Oxford - London - Portsmouth

All good things come to an end eventually. And so I leave the Heavenly paradise of Chinese friendship and cuisine (!) and hit the road to Oxford. My departure has been (happily) delayed by good company and food for several days... Today, on the day of my departure a light rain drizzles the whole morning: a good excuse to stay another day. But then again, I have already used precisely the same excuse for the last three days...
At noon, after countless cuppa (tea w/w milk) I decide to wait no longer and mount the panniers and set off.
Minutes later - I am not even out of Birmingham - the drizzle turns into a full grown downpour. Surprise... this is still England! But my spirit is light and I don't mind. Being on the road for the first day after a break is always easy. My thoughts wander off to future locations and the air that I breathe always feels lighter and fresher and I smile despite all possible hardship. I love this trip. What's a bit of rain when you will be enjoying the beaches of France in a few days time?!



I manage to find the marked cyclepath (No 5) to Oxford and follow it. I have no doubt that the British organisation "Sustrans", who is in charge of developing and marking the cyclepaths, have only best intentions. They would never want to lead a cyclist into a maze of roadsigns or forest paths. Yet they do just that every couple of kilometers.
First there is a teaser of a little stretch of beautiful, traffic free singletrack (see picture above). Then one of the blue roadmarks is missing or overgrown by the lush vegetation what makes me run straight into a fence, an industrial quarter, a motorway or...



... a mudbath.
Hurray! When I was about 10 years old, my parents took my brother and me to a pottery workshop. While my parents manufactured blue tiles for our kitchen wall, we kids did all kind of things with the wet dirt that we found there (I remember that my masterpiece was a little penguin that still stands on one of my mothers shelves today; catching dust, except with the part of the beak that broke off). Great fun. but the clay they gave us in the pottery workshop wasn't half as sticky as the mudbath that I encountered north of Oxford. While I try to find my way through the mud (in the far distance I can see a little sign with an arrow pointing to the left) my tyres clog up and so do the brakes, the chain, the shifting, the rims, my shoes, lower legs, upper legs, hands - short - everything.
The mud is so slimy and deep that it is very tiresome to push my bike. Its tyres leave deep canyons in the sticky grey mass. In the mud next to my canyoans I can make out marks from other cycle tyres. So there have been people here with bicycles before me. I am determined to continue. Finally, after 15 minutes of sweating and swearing I stand in front of the little roadsign with the arrow. It says: "public footpath".

Thank buddha nobody is around to witness this. I am so enchanted that even after my little hissy fit I still feel like murdering someone barehanded. Surely if it says "Sustrans" on his namecard. I must have lost the bloody path again somewhere. Somewhere? Somewhere BEFORE the mudbath! I look left and right. 8 foot high fences. There is no way getting through. I have to go back. Once more - through the mud.
Today, "Sustrans" surely qualifies for my favorite four letter word. From here I keep strictly to the main road to Oxford. Traffic is my best friend.

For the eye, Oxford is a very preasant city. Everything is very neat (except my appearance - dried mud up my legs and all over my arms. Little brown sprinkles in my face...) Colleges and museums everywhere! Marc, the lovely porter of Trinity College lets me park my bike in the entrance area while I visit the Museum of the History of Science on the opposite side of the road.

He also invites me to have a look at the college. I am impressed my the beauty and serenity of the buildings. More even of the perfection that goes into the space between: the famous English gardening. I have always wanted to know how they manage to trim their greens in that manecure kind of way. The secret is made of stainless steel and called "Buffalo 34". It has so many handles and switches that I wonder if the operator requires a license for it. Well, with or without license, (s)he definitely requires a whole lot of trust from the director of the college - fucking up that green surely inflicts the death sentence! (I witnessed how a tourist briefly stepped on the grass - the chief surgeon of the medical college needed 4 hours and 6 sets of sutures to attach his head back onto the neck...)

Completed in 1683, the Museum of the History of Science claims to be the world's first purpose built museum. It features an impressive collection of scientific instruments that were used for astronomical, chemical and physics experiements: laboratory apparatuses, early microscopes, a giant lobestone (magnet), first compasses, astrolobes (instruments to determine the position of the stars), telescopes, etc.

In the basement of the building there are several ancient "barometers" - instruments to measure the pressure of the air (see first picture of this post). By recording the development of the air pressure, scientists are able to predict the development of the weather. I have to smile when i think that a scale with "Rain", "Much Rain" and "Stormy" would have been fully sufficient for Great Britain. I mean, honsetly, did anyone ever witness "Very Dry" weather here?

On the ground floor I find different models of the universe. Their cages, beams and cogs are entirely made of shiny brass. They display our solar system either with the earth or the sun at its center! Back in the 17th century, the museum and its contents was used to conduct experiments and hold lectures. Strange to imagine that, back then, scientists were confronted with serious health hazards by supporting either the one or the other idea of what moves around what. Thinking about the world and the universe I realize that I still didn't finish the little front plate that decorates my bike since my departure in Tromso. So I look for a toy store and borrough some paint...

After Oxford I make my way to the south of England. My plan is to take a ferry from Portsmouth to France (Le Havre or St.Malo). I don't want to bother cycling into the big traffic chaos of London (I had been there during a cycling trip in 1996) so I stop in Reading for a day and take the commuter train to Paddington Station.

I am never sure what it is that makes me like this giant city. However, fact is: I love being in London. The architecture, the bustling traffic, the hordes of tourists, Chinatown, Hyde Park, the whole circus about the Royals and the change of guards...

This time I came particularily to visit the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. But how to get from Paddington to Greenwich?

When I was a child I often played a board game called "Scotland Yard", some sort of hide and seek between Mr.X and the London cops.

Mr.X uses different forms of transport to escape his followers. But he has to appear in intervals to let Scotland Yard know his position. He also has to unveil what transport he uses when. The cops use all the information to encircle the probable future locations...

I remember that a fast and effective way to shake off your hunters was the use of the boat services on the thames river (it had its cost, though - the charge was one of the "black tickets" - and you only had two of those for the whole game).

A fast and effective way to get from one end of town to the other? Here we go!

They don't actually charge "Black tickets" for it. They give you a 1/3 discount when you produce a valid day travel card. Good enough to enjoy a light breeze during the 40 minute cruise and see Big Ben, Tower Bridge, the London Eye, Tate Modern and so forth from a new angle :)

A visit to the Royal Observatory is a great experience! (If one has sufficient time, I highly recommend to also visit the Maritime Museum next door.) It is possible to enter the old working rooms and living quarters of the Astronomer Royal and his team. The position was established in 1675 by King Charles II and the first Astronomer Royal (John Flamsteed) started to observe the movement of the heavenly objects with state of the art technology.

A major problem at that time period was the determination of Longitude. It was already possible to determine Latitude of any given position by measuring the angle of the sun over the horizon at noon (zenith). So seafarers would be able to know how may degrees north or south their ship sailed in relation to the equator (the calculations could take up to 4 hours time!). Nevertheless, no matter how much efford they would have given into trying: it was impossible for them to determine their Longitude (the position West or East) because they lacked a method of comparing their local time to a given time on land.

Today, a simple GPS gives you within seconds a very precise position ( Latitude, Longitude: e.g. 34 degrees 20' 15" N, 59 degrees 09' 47" E). With this technology, nowadays, amateurs are able to navigate a sailboat around the world. Then, knowing the exact position of a ship had immense economical and military importance. A high price money was put forth for the person who solved the Longitude problem.

The astronomical society (with their Authority being the Astronomer Royal in Greenwich) figured that there was a way of finding Longitude by looking at the star constellations and the movement of the moon. But they lacked reliable long term data about the positions of the stars. So the team of the Astronomer Royal observed and catalogized those constellations over several decades. Basically every single night!!! Thus they lived and worked in the same space, which is the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

The person who then actually solved the Longitude problem was someone entirely different. It was a simple watchmaker called John Harrison. He used to build Tower clocks that were driven by long pendulums. But pendulums do not work reliable on a ship that moves and rolls with the waves. A pendulum clock would not keep time sufficiently accurate on board a ship to determine the Longitude with the required precision. During his life, Harrision build 5 clocks that were intented to be used aboard ships. They are on display in the Royal Observatory. And they are most impressive objects. The first 3 models don't actually resemble watches but rather look like time-warp-machines. Lots of movable parts. All made of brass. Beams in all directions, coil springs, weights, countless cogs. The first one weighs something like 75 pounds.

Imagine, for the completion of one of the clocks (I think it was the second one) Harrison needed 20 years!!! 20 years. I could ride around the world three times...

However, Harrision was never entirely happy with his designs until he created his famous H4 (Harrision model 4). He used a totally new concept and the size and complexity reduced drastically (see picture). This watch H4 was the solution to the Longitude problem. Now, a navigator at sea could compare the time on board his ship (noon is the moment that the sun is in the zenith) to the time in a distant place (e.g. Greenwich). The time difference would represent teh angle between his position and the position of Greenwich. Therefore Greenwich was made the location of the Prime Meridian and all calculations (also those of today's GPS) are calculated from this Meridian at GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).

How did captains know the exact Greenwich Meantime? Well, they just sailed their ships up the Thames river to Greenwich. On top of the Royal Observatory is a pole with the red Time Ball. Every day at 12:55 the ball goes up and drops at precisely 13:00. They set the watch and off they sail to their foreign lands...

By chance I arrive in Greenwich just a couple of minutes to one. So I actually manage to be there when the famous Time Ball rises and drops. A very nostalgic moment. In times of mass produced Chinese quarz watches it is hard to believe how this little red ball had once such immense importance.
(For those who are interested in this subject or want to make sense of my above mess: there is a fantastic book about the history of the Longitude Problem called "Longitude" that reads like a crime.)

After my visit to London I return to Reading and from there continue my trip to the harbour of Portsmouth. I decide to take a ferry to St.Malo in Brittany, France. Since I need to wait a day for the ferry I buy another day saver pass and return to London. This time it is Tate Modern, where I meet for a coffee with my friend Stine-Mari that I know from Tromso. With modern transportation the world is really just a village...

From Dublin to Birmingham

I didn't take a lot of pictures before, in and after Dublin. During my whole visit it was pouring as if someone had pulled the plug from a heavenly bathtub hovering over eastern Ireland. Not very pleasant. The east coast of Ireland isn't very enjoyable for long distance cycling. There aren't any cyclepaths and the roads as well as the views are rather boring. Trying to cycle into the center of Dublin is a joke. There are simply no roads for cyclists. It is motorways all over the place, each bearing a massive blue sign displaying that neither animals nor cyclists are allowed to enter. I finally have to cycle all the way to the international airport to find a bloody road that takes me into the center.
The nice thing about Dublin is my visit of Simon, an old friend of mine. Our mothers were friends in highschool and so we had spent a lot of time with each other while we were growing up - typically during Christmas and Easter holidays.
I hadn't met Simon for several years and now he's a grown up working in the software industry in Dublin. We have a ball in the pubs of Dublin until closing time. Actually without meeting any Irish... all the customers are tourists and the staff in the pubs normally come from Eastern Europe, Spain and South America.

I also meet with Emma, my colleage from Medecins sans Frontieres who now lives in Zambia. By total coincidence she has an interview in Dublin just that exact day and so we spend the afternoon. Pam (her friend from Belfast, were I had previously stayed) comes down to Dublin for a coffee and some shopping. It is quite the usual procedure: they shop, I gaze. I need nothing. Somewhere I find this announcement (picture below) for a lottery: 3 trips to Hollywood! Every week. "Hell! I won't even need that... I am already on a trip to Hollywood!"



After three days in Dublin I continue my trip down south. The idea is to cycle all the way to the city of Cork in the south west and take a ferry to Wales. When I leave Dublin I encounter the same problem as on my way in: there is no easy way out. It is again motorways all over the place. No animals and no cyclists. Annoyed I stop and wonder how to get out of this mess. Suddenly it starts pouring down like buckets are being empties right above me. I think about putting on my rainwear but it is already too late. Within less than 30 seconds I am drenched.
Now even more annoyed i think: "Screw Cork! And the whole east coast of Ireland with it!" I know there are ferries to Wales from the harbour in the center of Dublin. I am determined to take the next ferry out of there, no matter if the waiting will take a day or a full week. I turn around 180 degrees and make my way into the center.
The harbour is just as big a mess as the Irish roads. I play hide and seek with the ferry terminal but finally arrive at Irish Ferries. The next ship leaves in an hour! But they are already fully booked. My only option is to travel "Club Class", double as expensive but with a designated seat (plus snacks and coffee as much as I desire). I couldn't bother about those extras. I am done with Ireland - so give me Club Class or a Royal Suite, put me in the liferaft or strap me to the mast... just get me aboard that ferry!

On arrival in Wales my mood has lightened. I find a marked cycling track and cycle towards Birmingham. When I try to purchase some supplies in a village shop somewhere in the middle of the Welsh nowhere I face unexpected problems. The girl behind the counter looks bewildered at my money and says: "This is not our money! I won't accept this." I ask her what is wrong. I had withdrawn those bills from an ATM in Northern Ireland. She scrutinizes the bill once again and says: "Your money is Pound Sterling, but here in Wales we use British Pounds!" I laugh and tell her that maybe because of some local patriotism they print different bills in Scotland and Northern Ireland but that in fact the money used all over the United Kingdom is POUND STERLING! And what I just gave her IS a Northern Irish POUND STERLING. Now please let me pay for my milk and bananas.
She remains unimpressed. Different money in other parts of the great empire? No way. She has to call her boss. He doesn't answer the phone and I don't get my milk and bananas until Paul arrives, an older guy who had worked in a different village store all his life. He looks at the bill and says that it should in theory be fine. But the girl doesn't want to believe him unless he takes responsibility to refund her if I paid in counterfeit. He refuses and her trust in his long years of village shop experience go down the drain... She again tries to call her boss. I am about to leave. (Drink your fucking milk yourself. After all it is skimmed milk because you don't even have wholemilk in your darned shop!) Then suddenly she decides to trust Paul and cashes my ten pound note.
As I leave the shop I wonder if there isn't another ferry somewhere close that could relieve me of the whole of Britain.
Then I see a roadsign that announces: "Gyrrwch yn ddiogel." I think to myself: "Alright, if that means "Drive safely" in Welsh, no wonder there are hick-ups with the Northern Irish currency. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if they had problems with their own currency!"
I smile and head deeper into Wales.



I enter the national park of Snowdonia. It is truly beautiful here. A calm road takes me uphill and through a lush valley to the Welsh/English border. One more night until Birmingham where I visit friends that I know from my studies in China. I move my bike over an electric fence and sleep on an empty green.
Well, it is empty until at 6 in the morning I hear a slurping sound and something touches the outside of my tent. I am suddenly very awake and slowly open the zipper of my tent. There stand at least 20 cows. All young bulls. They gaze at me with increased interest and continue to lick my bicycle and tent. Very cute. But then again I wonder where they draw the line between their territory and my territory. I get out of the tent but they remain pretty unimpressed. Afraid that my stuff ends up digested seven times I take action by banging my cooking pots and running after them. It helps.



I start boiling water for my morning coffee and wonder how I will possibly survive a horde of cheetas in Central Africa when I already start sweating over a couple of peaceful grass eaters...



Cao Yang (right), Luo Yi (middle) moved to England six years ago and now have two children Yi Yang (left) and Yang Yi (temporarily with his grand parents in China).
We all know from our time in Wuxi. Luo Yi studied Interior Design and Cao Yang Graphics Design. We spent a lot of time with each other in China. We travelled to Nanjing (an ancient capital of China) and Chengdu and to a very mountain range called "The four girls" close to the Tibetan border. We went out or stayed in and cooked dinner and shared everything. Most of all a good time. (The only thing we didn't share were 30 rabbit heads which were marinated in a spicy sauce. I had previously tried everything. But I couldn't get those down. So Cao Yang and Luo Yi munched away on them during our 40 hour train journey from Chengu back to Wuxi.)
They both worked extremely hard to make a living in Europe. Most of their friends who stayed in China now have fancy careers and nice appartments. But Cao Yang and Luo Yi value the experience of living abroad and seeing things from a different angle. After all, they can always go back to China.



We stroll in the park, do a Chinese BBQ in the garden, repair Yi Yangs bicycle, visit the center of Birmingham and go see a movie with Yi Yang. In the evenings Cao Yang cooks the most fantastic Chinese dishes and we hang out and talk about the past, the present and the future. They (we) all miss China. But there are also lots of positive things about living in England. Yi Yangs bi-lingual education or the fact that you can just go to a park or museum free of charge.




I take the time to look after my bicycle, give it a thorrough check. In a store in the center of Birmingham I finally get some adhesive foil and start to create little flags for all the countries I visited since the beginning of this trip around the planet. Now, everytime I cross a border I add a new flag until hopefully my blue frame will disappear under a colourful international adhesive carpet...

Ireland

History classes in a German highschool in the Black Forest somewhere around 1984 teach you a lot of (repetitive) stuff about WWII and the 1789 French Revolution. But I can't recall that during the whole lot of 9 years any teacher even remotely spoke about what was happening in Northern Ireland. From the news I knew that there was a war going on, that explosives were going off in shops and aboard busses and that it had something to do with religion.

Now, roughly 20 years later, I arrive in Belfast. The city gives me a sort of mystical feeling, just like Hong Kong did when I first arrived there and maybe Cape Town or Mexico City will do. What is left after the war? Has it really ended? How do people feel about it nowadays?

Funny enough, we all know something about Belfast but we don't know it is about Belfast. For centuries, Belfast was home to some of the best engineering in the world. The shipyard of Harland & Wolff (on one of the pictures you can see a massive yellow crane with H&W on it) produced some of the best ships worldwide. Ten thousands of dock workers were employed here. In the very beginning of the 20th century H&W pioneered in the construction of a totally new class of passenger ships. They would be bigger and more glamorous than everything that existed before. The harbour of Belfast had some of the world's largest dry docks. But the construction of this new class of ships (almost 300m long and 30m wide!) demanded even larger docks. They had to be twice as long as the biggest existing dock!
Three enormous vessels were build in Belfast during the period between 1908 and 1914. The most famous of the three "sisters" left the dock on May 31, 1911 and started its maiden voyage roughly a year after. Belfast is her birthplace but the world (including Belfast) forgot about this due to more dramatic aquatic events.




When I stroll through the city, it has a feel of change to it, just like Berlin after the wall fell. There are numerous construction sites and cranes are sticking out of the skyline all over the horizon. To me, Belfast isn't a beautiful city (just like Berlin) but it has a feeling of being on the move, transforming from one thing into another, waking up from a long winter's sleep. In some places, old houses stick out betwen the newer functional buildings. They give a hint of how the city must have looked like a hundred years ago when the alleyways were full of noise from street vendors and horse drawn carriages and people wore hats and long fluffy skirts.

I spend a couple of days visiting Pam, a friend of my colleague Emma from Medecins Sans Frontieres. We explore the north coast of Northern Ireland and visit the Giants Causeway, a basalt rock formation that is dated back to volcanic eruptions about 60 million years ago. The remarkable thing about the basalt stones is their almost perfect hexagonal shape (resulting from the lava cracking during its cooling process). The basalt sticks out of the ground as if some giant kids played LEGOs and forgot them when their mom called them in for dinner (T-Rex-Bone steaks?).



We also hike to some nice stretches of beach where we discover the secret for the good taste of Irish butter: the cows up here are having a real good time... when they don't spend their days in a jacusy in the SPA, they just hang out on the sunny beach.

One thing that strikes me on my way through Northern Ireland is the presence of flags and banners. When I talk with some Irish in a Pub about the "past troubles", nobody would say out loud words like "Protestants" or "Catholics". The whole issue is a hot topic and nobody wants to take sides or be associated with one or the other.
So what was all this Union-Jack fuss about? Do you see the Queen and Prince X on banners all over London?
I visit a spot where the old "Peaceline" had been - a tall wall with a high fence (see picture) seperated one half of the city from the other half. This looks just like the Berlin Wall or the bloody thing they built in Israel! On some building I find massive slogans for the "Ulster defence force". For a people that apparently tries to get by on peaceful terms I find this slightly disturbing... I don't want to come across as a pessimist, but in times of a shaky peace, plastering half the place with flags of one party and painting the other half with slogans for the other doesn't really seem all to smart to me.




I am leaving Belfast after a couple of relaxing days at Pam's and head down the east coast towards Dublin.

Oh, yeah, the ship... well, when she left Belfast she was in perfect condition. She sailed the flag of the White Star Line and she was unsinkable. She sank on April 15, 1912 and was not found until 1985. This is one of the last pictures taken when she left the docks of Belfast. It's the Titanic.