Our summer months in Australia have been great – enjoying family and friends over the Christmas holidays, spending time up at our Blue Mountains property, afternoons at the beach, lazy days with more time and less rush. But we’ve only done three continents of our Follow the Sun journey and the next one promises to be the best yet – Africa! So I left Julie in Sydney and flew to England to reunite with the ever-loyal and patient Tramp and put him on a ship to Durban, South Africa.

Tramp has been spending his English winter tucked up nice and comfortable in a barn at our good friends Gavin and Emma’s place.  My return to their welcoming home in Essex meant reuniting with Tramp and beginning the substantial preparations for shipping him to South Africa.

Tramp was in remarkably good shape considering the roads and distances we have explored with him but he still needed a thorough service, replacement of a few parts and a bit of a clean up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In between these duties I also had the chance to explore a few places in Essex, a county which lies north east of London and stretches to the southern reaches of the North Sea.  Despite the winter months Essex is a beautiful place, rolling farmland divided by well kept tall hedges, sprinkled with small villages, a few larger towns bearing the long history of this region.  I had a great time exploring these narrow country roads, the wild and windy shoreline and some of the old pubs that mark most of the social life of the villages.

 

 

One of the highlights of my wandering was the seaside town of Southend-on-Sea, which features a very ordinary beach but – wait for it – the longest pleasure pier in the world!  And it was pretty good, I must say, with a colourful amusement park full of children’s rides at its base and an old train that takes tourists out to the restaurants and shops at the end. The pier is an impressive 2.1 km or 1.3 miles long and built in 1830, originally featuring a horse drawn carriage to transport people from end to end.  I strolled a fair distance out on the wooden deck to get a sense of the length and views before a bitter headwind blew me back.

 

Yes, England this time of year is cold, perhaps as you would expect winters here to be.  Temperatures never rose above 8C/46F, it was often drizzly or windy…or both…and any glimpse of blue sky was a rare moment for celebration.  My favourite display on my weather app read ‘4 degrees, feels like -1 degree’.  And no surprise because one morning we actually had snow falling for a short while.  Fortunately Tramp has an outstanding heating system and I slept warm and snug parked in Gavin’s and Emma’s driveway.

But amongst chores like replacing camper windows, fixing the diesel-powered camper cooker and going through the painful process of booking Tramp for his next ocean cruise I also had the chance to meet some of Gavin and Emma’s friends, in particular joining Gavin on two Thursday nights for many rousing games of table tennis in the village’s new community centre, followed by more sedate backgammon in the local pub.  Great stuff.

After sad farewells I left Gavin and Emma’s place and made my way…slowly…to the ports at Southampton.  Very slowly in fact because it took me three days to cover what would normally be a three hour drive.  First stop was the Old Jail pub in Kent where I had lunch with Iain, an old mate of mine from our corporate days.  Then it was on to Horsham for a great night of reminiscing at Tim’s welcoming home, another former colleague and great mate who worked with me in Madrid, Sydney and Bangkok.  Tim has been thrown a few curve balls in life but he and his partner Gaby are making a good go of it and I loved catching up with them.

I was headed for New Forest National Park, a vast natural park area near Southampton which has been preserved since the 1079 when William the Conqueror declared it his ‘new hunting forest’. Yeah, the English can impressively do longevity like few others.  Today the park features thick groves of first growth trees, beautiful grassy meadows, a number of creeks and ponds, a few historical homes and a number of communities which benefit from the natural surroundings and the tourists that come to explore them.  New Forest is home to a wide variety of animal and plant life but is most famous for the shaggy wild ponies that come in all colours and lazily graze on the open paddocks of the park.

 

I camped that night just off the coast near the town of Lymington and dined out on a beautiful sunset across the shoreline meadows.  The next day I took an early morning stroll, the sky foreboding, the sun still low and the temperature hovering around zero, following the trail along the top of the dyke that separated the cold still ocean from the marshy land.  This was beautiful stuff, wild ponies mixing it with ducks and geese, the horizon over the sea almost indistinguishable between the grey water and sky. 

But New Forest has many features and I headed inland to a fabulous area called Tall Trees and walked amongst giant sequoias and Douglas Firs that had been planted there in the 1850’s.  These giant trees, still in their adolescence as they can live over 1,000 years, provided a scenic setting for another beautiful walk before lunch. 

And after lunch I topped off a trio of diverse and scenic walks by following a forest circuit in the area called Wilverley Inclosure where it magically seemed I had the whole world to myself.  One thing for absolute certain, if you enjoy beautiful walks to sap up English nature at its best then New Forest National Park rocks!

 

But after two weeks in England my time was drawing to a close.  That night in the carpark of a hotel I repeated a process of packing all our worldly goods from all the outside enclosures and side lockers into the back of Tramp and closed him up ready for his long ocean voyage to South Africa. 

 

Shipping Tramp is always fraught with risks and stress – and outrageous costs – but we’ve done it twice before and at least by now we know the drill. I spent the fading light of a late afternoon madly unpacking all our personal items, gear and equipment from every secret – and not so secret – spot and jigsawed it all into the back of the camper. The next morning I drove down to the port, always another world in itself with its huge container ships, massive cranes, ordered chaos and men wearing fluro yellow outfits, and with one piece of paper earning one stamp I parked our might beast, handed over the keys and walked away.  It doesn’t get any weirder than that!

I spent the rest of the day exploring the old town of Southampton, one of only three English cities with its medieval walls still largely intact, and the next day caught a train to Heathrow for my long journey home.

The brief trip to the UK had been very successful despite moments of loneliness not having Julie with me.  I was able to refit Tramp for its long cruise to South Africa and the next leg of our journey, catch up with old friends and explore a few corners of the island I hadn’t seen before. But the real focus is on what is to come – meeting Tramp in Durban next month and continuing our Follow the Sun adventure. Africa, here we come!

And finally…everyone knows about England’s great pubs with their fabulous historical and cultural contribution to society.  I visited a few during my time in the UK but also snapped a few photos of their great signs.  Enjoy!

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