckers up my clacker. Jane was madly trying to recalculate a way out of this idiot's choice of route, when I second-guessed her again, only to drive the wrong way down a one way street. Fortunately British motorists are a reasonably patient lot and allowed me to do, what seemed like a forty-point turn, to get the Passat pointing in the right direction.
I think this gamut of transportation gave us a pretty good idea of what civilised travellers might use; and like or dislike the various forms I think we chose them well for the entire journey (especially the aircraft bit, as they tell me it is a long way to swim).
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