The 100-Acre Wood or My First Hitchhike

I will start with an explanation of why this trip happened in the first place. One of my favorite books in childhood was Winnie the Pooh, the Russian version of it especially, since my dad read that to us regularly before we went to bed. I was never really attached to the movies or the English version because both of these I encountered later in life and by then I had a very set image of what the 100-Acre Wood and all of its inhabitants looked like (and as a result was not fully satisfied by the traditional illustrations or the imagery of the cartoons). I am, however, digressing from my main point which is that for me Winnie the Pooh is a great bright part of childhood.

It is not surprising then, that I was very pleased to find out from Caity, whose dorm I was staying at, that Ashdown Forest, the place that inspired the 100 Acre Wood, was within a two-hour bus ride from us. We decided to visit it during my stay.

On the day that we were planning to set out, Caity had class until 11 am, so we decided to take a bus that left around noon. Then we were going to change buses in a town called Hayward's Heath and ride to somewhere called Wych Cross.

Our troubles started when the first bus was 12 minutes late, making us miss our connection by 5 minutes. At that point we were not too worried about the matter and waited for a little under an hour on the soft lawn of a nearby hospital. We ate the provisions prepared for the day and talked about storytelling.

Our next problem arose on the second bus. As it turned out, Wych Cross was not a bus stop name, but the name of an intersection or a town. We realized this too late and had to get off one stop further away from our destination. We tried hiking our way back, but ended up on some golf course and some private property. It was my first time walking around an actual golf course and I have to say I now understand the appeal of the sport: one gets to wander through neat slightly wooded grasslands without dedicating too much energy or concentration to the sport at hand. This is indeed perfect for business meetings. Caity and I were not there, however, to discuss the faltering economy or a competitor's sudden rise in sales or whether it was worth buying a Ferrari online. We needed Pooh's wood, so we trudged past the golfers onto some seemingly less used path.

Caity Standing in front of
the boyscout camp sign.

This took us to a campsite, where we asked for some directions and Caity posed for a picture with the boyscout signs. The people in the camp office said we were some 6 km or so away from our goal, that we needed to head a bit south-east in order to hit the road that led to Pooh's wood and that we could use their grounds to cut a corner. We thanked them for everything and proceeded to walk, wondering how it happened that we were so far away from our destination.

On the way I noticed that the landscape around us was indeed very similar to what I had imagined of the 100 Acre Wood. The ground we were walking through was mostly sand and as a result the forest consisted primarily of pine trees. Aside from the fact that pine trees are mentioned in several places in Winnie the Pooh, I must mention that pine forests are my favorite kind in general. They usually feature little undergrowth and so one can see further. The pine trees themselves with their long bare trunks and rooflike tops, form a natural collonade and leave one the impression of being in a cathedral.

Another detail that I picked up on was the abundance of ferns. In Winnie the Pooh they (and the fog) were the scenery for the chapter in which Tigger got unbounced. I felt a bit like Rabbit, walking through them and being slightly lost. I mentioned ferns to Caity, who remarked that for her the word was a bit bothersome from a philological standpoint. She pointed out that it can be used as both a countable and an uncountable noun.

After about half an hour we arrived at the Ashdown Forest visitor center (or at least one of them) that was fortunately still open (by then we had been wandering for almost two hours and it was 4 pm). There we confirmed that we were indeed considerably far away from the Pooh Walks (as they were called in the park) and it would take at least an hour to get there. The last bus from Wych Cross left shortly before 7 pm, which meant that we actually had about 15 minutes to spend  on site before we had to head back. We decided, however, that it would be silly to turn back now, after we had spent so much time shaking in buses and trespassing on golf courts and boyscout camps.

The long winding road...

We thanked the lady at the visitors center and set out to Pooh's wood. The road we walked on was a narrow cement country road with cars speeding by at 40 mph all the time. We saw some fields and forests and hills and even a mansion or two in the distance. The sun was getting lower and lower as we walked on and on. Caity was nervous, not without reason, about us getting hit by a passing car. I was getting nervous, also not without reason, about missing the bus.


Finally, after more than an hour and after scaling a considerable hill, we found ourselves at the start of the trail. At this point Caity had the idea that we could walk the trail quickly, then attempt to hitchhike back to the bus stop. This way we would get what we came here for as well as avoid yet another hour of walking.

We started out on the trail but soon disovered that the hilltop where it started, was covered in little paths leading here and there. Because nothing on the spot was marked and we only had a map from the visitor's center as a guide, we soon found ourselves walking on a horse path seemingly leading in the right direction, but in no way resembling a trail. This path led us to the "Enchanted Place", where we saw the Milne Memorial and confirmed that we had not been on the trail till that point and as a result had missed the Heffalump Trap and the Lone Pine. We retraced our steps towards these attractions and came across a very cozy and unique place. The Lone Pine was a shorter-than-usual tree, whose branches for some unknown reason all split at the very top of the tree and formed a wide cover, very much like a roof. This canopy stretched over a small sand pit in the side of the hill, creating a protected look-out point over the valley below. "This was worth it" - I thought to myself at the time.

The horse path that we mistook for the Pooh Trail

Lone Pine and Heffalump Trap at last!

This we thought were Roo's Sandpits.
They were not marked, so I guess we will never know for sure...

We then tried to find the Sand Pits, and seemed to have succeeded in this, though, because nothing was marked, we could never be sure. At that moment I noted that the environment we were in had significantly changed compared to that of our starting point. The sky was now cloudier, the sun much lower and the wind much stronger than over by the golf course. There were still pine trees around, but now they grew scarce and the ground was primarily covered in thistle bushes. This was the first time that I saw Eeyore's food up close and I must confirm that it is as pringly and inedible as described by Milne.

From the hilltop we looked over the hillside that was the inspiration for Eeyore's Sad and Lonely Place. It didn't look that cheerful: lone pine trees here and there with grass and thistles as undergrowth. Especially in the occasional light of the setting sun this did indeed seem quite depressing. It is also possible that our impressions of the place reflected our own worries about the journey home. In any case, we didn't linger there long and headed to the road that would take us back to Wych Cross.

One final glance at the setting sun from the 100-Acre Wood.

This was the first attempt at hitchhiking for both of us, so we were slightly on edge as we strode down the steep hill and waved down cars. The first 6 vehicles passes us by: a woman with a polite smile in a van, an old lady in an old car, a man driving a Smart car that would not have fit us all, a volvo driver who even signaled with his blinker that he didn't want to stop, and a couple of others who I have forgotten now.

Just as I had given up hope and Caity started describing the type of driver that would in fact pick up two young people on an evening road, a white ford pulled over and a round-faced glasses-wearing gentleman said he would give us a lift. This was an unexpected turn of events for me (I had given up hope) and I struggled to find a suitable topic for conversation as we whizzed along the streets past hedges and oncoming traffic at what I thought were impressive speeds. I told the man about our bad luck that day, he asked where I was from. He was incredulous when I named the USA.

-  You don't sound it - he responded.
 - What do I sound like? - I asked.
 - I would place you somewhere in Mid-Germany - he said.
 -  Really?
-  Yes. I work at a school, you see. We have German exchange students teaching there every year and you sound exactly like them.

We continued to talk about this and that. Caity put in a couple of words and our driver said she definitely sounded American. He himself, as it turned out, worked in a school several towns over managing their budget and was staying at a hotel in Wych Cross, hence could give us the ride. We were at our bus stop in no time (as was mentioned earlier, he drove fast), thus ended our first hitchhike. Not a bad experience overall: we saved lots of time and energy, I was told to my face that I have an accent, we "drove" a car through Britain (as opposed to a bus or train). I have to say that I'm a fan of this style of driving, where only commited people actually get a license and a car (both harder to attain in Europe than in the US) and these commited people speed like maniacs down small streets in small maneuverable vehicles. I have yet to see an accident during my stay and at the same time this kind of driving seems way more fun to me.

The rest of the journey home was uneventfiul: all the busses were on time and empty (on time because they were empty), we got home around 10, consumed some frozen pizza (it's surprising how unfilling it is on both sides of the ocean) and went to bed.

By jove, what a day!

P.S.
All pictures in this (and all other posts about the UK) are courtesy of Caity Gebhard. I am very grateful for her having a camera around and not being shy to use it.

It's a long way to London Town

I profusely apologize to my readers for not updating this page for almost a month. Some sort of lame writer's block (lame because I'm not really a writer and hence shouldn't have such problems) took over and its evil spirit kept me away from the blog.
I am, however, back and have quite a bit to tell. The next couple of entries I will post as I write them, which means some of the events described will be out of chronological order. To alleviate this problem, dates of the events will be mentioned in every post.

I am currently writing this out of a computer classroom in a University of Sussex dorm and thus I will start with the story of how I arrived at this location and what things are like here. As I am reluctant to purchase a camera of my own (I think it will be too much hassle trying not to lose it and also a hindrance to interacting with people, a challenge for me on its own), and my friend's camera died during the first day of my stay, this blog entry along with some private notes and memories are all that will remain from the trip.

In the morning of October 5th (a Wednesday) I flew with RyanAir from Baden Airpark to London Stansted Airport. In order to save money, however, I took a train from Konstanz to Karlsruhe the night before and had to spend about 7 hours at the latter's main train station. This stretch of time was actually welcome, because a lot had accumulated on my mind over the past three weeks or so and I had no real opportunity to mill it all over until that night. I also managed to grab a couple of hours of sleep on a stone bench, an extremely cheap and dry croissant from some eatery, two cheeseburgers from McDonnalds (compensation for using their wireless). Overall, putting aside a sore neck and a slightly chilled shoulder (both were fine the next day), it was not as bad as I had expected.

The bus express that was to take me from the train station to the airport was half an hour late, but luckily, there was still enough time to register for my flight. Honestly, I have no idea how I managed to get my backpack through as carry-on luggage. RyanAir has a very strict cabin baggage policy that only allows bags of certain dimensions to be taken on the plane. My guess is that this is to prevent people from taking suitcases with them and not checking them in as baggage to avoid fees. There was an evaluation box set up in front of check-in that allowed one to test if one's carry-on met the dimension requirements. My backpack barely fit into this box all on its own. Then there was the sleeping bag attached to it that did not fit at all. I guess what saved me was that the weight was under 10 kilograms and that seemed to be what was being checked most stringently.

It was my first RyanAir flight but I have to say there was nothing special about it. I chatted with an old German couple headed to London for a pan-England tour ending at York. I listened to Credence Clearwater Revival for about 30 minutes. I stared at the yellow seat in front of me. That was it. The plane set wheel in Stansted and I was on British soil.

I will now digress slightly to say a couple of words about how small I think the world is. Because this particular trip was organized slightly haphazardly and I didn't advertise it as much or as well to my fellow exchange students in Konstanz, I was to undertake my journeys alone. To my surprise and joy, however, I discovered that Susan, a South-African girl from my September orientation was on my train to Karlsruhe and Mikolt, a fellow fencer and also someone I knew from the orientation program, was on the same plane to London. Hurray to my friends being everywhere I go!

I originally was going to take a train from Stansted to Brighton. Upon talking to the ticket sellers, however, I discovered that it would be almost two times cheaper to take a bus to Victoria Station and from there to Brighton. I decided to do that.
The bus I took from Stansted to Victoria came equipped with wireless (very useful for notifying friends about changes in travel plans), seat-belts (apparently, it's law in Brittain to wear them in buses) and a driver possessing a very Brittish sense of humor. He started out by describing one of the stickers on the windows as a "hammer, but not really a hammer... Noone really knows what it is, so I just call it that.", then proceeded to mention a phone number that we could text with our opinion of his driving. He asked that if we had something good to say about him, his name was Paul, if not - Roger.

The passengers on the bus were not quite so jolly. There was an old couple behind me who were arguing about everything possible and mentioning divorce from time to time. Then there was a man who started talking into his phone to some Steve on the other end. There happened to be a Steve on the bus, who, having heard his name, thought he was being addressed and was very put out once he found out this was not the case. He complained for at least twenty minutes about how people answer their phones too loudly in public transportation or how that they answer them at all, or that there are too many Steves roaming the country... I didn't quite understand, because he spoke cockney. Overall, I have yet to hear English used to produce so much miserable and grumbling talk as on that bus ride. Luckily for me, my iPod still had some battery left, so after a while I drowned all of this noise in Dire Straits.

The traffic in London was quite insane and so I got to Victoria station just in time for my connection to Brighton, not with 55 minutes to spare, as the lady that sold me the ticket said. After that it took a more than an hour to get out of London onto the highway headed south.

The long time I spent busing around London let me make some first observations of the city. First of all, it's big and busy, much busier than I thought it would be. The traffic is comparable, I think, to that of New York City, with constant congestion and chaos reigning the streets. The same can be said about the plethora of shops and human characters crowding the streets with their bright (and not so bright) colors.
Secondly, the architecture is almost uniformly of classical (often) empire style. This left me with a feeling of cold grandeur associated with the city in general, similar to the feeling I got from the bus tours of Berlin that I went on between in 2004 and 2006. Another thing I noticed were the rows of townhouses marching along the side streets somewhere into the innards of the megapolis. Their monotonous uniformity made one think of a drearily industrial dystopia.

I didn't really get to see the countryside because in Britain, just like in the US (and perhaps every country that has them), the highways were almost always enveloped in a sheath of trees. In addition, it was four in the afternoon and the day, being cloudy, was starting to turn into night.
I arrived at Brighton Coach Station shortly after half past four and was greeted by chilly wind and rain from the sea and my friend, Caity.

We went to the university of Sussex, a 30 minute bus ride north of the city, deposited my backpack and sleeping bag there, and came back for a short introductory tour of the city. I will give more details about Brighton in a future blog post. For now it will suffice to say that we stumbled around for a bit, mostly looking for cheap dinner. We ended up settling for a 7 pound all-you-can-eat buffet at some Italian place in the center of town, then stuffed ourselves with impressively tasteless pizza and pasta along with some decent salads and boiled eggs. We then went home, to bed.

Thus, after spending 20 hours on the road and using 3 forms of transportation (4, if one counts walking), I began my stay in the UK.