Windsor, Stonehenge and Bath

There are a lot of interesting things about UK, one of them is that holidays here don't have names. They just call them Bank holidays. There is early May bank holiday, then late May bank holiday, then August Bank holiday and so on. Further, all these holidays are on Mondays to enable a long weekends. Convenient!

There is something about long weekends, though! You have to do something different on long weekends. It is just another day off, but somehow it seems like a crime to spend long weekends lazing around at home. So here we are, off on a day tour with Golden Tours, London to Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Bath. Our journey starts with meeting David, our fabulous tour manager at the offices of Golden Tours in Victoria, London. We then board the coach and depart for Windsor Castle, our first stop.

Windsor Castle is one of the three official residences of the Queen, presumably the best as the Queen spends her summers here. It is the largest inhabited castle in the world, and that is the beauty of it. There are a lot of great castles in the world, but most of them are in ruins, unused for centuries. This is a residence, all of the rooms we saw are actually in use. In fact, they warn us upfront that on any given day, the Queen may decide to use a particular room for something (like the State dining room for having a banquet) and then that room will be closed for visitors. So for today, we have told the Queen to restrict herself to her personal quarters :-).

Our tour guide, David is great. He is very knowledgeable, friendly and witty. The tour is a mix of nationalities - Americans, French, Spanish, we are the only Indians. David connects with everyone with ease, he even speaks in all these languages. He tells us about the history and the present of the castle, always with a witty twist to every event or fact. Windsor Castle has a gun room which is full of guns the British seized from Tipu Sultan, as well as Tipu's gold tiger. David actually tells the guard standing there, "See, this gentleman (pointing towards me) has come all the way from India just to take back Tipu's tiger, so would you mind looking the other way while we take it away?" David really made the tour fun.

We are able to catch the changing of guard ceremony at Windsor, which again is made interesting with David interpreting it. Here's the layman (or David's) version of the exchange that happens between the current guards and new guards during changeover, in layman's language.
The incoming guards come in with trumpets and band.
The existing guards get on alert in case the coming army is an enemy army.
Existing Guards - Hey Guys, you look British, are you really British?
Incoming Guards - Of course we are. We have come to relieve you. Talk of gratitude!
Existing Guards - Please present your credentials
Incoming Guards - Here they are
Existing Guards - You guys ready to give an arms inspection
Incoming Guards - Yes Sir!
Existing Guards - All looks good. Take over guys, we need to run.
The chapel at Windsor was also interesting. Unfortunately, no photos inside the castle or the chapel. After finishing our Windsor Castle tour, we went around the Windsor town and then on to Stonehenge.

Stonehenge is the main reason I am on this tour. One of the first books I remember reading in childhood is "101 unsolved mysteries of the world" and Stonehenge is certainly one of them. A collection of huge stones in the middle of an arid land arranged in a sophisticated manner 5000 years ago with so many mysteries attached to it. The place has an aura around it. The immediate thing that strikes you is - why would someone do this? The most acceptable theory is that it is some sort of a altar of Sun-God worship, because the first ray of the solstice morning sun falls directly on the centre. Still, why? There are better and easier and grander ways of worshipping sun all over the world. 5000 years ago, when metal tools were not known in this part of the world and civilization was at its formative stages, someone launched a project which lasted 1500 years which involved bringing stones from Oxford and some from as far as Wales, no means of transportation apart from rolling these stones over logs across these vast distances; which involved designing so that 29 pillars arranged equally spaced formed a perfect circle and the beams atop those pillars exactly fitted; which involved placing those stones at exact location when the concept of a crane was 4800 years in future; which involved the drive to continue for 1500 years such a project - the whole thing is sheer impossible and does not make sense, still it was done and there those stones stand as a reminder to us that we cannot explain everything.

The weather is holding very well, and the vast plains allow a good wind to come through, heightening the magic of the sublime, spiritual sort of experience. It is lunch time now, so we head over to a nearby English pub for lunch, before heading on to the town of Bath.

Bath, as the name suggests, is a town famous for its public bath. This place has the only hot spring in UK and the ancient Roman conquerors set up the Roman public baths here which used the waters of the spring and were meant to cure a lot of ills. We did not find anything great in the place, I mean its just another hot spring, there are dime a dozen in tropical countries. After the Roman baths, we do a round of the town of Bath, which has one interesting feature - all houses look exactly the same apart from the abbey. The whole town was designed by one architect and he sure did not believe in variations. All three storied houses, quite drab looking, and people were happy to live in those, they were posh. Can't understand these things!

Back onto the highway for the coach to drive us back to London while we catch a nap. A great trip overall. Thank you David, once again.

दूर तक निगाहों में हैं गुल खिले हुए (Holland and a touch of Brussels)

Hello! You guys must be wondering, what’s up with Madhu and Himanshu? They have been silent for almost 2 years, and then they are suddenly posting one travelogue after another. Well, both of us love to travel and have not been able to do so for quite some time due to pregnancy, Hiranya’s infancy and gloomy British winters. So now that the sun is out and Hiranya is of a travel-able age, we are back on the travel circuit.

To mark the occasion of the fifth anniversary of our honeymoon (in case you are prompted to search this blog for a travelogue for our honeymoon, let me tell you, it isn't here. Tons of privacy issues, you see!), we decided to visit the beautiful Tulip gardens of Holland. I mean, what better way to mark your honeymoon date than to sing “देखा एक ख्वाब तो ये सिलसिले हुए, दूर तक निगाहों में हैं गुल खिले हुए” (a romantic song from Bollywood movie Silsilay shot in Holland)? Not having time to research and plan out my own trip, I booked a 3-day tour of Holland through Star Tours of London, who have a very good reputation among the other Indians I have met in UK.

The start of our trip was plush. We had to catch our tour coach early Saturday morning from East London and that is quite some distance from Ipswich, so we decided to stay in London for Friday night. A last minute search on Google and we booked a room in the West Ham United Football Club Hotel. For the price they charge, it is a really plush hotel, with very comfortable rooms and very friendly staff. Any of you want a hotel room in East London area, this place is highly recommended.

This whole tour was a strange mish-mash of great experiences mixed with very irritating ones. The tour started with us boarding a bus from East London to Dover. This coach was our home for next 3 days (thankfully nights were at a hotel) and let me tell this to whoever had not done coach tours before – they are a pain! You get fed up of sitting in the same position for days; and if you are travelling with a baby who is just learning to move around and finds himself constrained to his parents’ laps, you are in for trouble. Hiranya was quite supportive though, he slept most of the coach part of the journey.

So we reached Dover and our coach boarded the ferry to take us to Calais. The ferry crossing was short and calm enough, by the time we had breakfast, the trip was over. Back onto the coach to go from Calais to the first stop on our itinerary – Madurodam, Holland. Madurodam is a tourist attraction 60 km from Amsterdam. It has miniature versions of all major structures/ buildings in Holland. Many of the models were working models, with a model Amsterdam Central station having miniature trains running and the model airport having miniature planes moving around towards runway. Nice place. We would have liked to spend more time than the one hour allowed by our tour manager.

Let me introduce you at this stage to our tour manager, Ms. Sangeeta. I generally don’t like criticizing people, but Sangeeta must be one of the most boring and unprofessional tour managers around. Her effort at telling us about the attractions we were visiting were restricted to reading out the names and one line descriptions from brochures; there was no initiative to get the group to mingle (we had to do it ourselves eventually), her humour was as interesting as a door-knob and her way of keeping people together was reminiscent of a kindergarten school-mistress. The whole attitude was – "I have to tick this list of places on the itinerary, whether you end up enjoying any place or not is none of my business". It was a rude shock to us when at the very first service stop on the way to Madurodam from Calais, she actually left us behind and asked the bus driver to proceed. Admitted that it took us an extra 5 minutes because we had to change Hiranya’s nappies and all. Still, we were not expecting to be left in the middle of nowhere. Thanks to our co-passengers who reminded the driver that we have been left behind that we were able to get back on the bus. Throughout the tour, she kept leaving people behind and we kept getting the driver to wait a bit more for the whole group to be in the bus. Amazingly idiotic, I tell you!

Anyway, we left Madurodam towards our hotel. A bit about our driver, Mr. Symon. An interesting chap, typical British humour, but does not believe in Sat-Navs and does not believe in asking for directions either. Result – we took 3.5 hours to reach our hotel which should have taken us just over an hour; it would have been even more had one of our co-passengers not got fed up, logged on to Google maps on his mobile, sat with Symon and showed him the way to the hotel. And what a hotel it was – literally middle of nowhere. One and a half hour drive away from Amsterdam, not near to anything or anywhere, I guess the hotel guys must have paid Star tours money to have us stay there :-). We finally reached the hotel at 10:30 in the night, all of us were starving, so we proceeded straight to dinner. The fabulous Indian dinner that we had been promised turned out to be a very average fare, but we were too tired to complain. We just finished our dinner and proceeded to our rooms to sleep. On reaching the room, we realised that the bed is just two single beds kept together rather than one double bed. On asking the receptionist and our dear tour manager, we were told that that is it, all the rooms in the hotel are the same. There of us (I, Madhu and Hirayna) sleeping with such an arrangement was really a challenge.

After a very basic breakfast the next day, we proceeded to Keukenhoff, the tulip gardens. On the way to the place, we saw tulip farms spread across acres. Amazingly beautiful. Like some giant hand has painted lines across the whole area. Red, yellow, orange, pink - so many colours, each more beautiful than the other. We just fell in love with the place [and with each other again, but that happens all the time ;-)]. The gardens were also beautiful, they had lots of tulip bed arrangements but somehow, we liked the farms better. The span of colours filling up the whole view just takes your breath away. It was a shame that the tourist attraction was the garden rather than the farm. Having said that, the Keukenhoff tulip garden is certainly one of the best places in the world that I have seen. Its huge, its beautiful, its very well arranged, the brilliance and the variety of colours and flowers is nothing short of dazzling. The weather gods were benevolent and it was sunny throughout the day, enabling us to enjoy the ethereal beauty of the place.

Again, we were allocated very less time there than what we would have liked. So rushed through the gardens and lunch to be back in the coach. To do what? To visit a cheese and clogg factory. Why on earth would any sane person want to visit a cheese factory when they can spend that time among tulips? Am I on a school education trip or what? And in case missed this piece of knowledge in school, a clogg is a wooden shoe worn by the farmers in Holland. Then on to Gassan diamond cutting factory in Amsterdam, who pride themselves on producing the best cuts for diamond and lectured us on how a diamond is priced. It really became boring. I should have stayed home and watched the Discovery channel!

After braving all this, we took a boat cruise across the canals of Amsterdam. This was good. So while my mood is good, let me take this opportunity to tell you a bit about what I loved about Holland. First, the tulip farms. Breathtaking! Then the amazing canal system. The whole place is full of canals, all connected to each other through a well-built network. Be it the Amsterdam city itself or the countryside and the farms, everywhere the canal network could be clearly seen to be in action both as an irrigation source and a transport facility. This, given that Holland as a country is below the sea level and has to pump out its waste water into the sea, was really a very interesting point to note. Next, the bicycles. As we were cruising in the canals of Amsterdam, we saw fewer cars than bicycles, which is very surprising in a modern city. There were thousands of cycles in cycle stands and moving about, looks like people here are very conscious of the carbon imprint of cars and their health. Great!

Our tour manager and driver then sold us two optional “extras”. The first was to go to Volendam, a fishing village and to Markerwaarddijk, a road with sea on one side and lake on another. Volendam was a disappointment – by the time we reached there, all the shops were closed, so all those opportunities to meet the locals and see the traditional Dutch way of life gone. We were left on the marina and given 45 minutes and this time, we really did not know what to do with the time. Markerwaarddijk road was good, though nowhere near as outstanding a photo-opportunity as we had been told. Trust the English to sell a doughnut for the price of Kohinoor!

Back to hotel for another average fare meal and then on to the other extra - “Amsterdam by night”. The fact that this would never have been an extra if we had been put up within reasonable distance of Amsterdam was not lost on anyone, but hey, we are on a vacation, right? Amsterdam is one of the most liberal places in the world in two respects. First - soft drugs like cannabis, hashish, marijuana are legal here and are sold in coffee shops. Second - prostitution is legal here, the red light area of Amsterdam is almost a tourist place, with semi-naked prostitutes sitting in their display windows soliciting trade. The uniqueness of the place was worth noticing, and I am not pronouncing right-wrong judgements here, but we found it uninteresting and repetitive after ten minutes. So another place where the allocated one hour was more than what we required.

Next morning was the trip back to London, stopping at Brussels on the way. What we did not realise was that when the tour manager said “photo stop”, she actually meant us to finish taking photos as fast as the camera shutter moves. We took some photos of the Atomium structure (a structure made in shape of an Iron atom), did not have chance to go inside that or to visit the nearby mini-Europe park which has miniatures of all famous structures of Europe. Very disappointing! Then we went to the Grand Plais, the central square of Brussels, which had nice buildings. Next stop was Mannequin Pis - this is supposed to be one of the most famous statues in the world. In reality, it is a small statue of a boy pissing and there is absolutely nothing great about it. After a quick lunch, we were back in the coach and on our way to Calais.

On the way back, we took the train shuttle from Calais to Folkestone. You are sitting inside a box called bus which is inside a box called train compartment which is inside a tunnel below sea. Layers of enclosures! Anyway, it was fast, and we reached our destination well in time.

So overall, a visit to two very promising and wonderful places. Holland was beautiful, Brussels looked interesting, but the overall experience was made very dull by the way the tour was planned out and especially by our tour manager. We have resolved to visit these places again on our own to really enjoy them at our own pace.