In London, we stay overnight with an old friend of mine from home on some very dubious sheets of his, then spend the morning admiring/being insanely jealous at the pomp and ceremony of the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace.

It’s just as we’re admiring Westminster Abbey and Big Ben in the afternoon that the air is suddenly filled with sirens and the roads jammed once more with police and emergency services after a fresh bomb scare, and Kylz and I decide for the second time in four days that perhaps London just isn’t the place for us.

Now, in Australia one is used to sweating up a storm, but it’s not quite what I was expecting of London. Hefting our not inconsiderable packs (girls never can travel light), we make a mad dash for a bus that is leaving in approximately three minutes from a station that is approximately three miles away.

At last, praising the miracle that is air conditioning, we fall into the bus in a heap, but our relief is shortlived when Kylie suddenly spots a blotchy red rash on my forearms and promptly diagnoses me with meningitis. Just as she is dashing down the aisle to inform the driver that we’d be making un unscheduled stop at the emergency ward, it dawns on me that my ‘deadly rash’ is nothing more sinister than the red of my shoulder bag rubbing off on my skin.

And so to Cambridge.

As usual I’ve been too harsh on ol’ England. True, I was grossed out by the medieval torture instruments at London’s Clink Jail - but for a more extensive collection of gory utensils from around the world check out this post on 20 medieval torture devices. Decidedly ew.

After three days of fantastic hospitality in Bath we make for the bus to London, having been told that it departs at 8:45am and it would be no problem buying a ticket off the driver.

We turn up at the bus station bright-eyed and bushy tailed fifteen minutes early, only to be told by the Grumpiest Driver in England ‘You’re too bloody late, tough luck. We’re full anyway.’ Slightly taken aback, we make to walk away, thinking we’ll just settle for the train, which is slightly more expensive but the only alternative.

Seeing that we weren’t going to cry and beg, the Grumpiest Driver in England then calls after us - ‘Well, go on then - only if you’ve got the right change.’ We clamber up onto the bus to find that only about four seats on the whole thing are taken, but even so, the Grumpiest Driver in England spent the whole trip glaring at us in his rear-vision mirror.

In London, we set off on a quick monopoly board tour - Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, the Strand etc. London is a little bit depressing for two reasons - one is the horrible discrepancy between rich and poor: you can see how fabulous life would be if you were a member of the snooty uppercrust (not so much for people living in the real world though).

The other is the goriness factor, which ranges from high to extreme. We walk past a good four pubs called ‘The Hung, Drawn and Quartered’, and even take a tour of the Clink jail (because it’s cheaper than seeing a West End musical). After an hour of chastity belts and graphic representations of torture for women, such as ‘gentle’ stretching with the limbs tied to horses going in opposing directions, we’re relatively shaken and ready for some calm inside the Tate Gallery of Modern Art. Instead, we manage to fall asleep on the grass outside it for a good three hours, and by the time we wake up it is closed.

By the time we leave, we’re quite partial to Bath.

Nonetheless, for a town that’s named for it’s renowned Roman baths, you certainly wouldn’t want to bathe in them. Not only are they just tepid pools of someone else’s ancient filth, they’re also lined with lead, which was possibly not one of the Romans’ most forward thinking technologies.

One local we meet obligingly explains the pricing system to us: ‘If you’re a foreigner, see, you ‘ave to pay eighteen quid to get in, which is a bit extortionate, see, cos if you’re local you get in for free, so I did, see, and it was JUST ABOUT worth it…’

However, Bath the city is just luverly daaarling, very Jane Austen with its doddery old ladies with their pearls and parasols, and beautiful old limestone architecture. Luckily Kylie’s friend Nick has arranged the weather for us in advance, so when we aren’t watching men in tights prance around in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (£30 tickets which Nick manages to procure for free), we’re lazing around in the sun near the park (but not actually IN the park, since it costs money to enter).
We even have such a luverly time that we’re willing to overlook the one night Nick drags us out to a bar which is literally swimming in vomit. Didn’t have our good shoes on, after all.

Some people seem to have got it in their heads that Stonehenge was NOT built by aliens. I guess it’s only fair that we let the weirdos have their say though. Check out this post on Is this how Stonehenge was built? Interesting, but still not entirely convinced it wasn’t little green men (and not of the Ampelmann variety…)

I arrive in Bath (eventually) at 3am. Things are looking up because even at this hour I can see it’s the world’s prettiest town (besides Konstanz of course). Have been travelling for a grand total of 19 hours (could have been back in Sydney by now!).

In the meantime, while my estimated arrival time kept getting put back from 8pm to 11pm to midnight to 1:30am to finally 3, my long-suffering sidekick Kylie has been whiling away the time waiting for me by downing vodka red bull after vodka red bull in her friend Nick’s bar in an attempt to show those Brits that colonials do it better. I find her with her head already in the loo: a fitting end to an altogether shocking day.

Next morning, we buck up and make for Stonehenge nearby. Verdict: aliens, without a doubt. More fascinating, though, are the long hours we spend marvelling at the English capacity to enthuse about absolutely everything - a waiter in the Italian restaurant Nick’s parents kindly treated us to was positively doing a jig as he told us ‘You can get garlic bread, or you can get garlic bread with CHEESE on it, which is QUITE EXCITING’…

…only to find myself still having to claw, scratch and pull hair to get on board. There was NO WAY I was missing that bus.

As it was, the trip was quite soothing at first and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, until at last it hit me - for the first time in four months I was back on the proper side of the road, actually able to understand the road signs flying past us.

That’s ‘flying’ in a loose sense of the term - just outside Heathrow we hit traffic. That is to say, no-one else on the road hit traffic, but we sure did. Every lane the bus driver merged into would abruptly stop, while all the other lanes would start flying past at breakneck speed. After traversing about 2 miles in the space of 2 hours, we pulled into Stansted just in time…to watch the connecting bus to Bath just pulling out of the station.

I think it was sometime between eating my soggy cheese sandwich in the biting wind and waiting in the pouring rain at midnight for my third missed connection of the day that it suddenly dawned on me why people refer to this country as cold, wet and dreary. It’s because it’s cold, wet and dreary.

Flew into Heathrow today without incident. A far cry from my first trip to London in 2005, when I arrived on the day of the London bombings.

The first I knew of the awaiting disaster was a text message from a friend back in Konstanz saying, ‘Please watch all your limbs closely to make sure they don’t fly off in a bloody gory mess’ (very good taste, that one).

As it turned out, the entire tube system had been shut down and all of central London was blocked off. Promptly, a group of Texans started crying out hysterically ‘Oh my God, they’re going to target airports next!’, at which point I made for the airport bar and downed four cosmopolitans in a row, because if I’m going to be blown up, then I’m bloody well going to do it in style.

Actually that was a blatant lie. What I really did was buy a cheese sandwich and sit outside in the wind with it, staring glumly at a billboard picturing a beaming couple saying ‘Take the tube - the fastest and easiest way into London!’ and letting myself be buffeted by cigarette butts and other assorted litter.

In the end I practically had to bequeath myself to a pimply bus station attendant just to procure a ticket to Bath in the hopes of getting anywhere but there. I knew it was going to be a shitfight for a seat so though I’d been stranded for six hours already and was busting for the loo - not reccommended when you’re about to embark on a five hour bus trip – I all but chained myself to bus station marker…

Since we’re on about, like, cultures and stuff (and yes, I’ve left myself open here to the usual jibes - “Australia” “culture” and “oxymoron”, that sort of thing - just couldn’t resist getting Borat’s views on things. Downunder on a promotion tour, seems he really got a kick out of cricket pads, boomerangs and our very own anti-Jew crusader, Mel Gibson. Ha ha.

For those of you who are also partial to the phrase-list-as-blog-entry deal, check out this post on Things you’d never expect an Englishman to say - classic. A sneak peak: “The French are an excellent people…”; “Maybe we should ditch the Union Jack and take up the Stars and Stripes…”; “Hugh Grant is such a versatile actor…” You get the picture.