Cotswolds : Day 5

Cooper's Hill.

Day five of my little walk in the west country, and it's a long one, I reckon at least twenty-two miles or so, mainly as I plan to make a substantial detour to find a campsite to the south of Cheltenham.  My old mate Austin is driving over from Wales to meet me there - I reckon he probably wasn't up for wild camping in the woods somewhere.  I also suspect he is to blame for the rain that continues to fall on and off - he always was good at making water fall from the sky, somehow or other.

Pencil shaped bollards in suburban Cheltenham.

The route continues to be hilly but very scenic, and there are plenty of points of interest, for instance early on I pass Cooper's Hill, scene of the annual cheese rolling event which is known the world over as a prime example of 'stuff those whacky Brits do'.  Then more hills and more hill forts, before leaving the Way and making a descent towards Cheltenham.  My route leads through suburban streets, plus a few footpaths, which unfortunately mostly seem to be shut due to construction work, a bit of a pain as I have to detour around.  I nonetheless beat Austin to the campsite, but don't have to wait long before heading off to a pub for beer and fish and chips, it is all most cheap.

Photos to go with this post can be found here

Cotswolds : Day 4

Dursley market house.

It seems the recent dry spell, most of which I wasn't in the country for of course, has come to an end, it rains all night and is still drizzling when I come to pack up the tent.  I can live with this...  The walking begins with a steep descent into Dursley, nice little place, I like the market house with its effigy of Queen Anne.  Then back up into the hills again, views not so great today what with the rain, but still plenty of interest.  I walk past a neolithic barrow, a trig point and more topographs - there have been a lot of them.  Seems more hilly today, lots of climbing up and down through woods.  Makes for a long day, it is past six by the time I reach camp just outside Painswick.  Nice campsite, I get a shower, there's even a communal space where I 'cook' some couscous, getting my long distance walk routine back now.  Campsite is oddly empty mind, so into the historic, stone built centre of Painwick for a beer or two...

A topograph.

Photos to go with this post can be found here

Cotswolds : Day 3

Taking tea in Wooton.

Another night in a random bit of wood, and this time it actually rains - has been a bit dry in England over the last few weeks I gather.  Well, the tent copes - this is the one I bought for the Grand Canyon back in 2007, I replaced the poles that broke during the 2015 festival marathon.  There's life in it yet...  The route continues to be very pleasant, through hilltop cornfields with splendid views.  I walk down into Wooton-under-Edge, historic centre of the wool industry and now a charming little place - I check out some 17th century almshouses, then enjoy a pot of tea in a 16th century garden.  And then into the hills once more, am liking the Cotswold Way I must say, beautiful country this.  Lots of monuments too - on an edge overlooking the Severn I find an impressive memorial to John Tyndale, first to translate the bible into English and martyred for his trouble.  There's a spiral staircase inside which I duly climb, good view from up here.  Not much further to walk from here - honestly, taking seven days for this trail is not terribly strenuous.   And shockingly enough, I finish the walk at an actual campsite!  Ashen Plains it is called, I'm vaguely expecting it to resemble the gates of Mordor, but it seems nice enough.  And yes, there is a nearby pub...

Tyndale Monument.

Photos to go with this post can be found here

Cotswolds : Day 2

Rather pretty up here.

I make camp in a random bit of wood, not for the first time, but it works out fine.  I did try to find campsites, but mostly they were a few miles off route, and then either wouldn't answer their phone, or did and said 'no tents'.  Ho hum.  Will try in person at a couple of them.  An early start then, and nice walking, up into hills with fine views as far as Wales.  I pass Norman churches and Iron Age hill forts, massive stately homes and a charming newly built folly - intended as a home for barn owls apparently, all seems very English.  Sheep graze, the trail is in good condition - I meet a volunteer who has been whacking nettles, good work that man.  There are plenty of hikers up here, many of them American or German, well why not.  My start this morning featured a monument to civil war luminary Sir Breville Granville, and my day ends with another, this time to Lord General Somerset, a contemporary of Wellington it seems.  And then, shockingly enough, to a pub...

Lord Somerset Monument.

Photos to go with this post can be found here

Cotswolds : Day 1

Royal Crescent, Bath.

Back to walking then - has been a while, particularly in the UK, so finding myself back here in summer it has to be done.  Off to Bath then to walk the Cotswold Way, one hundred and twenty miles or so through the west country, should be fun.  Not too much fun getting there mind you, some sort of problem with the line means my train gets to Bath around forty-five minutes late, but never mind.

Bath is really very impressive, I walk past the Roman Baths and many stone built houses, and of course many tourists.  Then up into the hills, grass covered chalk it seems, sheep graze, it is nice, ah, I have missed this.  I pass golf courses, a racecourse, the site of the civil war battle of Lansdowne, and then it's not far to a pub at Upton Cheney.  I have missed the 'beer after a long walk' thing also.  There is indeed beer, and pizza with thick cut chorizo, all good.  And if I have largely failed to sort out anywhere to camp this week, well, whatever...

The Upton Inn.

Photos to go with this post can be found here

Chiang Mai : Retrospective

Silver working - well, probably aluminium actually - at the Silver Temple.

Seems I rather let the blogging from Thailand peter out a bit, and now I am back in the UK, I should really bring the story of my time in the Land of Smiles to some sort of conclusion.  I guess, after being in the same place for five months or so, it became a bit tricky to think of much new to say - I don't know if the internet needed any more of me complaining about how ridiculous the Thai language is, and while there were an awful lot of places to go and see in the area around Chiang Mai, by the end of my time there I was going back to locations I'd already seen and indeed written about here.

Company!

Indeed - for a week or so in June, my friend Chris visited from the UK, and so I spent the time trying to pack in the highlights of the region for him and generally act as a tour guide, which was fun, but again obviously stuff I'd seen before in the main.  We did get to Doi Inthanon, Chris hoping to see some birds, however this is the rainy season... actually generally speaking the rain hasn't been too bad, just the odd heavy shower.  But during our trip to Thailand's highest mountain it rains fairly solidly, which apparently leads the birds to stay out of sight.  Never mind, I do also take advantage of his presence to do a few things I wouldn't normally, such as an excellent evening cookery course, a night of 'Kantoke Dancing' which is good fun, each of the local hill tribes taking time to do their thing, and even the city's famous ladyboy cabaret - it is in fact quite tasteful, and you can see that the performers are having a good time.

Not a bad Panaeng, though I say so myself.

But anyway - pluses and minuses of my stay here.  Really, there are going to be a lot more pluses here, I already miss the place, it was just such a pleasant city and indeed country to live in.  Fantastic, cheap food, beautiful surroundings, friendly people and really I got to live quite a luxurious lifestyle on my meagre budget.  Probably the best thing about Chiang Mai was going to school, crazy though the language itself is.  All my teachers and fellow students were fun to spend time with and while I may have struggled with Thai, learning such a different language, or trying to, certainly gave me a new perspective on linguistics, and had me wondering why English has some features and Thai has others.

Minuses - well I guess a minor annoyance was the way I started getting regular fines from the traffic police for not having a Thai driving license - but this was actually sorted pretty easily, I didn't even need to do any sort of test, just show my English license.  But really the major downside of being here really is the language.  Seriously I was one of the best students at the school, but progress was agonisingly slow, and when study is the only 'productive' thing I'm doing this gets a bit depressing after a while.  The way that even after six months, I could try talking to Thai people and just get a blank look, was really a little bit sad.  A consequence there of course that it was really quite hard to have any sort of conversation with anybody, and while I am generally pretty self reliant I actually did start to miss talking to people - it was good that Chris came when he did.

So... the question is now, should I try going back and continuing to bang my head against learning Thai, or just give it up as a bad job?  There are other places to go after all.  Still, not going to worry about that just now, rather, let me get back to where this blog started, namely long walks in the UK.  And pubs.

The ladyboy cabaret.

Photos to go with this post can be found here

Chiang Mai : The Vowels of the Beast

With my 'Lanna Flag'.  I totally made it myself.

So - four months into my Chiang Mai adventure, and I have managed, just about, to not throw my hands in the air and run screaming away from the language learning.   It is, however, hard not to get a little bit disheartened at how slow progress is - seriously, we are still talking about noodles and shopping.  I've got a decent handle on reading now, the aforementioned vowels, which use fourteen different symbols, variously written above, below, before or after the first consonant (or consonants) of the syllable, are no longer a mystery to me, and I can more or less correctly pronounce a whole bunch of irregularly spelled words.  Sadly it becomes clear that given the lack of spacing, punctuation and capitalisation in Thai script, the chances are that if I see a series of syllables that I don't know written down, not only will I not know the meaning, but I won't even know how to speak the words - basically you just have to know.

Traditional dress.

And it seems, it is pretty much the same deal with what passes for grammar here.  I increasingly get the impression that Thai consists of a (very large) number of what I might call 'template phrases', which allow you to express a certain sort of thing, with a few spaces into which the 'nouns' or 'verbs' can be plugged in - again, my early guess that Thai doesn't really differentiate between nouns and verbs seems to be on the money.  Is there any consistent logic as to how these template phrases work?  Maybe, if so I've not really spotted it yet, again you just have to know.  Get the phrase wrong, and Thai people will not understand, even if every word you say is correctly pronounced - or worse, you'll say something very different to what you intended, word order is very important.  On the other side of the coin, if you encounter one of these phrases for the first time, then even if you manage to recognise every word, the initial impression is often of an incomprehensible word salad.  It does not help that every Thai word seems to have many meanings, with the more common words often having dozens.

I find myself asking the teachers at school questions along the lines of 'has any of your students ever learned Thai to the point at which local people can understand them?' - the answer being 'well... a couple of Chinese people maybe.'  Chinese, it seems, is grammatically very similar to Thai, although the vocabulary is quite distinct.  Well... studying remains a largely fun thing to do, and I continue to enjoy the culture class on Saturdays, they still manage to find a different thing for us to do every week, most recently various culturally relevant handicrafts - I have variously folded pandanus leaves to make decorous air fresheners, created a Chinese lantern from tissue paper, and cut up more paper to make a charming decoration for the Thai New Year celebration, Songkran.

Me and my funky moped.

Ah, Songkran.  I guess, if you do one thing in Thailand during your entire life, coming here for Songkran is probably that thing.  Falling in mid April, the very hottest part of the hot season, in the past this would have been primarily a religious festival, during which the people would visit the temple, make offerings, symbolically release birds or fish, and pour trickles of holy water onto the shoulders of Buddha statues or each other.  Well, all that still happens - indeed, I spend a fun afternoon watching a parade of floats, dancing, drumming and so forth, much of the procession representing the various local temples, and there is indeed much pouring of holy water onto shoulders.  Mostly though what goes on now is a massive water fight taking place over four or five days and encompassing the entire country...  I understand that many foreigners hide at home for the period, but I rather enjoy myself, I variously walk, cycle, and ride my moped around town, spraying water over locals and tourists alike, while getting soaked to the skin in turn, all good fun.  I don't have any photographs of the festivities though - maybe if I do this again I will get a waterproof camera!

A pleasant spot by the Ping.

Photos to go with this post can be found here