Walking in the Lakes District

The sun setting out the front of the house

I know I have only recently been to the Lakes District, but we had a long weekend in May (actually we had two), so I was back up there.  Dave hadn't visited yet, and I had loved my previous walk in the mountains. This time we decided to base ourselves in the one location, and we hired a house for the weekend in Keswick. That was definitely a good idea, it was nice to be able to come back, put the (fake) fire on and just chill out with some wine and beers after a hard slog in the mountains.

I have to say I think the walking is better in the UK (than Australia). That's a big call I know, and there is some great walking in Oz as well, the whole of Tasmania for a start, but the ease of getting to these walks, and the fact that you don't have to worry about snakes, or heat exhaustion, or sunburn, gives the UK some major pluses. That and the scenery is really spectacular, and can still be pretty tough in terms of distance and elevation gain. If you pick your walks right you can also avoid the hordes of people as well. There are a few "classic" routes that everyone wants to do (myself included), but once you get off those, or if you go a little out of season, you can have the place to yourself. Which is incredible given how small the UK is and how many people live on it.  It's a good feeling though, knowing that there is so much walking available, and so easily accessible.

The Valleys in the Lake District

We did a couple of the classics this weekend round, Helvellyn and Skiddaw, we tried for Scarfell Pike, but Dave was feeling really sick, and the driving wind and rain was getting him down, so we skipped that ascent.  Helvellyn is the third highest mountain in England (at a mighty 950m) and Skiddaw is the sixth highest (at a less significant 931m).

Helvellyn in the distance, still with snow on it

Looking back along striding edge

Helvellyn was our long day, it's a great walk along striding edge, but just incredibly popular. I guess that's the downside with having such great walks so close to London, there are going to be a lot of other people wanting to enjoy it as well. This was definitely the busiest I've ever seen walking routes. Perhaps it is best to stick to out of season in the Lakes, just because it's so popular. Though I'm not sure I would be so keen to do striding edge if it was covered in snow and ice. It really is an edge of rocks that you have to scramble over for maybe 800m. If you are nervous there is a path a little lower down which does avoid pretty much all the rock scrambling, but perhaps that isn't as fun.

There was actually a traffic jam coming off the edge of the rocks, as there was a bit of a chimney you had to scramble down. There were a surprising number of dogs with people as well, and it was too hard for the dogs to do. So that slowed things down as well, as people had to figure out how to get their dogs down the rocks as well. The view from the top was pretty nice though. And the rest of the walk along the ridgeline was also great. So definitely worth it, I wonder how busy it is in late October though.

Another view of striding edge

The walk up Skiddaw was the best of the weekend I think. We went up the route that not many people use, probably because the elevation gain at the start is brutal. You start from lower down as well, and there is definitely not much of a path. We came down the standard way, and that's almost like a road, it's incredibly broad, still very steep in parts. But the view from the top is definitely worth it, it's gotta be one of the best in this area. It looked like you could do another fine ridge walk to get to Skiddaw as well, and as a plus it looked a lot less busy than striding edge was. All in all a great weekend of walking. And as a bonus it was only 20 pounds to upgrade to first class on the way back, which meant endless sandwiches and drinks, oooh yeah!

I don't have any photos from Skiddaw disappointingly so, since I didn't take my big camera with me, just my compact. And I have a feeling that compact has reached the end of it's life in terms of taking good landscapes. I think a trip to the camera store is in order.

It was lambing season - so the cute was out in force

Prague

Charles Bridge in the early morning

This was my first visit to Prague in about 15 years, and man has it changed! Last time I went I remember you couldn't drink the tap water, and beer was cheaper than bottled water. That may still be the case, but now you can drink out of the tap. This city is definitely a lot richer since last I visited.

There were hardly any homeless people (at least in the centre), maybe they drive them out of there. It's definitely a place for British people who want to drink a lot. Perhaps that's always been the case. I guess it comes from the beer being so extraordinarily cheap. And since it was a lovely warm weekend they were out in droves, without their shirts on. What is it with the British male and this desire to go shirtless in the middle of town? I think they need to visit the beach more to get it out of their system.

The old town square

Anyway there were a few out and about, actually more like standing around in beer gardens and loudly getting drunk. Aaah it's nice to be in a region of earth where your nationality is not the most embarrassing one on holiday. I can tell people I am Australian without being associated with drunken, shirtless boors. Of course in South East Asia it's a different story.

Back to the city though. So what's the first thing we book into do, a walking tour of course! Prague seems to be known for the "free" walking tours. They aren't really free though since you are paying with your time, and if it's really bad there is no chance to do a different one. And of course you are meant to give tips once it's over.

We decided to actually pay for one. And it started about 10 minutes after all the free ones departed, which I think was a ploy by this company. Since we got to stand there and watch the massed hordes get organised into groups of about 50 to start their "free" tour. Man it looked bad. I guess it depends what you want, they are incredibly popular so they must be doing something right. Our tour guide was really good, though slightly disappointingly it was taken by an American. You have to wonder why they can't get locals to talk about their own city. I suppose the slight downside with getting a local can be that they don't give you both sides of the story, only the good of the place, none of the bad.

View across the river to the castle

The tour was really good though, and you always come away with a better feeling of the town. I never appreciated there was a Jewish quarter, and for hundreds of years Jewish people all had to live in this one little area of town. In the late 1700's they were allowed to move into the rest of the city, which seems quite progressive for that time. A lot of the buildings have been bulldozed so it's lost it's ghetto feel. Though the synagogues and old town hall still remain. There is a vast Jewish museum there, which I would have loved to visit, perhaps if we do another visit.

Early morning on the bridge

I've certainly found the place I'll stay at next time I'm there, it's the Hotel Residence Agnes. The service is unbelievable. Free pick up from the airport, then whilst you enjoy a complimentary drink (beer, wine, water, juice) the receptionist takes you over the map and points out things that are good to visit/see. If you want to visit the castle you can be driven up to the top of the hill for free, we needed to buy train tickets, so we were driven to the station and someone came in with us to help buy them. Just amazing, definitely stay here if you are ever in town.

The city itself is of course wonderful. We got to do a great run one morning, it's definitely a good one for running around, since it's pretty flat, and it's usually so packed during the day. So we got Charles Bridge pretty much to ourselves, which is pretty special. We also found a statue of Sri Chinmoy, which was a little weirder. He is the founder of a religion who's motto seemed to be self transcendence through physical pain. They do organise some great races though.

Dave with Sri Chinmoy

Of course we went to the castle, but I was a bit disappointed in that. It's not like castles in Western Europe, where the place has been restored to close to what it once might have looked like. This is just a shell of a castle, there is no furniture, paintings, tapestries, I'm not sure why this is, since the building seems to still be in use. For such a massive complex, you just expect there to be more care in the presentation of what seems to be such an important building to the city. Instead nothing, just seething masses of tourists.

There is a lot of other stuff on the plateau, above the castle. We visited the Strahov Monastry (upon recommendation by the hotel), and it was way better than the castle. Maybe because we had no expectations.  It was founded in 1143 and it has these great halls. The castle is just a big barn, but these rooms are amazing, full of books, with incredible detailing on the walls. They are just worlds apart, and I think there were a bunch of other buildings that could be similarly amazing inside. Just avoid the castle.

The Theological Hall in the Strahov Monastry

Upon the recommendation of the tour guide we also visited this memorial to Czech parachutists. They assassinated a Nazi officer during the Second World War and were hiding out in the the crypt of a cathedral, before they were betrayed. The church was stormed by the Nazi's and the parachutists ended up killing themselves before being captured. They are now national heroes, but it just seemed like a really bad time. Once the Nazi's realised who had participated in the assassination they rounded up their families and shot them all, including the little kids.

The astronomical clock, with it's many dials

Prague was spared the bombing that other cities suffered during the war, perhaps because they had already been so comprehensively screwed over by Britain, France and Germany. It does mean that things like their astronomical clock is still surviving and in working order. I never appreciated how cool these clocks were, it consists of all these moving dials, hands and objects. It shows the position of the sun in the sky throughout the day, sunset and sunrise, the current local time and the zodiacal position. And this is all without daily maintenance, pretty impressive for something that was built in 1410.

Just overall a really nice city to visit, and it's certainly changed so much in the years since I was last there. We still got all the warnings about not getting into unbooked taxis, apparently they will charge you some crazy fare-rate. And to watch for pick-pockets and that sort of thing. But it feels like Paris is more of a scary city these days than Prague is. Just watch out for the British bar crawls.

Tokyo

Dave with some modern art in a shopping centre

After our skiing in Niseko we spent a couple of days in Tokyo. Last time we went to Japan we flew via Osaka, which was a slightly strange choice. This time I thought we would actually spend some time in the most famous Japanese city. It is a strange one, I can understand the fascination. We were staying near the Shibuya crossing, if you ever see file footage of thousands of Japanese people crossing a road, odds are it's this one.

It's a strange city, Tokyo, for a start it's massive.  I never really appreciated just how big it is, but you'll get on the tube for 40 minutes and then when you exit it's like you haven't moved.  You are still in the middle of a massive city.  London feels big, but if I got on the tube from central London for 40 minutes wherever you ended up would feel completely different from where you got on.  Whereas Tokyo feels very much like it's all the same, these massive concrete apartment blocks.  I have to say overall it wasn't an attractive city, I mean there are bits that are nice, and bits that have a different feel.  But there wasn't like there was this single skyline view that you could recognise, and go, yeah that's Tokyo.  I mean it felt like the most recognisable shot was the pedestrian crossing in Shibuya, which is saying something.

We went to the Edo-Tokyo museum, which is in a really cool, elevated building.  And inside there are all these scale models of buildings and towns.  It also had a really interesting section on Tokyo during World War II.  I really did not appreciate the scale of devastation from that War.  Everything I have learned has always been about the damage to Europe and really how much the eventual winners suffered.  I'd never realised that basically half the city was destroyed and 200,000 people were killed.  Though it seems amazing that Tokyo is still around, given that in 1923 it was also completely destroyed in an earthquake and resulting firestorm.  So in the last 100 years Tokyo has been completely rebuilt twice.  It's incredible that there are 35 million people there, and that it actually seems to function as a city.  It certainly explains the unbelievably ugly buildings.  For such a famous city the vast majority of it is really ugly.  But then I suppose they just needed to house as many people as they could as fast as possible.

View of Sensoji Temple in the midst of Tokyo

The other thing I noticed was that there weren't many parks, given that everyone seems to live in apartments I would have thought that there would be more green areas for people to use.  But all the parks seemed to be attached to either a museum, castle or cemetery, you couldn't just have a park. There also wasn't the same feeling of villages that you get in London, where there is a definite centre of the city, then each little area has quite a distinctive feel (at least in zones 1 and 2). In Tokyo all the areas feel pretty much the same, dense apartment blocks. This makes it even stranger when you happen across a temple or museum, since it really stands out from the surrounding concrete.

The park in Sensoji Temple with an arcade ride behind

You can't visit Japan without seeing a few temples. A massive complex in Tokyo is the Sensoji temple (near Asakusa), it's really popular. We visited a few temples, sometimes you just can't help it. And in each one I was struck by how much the people still follow the religion (?) I guess you would call it that, perhaps it's just more tradition. The cleansing, the clapping and throwing of coins and the praying. Coming from the UK to another country which is quite similar in a lot of ways, and yet in this is quite different. It was a bit of culture shock for me.

Looking over the village (and animatronic cat) in Fukugawa museum

There are so many museums in Tokyo, the issue is really travelling all over the city finding them all. We had a few instances where we struggled to find the underground stations, you somehow find yourself on a massive pedestrian walkway that you can't get off and is heading in the wrong direction. I think they need a few more signs directing people to the stations, they certainly weren't overly obvious.

Another museum we went to was the Fukugawa-Edo museum which is a recreation of a full, life-size, village from 19th century Tokyo (then called Edo). It's a tiny little museum, and we didn't see any English speaking guides or anything, in fact we had some trouble understanding that the ticket seller wanted us to stow our bags. But the museum itself has a peaceful atmosphere and apparently there are meant to be English speaking guides to take you around. We just got a printed sheet. The other thing to remember (in fact should be a given for Japan) is to wear socks that you can walk around in. Since here you can take off your shoes and enter all the exhibits (or houses). I really have to remember to not pack holey socks when I go to Japan.

Gate from Imperial Palace with Tokyo beyond

Of course a must see when visiting is the Imperial Palace, you don't get to see the bit where the royalty lives, they are very well hidden from the tourists, but you do get to see some of the old Palace. Mainly it's just a massive garden. There were some buildings scattered through the gardens, but you couldn't go into any of them. So a little different from most national castles in towns you visit. The gardens were nice though, good to get out of the bustle of Tokyo. We were also getting into cherry blossom season it seemed. There was one lone cherry tree blossoming and it was completely swamped with people. There were also pear and apple trees blossoming (which to my untrained eye look identical to cherries) and yet they were getting no attention. It was really all down to the cherries.

We managed to do a lot of museum visiting whilst in Tokyo, we also got along to the Museum of Contemporary Art, these can be a bit hit and miss, sometimes they are really great. This was a better than average one. I suppose I was expecting more East Asian artists, but there was a Spanish artist exhibition on at the time. If modern art reflects the society it is created in, then Spain has a real problem with feminism. Holy cow, it was like every second piece was exploring woman's role in Spanish society, or machismo, or discrimination, man it was a bit overwhelming. Glad I'm not a woman in Spain, if that art is reflective of their attitude towards them, because man they have problems. The art itself was pretty cool though, and there were some pieces by Japanese artists.

Prada building - just one of many awesome buildings

One of the highlights of the trip was this little self-guided walk we did through the Harajuku district. It borders Shibuya, and it's like a completely different world. Shibuya is totally overwhelming with the number of people, and then you go one street over, and you are in this completely calm, but still very lively, area. Oh it was so nice, when you imagine Tokyo I think Harajuku is what you are picturing, just shops and restaurants, and bars and people strolling along. But with lots of colour and weird things in the windows.

The self-guided walk was all about architecture, perhaps the other good thing about having to constantly rebuild your city is that there aren't any Grade II listed buildings which need to be maintained. So if a rich company wants to create a flagship store, they seem to generally start from scratch, plus they also seem to be a lot more willing to try crazy things. Ever couple of hundred metres there would be another great building. I'm normally fairly indifferent to architecture, but these buildings really changed my mind about it.

Another highlight was the Asakura Museum of Sculpture. It's the artist Asakura Fumio's house (he's dead now), originally it was his workplace and school and now it's a museum of both his sculptures and his house. He had a great house, centred around this courtyard, which is basically just a pond, filled with light and his sculptures. Definitely worth a visit.