Just under a hundred kilometers to the west of Norwich is the city of Ely, which we have already passed through on the train a few times on our way elsewhere. As it had been recommended to us as one of the best preserved medieval towns in the area we made a visit today.
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Tag: walk
Lowestoft
Out on the coast just south of Great Yarmouth is the town of Lowestoft, which is where trains travelling over the swing bridge at Reedham end up. I managed to pry Felicity loose from her keyboard late morning and we hurried to the station just in time to catch the midday train.
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Great Yarmouth
Although we have already visited Yarmouth on two occasions, we hadn’t explored the town or seen the beach, so we caught the train out to the coast this morning to see this famous “resort”. Sadly, we discovered that it’s heyday was about a century ago, and that the town seems to have gone steadily downhill since then.
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Murray Edwards College Cambridge
Felicity went to visit a professor at Cambridge University today, so we went for a long walk through the interesting city afterwards. Unlike Norwich, the central part of town is swarming with tourists, and there are students from all over the world making it a much more cosmopolitan place.
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Wherryman’s Way – Chedgrave to Reedham
Today we completed the final section of the Wherryman’s Way, so we have now walked the whole distance from Norwich to Great Yarmouth. We started by catching the midday bus to Chedgrave, and disembarked outside the White Horse Pub where we had ended our walk on our previous visit.
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Wells-next-the-Sea
This weekend the woman Felicity is working with in Norwich invited us to stay the night with her and her husband at their cottage on the northern coast of Norfolk. We decided to catch the train to Sheringham and walk to Wells along the Norfolk Coast Path.
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Burgh Castle
When I looked for places to visit near Great Yarmouth, the first place that caught my attention was Burgh Castle. It isn’t actually a castle, but instead a Roman coastal fort that they called Gariannonum.
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Norwich Nooks and Crannies West
The third of the three inner city walks heads west from the central market. One of the first interesting places was the site of Bethel Hospital, the first provincial mental institution in the country, opened in 1713 with the aim of treating patients rather than just locking them up. It operated until the 1980s, and has since been converted to apartments.
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Wherryman’s Way – Reedham to Yarmouth
We decided to spend a day in the countryside for a change today, and took a train to Reedham on the Wherryman’s Way. We would have gone back to Surlingham to continue where we stopped last week, but it is a bank holiday here in England and the normal bus service is not running.
Norwich Nooks and Crannies South
The second Nooks & Crannies walk goes to the south of the market, and is 2.5km in length. It starts at the Royal Arcade, which was opened in 1899 and is considered an Art Nouveau masterpiece. The glass tiling and mahogany shopfronts have been described as a ‘fragment of the Arabian nights’.
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Norwich Nooks and Crannies Northeast
The Norwich City Council has published a booklet describing three walking routes titled Norwich’s nooks and crannies. Today we walked the first of these, which is a 3.5km loop to the north east of the city market.
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Wherryman’s Way – Norwich to Surlingham
After my big mission yesterday I was hoping for an easy day exploring the city, but Felicity was keen to start walking one of the long-distant trails leading out towards the coast, so we spent another exhausting day of touristing. Wherries were barges with large black sails, used to transport goods up rivers to inland towns, and played an important part in the history of Norwich.
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Weekend in Shanghai
When we landed at Pudong airport and joined the long queue for immigration I was encouraged to see a sign saying that they process 98% of passengers within 20 minutes. We must have been in the 2% because it took over an hour to get to the counter, where we learned that because we wanted a 72 hour transit visa on demand we should have been in a different queue at the far end of the room.
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Allansford and Great Ocean Road
Felicity is presenting at the 15th World Congress on Public Health in Melbourne this week, so we decided I would accompany her and spend some time checking out the city’s cycle trails. Our friends Marion and Elephant invited us to visit them in Allansford near the western border of Victoria for a few days beforehand.
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Ohiwa Beach and Uretara Island
There is a great free campsite at the mouth of the Waiotahi River, just south of Whakatane. After finding a good spot we went for a long walk down Waiotahi Beach to the south before dinner.
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White Island
For the last couple of days, our view has had White Island steaming gently on the horizon. We have both wanted to visit for ages, and even made a booking once, which was cancelled by wild weather. When we inquired at the Opotiki I-site yesterday and discovered that the conditions today would be as good as they ever get, we knew we had to head straight for Whakatane.
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Whitianga Bay
Felicity wanted to talk to the doctor at Te Kaha’s medical centre about student placements, so we stopped for half an hour to enjoy a cup of tea with her. She told us that our planned campsite at Omaio would be very busy because it is right next to the cemetery and a big tangi is happening. She suggested we could stay at her mother’s property a few kilometers further on.
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Anaura Bay and East Cape
Because we were already inside the Eastwoodhills Abouretum when we woke up, we decided to have another walk after breakfast, and explore some of the areas that we hadn’t visited the day before.
This time we found an almond tree, which I have never seen before. The nuts (or more correctly seeds) were surrounded by a soft flesh similar to a peach or apricot, which are in the same family. Our nut collection is growing!
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Gisborne and Rere
It rained overnight at Morere Springs, but the sun was shining again by morning. We decided to hike the Mangakawa Track which climbs high above the hot pools before following the Mangakawa Stream back to the springs.
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Kopuawhara Stream and Mangaone Caves
When we first woke this morning, the sky was quite clear with an pink-orange glow. I was still drinking my bed tea when out to sea the sun popped over the horizon and shone straight in our bedroom window. It was obvious to both of us that it was going to be a kayaking day.
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