World Trip 2002 - London
Day 29
London
we great! I love that old city. The place has life in it, a vibrancy and buzz
that many modern cities just don't have.
Andrew and Alex were great too. Top sports, good people. Andrew was really good in showing me around London despite being in the middle of moving house and being quite broke. I know he may have felt a bit guilty at not showing me much but really he showed me heaps of stuff and I was really happy to have met him. I felt a bit worried for inconveniencing him by sort of imposing myself upon him. But I don't think either of us worried too much about that and just had a good time.
Day 30
I met Andrew at an underground station. We walked across a bit of London for me to dump my bags then we caught trains south to head for his place, where he was living with his parents.
Andrew's friend turned up to drive us to the Cane Hill bunker, not far from Cane Hill hospital. Andrew mentioned that a lot of people had emailed him about the bunker suggesting that patients from the hospital were taken down there for torture and that there were secret tunnels joining the hospital to the bunker and there were still some patients down there. It was of course utter rubbish. Nobody ever did experiments on people down in the bunker, there was no secret tunnels and no bodies left down in the tunnels let alone people living in them.
The bunkers were quite cool. Not at all like the coastal batteries I had seen in Australia. This was more of a bomb shelter like bunker. There was a whole series of tunnels laid out in a grid pattern. There was also a heap of really cool machinery down there and weird odds and ends. It was pretty atmospheric too.
After the bunkers we drove up to Cane Hill hospital and scouted the area for holes in the fence. This as the fence from hell. It was a good three metres high, made from solid metal pickets that were strongly held in place. You could not cut it with basic wire clippers and it wasn't the sort of place to have holes left unrepaired for long. This was all in response to numerous fires set in the hospital recently. Some crazy serial arsonist had been trying to burn the place down. This pissed Andrew off of course because it made it harder to explore and attracted unwanted attention to his web site.
While we were driving around Andrew explained how one night he and a few mates had been climbing up some building to a second story balcony, I think to watch some new years fire works display or something like that. A couple of other guys had climbed up on the balcony with them and were mucking around and pretending to be cool. One of them turned to Andrew's friend and said "So what do you guys do?" The friend turned back and said "We eat people.". Just like that, calm voice. The guys laughed and thought it was a joke and then asked again "No, what do you really do?" Andrew's friend said again "We eat people." This time the guys were a bit put off and apparently decided to get off the balcony. So for a while that was their thing. They brought some masks like those used in the movies Scream and Scary Movie and would drive around at night. The car had a public address system so these four guys would pull up at lights, turn around to the car next to them and say over the PA, "We eat people." I am sure they frightened a few people. Anyway, this explains the next paragraph.
The first night I was surprised and shocked by a funny incident. I had just drifted off to sleep when suddenly here's Andrew's face looming up beside the bed, glowing blue from a night light with a big grin on his face. I almost jumped out of the bed in fright! My first thought was "Oh my god he's an axe murder!" It turned out I was snoring and Andrew just woke me up to quiet me down. It's very funny now when I look back on it. I mean there he was grinning evilly and lit up by this eerie blue light. Of course he was quite harmless and a gentleman throughout the time I stayed with him.
Day 31
After Cane Hill, Andrew showed me a cool abandoned railway. It had a great little abandoned bridge which I had seen a photo of. It looked good to explore. We came to the rail line, hopped a fence and started to walk along the overgrown line. It had quite high trees on it, despite not being abandoned all that long. Andrew recalled when trains had run along it. We walked along till we encountered the brambles from hell. Then started a period of scratching and tearing and pain and cuts and the scratching and the tearing and the "Ow" and the "Shit!" and the "I can't see over that." Let me just say that it was painful and in parts the brambles were higher than we were.
Despite that, I had a good time. Sure I got a few scratches and cuts but nothing serious. It was fun. Now I know how the early explorers of the Amazon Jungle felt like as they hacked their way through thick impenetrable jungles. I felt like the guys who discovered all those lost Mayan cities. We just found a small well known abandoned railway station. I think Andrew was worried I'd be cursing him but really I had a good time.
Day 32 and 33
At this point Andrew was moving house so while he stayed at his parents house I went up to his new place and stayed the night there. No doubt to avoid problems with my snoring. I ended up meeting with Alex at some Tube station before we caught another train to an active funny farm to explore it's tunnels.
It was unusual to explore the tunnels of an active mental asylum. Getting in was easy, we knew a guy with a key. In we went, wandering around. The photos show what was there. The most amazing things were the big ass alien communication device and the massive generator. There was also a pretty nifty well down in the basement of one of the buildings. That was pretty cool, it had a stream of water running through the bottom of it. I only got to spend a short amount of time with Alex, but he seemed like a really good bloke. He was a real character, quite interesting. I'll have to email him more often.
It was about the afternoon of this day that I came to realise that food in England was expensive. In fact, everything there was expensive to an Australian. But if you shopped around you could get a few bargains. I brought some basic food supplies, bread, milk, sliced meat, cheese slices and some other stuff in a store making sure I'd have plenty for Andrew to eat as well. It was the least I could do, seeing as how he was putting me up and was broke. It was only after I returned with this that I came to realise I had been shopping in a relatively expensive corner store and had walked right past a much cheaper supermarket. :) Them's the breaks.
Day 34
I debated what to do with my time in London, as Andrew had to work. He had of course explained this well before hand. I arranged to catch a bus north to Liverpool and then on to Glasgow.
Day 37 and 38
There was a tube strike on in London shortly after getting back so I spent the day Getting pictures off of my digital camera and burnt them to CD to allow me to take more pictures. I had considered going out to Dover Castle but I had to keep an eye on money usage. In the end I roamed around London taking photos of Tube stations. I didn't bother photographing White City, the only abandoned station I passed that was visible. It was just too dark. Down Street wasn't worth photographing either.
From London I flew over the Channel to Amsterdam and caught a train to Rotterdam.
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