Wengen - or the highest railway station in Europe

Underneath the Eiger

The next day it was time to walk to our next hotel.  That was it for Grindelwald, it was on to Wengen, at 1300m we would be sleeping a bit higher tonight.  But first there was a long days walk ahead of us.  We had noticed the previous day that the morning was pure blue skies but by the time the afternoon had rolled round the clouds were gathering.  So we thought it best to try and get an early start today to try and take advantage of the clear skies and views in the morning.

It was still a long hot morning, starting at 1000m in Grindelwald, we had to get to Kleine Scheidegg at 2061m first.  On the way there we also passed Alpiglen, for those who are interested in the Eiger summits, this is where most people camped before attempting the climb.  And Kleine Scheidegg was where people would watch through telescopes as the climbers died as they tried.  The whole morning was spent walking under the north face of the Eiger.  It's almost impossible to get a sense of scale, it's just so incredibly big.  It is standing another 2000m above you at this point and those sorts of vertical distances just seem so hard to judge.

Our walk the day before

Looking down to Grindelwald

This was probably the hottest I've been through the whole week, it was just this never-ending uphill over 6km climbing 1000m.  We could see across the Grindelwald valley to where we had walked the day before, even catching a glimpse (we think) of our lunch spot.  This was a much easier walk than the day before, and also a lot greener.  It's hard to capture but all the wildflowers were out.  It was not so much meadows that you were walking through, but more carpets of flowers.

The flower explosion

Again there were hardly any other people on the trail.  We kept leapfrogging with one cyclist, he would have to go round the switchbacks and we would take the more direct route along the path.  It seemed like we had reached the gradient where it was quicker to walk.  He would pass us when we would stop for a drink, but then we would overtake him later on.  Though he would have got down the other side of Kleine Scheidegg much faster than us.

The Eiger in blazing sunlight

When you arrive at Kleine Scheidegg it's a bit of a central train station, which is a bit bizarre since nobody lives here.  It's literally just restaurants and some hotels.  But there are 3 lines ending here, so it was all really busy.  We did take the train from here, it was the train up to the Jungfraujoch.  This is the train line that goes through the Eiger, there are 2 viewing stations on the way up and these are where various rescue attempts were launched for people dying on the climb up.  The trip takes an hour up, which is pretty long, but that includes various halts to let trains going the other way go past.  Jungfraujoch is also at 3454m, so there is a fair elevation gain for the little train.

Jungfraujoch

On the other side of Kleine Scheidegg

Again it was a bit of a shock to us, since this is seriously touristy, compared to walking through wildflowers with nobody around.  Being surrounded by so many people who were losing their minds over the snow was a bit of a shock to the system.  I would recommend taking the trip up though, it's expensive but you don't get many chances to get that high, not without a few years of mountaineering practise and a serious amount of gear.  It is a completely different world that high.  And you are right between the Jungfrau and the Monch, they are only about 500m further above you, which at that point doesn't look that high at all.

The unbelievable north face of the Eiger, looking all the way down to the walking paths below

The ice palace with strange sculptures

The stops along the way are amazing too, you get a real sense of how inhospitable the north face of the Eiger is. It's just a sheer drop thousands of metres, it's incredible people even managed to climb it in the first place, or that they now do it in a bit over 2 hours!  The launching of rescue expeditions from this point must have also been something else, since I'm not sure how you even get the first foothold in.  You also get a feel for how the weather conditions are actually different here.  It's hard to appreciate in Grindewald or walking around, since the sun is blazing, and there isn't a cloud in the sky.  But stopping off at this gallery, you can see that it is in total shadow, and what's more there was just a constant fall of rain, though I suppose it was more the melting snow from above.

Those tiny black dots are actually people heading off down the glacier

Dave at Jungfraujoch

I love that when they started constructing this railway all the way back in 1896, they had the forethought to provide these little intermediate gallery points.  And you think at the time the Swiss government is building the highest railway station in Europe, Sydney was struggling to build a few metropolitan lines.

When you get to the final station you can tell there has been a lot of thought put into containing the tourists.  It's not a normal train station with just an open platform.  Instead it feels a bit like a survival dome built on another planet.  They really try to corral you inside.  I can only imagine the troubles if they just let the tourists wander around where ever they wanted up there.  I guess the Swiss guides would probably get a lot of rescue practise in at least.

So they try and have other little attractions for you, rather than getting outside.  There is this weird mural section, which you travel past on escalator, then there is an ice palace, which are these rooms all made of ice, with ice sculptures. There is also a movie and a little on the history of the construction.  An awful lot of people died whilst building it, the labour relations were pretty bad back then.

More flowers on the way to Wengen

Whilst we were up there we actually spotted a couple of teams of people heading off down the valley.  I'm not sure how long it would take them to reach civilisation from that far up, but it looked like it would have been a lot of fun.  Too bad I don't have any snow skills.

A rougher path than the morning - with the clouds building

The trip from Kleine Scheidegg onto Wengen was a bit of fun, as soon as you leave the train at Kleine you are again completely alone, the trail was a bit wilder in the afternoon as well.  The clouds really started building at this point.  This was the only day we got rained on, at one point it was actually hail, that was a pretty bizarre experience.  It wasn't cold and we were at maybe 1400m, so not high, and the rain suddenly went to little hailstones, before turning to bigger ones and really hammering down.  Luckily it only lasted about 5 minutes, and that my raincoat is quite thick. 

Total walk 18.5km, total ascent 1100m, total descent 850m.

How Swiss is this!

Grindewald and First to Shineger Platte

View of the Eiger from the start of the walk

We spent a week in the Swiss Alps on a pure walking holiday.  The idea being that you walk between hotels whilst your bags are transferred for you via train.  Meaning you never have to carry a heavy pack on your back and can just enjoy the scenery.  That didn't mean the days were easy, I didn't truly appreciate how steep these mountains were.  A 1 in 10 gradient would be considered a gentle slope in these parts.  And since most days involved some sort of 1000m ascent followed by a similar descent at the end of the day, it got kind of tough during the middle portion.

The wonderful Swiss infrastructure

We went over the snow covered pass up ahead

We spent two nights in Grindelwald, which is this little village at the base of the Eiger.  I've never been somewhere where you would have been majorly out of place if you weren't in outdoors gear.  Nor a town where 95% of the shops were selling hiking gear.  Normally I'm the one looking massively out of place, covered in mud and wearing hiking boots.  And whilst there wasn't much mud around, there were an awful lot of hiking boots.  There were also a lot of big tour buses, this was definitely the most touristy spot we stayed at.  And I have to say I've never been somewhere with such large concentrations of both tour buses and hiking gear.  I always thought they were the antithesis of each other.

Bachalpsee, easy part done

Our first taste of snow heading up from Bachalpsee

The trip there from Zurich airport was unbelievable smooth.  I thought we had been booked on some pretty tight connections with the trains, it was 3 trains in the end to Grindewald.  In most cases it was something like a 6 minute change.  You would never attempt that in the UK, I would think at least a 20 minute buffer is required here.  But the trains were seriously like clockwork.  Perhaps that's why they need such good watches, it's to keep the trains on their precision timing, accurate to the millisecond!

The lunch spot at Faulhorn ahead - hot soup at 2681m!

Our first afternoon in Grindelwald was spent admiring the view and having beers in the shadow of the Eiger, you can't get much better than that.  I was all inspired to read the White Spider again, but then it got a bit too scary for me, so I read Into Thin Air instead.  They are both really good books though, and if you have ever wanted to climb Everest read Into Thin Air first, it's really put me off that mountain.  And when you summit a mountain do you think you have to get back alive in order to claim it?  In The White Spider there were a lot of attempts made on the north face of the Eiger, and not a great success rate and I always wonder if you die on the way down can you really claim it?

The Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau, don't think you can get a better view than that! Unbelievable

Our first proper day of walking was a loop from Grindelwald, up to First and then across to Schynige Platte with a rack railway down and train to Grindelwald.  I have to say the infrastructure in Switzerland is amazing.  Not only are the trains accurate to within a second, but you can get so high up the mountains without walking a step.  It means you can live in the valleys where there are still trees, and cows can survive but go walking in the mountains in the afternoons.  It also saved my knees from a pounding on many occasions, which was much appreciated.

Looking down to Lake Brienz in the distance - it's at 560m elevation, we are at 2600m, that's quite a fall!

More photos at Bachalpsee

The trip to First was in a cable car, and not just a ski lift where it's just a little seat with a bar that comes down, but a proper capsule with automatically closing doors and walls all around you.  It certainly helped to overcome my cable car fear.  I hate the feeling when they go over the poles, and it feels like it's deciding whether it wants to stay on the cable or plummet hundreds of metres.  Grindelwald is only at 1000m, but First was at 2100m, now that's a cable car ride.  So without walking a step we were already nearly at the height of Australia's highest mountain.  There are going to be a lot of mentions of elevations over the next few posts, apologies if that isn't interesting to you.

From the cable car we came across our first and only experience of tour groups in the mountains. There were a whole bunch of elderly people doing a variety of rather strange stretching routines, I'm not 100% sure why you need to be stretching your triceps before a walk in the mountains.  It was then an easy walk up to Bachalpsee, this alpine lake.  Along the way you just had constant mountain vistas all around.  The part to Bachalpsee was definitely the easiest part. And I think it was also where most people turned round.

The afternoon clouds gathering

We kept going, and this is where it started to get snowy.  It was unusual to spend so much time walking in the snow, growing up in the tropics and all.  It was really a function of the surroundings, which way the slope was facing or the mountain structure as to whether the snow would gather.  Much more than elevation.  We were at 2500m at some points and the path was total dirt, with hardly any snow, but then further on at 2300m and you would be in metres of snow.

The snow in earnest

I'm glad it was a Sunday and there were quite a few people out walking about, since it was a bit dicey in some parts. It was reassuring to know that if anything went wrong there were other people around with the ability to speak German and mobile phones.

We had lunch at Faulhorn, which at 2681m was the highest point of the day, and already higher than Kossie.  In fact over the week I think we ended up higher than the highest point in Oz on three days.

I like how the Swiss decided that rather than putting the hut at the junction of tracks, at maybe 2500m, they went all the way to the top of the mountain.  And when I say hut, it was much more than that, more of a settlement, with a restaurant and terrace, really quite civilised.  We were still rather early in the season, so the restaurant was closed, but the kitchen was still making hot soup.  It was more of a stew really, nice and thick and warm.

It was at that point that we find out that the rest of the route is officially closed.  But the guys at the hut said it wasn't so bad, and that we should be fine.  And in the end we were fine, but there was one really scary point.  Basically the next 3kms or so were all completely covered in snow.  And when you are following contours it's much more scary than if you are going uphill, since to one side of you is just an incredibly sharp drop, hundreds of metres below.  Most of the time it wasn't so bad, you could see that you would slide for awhile but then come to rest in a valley.  But at one point we had to go round the end of a ridge, and the land just dropped away, that was white knuckle stuff, I did not enjoy that at all.  The sad part was that the views would have been great, but I could not look.  It was head down and just make sure you were firm in every footstep.

And yet another - it was a pretty spot

What made it easier was that quite a few people had been through before us, so there was always an obvious path to follow.  But I would have hated to be the first person cutting the trail at some points.  It was also lucky that the snow was generally pretty soft, it wasn't the ice fields that we've had before, where you can't get any grip with your boots.  But it was still a good introduction to walking in the alps.

The terrain on the last section, quite different from the snow covered portion

The last 2kms of the walk were a bit of a grind.  We were out of the snow, but the trail hadn't been maintained (probably because it was still closed), so now it was just eroded dirt slopes.  It was still as steep as before, but this time there wouldn't be any snow to cushion your fall.  The density of other walkers really dropped off at this point.  I'm not sure where they all disappeared to since there didn't seem to be many ways off the mountains.  Maybe they got lost in the snow.

There aren't many photos from this section, since I was seriously flagging at this point.  After slogging along all day, with intermittent fears of death, we ended up at Schynige Platte at 2100m and is a rack railway trip from Interlaken.  So there were serious amounts of people there.  It was a bit of a shock to the system after a day basically spent alone.  Everyone else looked so fresh and clean, and I felt gritty from the sweat and dirt.  And then we all had to pack into the railway cars to get back down.  I feel for those people stuck in our car, I hope we didn't smell too bad.  But if this was a taste of walks to come, we were in for a serious treat.

The days walk - 18kms, 600m elevation gain, 600m descent.

Punchdrunk - The Drowned Man

We went to see Punchdrunk's latest show last weekend.  Punchdrunk is this 'immersive' theatre group.  Their last show was a take on Macbeth in New York, and was quite popular with celebrities, so you know they've made it now.  Once people find out Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom like your shows you'll never struggle with selling tickets again.  This latest show was in the old Royal Mail sorting warehouse next to Paddington Station.  The idea behind their shows is that the audience is free to roam around the space, coming across performers almost by chance.  It's an interesting idea for a show, that your journey around the theatre guides your experience, rather than the experience being very much dictated by the company on the stage.  And they had put so much work into the set.  It was 4 floors in this warehouse and the rooms were amazing, the level of detail that had gone into everything.  It is almost worth it just to see that!  I was kind of hoping for a bit of a video game experience, it did feel like it could be a little like something like Fallout, where you wander around trying to find people to give you a bit more of a clue on the story.

It felt like they didn't quite hit it, it could have been amazing, but I think the space was just too enormous for how many performers there were.  So 4 floors and each floor was huge, in fact it was so big, it turns out there was another whole floor we didn't even find.  Not only was the space enormous, but there were only 34 performers, and really the density was much lower than that, as there generally needed to be at least 2 together to perform any scenes.  So pretty low performer density there, and there were also something like 600 people at the show.

In the end I think we only saw 5 scenes over the 3 hours we were in there.  The final scene is one where finally the guides start ushering you around, and they move you all into one big room where everyone comes on stage for the finale.  And I swear there were at least 5 people that I didn't even see during the 3 hours I was wandering around.  I'm guessing they were all on the floor that I missed.

They are a contemporary dance group as well, and whilst I don't mind contemporary dance, especially performed by people as good as this, I just wish I had managed to see more of it.  Without the dialogue it becomes a bit harder to piece together the character interactions, and with only 5 scenes to go off it was pretty much impossible.  Sure people say that with punch drunk you get out what you put in, but the putting in seems to involve stampeding after any performer you glimpse, with elbows flying.  And I'm not quite prepared to work that hard for my theatre.

And for those who may have seen it already, what the hell was going on in the attic?

Berlin

A German knight

Our last long weekend was spent in Berlin.  I was last there maybe 5 years ago, and it's amazing how much it has changed over such a short time.  Last time it still felt a little derelict, with abandoned warehouses and vast empty lots.  But this time it felt like it was kicking up a gear.  There were cranes all over the place, everyone seemed to have a job, it was really clean.  You feel like "what Euro crisis?"  Germany is definitely doing OK during this time.  Not like slightly depressive France, or Britain with it's constant obsession with immigrants

Last time I was all over the Second World War things, I really like that period of history.  But Dave had never been to Berlin and he actually isn't interested in that era at all.  Which was kind of good, because it meant this time we did all this stuff I hadn't done last time.  In the end we hardly ventured far at all.  We spent most of our time on Museum Island, which was about 10 minutes walk away from our hotel.  And I hadn't even planned it that way, it was just the way it happened.  We had learnt from our Copenhagen trip that Museums can have odd days closed.  In Berlin it was Monday, so we could make sure we didn't end up wandering the streets on that day disappointed that our museums were closed.

Oldy-times signatures - your mark attached to the paper

The awesome German Empire coat of arms

We again had a problem with the taxi driver from the airport, we were easyJetting, so landed at the airport with no late night train service.  Even though I showed the driver the address and the area, he ended up taking us to completely the wrong hotel.  Luckily the receptionist there came out and put him straight.  Airport taxis!

We hadn't any real plans for things we wanted to see.  On the first day we came across the National Museum, which was the historical museum for Germany.  That was a great museum - we spent hours in there, the only reason to leave was hunger.  It started off way back with the Germanic tribes who destroyed Rome. And went all the way through to after the Second World War.

I never really appreciated the trouble the Reformation caused for Europe.  I have been reading about that time from the perspective of the English.  And compared to Europe the Reformation basically did nothing, I mean a few Catholics and Protestants got burned at various points, but there weren't too many England wide wars.  In Europe it just felt like they all went a bit crazy and started fighting with each other for a couple of centuries.  It was impossible to keep track of them all, and in the end I had to just skim over that entire section.  It wasn't until we got close to the first world war that things started to get a bit more settled.  At least that's what it felt like.  I would like to read a bit more on this period.  But man it seems like it's going to be tough keeping all the alliances straight.

The radio tower - every city needs a big pointy object

A reconstructed Roman market gate

There were a few other great museums on this same island.  One was the Neues Museum - this is really famous because it contains the bust of Nefertiti.  Any pictures you see of Nefertiti or ancient Egyptians is generally of this bust.  It is quite an impressive bust.  Unfortunately no photos allowed. It's a bit like the German Mona Lisa, except not made by Germans.

There is also the Pergamon Museum and I think that's a bit of a must visit.  It's not very big but is has three awesome exhibits, all reconstructed artifacts.  There is the Pergamon Altar, another awesome Greek city state back in ancient times.  I think it is actually in modern day Turkey.  It had this great altar built on a hill, with this amazing frieze.  Which is now re-built in Berlin.  There is also a Roman market gate - only 60% or so of the structure is original, but it's amazing to see how big they were able to build back then.  Finally there is the Ishtar gate - built by the Babylonians.  Again amazing to see something that old (575BC) look so large and colourful.

Part of the Ishtar gate

The final museum on that island was the Bode museum.  This was really a sculpture museum, they had a few Donatello's which was kind of impressive.  The audio guide was again a good addition.  One of the Donatello's was of this little boy, the fact that there was a twist to his body was this amazing innovation at the time.  It meant that the sculpture actually had viewing angles all around the body, instead of just straight on as it had been up to that moment.

We also went to two awesome restaurants - Reinstoff and Horvath.  Reinstoff was two starred, which we would never normally go to, but work had given me an award which was money for a pretty fancy dinner for two.  So we thought why not.  It was pretty nice, though could have perhaps been served slightly faster.  There were some big gaps between the courses, and it didn't finish until midnight.  I am not a night owl, so it was a bit of a struggle eating that late.  But the courses were all great, with some slightly odd innovations, which I always like. And the ambiance of the restaurant itself was really nice, hidden inside a courtyard, very dark, but each table was well lit.  And not many people at all, yet heaps of serving staff.

The walk back to the hotel was interesting.  We had walked there as well, which was before the sun had set, and it seemed like a

Donatello - with a twist

nice neighbourhood, full of little galleries and boutiques and coffee shops.  But then it seemed as soon as the sun goes down it turns into something completely different.  In that all these prostitutes come out.  It seems that street is where they do business, I guess it was opposite a large park, maybe that helps business?  The first one I just thought, hmmm she's wearing an unusual outfit for such a cold night.  But then you pass another one, and another, and they are all wearing the same sort of clothes, I guess it's a uniform of sorts.  And then you are just wondering, holy cow, how long is this street and when will this end.  Since it's the clientele which was a bit worrying.  But then you reach the Hackescher Market and suddenly it's all over.  Pretty bizarre.  I think we should have taken the staff's offer of a taxi.

The next restaurant we went to was Horvath, which was in the old West Berlin side.  This was about the only time we really ventured much into West Berlin, and I gotta say I prefer East Berlin.  You always have this idea that the Communist side would be full of horrible concrete block apartment buildings and really run down.  But actually that was the West side.  The east was full of the historic section, and all these interesting buildings.  Perhaps it's a bit different in the other cities, or further out of the centre.

Though the area around the restaurant was a bit depressing, massive concrete blocks and thousands of TV aerials, the restaurant itself was really nice.  The food was really good, and thankfully they were much quicker at serving.  The suckling pig was a bit of a stand out.

The bunker - now art gallery

My most Berlin moment of the weekend has to go to our visit to the Sammlung Boros collection.  We were on our way to the Contemporary Art museum and had stopped at a cafe for refreshments - it was a bit of a walk.  And across the road was this massive concrete bunker (we were back in East Berlin at this point).  I'm thinking - this has got to be something, it so obviously stood out from the normal hotels and apartment blocks around it.  It turns out it was an old world war two bunker, which had been used for raves in the 90's before being bought by a rich advertising executive to house his personal collection.  Since we were looking for modern art anyway we thought, well lets have a look.

We go over the road and there is literally no sign anywhere, we walk all the way around it and there is only a single door.  We just hope that we have actually got the right bunker, and that this isn't some drug den.  But you open the door and go round a corner and suddenly there are artful pieces of driftwood laid out - so we are probably not in some drug den.  Around another corner and there's the reception, with fashionable hipster.  We ask if we can visit, but he says we can only go with a tour, and that the next open English tour is in 10 weeks time.  But he then says that a tour has just left and some people hadn't turned up so we could join in with that one if we wanted.  And we are all like "hmmm maybe, what do you think?, oh all right why not".  And he's probably thinking, there is a 10 week wait and you are umming and ahhhing over it!  Anyway I have to say we weren't the biggest squares there, since some people left halfway through.

It was some of the most modern modern art I have every seen.  Some was pretty cool, and there was usually a good idea behind it.  But some, like the rubbish bins on the wall, was not so good.  Literally someone had just stolen bins from the street, done nothing to them, and stuck them on the wall.  I'm not sure what that was trying to say.  There was also the video of someone doing the moonwalk through darkened streets.  Again not sure what the message with that was.  Being inside the bunker was pretty interesting.  They had done quite some renovations, turning 130 rooms into 80, so it wasn't quite as claustrophobic as it could have been, but still pretty full on in some parts.  And the guide was pretty good, he obviously loved it, so that level of enthusiasm certainly helped.  You just felt like a bit of a fraud, since some people were so into it, and taking notes about what he said.  Whereas you are thinking, it's just bins!  Anyway, if you know you are going to Berlin in 10 weeks time, I would try and book a spot.

Winchelsea to Hastings

A reed flower

We walked from Winchelsea to Hastings on the hunt for bluebells - and we were not disappointed!  We are going for a week long walk in the Alps soon, so wanted to make sure we were getting sufficient walking training in.  Don't want to get 2 days into 6 full days of walking and start getting massive blisters forming.  So we basically just picked the toughest walk in the book we have - the Time Out Country Walks Volume 1.  We have done a few walks from this book, and they have nearly all been good.  There was just that one disappointing one in the post-apocalyptic chilterns.

There were so many bluebells out

Bluebells in close up

But this walk was nothing like the Chilterns one, it was possibly the best we've done so far.  Great scenery and finishing in Hastings, which was a nice little town.  You start the walk in Winchelsea (which I was constantly mispronouncing, the stress is not where you think it should be).  Winchelsea used to be on the coast but apparently a big storm has meant that it is now 2km inland.  It must have been an almighty storm!

Then it's off through the great English countryside towards the coast.  This walk was opposite to the last one we did.  On the last walk we had to absolutely smash through the first half to get to the lunch spot on time.  On this one no matter how leisurely we walked we arrived at the suggested lunch spot about an hour before they would have started serving.  Luckily the walk passes through Icklesham (which is a tiny village), but in the All Saints church there was their monthly church fete.  We made the detour thinking we could go a piece of cake, or they would at least have a cup of tea on offer, this being the English country side.  But actually they were going all out, multiple types of cake, and a full ploughmans, looks like lunch was back on the cards.  It was perfect walking food, but you did have to sit through being the novelty of the fete.  I don't think they get many outsiders in Icklesham so it seemed like everyone wanted to talk to us and to know where we were from, I guess the accents stood out a bit there.  

Yet more bluebells

All Saints church at Icklesham - first lunch stop

Further on there was yet another pub, where we stopped and had another ploughmans.  I got to say this lunch was nowhere near as nice as the 3 pound one we got at the church.  There was a massive pickled onion.  Imagine a normal brown onion you might get in the supermarket, then imagine it pickled and on your plate.  I would give a lot of money to see someone eat that.  Why on earth would you serve that as a standard part of your ploughmans is beyond me.  But then according to the walking book, this pub we were eating at was meant to be closed, so maybe it was under new management - new pickled onion management.

Lambs seemed to want to feed when they got scared

Potential murderer?

The next section was mainly through fields towards the sea.  All the lambs were a bit bigger since the last walk we did.  I wonder how much longer before they are all slaughtered and we see them in Sainsburys?  There was only one field of cows, but I have to say I was a bit nervous crossing through this one.  Normally cows don't really bother me, but literally a week before we went on this walk I saw a news article about some British walkers who were crushed to death by cows.  I think they were also walking in the south of England, like we were doing.  So I was definitely on the look out for any potential human killers amongst this herd.

Staring down a train

Caterpillar exploring a fence

On the way home we got a little delayed because the train driver saw someone walking along the tracks, I saw the same person, and thought, hmmm that's a bit crazy.  But then when we get to the next station the train driver disappears to phone the police.  I'm not sure why they don't just have a phone or communication device in the engine room so the train driver can make reports at the time of witnessing them.  But apparently not, I guess he had to go find a public phone to make a police report.  He wasn't coming back anytime soon.  I've never had a train driver abandon their train before.

A carpet of bluebells

The sea shore - with added wind farm

The way this walk is advertised in the book is either swimming in the sea or bluebells.  It being an English sprautumn (as Stephen Fry calls this attempt at a season), there was no way there was going to be swimming.  Which left only the bluebells as a possible attraction.  Me in my pessimistic way was thinking maybe we'll see the odd bluebell here and there, with maybe a little glade in one of the woods.  So when we went through the next section I was a bit overwhelmed.  It was a sea of bluebells, with the trees growing out of this blue carpet and the path weaving through them. I've never seen so many, and that by itself made the walk a success, the clifftop walk was merely a bonus after this.

Gorse in full flower - with the sea beyond

Tree which has possibly lost it's roots to erosion

We did eventually hit the sea, it was a walk in two halves - the first was a fairly leisurely stroll through fields with bluebells, tea and cakes.  Whilst the second was an up and down slog along the top of the cliffs.  This 7km section was completely spectacular though.  Apparently the erosion along this part means that an average of 1.4 metres of cliff-face is lost every year.  One village is right on the edge, the path goes between the back gardens of the house and the cliff.  They really don't have many more 1.4m to go before the cliff is running through their back garden.  At one point we had to detour through the town proper since the erosion had claimed the path.  You see fences just ending in mid-air, it is slightly freaky, though there must be great views from their, especially if there is a big storm rolling in.

There are about 4 glens along this section, and in each one there are little woods, with more bluebells and wild garlic, and little streams.  And out of the glens there was bright sunshine and flowering gorse.  No post-apocalyptic feel here.  Everything was flowering - there would be these little abandoned meadows full of bluebells and other flowers (I don't know my English flowers, bluebells, dandelions and foxgloves are about the extent.)

More gorse in bloom - with more sea in the distance

Apple blossom along route

I'm pretty keen to head back to this section of the country, apparently the walk we did wasn't even the "best" in the book.  There's meant to be another one which is even more spectacular.  For those who know a little English geography I'm thinking the seven sisters at some point, so a little further west from where we did this walk.  Maybe I'll save that one for proper summer, when it might actually be possible to swim in the sea without dying from exposure later.

Hastings was a strange little town - very spread out over the cliffs.  It felt a bit like a seaside resort and yet also very old.  I mean I suppose it has been around since at least 1066.

The final view of the day - Hastings