Kernow

I'm in Kernow, that'll be Cornwall to you of course. I drove down Thursday for a few days but didn't really realize that it's a long weekend, by today it's obvious as all the hotels have filled up and there are tourists everywhere. Luckily there are seven Cornish pasty shops in town so plenty of food available.

It's really beautiful down here and we're staying in a lovely hotel in Penzance, it's a winner of the English Tourist Board "Breakfast Award". It was very nice to be woken up by the smell of bacon this morning. In fact it's been very nice since we got here. When we arrived the landlady asked if we wanted tea and we were presented with this:

The full clotted cream tea business, very nice and the start of a pretty calorie laden day. After a wander around town we had dinner in a local pub called the Dolphin, it was used to recruit volunteers to fight the Spanish Armada in 1585 and is reputed to be where Walter Raleigh smoked the first pipe of tobacco in England. Mind you both of those facts are from the pub's menu and may be for the delectation of the tourists. Even so it's a pretty old pub and the food was great. So was the beer actually.

CG arrived today after a long and tortuous train journey, something about the wrong sort of fire on the line, so we had a bit of an explore. Firstly off to Lands End, which CG's landlord had told her was only 350 miles from America. He was only out by a factor of 10 but this may have once again have been a tourist teasing fact. It was forecast to be a crappy weekend but today turned out beautifully and after walking the cliff path from Sennen I've got quite sunburned. After the cliff path we walked around a few of the little villages. This is where you notice that the locals and tourists/holiday homes are next to each other and there is quite a contrast. To buy a house here you need to be rich. Very rich. But the locals are actually pretty poor. In fact Cornwall is one of the poorest counties in Europe. It's sad to see some communities that are almost entirely made up of holiday lets. It makes for a very dead and empty community. It's not just the differences in wealth that let you tell the local from the tourist houses. All the locals have net curtains or blinds and none of the tourists do. I guess they forfeit the view for a little privacy from the likes of me walking past. It's strange to think that many of us try hard to maintain ethical and nondestructive tourism but have killed lots of communities in our own backyard with love.

Driving round here is a bit of a challenge. It's unnerving to drive down a tiny single track road and come to a sign saying "road narrows". Narrows to what? A footpath?! This narrowness of road is made somewhat worse by all the locals bombing along at 60 miles per hour and the double decker busses. If you don't like country driving I suggest you avoid Cornwall.

It's worth making the trip though to see some of the spectacular things. We spent the afternoon at the Levant tin and copper mine which closed in 1930 but had been mined for a few hundred years before that. If modern miners think they deserve their high pay for the difficult conditions they work in they don't know they're born. For a start they used to get to the bottom of the mine (1600 feet deep) on ladders. It took an hour and a half down and two and a half up. For each shift. Before you even start to get paid. Then once they get to the bottom they had to walk a mile out to the mine face. And this mile is out under Atlantic ocean. I cannot imagine how hard a life it was. It did produce a lot of innovation though. Many mining technologies were dreamt up by Cornishmen. Mostly involved with pumping, which makes sense considering the whole under ocean mining thing. It's hard to imagine what it was like when all the mines were all working, the whole Cornish coast must have been a hellish vision of fire, chimneys, slag heaps and toxic chemical processing. The whole area is WHO listed now, it's amazing to think it's categorized the same as the Taj Mahal and Ankor Wat but they all represent a part of human development and history that's past.

Dinner tonight is at another pub, even older than the last one. I'm expecting the menu to tell me that it's where Mary and Joseph got put in the stable.