Tag: <span>travel</span>

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The Royal Pavilion in Brighton is the strangest place. By appearances, it looks like an exotic middle-eastern palace. The architecture is stunningly intricate, consisting of vertical columns, and ornate spires, making you feel like you are standing in the middle of Indoa. However you are in fact standing in the middle of Brighton, UK.

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The pavilion was built for King George IV (regent at the time) between 1784 and 1811. Being far from London (at least before the train service), it was used by him for his dirty weekends with his “long-time companion”, Mrs Fitzherbert.

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If you are in Brighton, visit the Pavilion, or at least sit for a few minutes in the wonderful gardens around the back and enjoy the architecture.

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Travel

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The lanes in Brighton are a wonderful set of pedestrian roads and alleys filled with little restaurants and shops. It is a complete maze, and very easy to get completely disorientated and lost in them.

Cds MG 1352However getting lost is part of the experience, you will simply another interesting little shop.

The shops used to be the fishermen’s cottages, and they still retain a lot of their character.

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There is also daily ghost walk, where you learn about the murders, lovers, ghosts and haunting in and around the lanes. It is a little cheesy, but for 5 pounds it is a fun 90 minutes.

Travel

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These beach houses remind me very much of the Muizenberg beach houses. Well that should not really be a surprise since the Muizenberg beach houses are based on the ones in Brighton.

However while Muizenberg has about 5 houses, in Brighton there are rows are rows of them, literally hundreds of them in a long ling all the way from the Pier through Hove into the next village.

If you plan on buying a hut you had best start saving; they start at 11,000 pounds!.

By the way, the rules dictate the colours that the houses are painted, but you are free to paint the door whatever colour suits you.

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One of the many daily commuters in Brighton cycling past the famous beach huts.

Travel

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A chocolate skull found in a remarkable shop in the lanes in Brighton. They specialise in morbid and gothic chocolates and cakes.

It is rather bizarre, but the artwork is absolutely amazing. I forget the exact figues, but the cake costs something like 200 pounds, but it feeds about 100 people.

The shop is called choccywoccydoodah, and their website is www.choccywoccydoodah.com.

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I think that their other shops do regular chocolates, but not this branch.

Food and Drink Travel

We spent the weekend at Gold Reef City for annual Toastmasters conference. We arrived in a beautifully warn Thursday afternoon, and we had a couple of hours to spare before the formalities started. So what better way to spend it than wondering around the theme park.

The theme park is made to look like and old mining town, complete with mine trucks full of ore, old houses, and mining equipment strewn all over the place. It is a little cheesy, but not too over the top. The theme park is home to the (real) Crown Mines #14 shaft, which stretches over 3500m deep, and it its time was the deepest shaft in the world.

Today, you can travel down the shaft to a depth of about 250m and get a taste of what it is like working in a gold mine. being a theme park, there are the usual set of rides such as roller coasters and ferris wheels.

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Ferris wheel, note the soccer balls.

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One of the many roller coasters.

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Sign for town square. The whole park is laid out to look like Johannesburg around 1900.

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There are peacocks wondering around all over the place, in particular around the Protea Hotel where we stayed. The rooms have just been redone, and it is very nice.

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Old steam engine.

Gold Reef City is a great place to spend a day, but in honesty, a day is probably long enough, you could probably even get away with 1/2 a day if you were pressed for time.

South Africa Travel

Today I did something I have never done before. Lois and I went for a ride in a four-seater aeroplane. We saw the brochure last night at the hotel and thought “why not!”, so off we went. We took off from the Avignon airport (which is basically a small building and a single runway).

The cabin of the plane is about the size of a mini, and the engine is probably not much bigger (I am still partially convinced that the engine is just a really long elastic band). The plane honestly needed about 100m runway to take off, and a bit longer to land.

The trip was fantastic, we flew really low over the whole area, giving me a wonderful opportunity to see the landscape from above and to take some great photos. We opted for the shortest trip –which is about 25 minutes. The longest trip is about 1 ½ hours, and goes all the way to Marseilles.

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Here are some vineyards; they are all over the area. The bright yellow in the middle is actually a sunflower field.
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A hilltop fortified village, of which there are many. You can literally have a several hundred meter drop out of your bedroom window. No sneaking out at night!
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This is the centre of Avignon, clearly dominated by the Papal Palace. Building started in 1305, when the papal court moved from Rome to Avignon. In the second picture, you can see the town square as well.

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The bridge on the right is the remains of the famous bridge "Le Pont St Benezet". This famous bridge was built between 1171 and 1185, with an original span of 900 m. See this post for more details.

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Finally, our landing and a quick pic of us at our aeroplane. It is not often that I get to sit in the front! The trip is expensive, but I really encourage you to do it – it was worth every cent.

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Travel