SPAIN BLOG: written 13-9-21

 

With Africa's coast on the horizon (pictured) and my mother-in-law on board, the offshore wind blew my paddleboard away from the shore.

The biggest megaflood in history had severed the beach – near Spain's southern tip – from Morocco's mountains five million years ago, creating the Mediterranean Sea as the ocean gushed in.

This patch is where Spaniards go on holiday; the 'wrong' side of Gibraltar, where the chilly Atlantic throws bodysurfing-perfect waves onto expansive yellow-white beaches backed by dark green bulb-like stone pine trees, olive-green bushes and orange earth reminiscent of Australia's Outback.

And there's not a sunburnt Brit in sight.

It's the proper Spanish experience - and that means Spanish hours, of course. Lunch at 3pm, beach sunbathing until 9pm sunsets, and hotel kids' shows until 11:30pm.

Native-only guests ensured flamenco and food of the highest quality. Ordering squid and expecting a few battered rings, a foot-long beast was slapped on my plate.

Days earlier, our train had rushed south as Spain's sun-bleached dry heart flashed by at 156mph.

Wide plains and scrubby hills looked like Western movie backdrops (many spaghetti westerns were filmed in Spain), dotted with crumbling abandoned farms and factories.

And it was no less otherworldly in our destination, the Costa de la Luz, with sunset light creating a War of The Worlds scene as we drove through whole forests of giant wind tripods, sorry turbines.

A who's who of the biggest names in maritime history had their sails filled by those same winds, whistling through the Strait of Gibraltar.

Christopher Columbus left from here to discover the New World, Sir Francis Drake singed the King of Spain's beard here, and Britain's biggest ever naval triumph, the Battle of Trafalgar, was just offshore from our hotel.

Leo's focus, however, remained on dunking me, collecting shells and pebbles ('Daddy, Daddy, look at this beauuuty!'), and beach volleyball practice.

CHURROS AND KIPS

I knew it would be a good food holiday when, within minutes of arriving in Madrid, a cheery 'churrero' maestro had clamped a giant rolling pin to his chest to squirt dough through a metal funnel, creating churros - Spain's famous tube-like fried pastry snack - for Leo to gobble.

Green salted padron peppers and Spanish tortilla could happily be on my plate every day of my life. And to drink? Sweet sherry from Jerez, down the road from our hotel.

After a couple of restaurant stuffings, we found even 'half-rations' on menus were meals in themselves.

Stopping at a 'figs for sale' sign one day, a lady farmer showed us her family's dry but bountiful plots.

As we tried not to trip over – among other delights - three melon and two watermelon varieties, she insisted on gifting us tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, courgettes and sweetcorn – all of which Nati's mum promptly whipped into a giant veggie Peruvian paella.

No-one can accuse this blog of shying away from the big issues of the day.

Churros, dunking daddies and sherry – they're all here.

Now, an even harder-hitting subject: Do Spanish people still have siestas?

Cruising down Seville's utterly-deserted residential streets in the afternoon, I'd say a big fat yes.

Our generous female farmer friend also said yes, but it's only a 20-minute nap, in summer not winter, only in sizzling Andalusia, and mainly only older people.

And that's pretty much what studies show as well. The two-hour snooze is sadly a myth, but four in 10 Spaniards do take short kips.

Don Quixote never snoozed though - the habit only began in the 1930s, as people juggled morning and afternoon jobs.

HOT AND COLD

Drinkers are fanned with fine mist outside bars in Seville – and with very good reason.

Just 34C when we visited but with 42C summer highs, a 47.4C (117F) new record Spain temperature had been set weeks before our visit near Andalusia's capital.

But our coastal spot 70 miles away was just 25C, and cool in mornings and evenings. Why?

The epic Canary Current, which chills 2,000 miles of the eastern Atlantic Ocean from Spain all the way to Senegal.

Staggeringly, it means north-west Spain's summers are often cooler than Britain.

And sea temperatures in northern Spain, Portugal and Morocco are often just 19C in summer – colder than southern England.

In our southern tip of Spain, the sea was 23C - regarded as the minimum to comfortably swim - but still felt chilly.

Doesn't the Mediterranean's 26C water warm our cool Spanish hideaway, I wondered? No - the Med's water is saltier than the Atlantic, so heavier, sinking as it spills out of the Strait of Gibraltar into the ocean.

MARITIME MASTERS 

Europe's oldest city, Cadiz, founded 3,100 years ago by Phoenicians from Lebanon, is an old town gem squeezed onto a Venice-like island.

Romans built the most spectacular fish-processing factory you'll ever see, with temple columns and a forum adjacent to south-west Spain's most famous beach, Bolonia, backed by a giant sand dune spreading past vivid green trees.

Muslim Moors named a rocky outcrop Jabal Tariq (Say it fast = Gibraltar) in honour of their army general, as they conquered and controlled parts of Spain for over 700 years.

Columbus left from our patch in 1492 to discover the New World, meaning most of the first Europeans to step foot in the Americas - his crew – were from a nearby town.

(The explorer would never have made it back to Spain had he not understood that Canary Current above. It creates one side of the clockwise triangular trade winds pattern spanning the Atlantic. Two hundred years earlier, Genoese adventurers Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi had also set sail for India – but, as Atlantic trade wind patterns had not been discovered, and it was impossible for them to sail north into the wind, they reached Africa and were never heard of again).

Home port for Columbus, and Spain's riches which followed from the Americas, was Seville. We saw fine colonial buildings, and, in inadvertent box-ticking, the bullring and a hen party wearing famous red-with-white-spots dresses.

But Spain wasn't ever master of the seas. Drake frazzled the king's beard by sinking 20 Spanish ships at Cadiz in 1587 – delaying the disastrous Armada invasion by a year – and a British raid destroyed Cadiz and Spain's anchored treasure fleet in 1596.

Barbary pirates from north Africa also terrorised coastal inhabitants - kidnapping a million Europeans in the 1600s and 1700s to take home as slaves.

Our local beach would have had a grandstand view of Trafalgar's 1805 battle, three miles out to sea.

Nelson's ships captured two-thirds of the Spanish-French fleet, halting Napoleon's plot to invade Britain.

Victory was due to the brilliant one-armed and one-eyed Nelson having more battle-ready sailors, and unusual tactics - sailing straight into the arc of Spanish ships in two lines, rather than sliding up up side-by-side for the usual kamikaze cannon exchange.

Soberingly, 5,000 mainly Spanish sailors died not far beyond the scattered kitesurfers we watched.

And right next to our hotel, 2,000 British and 3,000 French died in a day in in 1811, in another Napoleonic epic.

PLATES AND PADDLES

Spain's position at the gateway of Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean pretty much guaranteed its tumultuous history.

Eventually, that door will shut, as the Mediterranean evaporates when Africa's north-moving plate joins with Spain again.

But right now, Morocco's stretch of pine-clad hills, whitewashed towns and glimmering lights thankfully remains 20 miles from my paddleboard and mother-in-law, as I paddle hard into the wind and we rejoin Nati and Leo beside our sunset sandcastle.

ends

BULGARIA BLOG: written 20/5/19

Hristo Stoichkov.

That's all I knew about Bulgaria before this trip.

What do I know now? It's the oldest country in Europe but its people are Asian and its culture was almost wiped out.

And they're addicted to cheese.

OUT OF AFRICA, AND ASIA

Parts of Sofia and other towns resemble Dickensian London or Havana; crumbling 1800s houses with sagging roofs, orange slates falling off and small dormer windows.

This was the first-populated area of Europe as out-of-Africans migrated along the River Danube 45,000 years ago.

Thracians, the first culture to work gold – with a sideline in recreational drugs and orgies - arrived in 4,000 BC.

Sofia was almost capital of the Eastern Roman Empire ahead of Constantinople, and remained its second city thanks to 85 hot springs which still still flow out of snow-capped Mt Vitosha overlooking the city.

The Roman city of Serdica was hidden until 20 years ago, when subway excavations dug up a 20,000 capacity amphitheatre.

Now, remarkably, right next to Sofia's main station and square, I walk down Roman roads, marvelling at bathhouses and remains of red brick villas.

But Bulgarians are not European. Bulgars, relatives of Mongolia's Genghis Khan, came from Central Asia in 632AD and even called their leaders Khans.

Sick of using the Roman alphabet, two Bulgarian brothers dreamt up Cyrillic, based on Greek.

Bulgarian culture would have been wiped out during the Ottoman Empire's 500-year rule until 1878, had it not been for monasteries preserving the language, culture and religion banned by Muslim rulers.

Russian Communists invaded at the end of World War II, and the secret police which followed was among the most feared of Soviet states.

Bulgaria is now in the EU but still hasn't joined the euro.

SPLASH AND SOBER

They really like cheese here.

Some bakeries had eight variations of cheese pastries. The country's most famous dish - kavarma meat stew, served in Sophia's (outstanding) most traditional restaurant – was submerged in cheese.

And in a mountain village restaurant, Google Translate's astonishing live video screen changed Cyrillic words to English before my disbelieving eyes, revealing 'omelette with cheese and cheese.'

Bulgaria's mountains look like a lush, smaller version of the Rockies, with beige cliffs, Alpine meadows and gushing rivers which I found to my surprise not to be cold when our raft capsized.

Black Sea beaches are calling me for a future holiday.

Travelling in my twenties, I hated flowers, walking tours and being sober for more than 24 hours.

Now, I like botanical gardens and loved the Free Sofia Walking Tour, source of most facts in this blog - but I still couldn't resist downing a pint of beer through a 3ft vuvuzela horn on Sofia's high street.

Well, I was on a stag do after all.

SOUTH-EAST ENGLAND BLOG: written 21-9-20

        

 

Foreign forays were off in 2020 – but staycation surprises revealed the very origin of Britain, and its people.

We're sand powder hounds.

There are only four sections of sandy beaches in South-East England – so we visited them all; about 70 miles east, south-east, south and south-west of London.

A STONY SURPRISE

I picked up a dark rock in a thin white casing, looking like the end of a dog bone, in white chalk cliff-ringed Thanet, Kent, 70 miles east of London.

A week later, as Leo and I munched blackberries by a ploughed field at the very top of one of the Chiltern Hills, 30 miles west of London, I picked up the same rock.

It was so sculpted, it seemed only the sea could have shaped it.

Baffling the friends we were visiting, I announced my sudden theory the rock was formed by a sea which covered the Chilterns five million years ago.

I was only 140 million years out. More accurate than some of my journalism stories, you may say.

Now guess where, on today's map of the world, the Chilterns – and the rest of England – was when this rock formed?

Tunisia; 1,500 miles south in North Africa. 

Yes, that sounds bonkers – but it turns out England was near the South Pole 600 million years ago. (Scotland was on the Equator, with mountains as high as Everest)

So why does South-East England have stone rather than the sandy beaches common in the rest of Britain?

Because the region is made of mainly soft chalk (squashed shells). Its grains are so fine that, when eroded, they are washed away or become mud.

To get sand, you need two things.

One - harder rocks.

London and around does have some hard rocks – the 'flint nodules' I found. They are sparsely dotted through chalk and, despite being formed from squidgy squashed algae, a chemical reaction made them so hard they were the Stone Age axe of choice.

And two - a lot of time.

Flint has only been exposed since yesterday in geological terms (when a huge flood created the English channel 225,000 years ago).

That's why flints is still shingle or pebble on beaches.

They will be eroded to give South-East England sandy beaches in about 100 million years.

But remember your jacket if you fancy a day at the beach then – as Britain will be near the North Pole. (We move north-east 2cm per year).

TREASURES OF SAND AND SEA

Bolivia's famous perspective-warping Uyini salt flat lakes (the best place I've ever visited) look a bit like a beach in West Sussex.

You read that right.

The mile-long, still low tide pools at West Wittering, facing the Isle of Wight, stretch to close to the horizon and reflect the sky.

A bit like a mega natural infinity pool.

It's disorientating as, without a horizon beyond a reflective lake – as in Bolivia – it feels like you're inside an absurd painting of blue and white whisps.

And it was from abstract to adrenalin as waves rolling over an offshore sandbar enabled a 100-metre paddleboard surf (ok, on my knees).

But South-East England's best beach is Camber Sands, East Sussex.

The vast and spectacular three-mile sweep of sand is backed by a mile of 30 meter-high dunes (37 seconds to run up the steepest path with Leo on my shoulders; less to drag him down on a picnic rug). 

The little adventurer's delight at the swift incoming tide swallowing sandcastles was exceeded only by his sheer joy at digging up 'silver' pirate treasure coins – as said incoming tide rather caught out Daddy and gushed around our calves as I questioned what plonker would have buried treasure there.

Captain Hook had fortunately been on his day off that day; and not for the only time during a summer of finding buried beach hordes.

Explosions and mushroom clouds from the direction of nearby Dungeness nuclear power station threatened to cast an acid cloud over our day. They turned out to be from an Army firing range.

Camber's dunes didn't exist 350 years ago, until the beach blew inland. It created a beautiful place, unfairly maligned by its Hi-De-Hi-style Pontins holiday chalets.

You don't have to go six hours to Cornwall for cliff-backed sandy bays with rock stacks.

Thanet, Kent, 90 minutes from London, has bays, notably Botany Bay; the classic seaside fishing village Broadstairs; upmarket Ramsgate and kitschy Margate, where I literally stood in the footsteps of my great-great grandfather outside the guesthouse he once owned.

The beaches are best at high tide. Low tide reveals dark rocks and seaweed, including one particular sandal-sucking, calf-deep swamp we were compelled to cross en route to a(nother) of Capt Hook's misplaced treasure stashes.

We watched the wind blow cumulus clouds along the coasts of France and Essex, each 35 miles away, and Belgium, 80 miles away.

Storm Ellen whipped up record wind power generation as 300 towering 100 metre-high wind turbines span at three of the world's biggest wind farms a few miles offshore.

Appropriately enough, we stayed in a 200-year-old windmillers' house.

'Mudeford Spit' is not a likely name for a millionaires' playground.

But even the Bahamas' famous Paradise Island was once Hog Island pig farm.

Mudeford's wooden beach huts in Dorset stand on a 30 metre-wide strip with tufty dune grass and a sandy beach on one side, and a calm harbour on the other.

It's a Castaway feel – but huts cost £300,000, yachts dot the harbour and jetskis bounce through waves.

£100,000 luxury caravans stand by the next beach.

And five giant £500million cruise ships lay anchored offshore (mothballed from Southampton's port due to Covid).

Round the headland, Bournemouth's seven-mile stretch of sand felt luxurious underfoot.

The fact Nati swam just before October tells you how nice the sea was.

COUNTRYSIDE CLASSICS

Britain's most famous natural view is arguably where the sea slices off the end of the South Downs hills at Seven Sisters, East Sussex, exposing 100 metre-high brilliant white cliffs.

This view is not from any tourist spot, but down an unsignposted track by an old barn. It overlooks four miles of cliffs, old coastguard cottages and a New Zealand-style pebble-bottomed valley floor through which a river cuts an S-shaped path.

Another classic English countryside panorama greeted my brother Dom and I one evening near Milton Keynes, 50 miles north of London.

With a golden sun low in the sky ahead of us, we cycled downhill along the edge of a ripe field of swaying wheat, past oak trees overhanging hedges.

All of Britain once looked like Hampshire's New Forest.

I went to university down the road, but 20 years ago it was 10p-a-pint nights rather than 800-year-old trees that had my attention.

Now I love trees, not Foster's. Leo's cedar cone and conker hunting has reignited my arbor instincts.

The New Forest's moss-clad native oak and beech trees are western Europe's best example of the ancient woodland that once carpeted the continent.

Semi-wild ponies and wild pigs roam. Immense non-native pines stretch skyward. Purple heather heathland fills cleared gaps in the forest.

South-East-England's hills are the chalky ridges of the Chilterns, Kent Weald and North and South Downs.

The River Way flows out of Surrey's North Downs in a serene scene.

Had Toad, Ratty and Mole boated past on the reed and weeping willow-lined river through cows' meadows, I wouldn't have batted an eyelid.

The North Downs' steep and grassy southerly side provides awesome hikes with a view, and Leo and my favourite winter sledging spots.

Its gentle northerly slope covers most of south London, steering the Thames past classic river beaches (with easily-swimmable water warmer than the sea) in Thames Ditton, Teddington and near Richmond; home to the deer park with a lockdown car-and-adult-bikes ban, making it exercise heaven for Leo (bike), Nati (running) and me (skating).

INVADERS AND HEROES

We'd learnt the history of Britain's land – but what did we discover about its people?

Those strong winds in Thanet, Kent, helped scupper Caesar's first invasion of Britannia there, wrecking ships.

Hunting dogs and slaves were the main exports from the most important port in Britain at the time – Hengistbury Head, Dorset, then inland on a river as low sea levels allowed Roman soldiers to wade to the Isle of Wight.

Wine and olives were the main imports – and still are; Mudeford's millionaires are next door to the headland, now a hikers' haven on the coast after sea levels rose.

It turns out a sneaky trick was how William conquered England's Anglo-Saxons in 1066 – in Battle, East Sussex.

The French feigned withdrawing mid-battle, Harold's army ran after them but in doing so spread out, and the French counter-attacked.

The Normans' most obvious relics are their stout 800-year-old churches, looking like mini-castles and complete with ramparts.

Possibly Britain's best-preserved medieval town, Tudor 600-year-old houses, black-timbered with whitewashed panels, stand wonkily over the cobblestones of Rye, East Sussex.

Leo was unimpressed, insisting on stopping to make Lego.

One of William's knights built Leeds Castle, Kent, but the famous current castle is a (beautiful) fake – built only 200 years ago, 300 years after castles' defences became almost worthless.

Repelling archers and pouring boiling oil on swordsmen clambering up ladders was one thing – but gunpowder and cannons were quite another.

A crooked funnel on top of a cute circular building in Kent means it was an oast house, used to fire and dry hops to make beer 200 years ago. Beer heritage remains strong here – with stacks of local breweries.

On the last day of our holiday, something wonderful happened in the clear blue skies over Seven Sisters' cliffs.

A purring Hurricane Second World War plane banked and dived, rehearsing for the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, when dogfights laced these skies south of London as brave men fought for the freedom of our land.

DIFFERENT IS NOT BETTER

Let's be honest. Brits like to say other countries are better than ours.

We say we go abroad for holidays because the weather, beaches and food are better than here.

It's a novelty to be in another country and culture. But other countries are actually different, not necessarily better, than Britain.

We should appreciate Britain more – and be proud to acknowledge it. Who needs a passport to have a holiday when you have this on your doorstep?

CROATIA BLOG (written 6/9/19)

If you want a sandy beach in Croatia, come back in 10 million years.
So it's just as well Croats don't like sand.
Travellers – me included – search for white grains like the holy grail. But Croats complain sand is dirty.

Balkan beaches are too young for their rock to be worn into sand by waves and wind.
And so Croatia has pebbles – and that means size is everything.
White and smooth and 2cm wide is lovely underfoot and on the eye, 5cm rounded is OK, but 10cm and rough is awkward – but still popular in a country of rock-loving sand-haters.
And the Adriatic Sea? Transparent, clean and even with coral – a first for me in Europe.

OLD TOWN DELIGHTS
Every town in Istria (northern Croatia) has an old warren of lanes with cobbles worn slippery-smooth and somewhat crumbling houses with big shutters and balconies - looking very like buildings in Venice.
That's because the people wearing the cobbles smooth for 500 years were...Venetians, in charge from 1267 to 1797. 'Venetian Gothic' is the architecture style.
The town of Rovinj inparticular has lanes so narrow neighbours could touch across the street from first-floor windows.
Pleasingly – unlike in other countries' often over-restored old towns – these lanes are lived-in, with old ladies stringing washing from upper windows.
The Italian influence continues today and it's everyone's second language, despite the Austria-Hungarian Habsburg Empire being in charge for a century until 1918.

The Romans were here first. But these days, the world's best-preserved Roman amphitheatre (the original height for an entire 360 degrees; it once sat 25,000), rather than gladiators, now hosts World Cup football screenings and music events.
The volume can't be turned up too loud, for fear the 2,000-year-old walls will collapse.
Leo bobbed along to drum 'n' bass at his first ever music concert.
Shows getting the biggest attention at Pula's famous amphitheatre are those by national heroes, the simply brilliant '2 Cellos,' the world's most famous classical music pop cover performers.

TUSCANY AND TRUFFLES
Away from the beach and old towns, the countryside is in places Tuscany-esque, with tall pine tree-lined roads, yellowing fields and a scattering of kazuns; 200-year-old, dry-stone, 10 metre-wide circular shepherds' huts (a good use of rocks littering fields).
Coastal areas are tangled with pretty bright green trees loaded with pine cones (Leo now even says he prefers them to conkers).
Briyuni Island, a car-free mini Tuscany just offshore, has lagoon-like water and 125 million-year-old, 60cm-long dinosaur footprints, when the land the beasts stood on was amazingly 2,000 miles south where present-day Libya is.

Istria's olive oil has been voted the world's best four years in a row, so that accounts for all the olive groves.
And there are plenty of grapes for wine – although our favourite was the sweet blackberry variety.
The countryside's most sought-after treasures are truffles - and not the Cadbury's Roses chocolate version.
But the pricey fungus tasted like a garlic overdose to me.
Fruit and veg shops are stacked with produce almost entirely from Croatia.
And the garden of the house we stayed in had apricots, mandarins, limes, grapes, pears, apples, strawberries – and the fruit seemingly every garden has; figs.

SLAVIC SUPER-STATE
Yugoslavia was formed in 1918 by Slavic peoples to prevent Italy marching back in after World War I. Slavs had had enough of centuries being controlled by Italy and Austria-Hungary in the north, and Turkey's Ottoman Empire in the south.
Yugoslavia's constituent parts were areas we now call Serbia, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Slovenia.

What seemed a decent idea – teaming up to prevent bigger powers taking over - was ruined at the start and the end of the 80-year period by some Slavs' hatred for one another.
Inter-ethnic fighting dominated World War II, before the fighters winning internal wars formed the world's most successful communist state, with a booming economy and free travel.
But leader Tito died after a 34-year rule in 1980, the economy collapsed, ethnic and religious (Catholic v Orthodox v Muslim) tensions grew and, after Communism collapsed, states withdrew from Yugoslavia.
Appalling Serb-driven wars starting in 1991 killed 140,000 – half in Bosnia – with (also Serb-driven) ethnic-cleansing, genocide, war crimes and massacres, including in Sarajevo and Srebrenica (shamefully under the noses of Dutch UN soldiers).

The Slavic countries are not friends now, but some peoples are, to an extent - for example Croats and Serbs.
Life seems normal now in Croatia, the first Yugoslav country in the EU (but not yet the Euro). Bosnia is still struggling.

CROAT CHEERS
Tourists – who loved Croatia in the 80s – are back in hordes. I'd never seen a hotel comparable with the spaceship-like, 500 metre-wide one we walked past in Rovinj.
Everywhere is clean; there's no litter anywhere.
I enjoyed learning some Croat. My favourite new word (it means 'cheers') is zivjeli - pronounced 'djibili' - hard enough to say before the first rakija grappa shot, never mind after several.
And my toast?
Peace in this pretty land.

NORTH-EAST ENGLAND BLOG: written 29/8/18

I once wore shorts to visit family in north-east England, and it was snowing when I arrived.
A nearby moor-top reservoir usually looks like it belongs in Hound of the Baskervilles.
And Whitby's windswept beach is better known for being sand-blasted than sun-baked.

But this time was different.
Stand-up paddle boarders were on the reservoir (Scaling Dam).
On the Costa del Whitby, the harbour could have been in Greece, with a lake of water, al fresco diners, graceful fishing boats and twinkling lights.
The August Bank Holiday heatwave was so hot we even saw a three-foot grass snake.
And on the Teeside Riviera, locals cowered in the shade for fear of melting on the streets.

Ee ba gum, as they say around here. It means 'by god,' by the way.

HOME TRUTHS
I've blogged about French Polynesia and Indonesia – but this blog is closer to home, and closer to my heart.

I'm not from London, where I was born and live now.
I'm not from Lincoln, where I grew up.
My family – and therefore me - are from Stockton, a town 200 miles north of London.
Here, my grandparents lived, ran corner shops, worked for Home Guard patrols in World War II, and enchanted my childhood visits with joyous memories of farm visits, card games, home-made biscuits and fudge.

Houses and beer are half the price of London here. But life seems twice as nice.

YORKSHIRE LIFE
Real-life Postman Pat.
That's one way to describe the area's North York Moors, where we stay with family in a beautiful old house with flower-decked gardens.
There are farms, rounded valleys formed by glaciers' meltwater - and nearby Lealholm, described by the Sunday Times as the 'prettiest village in Yorkshire.'
Between the nest of light-grey stone houses straddling a humpback stone bridge, kids – including mine – love playing on the stepping stones in the River Esk, in which I swam for the first time since childhood.
The sunbathing throng meant no-one was using the village green's horseshoe-throwing quoits pitch.
But the shop selling lush fresh scones (Nati!) and ice cream (Leo!!) was open.
The pub is the centre of the community, selling locals' rabbit, pheasant and beef - and with a darts board with no trebles.
Yorkshiremen's gruff accent soon melts after a pint.
The phone service on my phone says nowt, of course, but - ey up, lad - that's part of the appeal.

STEAMY NOSTALGIA
It was from Postman Pat to Thomas the Tank Engine as the North York Moors Steam Railway's engines chuffed and Leo cheered.
We were back in the 1950s and the heyday of rail, with pastel-coloured station tearooms decked with 60-year-old posters promoting beach resort day trips.
George Stephenson's assistant built the railway, but when it opened in 1836, it was pulled by horse, and even rope on one hill.
These days, the soot-caked, sweating faces of engineers shovelling coal into fires on the world's busiest steam railway belong to 100 staff and 250 volunteers, one of whom told me he had worked on the line since it reopened in 1976.
Steam is romantic and nostalgic – but just not practical: it takes four hours' coal burning to build up enough steam pressure to power an engine.
We stopped off at the village of Goathland, with its train station used as Hogwarts station in Harry Potter, and where TV show Heartbeat was filmed.

PURPLE PATHS
Over the purple heather one way is Whitby, with a replica of local boy Captain Cook's Endeavour in the harbour, the Abbey on the hill and a straight-off-the-boat fish market.

Over the heather the other way is Stockton, one end of Stephenson's world's first steam rail line to Darlington in 1825.
The line, built to take coal from mines to the port, saw the town boom.
My parents were born there in the post-World War II baby-boom, the years of rationing, the excitement of the first cars and TVs, knowing everyone on your street and leaving your front door unlocked.
The town's engineering industry slumped in the 1980s, but the friendliness remains, always notably higher than London.

MEGA HISTORY
Giant-scale theatre sees a helter-skelter history of England told in the 'Kynren' show.
It's part-inspired by the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and is held in a coal-mining town near Durham.
Its 8,000 seats sell out for every show. If it was near London, it would be a media sensation.
Swords clash with the Romans, Vikings, King Arthur and William the Conqueror; you can actually smell the smoke from the Industrial Revolution's chimneys; and cinema-style surround sound is stunning for the growl of a World War II plane.
There's even snow, in my favourite scene: the mist-shrouded World War I battlefields Christmas truce.

During the show, Leo was the most animated he has ever been watching anything, waving his arms like an orchestra's conductor.
500 volunteers are the show's actors, and most have performed every summer Saturday for the past four years.
An ex-banker who went to school nearby dreamt up the show to bring tourists to the area.
He recruited Steve Boyd, the laid-back London-based American who has directed mass choreography at every Olympics ceremony since Barcelona 1992, and guided Nati and I as we danced in London's Olympic opening ceremony.

Oh, and 'Kynren'? It's Anglo-Saxon for 'generations.'
This blog is the tale of my family's generations.
My kynren, or as we say in modern English, my kin.

MUNICH & AUSTRIA BLOG (15/8/19)

A man in lederhosen (leather shorts) strolled through the arrivals hall of Munich's glimmering airport.

He was not a tour guide.

He was not on a stag do.

I've seen Peruvian women in bowler hats in Andean fields, American Indians in blue dresses in supermarkets and Indonesian monks in orange robes on mopeds.

But the 70-year-old Bavarian man in Munich was the first European I'd ever seen wearing traditional dress not for a special occasion - but as part of day-to-day life.

Despite appearing impractically hot and of little use apart from for filming a YMCA music video, the leather loin gear was once worn across much of the Alps.

FAIRYTALES AND...SURFERS?

We also spotted Robin Hood-style trilby hats with feathers.

That was appropriate, as we were in the land of fairytales (Brothers Grimm, publishers of Cinderella, Snow White and Hansel & Gretel were from Bavaria), as demonstrated by a trip to a kids' fairytale theme park (the talking tree had Leo entranced).

Munich's strong regional identity feels different from the rest of Germany – and that's as Bavaria ('Bayern') was its own kingdom for 700 years, until Prussia united in 1871.

We got up-to-date using electric scooters to visit surfers - yes, surfers – on a river in mega English garden park, complete with conker trees.

SHANDY SURPRISE

Bavarians like drinking. A lot.

I felt tough ordering a one-litre stein of 'Hell' lager in the world's second-biggest beer garden, the 6,000-capacity Augustiner Keller, so big staff drive a small lorry to collect glasses.

But a revelation is that most people in Munich's beer gardens don't want to get drunk.

How do I know this? The biggest queue is always for 'Radler,' a 2% beer and lemonade shandy.

So how terrifying was my stein of 'Hell'? The word actually just means pale beer.

I ordered a bratwurst and a lonely sausage was placed on my plate. Do you have any bread, please? No, we don't serve bread.

That must be an American invention then.

Giant dollops of sauerkraut yellow cabbage and sweet red cabbage were my side dishes.

And that really is what we saw the locals eat.

My preconception of Munich's beer gardens was based on London's Winter Wonderland festival beer hall, a feelgood singalong and dancefest of Take Me Home (West Virginia), Summer of 69 and 90s EuroDance.

But it's only Oktoberfest (originally a celebration of a Bavarian king's wedding) which has the singalong.

Munich's beer halls and gardens rarely have live music.

MUSIC, BUT A DARK PAST

We did finally find a brass band to bob along to in Hofbrauhaus, the world's most famous beer hall, which I very uncomfortably discovered later hosted the first meeting of the Nazi party.

Munich shamefully was the home of Nazism as Hitler exploited the economic crisis after harsh World War I Versailles settlements, and Germany's widely-held belief it had been unlucky and should have won WW I.

Hitler sold postcards to tourists in Munich before becoming the most evil man in history, building the first concentration camp and main SS training centre at nearby Dachau, beginning the Holocaust  and its 11 million victims.

Tour agencies even offer tours of Hitler's Munich. I was utterly appalled at the idea.

So, from the country that started World War II, to the one that started World War I.

GIGANTIC VIEWS, GOULASH & GELATO

I felt like I was on the front of an Alpen box as, as cow bells chimed, I munched muesli on a village house's terrace, facing Innsbruck's 2,000-metre high Alpine wall.

Well, Austria is the home of My Muesli, a shop boasting 100 varieties and even mix-your-own.

Some of the village's magnificent flower-decked, double-balconied, wooden-fronted giant homes even had painted murals on their walls

Leo picked apricots and blackberries. Grapes even grow at 1,200m altitude, despite being snow-covered for four months of winter.

The most surprising crop, however, is sweetcorn, with field after field of it.

Stunning narrow streets in old towns nod to long-gone times.

Austria was one of Europe's largest powers through medieval times, as rich rulers paid Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss to base themselves in Vienna.

It inadvertently started World War I in an attempt to hang onto its Balkan states and territories. Austria lost and its land was stripped (Tirol, where we stayed, is now two-thirds in Italy).

But it wasn't all Heidi, yodelling and thigh-slapping.

We shovelled in fluffy calzone pizza in a swish restaurant overlooking the lake in which Leo then swam by himself for the first time.

For Leo, the lake also had the 200m-long best children's playground I'd ever seen. For Nati, it had lush creamy gelato. For me, it had beach volleyball courts (yay!...I mean yah!).

We spotted camels in the Alps – but that was at the circus.

Even my German was improving. Some words are the same as English e.g. garten, haus. Some are like French. Some are like Chinese.

Candidates for my favourite moment of the trip include managing three bowls of goulash in one sitting, and, the same day, four gelatos.

But sitting with Leo at the top of the first Alpine hill he climbed, as he picked purple, yellow and white wildflowers as church bells peeled from three villages...now that really was magical – like one of those fairytales.

UTAH, ARIZONA & NEVADA BLOG (written 12/6/19)

The Wild West. Epic scenery. Pioneers. Route 66. Red Indians. Ghost towns. Two-mile-long trains.

With so many themes, is it hard to know where to begin a blog about the USA's South-West?
How about this?
The very first person I met on our trip was friends with the sister of Butch Cassidy, the Wild West's most successful outlaw.

WESTERN MAGIC
I've loved Westerns since I was a kid. Thanks, Dad.
I've loved history – particularly exploration of new lands – since a round-the-world trip 15 years ago, at age 27.
So I was cooing with delight when sitting in a rocking chair in the actual cabin of the sheriff who rescued Mormon pioneers stuck in snow in 1856.
And when my son Leo, 3, and I climbed onto a real hooped canvas wagon in a restored 1880 village, all my dreams had come true.

Within five minutes of arriving for my first taste of the Wild West at Salt Late City's Mormon Pioneer Museum, I was rubbing my jetlagged eyes with disbelief when, while leafing through a Butch Cassidy book, the elderly librarian told me she was a family friend. (and Cassidy's sister gave her a wedding present).

Constance Hutchison, the librarian, insists Cassidy was not killed in Bolivia – as shown in Paul Newman & Robert Redford's movie – but escaped and returned to Utah, died in 1937 and is buried within a day's ride of his hometown Circleville.
Constance's surprises just kept coming. She's also a direct descendant of the 1620 Mayflower's crewman John Alden.


NOW SIT DOWN, IT'S ALL MADE UP
Now make sure you're sitting down, Western fans.

The Wild West as you know it is a complete fabrication. Hollywood movie directors made the whole thing up.

Only a handful of face-to-face gunfights ever happened (eg OK Corral), and none at high noon.
Gunmen, who didn't wear cowboy hats and didn't wear holsters but kept a gun in their pocket, did not wait for an opponent to draw first, did not shoot from the hip without aiming, did not shoot accurately, and did not shoot from distance but close-up.
The fabrication about gunfights comes from sensational novels written after an 1867 newspaper article about a rare real gunfight involving Wild Bill Hickock. These novels were the inspiration for Hollywood westerns.
There were plenty of murders though, and gunmen were happy to shoot someone in the back, as Jesse James' cousin did to him to claim reward money.

And Native Americans were not the bad guys. They helped pioneers (who were stealing their land) navigate and plant crops, and traded with them.
Pioneers didn't circle their wagons to protect against Indians, but to prevent their cattle wandering off.


TUMBLEWEED & GOLD
But a two-foot wide ball of tumbleweed really did blow into our car one day.
The wind really does make a swish sound as it blows through scattered trees.
And the sheriff still posts $1,000 reward notices in saloon windows for a burglar.

Inside that saloon – the old stagecoach stables in Chloride, Arizona, population 420 now but 5,000 in the 1870s gold and silver strikes – a cowboy sung and danced to Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.
We walked with only moonlight and a creaking hotel sign to guide us between restored wooden buildings in Oatman, population 70 but boasting 13 hotels and a suburb of tent brothels when $1 billion of gold was mined in the 1910s.
The next day, as a rattlesnake chattered, I found miners' century-old tins of oysters in gullies and peered between 20metre-high collapsed wooden mineheads down shafts, some 400m deep.


PIONEER SPIRIT
The California Gold Rush of 1849 had fanned the rush west.

The astonishing fact is that 500,000 pioneers made the five-month journey of up to 2,000 miles from the Mississippi over the Rockies for a new life in the West between 1830 and 1870 – and all those over age five walked. The whole way. Barefoot (Most were too poor to afford shoes).

Wagons were full with 1,200kg of dried food and equipment. Extra weight would slow the mule/ox, and the path was too narrow for wagons behind to overtake.
One in 10 pioneers died on the way, mainly due to disease, often cholera from polluted water, sometimes rivers accidentally polluted upstream by other pioneers.

Incredibly, 6,000 Mormons didn't even use wagons. The man of the family simply pulled a mini-wagon 'handcart.'
To understand why they did it, you need to understand how appalling conditions were in Europe.
The Industrial Revolution had turned cities into slums.
Poor factory workers met Mormon preachers and swopped 16 hours a day in a factory for a new life in the USA's West.

So when the pioneers finally made it to the West, what awaited them?
Racing to build a log cabin before they froze to death in winter.


TINGLES FOR ROCKS
I'd always loved Australia's scenery the most. But sorry, Bruce and Sheila, the US is now in first place.
It's just so big and expansive. Salt Lake City's valley is a whopping 18 miles wide, boasting epic Utah skies and wispy clouds kicked up by the Rockies.
But to bust some more misconceptions; Arizona and around is not desert.
Parts have green bushes, parts have cattle ranches and even crops, and the Grand Canyon is rimmed by a beautiful gnarly pine forest with red soil, 8ft elk (we almost hit one), and tarantulas (actually harmless).
Most remarkably, snow-capped mountains are visible in June – even from Death Valley.

Feeling like a pinprick is easy at the mile-deep, nine mile-wide Grand Canyon, looking down at rocks almost two billion years old - half the age of Earth - then gazing up at the sparkling Milky Way, shooting stars and satellites.
The power of nature is everywhere, especially when you realise the Canyon was created in just six million years, a blink of an eye in geological terms.
Note the Grand Canyon National Park is actually more of a valley, as it is not sheer-walled. Other parts of the Colorado River do have vertical cliffs, such as the Grand Canyon image you probably have in your head right now (thanks to google photo results), 400m-high Horseshoe Bend, 100 miles away; and the 300m-high spot where Leo and I swam in water surprisingly tepid given it was snowmelt.
That was at adventure sports and RV ('recreational vehicle,' think caravan the size of a house) capital Moab, boasting rock arches, some of the world's top dinosaur sites, and a Wrangler-sponsored rodeo with all the locals brilliantly in jeans, Stetsons and check shirts.

But for me the scenery was all about Monument Valley, arguably the world's most iconic natural wonder thanks to John Wayne westerns starring the 400m-high rock stacks made of compressed sand dunes beside an ancient sea which split the USA 270 million years ago.

My tingling anticipation sensation in the days before visiting was comparable only to the days before seeing Machu Picchu and the Northern Lights.
And the immensity of USA vistas was summed up by the view made famous in Forrest Gump: a dead straight road to an horizon with silhouettes of Monument Valley.
13 Navajo families live in the valley itself.


NO “HOW,” NO TEEPEES
Now to quash some Indian myths.
They don't raise their hand and say “How.”
They don't live in tepees.
And a wigwam is not a teepee.

Only the Sioux said “Howgh,” and didn't raise their hand.
Only the Plains natives lived in tepees (up to 6m high, with nine poles representing the nine months of pregnancy, covered by 15 buffalo hides).
A wigwam is an igloo-like dome of skins over thin sticks.
Natives in the South-West lived in – and some still live in, such as the grandparents of several Navajo people I met – a hogan, a thick timbered dome caked in adobe earth on walls and roof.
Some lived in stone houses hid by cliffs.

Hundreds of tribes lived in America before Europeans arrived in 1607.
They hunted and gathered, and traded and fought with their neighbours, scalping them, gruesomely especially prising the scalps of women and children (Demonstrating they had entered the heart of their rivals' camps).

Their culture's transformation by the horse is viewed as arguably the biggest transformation to occur in any culture.
It was obtained from Spanish Mexico in the 1600s. Previously, to catch buffalo – their main food – they had to drive herds off a cliff or don a wolf hide and creep close enough to spear them.

But the USA's greed for gold and land (eg increasing the size of the country by 50 per cent after deliberately provoking war with newly-independent Mexico in 1848) meant the native population plummeted from between two and 15 million to 250,000 by 1890.
European diseases were the main cause. Indian Wars saw General Custer appallingly boast of easy victories after murdering women and children. Forced marches to detainment camps killed thousands.
No wonder the Hualapi people we met have brochures and posters calling their treatment genocide and terrorism.

Living standards today on reservations (semi-autonomous Indian land) are far lower than the general population.
60,000 of the 180,000 Navajo on their reservation have no mains electricity or water.
More than half of all deaths on the Hualapai reservation are alcohol-related.

But traditions remain.
All main life ceremonies are still held in hogans, including healing ceremonies as medicine men drizzle coloured sand on the floor to create stylized art symbols, wiped away before sunset to represent healing.
The biggest celebration in woman's life is for her first period, when 200 extended family members demolish a 5ft-wide cake. There's no typo.
Weddings – not allowed to someone within one of the foour clans each person has, and disproved of to a white person – attract 500 guests. All male guests must arrive by horse. Really.
Many Navajo speak their language as their first language. (and taught me, eg yaaheth = hello, dejunier = beautiful)
Most live in modern homes, but we saw elderly folk in a town dressed in stunning red and blue traditional clothes, even for a trip to the local supermarket.
And young adults share traditional beliefs – such as that rare tornadoes this year were punishment for the Navajo's current generation losing their culture.


SACRED TARMAC, TITANIC TRAINS
We followed the road of dreams down Route 66.
Tens of thousands of families in Model T Fords emigrated to California down the now-sacred Tarmac after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and 1930s Dust Bowl Great Plains drought.
Coming-of-age, Chicago-to-LA, 2,000-mile road trips followed in the 50s and 60s – and then the towns died overnight in 1984 when bypassed by new highways.
Now, Route 66 nostalgia is rescuing the towns with a tourism boom, especially in Seligman, Arizona, time-warped in the 1950s with neon signs and the famous Snowcap ice diner with old pick-up trucks parked in the garden with painted-on eyes on the windscreen – a significant inspiration for animated movie Cars.
The problem with a diner from 1953 is you have a 1953 menu.
We muddled our way through the menu, which included milkshake (a meal in itself), malt (1950s milkshake loaded with malt barley), float (ice cream in fizzy drink), root beer (fizzy sugarcane) and sundae (milkshake with ice cream).

The big attraction on Route 66 for Leo was not the road, not the milkshakes, and not the motels (hot tubs, ice machines and king-size beds blitzed preconceptions of low standards).
It was the freight train line, running alongside the road for...100 miles.
Leo's favourite activity on our trip was giving train drivers and lorry drivers the horn gesture (fist above head, pull arm down to shoulder level, shout 'naaah naaah,' leap with delight when driver lets blast).
First we counted a train with 109 wagons. We thought that was a big one. Then we got 128. Surely we couldn't beat that.
Then, one epic day, Leo and I leapt from our car at a level crossing as a train passed at 40mph. Over three minutes later - I know, I videoed it - a 272-wagon monster had passed.

Each wagon held a shipping container. They are 12m long. Plus coupling makes 15m per wagon x 272 wagons = 4km-long train.
Oh, and every wagon was stacked with two shipping containers. That's 530 shipping containers on one train. 40,000 tonnes. Half a cruise ship.
So that's why the train had nine engines.
And guess what? It overtook our car at 60mph later in the day.

Who goes to a place with such colossal sizes of road and rail?
People making colossal journeys of their own, of course.
An elderly couple in a glimmering red 1938 Buick with an immaculate dashboard pulled up next to us at a garage. They were doing a 2,500 mile return trip in three days each way.
Rock band AC/DC's Austrian bouncer gave Nati a spin on his Harley Davidson. He was doing 7,000 miles in three weeks.
But a guy I saw walking into a supermarket in a yellow shirt stole the show. Robert Cleave is 16 months into an 18,000-mile, 18-month round-the-world cycle. So how old is the fit fellow? 64 – he's just retired.


YES WE WENT TO VEGAS, NEW PERSPECTIVE
Our meagre 1,200 miles was accompanied by my exploding Spotify account's playlists of road trip rock, 50s and 60s, country, western movie themes, Aaron Copland's hoof-racing Hoedown (imagine the Oklahoma land rush as a five-minute classical epic), Native American flute – and house music classics such as Utah Saints, The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds, and Power of American Natives.

There's a tiny time window to visit the USA's South West if you don't want to be frazzled or frozen.
Route 66 had snow two weeks before our 30C visit in early June.
Vegas, which has 4C spring nights, leapt in nine days from 22C to 38C - and is staying that hot every day the three months.
It's down to the 1,000-2,000 metre Colorado Plateau's altitude, and the desert.

Vegas, virtually single-handedly popularised by mobster-friendly Frank Sinatra by the way, is not a Dubai-esque futuristic metropolis in the desert. Two blocks off the main drag could be any other city (My attempt at performing the Levi's advert in a launderette was cut short by Nati).
But it's exciting to see the famous hotels (some with 16,000 beds; that's four cruise ships), Bellagio's fountains really are beautiful, 1950s Fremont Street's four-block long video ceiling is mesmerising, and the 1950s neon signs scrapyard is fun.

Salt Lake City is Vegas' antithesis. The near-sober, immaculate, blue-skied home of the Mormon church, is bursting with green grass and super-sized houses below the snow-capped edge of the Rocky Mountains.
It's super friendly, five-kid families are standard, and, walking down the street at sunset on Memorial Day, I was invited to a neighbours veranda barbecue and plied with hotdogs and amazing toasted marshmallow-and-cracker sandwiches.
They are great people, so they're not Trump supporters, of course. Wrong. They're all massive Trump fans.
The USA's South-West is not the land of fake news however, it's the land of no news. It was impossible to buy a newspaper. They're just not sold in shops any more.

As I was flying from Europe to the west of the USA for the first time, I expected we'd fly west from London, right?
So I was increasingly staggered to pass my home town of Lincoln, due north of London; then Edinburgh; Greenland's ice and fjords, and; Canadian Hudson Bay's five-mile wide icebergs drifting down the North West Passage.
The reason is the world's countries are not as we see them on the standard Mercator Projection world map, but actually, as the Peters Projection shows, droopy like wet washing on a line, so arcing north is shorter than flying west in the straight line you would expect on the Mercator Projection.

An appropriate start to a trip which also corrected my perspective on the magnificent Wild West.