So we arrived at the hotel at 8.30am but couldn’t get our room until 2.30pm. We are at the Shakespeare Hotel in Paddington, the same hotel we used last year and in the same room. It is an easy train ride from Heathrow to Paddington on the TFL trains using our newly topped up Oyster Cards. We left our luggage at the hotel bag store and set off for a stroll in Hyde Park and to find a coffee.

We picked up a brochure on walking tours of London and saw there was an interesting one not far away in Notting Hill starting at 10.45am. This company was called London Walks and they have hundreds of different themed walks. To go on a London Walk you just turn up, no need to book. You meet you guide and the rest of your group outside the designated Tube stop near the area of your walk. Pay in cash £10 for adults, £8 for seniors. The walks last 2 hours. Our guide was Clare, a true Londoner aged in her sixties who lived for a long time in Notting Hill. There were about 20 in our group. We ended up doing the tour twice, but more of that later.

Notting Hill is an affluent, cosmopolitan and multi-cultural district in the Royal Borough of Kensington, West London. It is known for an annual carnival, Portobello Road Markets (Saturdays) and most recently as the setting for the1999 romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, although it has been the setting for more than a dozen other films.

The walk is a pretty leisurely amble through the most interesting streets with Clare stopping every few hundred metres and talking about the history, culture, significant buildings and significant people associated with the district.

We started at C. Lidgate a butchers founded 150 years ago and now run by the fifth generation of the same family. It is claimed to be the most expensive butcher in the UK with fillet steak at £80 per kilo. They sell meat supplied by the estates of Prince Charlies and on the occasion of the 100^th birthday of his grandmother, the Queen Mother, they sent her 100 sausages.

Along the way we saw the Electric Cinema, operating since 1910, one of the first theatres designed specifically for movies. We finished at a shop called Books for Cooks selling exclusively cook books formerly owned by the now deceased Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson, the two eccentric cooks from the ‘Two Fat Ladies’ television series who drove around on a motorbike and sidecar.

It becomes a bit of a walk past of houses of notable people e.g. Shirley Bassey, Ginger Spice, Annie Lennox, clarinet player Acker Bilk etc. We did see the Samarkand Hotel where Jimi Hendrix died in 1970 where he overdosed on sleeping pills and died of suffocation through vomit. We saw Portobello Hotel where Johnny Depp made a bath of champagne for Kate Moss to bathe in when they were a hot couple.

Notting Hill was rural land outside the City of London up until about 1800. At that time it had a large gypsy encampment and many potteries. The area had good clay for making tiles and pipes. Piggeries were forced out of Marble Arch in London and set up in Notting Hill. The pig slurry filled the pits dug for the clay and formed a foul area of pig slurry called ‘the ocean’. About a thousand gypsies lived in squalor in the ocean.

In the 1800s developers moved into the district and built large expensive houses. The developments were terraces or crescents built around private communal gardens or ‘paddocks’. This affluent area also had for a short time its own exclusive race course – ‘The Hippodrome’. By the twentieth century the area had lost its market value and most of the large house were sub-divided into small tenancies and after WWII it became an area for the down at heel in cheap lodgings. Labourers were brought in from the West Indies to help with a labour shortage after the war which led to racially motivated riots in the 1950s. From the 1980s gentrification has seen property prices soar and the houses converted back into large homes.

We thought the walk was pretty good value and Clare was quite entertaining. The walk finished bang on two hours in the Portobello Market. At the start of the walk I realised I had not put the memory card back in my camera after downloading photos at one of our stopovers. So I couldn’t take any photos. We decided to go to our hotel, check in, have a shower and then come back and quickly go around Notting Hill again taking photos of where we had been. This sounded good in theory but was a bit of a disaster in practice. By now we had been about 30 hours without any decent sleep and we couldn’t quite remember where Clare had taken us so we often got lost and there was much back tracking and going around in circles.  Eventually it got too much and two very weary zombies trudged back to their hotel absolutely knackered. We didn’t even eat dinner before collapsing into bed.

 

Staying at the Rydges Hotel at Wellington Airport was a new experience for us. It certainly makes for a relaxed and stress-free departure for flights leaving very early in the morning. And it came with one complimentary drink (to share !!) at the bar, always a good way to start a new adventure.

The hotel is a strange modern version of Art Deco, done almost exclusively in black and white. The bathrooms especially are an eye-popping contrast of black and white tiles in a zig zag pattern and matt black plumbing fittings.

It was extremely quiet, the best noise insulation I have ever experienced in a hotel, has very, very comfy beds, and it is only a couple of minutes lift and escalator ride from your room down to the check-in kiosks.

There were a lot of artworks about and for me the best were three beautiful bikes on display. They originally wanted a classic car but couldn’t get it through the doors so the next best thing for cycling enthusiasts and non-art lovers was a display of the finest road bikes on the planet.

The first was a Pinarella Dogma F10, currently the fastest road bike in the world, ridden by Team Sky to three Tour de France titles in 2016, 2017 (Chris Froome) and 2018 (Gerrant Thomas).

The second was a Greg LeMond Team Z from 1991. Hand made with a CrMo frame. Lemond won three Tour De France Tours and two Road Race World Championships.

The third was a Factor O2 Disc, built with no compromises of carbon fibre, disc brakes and blue tooth wireless gear changes. It is only for the fastest riders in the peleton, and The Wobbly Wheelers!

It was a smooth and uneventful flight from Wellington to Sydney except that we now know why New Zealand and Australian soldiers were called ‘diggers’. On a perfect sunny, calm Sydney morning the aircraft landed with an almighty jolt, the pilot seemingly trying to dig a trench the length of the runway. Everyone was tossed violently forward and I had to grab hold of the back of the seat in front.

The least said about waiting around for seven and a half hours in Sydney Airport the better. The flight from Sydney to Heathrow was surprisingly good and the time passed quite quickly. An 8hr 20mins leg to Singapore where all 474 passengers had to disembark for an hour and a half while the plane was refuelled and reprovisioned, then a 13hr 30min leg to London. Qantas was exactly on time all the way and the only snag was when we got to Heathrow there was some congestion so we flew in circles for about 20 mins.

We arrived at Heathrow at 6.30am all well and with all our bags. We were at our hotel by 8.30am but couldn’t check in until 2.30pm so dropped off our luggage and set off to find something to do for 6 hours. More on that in the next post.

As usual we arrived in London with a guilty conscience. A return flight Wellington to Heathrow produces emissions of 5.71 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per person. The average yearly emissions for New Zealanders are 16.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent so we have used a huge chunk of our share in just these flights. We’ll be planting hundreds of trees in QE Park next winter. Our little 1300cc Suzuki Jimny produces 0.21 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per 1000kms so we’ll have to cut back our driving drastically as well.

 

Last year we walked 500 km of the South West Coast Path from Westward Ho! to Plymouth. At 1000 km the South West Coast Path is the longest of the United Kingdom’s National Trails.

We enjoyed the walking so much we have decided to return and walk a further 300 km approximately.

This year’s walk is in two stages. The first stage is from Minehead to Westward Ho!

The second stage is from Plymouth to Brixham.

Before and after walking the South West Coast Path we will have a few days in London. On the way home we will stop over in Perth Western Australia for six days for the wedding of our son Simon and his fiance Dezaray on Rottnest Island.