Chapter 5 Departing Manchester

Our time in the UK has nearly come to an end. Just after we have become accustomed to being greeted with "ya'll right?", referring to our mates as "lads" and hearing the word "bollix" whenever a Brit didn't believe us, it's time to go. Paying AUS $2.50 a litre for fuel and commuting for up to 40-60 minutes on public transport to get to work each morning will be easier to leave behind. It feels like the exact same edition of English newspaper has been printed each day that we've been here as the content never changes: criticism of Tony Blair's government (centred on Iraq), criticism of a royal or Posh and Beck's. Overall, we have been left with a very positive impression of the UK, wonderfully friendly people with a great sense of humour, amazing history and a beautiful nation.

The majority of our last four weeks have been spent preparing for the next leg of our travels, however we have managed to do a bit of sightseeing. Two friends from Tasmania, Jordy and Anne, recently arrived in Edinburgh, Scotland (after spending a month touring Thailand) on a similar type of trip to what we are doing. We hosted them in Manchester for four nights and on the Saturday we all drove to visit one of England’s most famous castles, Warwick Castle. Although it is fairly crowded with tourists, the castle itself still breathes of history (it dates back to the time of William the Conqueror in the late 1000's) and you can't help but get a realistic feel for what it was like during the war-times in England. After visiting the torture chambers and dungeons where traitors, felons and enemies were stretched and even left dangling naked in metal shackles from the ceilings until they died, you become very grateful for our justice system these days.

On the way home we visited Stratford-Upon-Avon, the birthplace of Sir William Shakespeare, not that you needed to be told that prior to going, as nearly every second store was named after some play on the words of Shakespeare literature.

The following weekend we took the 4 hour drive up to Edinburgh where Jordy and Anne hosted us for the weekend. With streets of Georgian townhouses and a looming castle on a hill in the centre of the city, it feels like you've stepped back in time 4oo hundred years, only without the public executions. As we toured the city on the open-top bus we had "The Last Drop" pub pointed out to us, an old pub where the soon-to-be beheaded were given their "last drop" of whiskey as some form of pain relief prior to their public execution.

To get some concept of what life was like in Edinburgh hundreds of years ago, we took a fascinating underground tour of the once plague-ridden nest of streets (called "closes") and remains of houses to the people who once lived there. The most important thing we learnt was if you were ever walking down the narrow closes at 10pm and you heard the words "Barre de Loo" (French for watch the toilet) don't look up and get out of the way as that was when each resident (some 7 floors high) was allowed to through their daily bucket of sewerage out their windows and onto the streets below, there were no sewerage pipes. Needless to say the residents on the ground floor paid the least rent...

Given that the house Jordy and Anne were staying in had a cable TV, we were able to watch the AFL Grand Final that night. Thankfully we'll be home for the Hawks premiership next year.

We depart Manchester by train on Monday the 10th of October and fly to Cairo, Egypt the following day where we will spend 9 days trekking down and back up the Nile. We will then spend 3 days in transit in London (our final time in the UK) and then head on our European leg of the trip. We are excited.