British Sunbathers on Weymouth Beach

March 13, 2015 in Travel

English beaches always surprise me with just how much 'stuff' is on them. In New Zealand, beaches are basically sand + water, maybe a cafe up the road if you're lucky (not counting Mission Bay or Takapuna of course). But at Weymouth, there are a million beach chairs for hire, changing sheds, rental paddle boats and kayaks, organised games of football and volleyball, fairground rides, minigolf and even Punch & Judy is still around. Maybe I'm spoiled by the large amount of sandy real estate on our beaches, but in summer Weymouth is packed almost from edge to edge. Not quite Copacabana, but far beyond what Muriwai looks like even in the peak of summer.

*note* please click through and watch on the vimeo website for HD video quality.

All this action on the beach does make for interesting sight seeing and people watching, and in fact I made the video above to show a bit more what it looks like in person. And for something to do to keep me entertained for an hour or two one afternoon. These pictures look quite different to those from my last visit in the UK winter, which you can see here. I also enjoyed checking out the old fashioned Punch and Judy show, which i guess is quite an idiosyncratic British type thing.

Not much more to say about this really... just a selection of images to show Weymouth in all it's summer glory. Definitely a lot more going on here in summer rather than winter, and a lot more pleasant to walk around and explore. Check out the previous blog post for a quick history lesson about Weymouth including the royal holiday visits from King George, making this one of the first modern tourist destinations. Oh, and potentially the site where the Black Death first reached the UK!

Classic (I assume soggy) British fish & Chips

Portsmouth Historic Dockyards

February 18, 2015 in Museum, Travel

One for my Navy friends today! After our holiday to the Channel Islands and France I had a day with my parents in Weymouth before heading to Germany for work, and we visited the important Naval town of Portsmouth and the Historic Dockyards. This is part of the Portsmouth Naval Base, the oldest in the Royal Navy, in use since the 15th Century, and at one time the largest industrial site in the world! The museum part of the base is a huge tourist attraction, home to several large restored and historically important warships, and many different museums.

The main attraction is the HMS Victory, a 104-gun first-rate ship of the line and Admiral Lord Nelson's flagship from the Battle of Trafalgar, the most decisive victory against Napoleon's navy. Nelson was shot and killed at the end of the battle, and the spot on the deck where he fell is marked by a plaque. He was then - respectfully and carefully, I am sure - stuffed into a cask of brandy and lashed to the mast for the long trip home, before he was interred in St.Paul's Cathedral, which I visited on the way home from Germany! The ship itself is very well preserved, with lots of interesting displays, and interesting to imagine working and fighting in the cramped conditions, and low ceilings. The HMS Warrior was another interesting ship, fully restored as a museum. It was the first steam powered and iron-hulled armoured warship in the Royal Navy, although did not see long service before becoming obsoleted by new mastless armoured war ships, and was turned into a floating oil jetty among other ignoble uses before eventually being restored to almost new condition.

The Mary Rose museum displays the remains of King Henry VIII's warship which was rediscovered in the Solent and salvaged at great expense in 1982. This is an extremely important archaeological find, as there was a huge number of well-preserved artefacts recovered including weapons, sailing equipment and many personal items from the crew. Even the ship's dog was recovered! Many of the items on board can be traced by the cabins they were found in, like medical equipment belonging to the barber-surgeon (yes, same guy!). Conservation of the hull has been underway since 1994, due to be completed only in 2016, by impregnating the wood with polymers and now in the final 5-year drying out period! This was a really interesting and well designed museum - the new museum opened in 2013 - and probably the best part of the dockyards for people not so interested in actual ships!

The last part of the dockyards I managed to visit was the HMS Alliance, part of the Royal Submarine Museum, which required a water taxi ride across the busy harbour. The Alliance is a WWII-era submarine and the only one of its kind still around. Supposedly this is a relatively 'comfortable' submarine designed for the huge Pacific theatre, but it was still very cramped and claustrophobic - but lots of interesting equipment to look at for engineering nerds or fans of brass valves and gauges....!

Jersey Island

January 04, 2015 in Travel

It's 2015 already, and I'm still behind on posting photos from my holiday last July! But if I don't at least post them on my own website, then they might as well not exist! So, here we go again - these are from Jersey, the largest of the Channel islands, second we visited after Guernsey, and also famous for cows and dairy. Although due to some tricky tax arrangements, Jersey is a massive financial hub and one of the world's leading offshore financial centres. It's also a popular tourist destination from both directions - I imagine it seems quite continental to those from the UK, and quite British to visitors from France!

Jersey is much bigger than Guernsey, big enough to support several medium-sized towns and small villages, although the whole island still takes only an hour or so to cross by car. We spent a bit of time exploring around the tiny, twisting roads, and also visiting several tourist attractions. As on Guernsey, Jersey has a rich history including occupation by Germany for the duration of WWII, and a very interesting museum built into the war tunnels.

The view from Mont Orgueil over Gorey Harbour

Jersey has been a strategic location in the English Channel for over 800 years, and has several interesting fortified castles including Mont Orgueil in the east facing directly towards the Normandy Coast, which started construction in 1212, and was updated several times over the centuries for the changes in styles of warfare such as the development of artillery, and was finally handed over to the public in 1907. There are also many other defensive sites all around the coast, as we also saw on Guersney, either older ones such as Elizabeth Castle at the mouth of the harbour, or newer artillery emplacements built by the Germans in WWII.

The beach at St.Aubin, across the bay from St.Helier

Jersey also has an interesting history dating well back into the Palaeolitihic era, since before rising sea levels turned it into an island, with many bronze age and early iron age settlements. We visited some sites such as La Hougue Bie, a large burial mound dating from 3500BC in the Neolithic Era. Quite impressive for some tourists from New Zealand, with earliest history only 700 years old, and European settlements all of 200yrs old... The museum of the history of Jersey also had a nice display of the Grouville Hoard - a collection of over 70,000 Roman and Celtic coins found in 2012 by some guys with metal detectors, and now worth around 10 million pounds!

Out B&B in St.Helier, my mum hanging out the window

The Grouville Hoard of 70,000 ancient Roman and Celtic Coins in the Jersey Museum.

Sailing to the Channel Islands

December 02, 2014 in Travel

In August this year I had another trip to Germany for work, and I stopped off in the UK first to visit my parents and take about a week of leave. My Dad had been wanting to visit the Channel Islands for a while, and I was very keen to see Mont St.Michel in France which is just a bit further along the coast, so I was happy to join them for some sightseeing! We caught a big catamaran ferry from the Weymouth pier, walking distance from their house, and sailed around 2 1/2hrs to Guernsey Island, the smaller of the two main Islands, Jersey being the larger one. The islands are famous for all sorts of random things (Jersey is a massive banking hub!) but the only thing I really knew of before I landed there were the famous Jersey (black and white) and Geurnsey (brown and white) dairy cows! Coincidentally, NZ now has the largest population of Jersey cows in the world, more than Jersey itself, at around 600,000. Of course we have like 6 million cows so it's only a moderate fraction popular in Taranaki apparently. That's your dairy fact for the day!

Escape Tunnel! In the underground military hospital

We had an afternoon and morning in Guersney on the way over the channel, before we sailed another hour to Jersey, and spent the time checking out the capital 'St Peter Port' and driving a rental car around the island! The island is around 73km2 and population around 70,000, so not very big at all, but there was plenty of interesting things to look at spread around, and definitely worth getting out of town to see the rugged coastlines and skinny streets - curvier and tighter than anywhere I've driven yet in Europe! The Channel islands have a very rich history, especially compared to somewhere relatively 'new' like NZ, going back to Neolithic times in 6000BC. Due to their defensible nature and proximity to France they were invaded many times over by the English and French, and most recently by Nazi Germany - the Channel Islands were the only British Soil to be held by Germany, and they were quite keen to keep them.

There were some interesting tourist destinations showing the WWII history, the most impressive of which was the German Military Underground Hospital, a large complex of tunnels dug into a hillside to create a protected hospital and ammunition store. The floor area of 7000m2 was dug out by prisoners of war, starting in 1940. There was an even larger complex built on Jersey, which has been turned into a flash museum, but this one was a cold dank series of tunnels largely unchanged, and mostly empty apart from a few pieces of equipment left behind. It was very dark and quite chilly, with freezing water flowing down the walls in places, and would not have been a pleasant place to recover!

We also visited some other tourist sites such as the 'Little Chapel' built on farmland out of thousands of pebbles, shells and broken pieces of china. It was built in 1914 by a monk, hoping to replicate the grotto and basilica at Lourdes, and is apparently the smallest consecrated church in the world! Probably not my best photographic essay today of Guernsey, but I was a bit slowed by illness and learning how to use a new camera at the same time! Everything from this trip was shot on the Panasonic GH4, which worked very well :) It has some very advanced video features, but also performs very well photographically and recommended as one of the current top of the line mirrorless cameras.

British Sunbathers on Weymouth Beach

Portsmouth Historic Dockyards

Jersey Island

Sailing to the Channel Islands

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