On The Road Again

It's good to don the backpack once again after twelve months spent, more or less, in the one spot. I liked a lot about Edinburgh , not least the friends I made, the people we worked for (Moureen and Barman) and the beautiful Old & New Towns. What I didn't like, however, were the neds - the police acronym for 'non-educated delinquents' (maybe one day I'll point out to a Scots cop that they should be 'uds'). Anyway, more on neds another time.

Our first point of call was Cambridge , home of the university and the most ludicrously over-priced hostel in the world. £22.50 a night (about $46Aus!) they wanted for each dorm bed! Bloody Hostels International. They offer the blandest, most sterile and most family friendly (yes, in a bad way) backpacker lodgings in Europe - then they charge out the yang for it. We walked half a block up the road to a B&B where for a few pounds more we got our own room, TV and a cooked breakfact (albeit a cooked breakfast in a room where the owners' family watched Al Jazeera on a big screen TV with the volume turned up so as to drown out diners' chatter).

Cambridge is nice enough but there isn't much to it other than the University. Which I guess is a bit like saying that Vatican City is nice enough but there isn't much more to it than the Church stuff. Anyway, we had a great first afternoon punting on the Cam in beautiful weather - clear and about 20 degrees (not bad for late September in the UK ). Punting is tiring when you're learning. I wore myself out after not managing to 'let the pole do the work', as instructed. We cruised past Trinity and John's - both very attractive colleges - then drifted by the inevitable Ugly Buildings (which, in the 1950s/60s, popped up next to, or simply replaced, anything of architectural significance in the UK ). The centre of town is quite nice, we wandered around a bit and had a beer in one of those ubiquitous Wetherspoon's pub. Not much else to report, unfortunately. I wanted to see Trinity Library but we missed opening hours.

Next stop was Cornwall where we went to visit our Canadian friend Marie, who was a lovely host - she let us share her room above the Barracuda (the South African themed pub where she worked) and showed us around town. Newquay is described in the Lonely Planet as "a tacky tourist town", which, to be fair, it is. What the Lonely Planet doesn't say is that tacky can be a lot of fun. We spent a few days drinking, laughing at stag parties and wasting money in the innumerable "amusement" centres. The stag parties were so sad. Groups of guys wander through town dressed as the Jackson 5 (or the Jackson 16 as the case may be) or as gangsters or simply wearing matching "Dave's Stag Party, Newquay 2006" t-shirts. Anyway, the saddest thing is that, because of the sheer number of bucks' nights, there are about 10 men for every woman. And so it is that at 2am on a Sunday morning you can witness a group of 16 bored looking blokes in afro wigs standing around a pool table waiting patiently for the evening to end - hopes of hooking up with a Supremes-themed hens' night long having faded.

There was more to Newquay than booze, stags and fruit machines though. The beaches and scenery are pretty impressive. Did you know it is possible to surf in the UK ? Well it is and people do. There is even white sand, which I was under the impression did not exist in England . Then again, I'd also presumed it impossible to get sunburnt in Scotland - another myth busted. Marianne and I even went swimming one day. Once everything had reached maximum shrinking point, it was quite nice in.