some moor pictures (and some others too)

As well as farmers, moors and rain, this is what else is you can find in Devon...

It's always a good time when you're learning to slack-line.

The drama of the west coast...we also saw a dead cow on this beach.

The tiniest fishing village that ever there was. Clovelly. 

Polperro! And the ubiquitous blue and white. 

Polperro makes us smile. 

Smugglers coves in Cornwall...Famous Five style. 

Say hello to Mr. December. 

Oh, the charm. 

The colours of a Devon winter.

Where ever you are, it's always appropriate to yoyo.

King.

Sunset at Hound Tor (a tor is a hill with a pile of rocks on top, to be found all over Dartmoor).

Will's bit on the side...of eggs. 

Sideways Will and pony. 

We went to the marble museum and this is what we found...

"Sound the trumpets Nigel, it's time to drink tea and hunt stuff."

Lucky penny tree. 

Running around Exmoor...in a minute it will start chucking it down. 

Exmoor in the mist.

it's chucking it down but DON'T MENTION THE WEATHER.

Welcome to Devon, England. Here you'll find cream teas aplenty, thousand year old country lanes and farmers of all kinds. Have fun, watch out for floods and remember, DON'T MENTION THE WEATHER.

We have been in the motherland for nearly two months now and we are learning ever more about our English friends. Like when it's raining it is actually 'chucking it down', if you want to do something you are actually 'up for it', tea preferred over water, you are allowed to put exclamation marks in the names of towns, a la Westward Ho! (I'm not sure what Westward Ho!ians do when they want to jubilantly welcome visitors to their town though...) and although the locals are allowed to be as derisive and moany about the (at the moment fairly terrible) weather, as a visitor you are most unwelcome to join in the chorus of whinge unless you want to hear 'this is England! What do you bloody expect!'. I feel it may be a bit of a sore spot. We are clever though so now when it is raining we just smile resignedly and say 'ahh well, we had that lovely spot of sun last week, no problem.'

Since leaving London we have been taking full advantage of the expansive hospitality of Will's distant relations, and meandering through Devon along the way. We have celebrated christmas England style: roast turkey and all the trimmings (including that odd English condiment, bread sauce) and pudding with custard and fruitcake and thousands of mince pies, danced in the new year in a barn amongst kids and dogs and wellies and a punk band, wandered down countless tiny country lanes that are so old the road level has sunk several inches below the fields on either side and so narrow that if two cars come upon each other one has to reverse until they find somewhere to pull in, drank warm pints of ale fireside in homely little pubs, eaten scones with clotted cream thick as butter and admired some beautiful cloudscapes. And spent more than one relentlessly rainy day getting our cabin fever on. It's all terribly English really.

Our explorations of Devon started in Halberton, a little hamlet near the thriving metropolis of Tiverton, about 3 hours south of London. We eased our way into country life with walks along the nearby canal and cycle rides in and around Tiverton, a town where there is no excuse for bad hair ("Tivvy" is no metropolis- that was my facetious side shining through- but as a relatively small English town it has no less than 7 hairdressers...we counted. And this is a recurring theme in small town England; apparently a complete absence of sun is bearable if one has perfectly coiffed hair). We visited Exeter, the nearest city, and wandered along its quay, admired the kitsch for sale at the christmas market and took a tour around the wonderful cathedral. Here we learnt about the cat that was employed, at one penny a week, to catch the vermin drawn into the church by the animal fat used to grease the huge mechanical clock and about why Americans should not be allowed to join group tours. We bought each other christmas presents then tried to forget what they were so we could be surprised on christmas day. We decorated the christmas tree and made lots of goodies to ingratiate ourselves with our obliging hosts.

As I couldn't come to England a fourth time and again miss one of its most iconic sites- and Will was also keen- we borrowed the car one Friday evening and hit the open road. After we had packed- the kitchen sink stayed in situ, but barely- I jumped in the driving seat and we were off. Well, I jumped in the driving seat, sparked fear in Will's heart as I panicked and "jokingly" clarified which pedal was which, and we were off!

Our plan was to sleep in the car and be at Stonehenge for sunrise the next day, as it was the winter solstice and something very clever is supposed to happen involving the sun and the stones and the shadows on the winter solstice at Stonehenge. Of course, the English sun is a little bit contrary and on this morning, to the consternation of the thousand or so people standing around in the miserable dark drizzle, it decided that the clouds probably had everything under control and it might just stay in bed. We did get an unexpected glimpse into paganism though as we celebrated the solstice druid style. For those playing at home, here's how it's done: first call for peace in all corners of the globe, then get everyone to chant together- this will create an eerily harmonious sound in the circle, then talk a bit, do some praying and beat some drums, smoke weed and be cheerful. Dress-ups are appropriate...unicorns, human trees and capes aplenty.
Pagans are a slightly odd bunch, turns out, but welcoming in the shortest day of the year with them in a huge stone circle in a field in England was certainly memorable.

However, we aren't druids and after about an hour the magic of the morning could no longer block out the freezing cold wind and rain and we jumped gratefully back into the car, turned the heaters to full and drove to Bath. 2000 years ago we would be eagerly heading for a day of pampering and socialising; preparing to have our skin scrubbed and scraped, our eyebrows plucked and our ears cleaned, to sweat in a sauna and re-energise in a plunge pool, and to gossip, giggle and flirt our way around the swimming-pool sized main bath. All the while in the nude. Fast forward several millenia and we are wandering, fully clothed, around a slightly more subdued bath-house complex guided by the disembodied voices of Bill Bryson and a knowledgeable English lady. We couldn't take a dip, unfortunately, but we did drink from the fountain of magical (very irony lukewarm) Bath water. We are now immortal.

Our appetites for local history not quite satiated we took a walking tour around the city and learnt about Bath: the making of. Obviously the presence of natural hot springs play a major part in Bath's history, in that there wouldn't be a city there at all if it wasn't for them (and those canny Romans turning them into a fashionable destination). The limestone found in the local hills is also a major player, being the main material for most of the old buildings.
Moving into the human realm, the city owes it's outstandingly aesthetic architecture to a father and son team named John Wood (elder and younger). They were champions of the Palladian style-elegant, harmonious, proportionate and balanced- and sought to turn Bath into the Rome of England. A square, a mansion and the foundations of the Circus- his magnum opus- later and John Wood the Elder died. His son took over, finished the Circus and added to it the Royal Crescent, which is considered to be one of the best examples of Georgian architecture in Britain- and speaking as someone with no architectural knowledge at all, it is amazing; a building that makes you happy just by being there. He was obviously pushing the right buttons; most of central of Bath is his work. We'll leave the Woods to their building and move onto the man who cleaned up Bath's society. Beau Nash came onto the scene in 1705 with his velvet and diamond rich wardrobe, his fortune made in gambling and his personable charm and transformed Bath. He commissioned a ball room, set in place a curfew so that people felt safe on the streets, introduced rules such as the one that forbade 'exhibitions of resentment from either gentlemen or ladies on the grounds that someone had danced out of turn'. Essentially he poshed up Bath, and he looked damn fine doing so...

"(Beau) wore his gold-laced clothes on the occasion, and looked so fine that, standing by chance in the middle of the dancers, he was taken by many at a distance for a gilt garland".
                                                                                                         Lord Chesterfield

100 years later Jane Austen ensured Bath would be on the future literary trail by making the city her home for 5 years and using it and it's society in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.

Before we left Bath we visited another of John Wood's creations, the Assembly Rooms, a function centre housing some incredibly glittery chandeliers and the fashion museum, where we looked at lots of dresses and I got to see how uncomfortable women used to be back in the days of hoop skirts and corsets. The answer is very, surprise surprise.

Then with our brains heavy with new information we ran back to the car, made it within minutes of our parking ticket expiring and headed home to rest our fact-filled little heads. Christmas was mere days away and we needed to be bright and well-rested for all the eating and present opening to come.

happy snaps from cheerful chaps.

And off we go again, up through Europe and into central France.

Will finally grabbed a bull by the horns in Belem (and then rode it into the pit of hell...)

Porto. The best city in Portugal.

Porto's river at dusk.

So happy to be in Bordeaux that we stayed the night.

Pretty Bordeaux.

Please take us. Please.

The cottage and the countryside.

It's freezing but don't worry I have a tree.

Autumn.

You get a prize if you can guess who we're channelling. 

A chateau. 

Casually stealing sunflowers.

This was at the castle in which Joan of Arc met the king. We found egg stools and did the natural thing.

The French countryside.

And that's what we've been doing the last couple of months. 

a cottage in the countryside

As I write this I am sitting in front of a fire, in a little cottage, in the French countryside. A magical place where two amazing and huge meals a day are cooked for us, the dog can open and close the door by herself and the local history goes all the way back to pre-historic times (paradoxically enough). We are staying with the wonderfully welcoming and accommodating Virginia and Nick, (Will's grandfather's sister and her husband), in a little village called Chaumussay in the Loire region. It isn't all ribbons and charm though...today we spent all but 40 minutes inside, sheltering from the kind of weather that is just waiting for you to tentatively venture out, so it can wrap it's icy fingers around your neck while slowly soaking your clothes with drizzle and laughing maniacally.

To get here we first had to get from Porto to Bordeaux. The plane did most of the work there. We arrived in Bordeaux in the afternoon and the city looked so inviting in the late-autumnal light that we decided to spend the night, before heading into the country. We found, after a bit of desperate panic, the only hostel in Bordeaux, got ourselves a private room and hit the streets to make the most of the quickly disappearing light. Bordeaux gives the impression of being a very well-heeled city, perfectly dressed, not a hair out of place, always on time and with lovely manners. Perhaps there is a seedy underbelly, but we didn't see it. We saw the the lovely old buildings standing proudly on the river-front, a church spire turned gold in the rich afternoon light, long wide streets lined with the sort of shops that tantalize you with all their beautiful things you could never afford and clusters of noisy little bars tucked down side streets. We went into one such and got a rude shock when we ordered two pints and had to hand over 12 euro. Why, there must be some mistake, we thought, Europe is cheap, what is going on?! Apparently wonderfully accessible Spain and Portugal are the cheap exceptions in this western side of the continent. Anyway, we drank our budget busting pints (and they were actually much better than the beer in Portugal, but don't tell), decided we could ill-afford another and went back to the hostel to rest up for a big day of hitch-hiking.

We could not afford the train; it was going to cost 40 euro each to go two hours up the road- absolute insanity in which we would have no part. So hitch-hiking it was. And we made it...it took about 8 hours, and we became very familiar with the servos along the auto-route, and we did have to sit in freezing cold drizzle for a bit, but we also met some very obliging French people who were only too happy to help us (and to speak in English, thank goodness) and we rode in a very fancy BMW with a man who had no qualms about reaching speeds of 150km. And at 8pm boy racer in his beema dropped us right in the middle of the town we needed, at a cafe, and we spent our last 5 euro on beer while we waited for Nick to pick us up.

And we arrived at their charming little country cottage to a hot dinner on the table and a separate little house, very warm and cosy against the outside chill (which we thought we may have to sleep in), where we would be staying. Not bad...I guess...

This area of France is absolutely saturated in local history, from local families who have been in the area for hundreds of years to Joan of Arc and her capers all the way back to the pre-historic people who roamed the area searching for top quality flint (of which there was an abundance here). With a combination of long walks, bike rides and little day trips in the car we have seen a lot of the area and its stories. We snooped around the grounds of a castle that has been in a nearby village for nearly a thousand years and has been in the same family for about 700; now there is just one man left there, going slowly bankrupt while living in a castle. We saw a geometric spired church in another village which was built by a local lord and his wife to give thanks for the safe passing into the new millenium...the first new millenium. We went on a family outing to the castle at a town called Chinon, where Joan of Arc first met and accurately identified the Dauphin, thus enabling her to lead an army to re-take the city of Orleans from the English and liberating France. We rode our bikes out to a museum that told the story of the prehistoric people that moved through the area thousands of years ago, scouring the ground for its superior flint from which they made their weapons. We have seen the remains of a chateau that was sent  up in flames of retaliation when a retreating German army was attacked in WW2, and the poles marking what was the demarcation line between German-occupied and free France from 1940 to 1942.

As well as living in a history lesson, I have been making my 8 year old self very jealous indeed by living in an Enid Blyton story. We have been walking through woods (proper woods with woodland creatures and autumn coloured leaves), collecting chestnuts and subsequently roasting them over the fire, building little homes for hedgehogs...we've yet to see Moonface or any flying chairs though. So we're basically just living out an English childhood. But I had an Australian childhood and Enid Blyton was as close as I got to chestnut roasting and so you see, the two are inextricably linked.

And any time that is left in between all this is filled with cups of tea and coffee, reading by the fire (this is becoming more and more prevalent as the weather becomes less and less inviting), games of Scrabble with the insurpassable Virginia (we've won maybe three or 4 games between us, out of probably 15), long lunches and dinners with garden fresh vegetables and home-made wine, walks through the surrounding woods and farmland and scrumping (I'm going to stick with that) sunflowers from fields we see along the way.

Oh how we love the French countryside. How marvelous, how refreshing, how ridiculously picturesque. How we will miss our brisk country walks.

Paris awaits.

a misadventure and a slaughtered sheep.

It is a very tired and weary couple of Will and Jordans that greet you from blog world today. Turns out, after two months in genteel Europe we've gone soft and are having trouble re-adjusting to the crafty "sales techniques" of those who live in the not so lucky world. But. Take it back about a fortnight.

We ended up staying on at the finca in Spain for an extra week, not really for any particular reason, just because we liked it and both decided it would be stupid to cut our time there short. And it is a good thing we did. We gained two anecdotes to add to our repetoire from that week.

After finishing work one afternoon- and after our afternoon nap- we decided to walk out to an old monastery, set in the hills behind the finca. We set off at about 5, and it was quite a pleasant walk, through the valley, up along the ridge, down through olive and carob groves...then we realised we had been walking for more than an hour and the monstery was still a mirage in the distance. Being sensible, we thought, 'we should go back, don't want to get stuck out here in the dark'. Hahahaha...oh how we laugh. Now. It was most definitely not funny when we were running around like panicky idiots on the top of a mountain at dusk, staring at a wall of impenetrable, prickly shrub that stood between us and a delicious pizza dinner. (Actually, it would have looked quite funny...we were in no mood for frivolity though, you understand.) Anyway, we were on the ridge because we knew we could walk down a slip in between two of the hills. We just didn't know that by the time we found the slip it would be dark. So there we were, panicking our way down a rocky, prickly, slippery, ankle-breaky "path", in the dark, with only the thought of the wild boars that would surely snuggle up to us if we didn't make it home to keep us going. We made it home. Scratched up legs, huge appetites and a story and we were home.

Then the week went on. We went for a couple more walks- strolls really, safely along flat ground. Visited another old English couple who fed us a huge roast dinner with banana split chasers. Saw more charming villages. Hung out with the dogs. Painted a bit. Then it was our last day- for real this time- and we were ending it with a memory that will last forever. Our first sheep slaughter. That's right, we are well on our way to becoming real country people, who can kill and chop up a sheep for many a future dinners (I say well on our way...that may be an exaggeration. We were in fact giggling hysterically through most of the "operation", and I may, at one point, have had my photo taken holding a knife and fork next to a dangling sheep carcass...). But it's a start. I know what bit loin is know. And I know I will never be a vegatarian- seeing all the neatly cut up joints on the table set my stomach a-rumbling, even as the dog was licking up sheep's blood off the floor.

So, we knew we stayed for a reason. But then we really did have to leave (it was getting to the point that we probably would have adopted the finca as our second home and Cathy and James would have found themselves with two new grown-up children). We took our cue from the ducks and headed to Granada.

A wonderful city is Granada. And not only- though this is probably a large part of it- because of the 'free tapas with every drink' thing they have going on. Seriously, 2 or 3 euro (that's $3 or $4) and you can have a beer or wine or sangria and you will also get a little dish of stew or a piece of pizza or some meatballs. These Spaniards, they know a thing or two about the good life (you know, except in regard to the economy and running the country smoothly; food, drink and sleep though- they have it down!) But Granada is also a very wanderable city. The Arabic area climbs up a hill in all its whitewashed, tiled charm to several fantastic panoramic city views (edit out all the ipad-wielding tourists). The main city centre is walkable and dotted with little plazas of fountains and trees. There is the majesty of the Sierra Neveda mountain range in the background. There is a river and watching, steadily and serenely over the city, the Alhambra. An Islamic complex comprising palaces, unimaginably beautiful gardens, and everything else needed in a royal complex back in the day. It is a relic from the days of the Moors and (I'm sure) a world heritage sight. It would be a huge mistake to come to Granada and miss it (and we nearly did). But we lined up from 7am, in the rain, to get a ticket and it was truly worth it.

And for now, that is the end of our European adventure. I do, however, get the feeling we will be back on its welcoming soil before too long. Morocco is a little more difficult than we'd like at the moment and it is, after all, just a short hop across the water. Those Portuguese tarts are calling to us...

(Also P.S. no photos again, back to the imaginations I'm afraid, at least for now).

round two.

These photos will about bring you up to speed with where we are...from India, via Sri Lanka, and onto Spain. 

This is the huge temple that dominated the Indian town that, if anyone can remember my post, I was very sick in and quite frankly, didn't enjoy at all. I do like this photo though.

This is from that same town; while I was sick in bed Will went to conquer the big hill, as is his way, and found these monkeys at the top.

Pondicherry...the first time we've had cheese since Nepal and the first time we've had jam that didn't make us feel ill from chemicals since we left home...we are understandably excited about our picnic (even if we did have to have it on a hill to avoid all the poop on the grass...ahhh, India).

The town policemen doing the town policemen dance in Mamallapuram, the town we spent our last week of India in. P.s. they aren't really dancing, Will just happened to catch them in this hilarious pose.

The big rock! We summited this in Sigirya, Sri Lanka. There were some ruins on top and an excellent view.

Also at the big rock. Apparently there were hornets- we didn't see any but this sign is hilarious.

The tea fields of Sri Lanka- this is where your morning cuppa comes from (most probably).

Will dangling precariously on the edge of another big rock we climbed. This one was called Ella's Rock in the town of, strangely enough, Ella.

Tropical paradise. I think that is all that needs to be said.

Learning to surf in Basque Country. One half of the couple that were our first wwoofing hosts in Spain was a very keen surfer and Will took every opportunity to practise, even though the water was freezing (I know, I swum without a wetsuit...I'm real tough).

Tourists in San Sebastian. As well as taking this very posed photo we also paid way too much for some tapas, before finding the much cheaper and more delicious tapas laden bar in some side street. This city is also home to the most crowded beach I have ever seen. Ever. We considered ourselves lucky to find one square metre of human-free sand.

The Casa de Paja; our first wwoofing project in Spain, helping some hippies build a house of straw. See that smooth, smooth concrete? Smoothing that onto the wall was basically our job for the whole two weeks...we became very, very good. 

The morning view of the village we stayed in while wwoofing...there was no more than a couple of bars and a squash court. Very Spanish country-side.

Back into the city now. This is one of the sculptures outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which we visited on our very rainy last day in the city before heading south. The sack underneath the spider's belly is full of eggs; it is a sculpture to celebrate motherhood.

And this is the river-side facade of the Guggenheim. I like it because you can admire- for free- the sculptures and building itself without needing to part with hard-earned cash to go inside...it's bringing art to the people.

A big, building-side gecko made out of CDs in Madrid.

So that ends the photo journal post. Stay tuned for a Barcelona (aka coolest city we've all ever been to) update.