Day Trip to the Coast

So yesterday when I woke up, I thought to myself, "Where can I go to get heckled by locals, covered in mud, hike up a two-lane highway with no shoulder and get hit on by Serbs?" As it turns out, the answer is Dover and Canterbury.

When we bought our train tickets out to the coast, we thought we were in for the picturesque white cliffs of Dover and the gorgeous Canterbury Cathedral. We did manage to get around to those places, but not before we'd navigated some obstacles.

There was only a slight hitch in getting to Dover -- train maintenance meant we had to take a bus transfer into the city. And once we got there it was beautiful despite the rain -- tiny and well-preserved with an enormous castle on the hill overlooking the sea. We walked through town to the tourist center, but it was closed. So after a delicious pub lunch, we decided to make it up to the cliffs ourselves. We had a map with a road labeled "To the cliffs," although the cliffs themselves were not on the map. We bought bus tickets up to the castle and figured we had to walk the rest of the way. We were certain we were headed in the right direction until the sidewalk ended and the road turned into a two-lane country road with cars speeding by. We trudged through the mud and weeds until we began to doubt our decision. We paused at the roadside, on the brink of turning back, when a jogger came running by and we asked directions. We decided if he could jog up the hill, then we must be able to make it. Thirty minutes later we did make it up and found ourselves atop one of the famous white cliffs. And to our right we saw the "pedestrian path" leading straight down to the city center for what would have been a ten-minute hike at most.

We were tired, out of breath and already covered in mud. I think I even said, "Let's get this over with." There's a path that runs along the edge of the cliffs that you have to walk in order to get a good view. We set out in our tennis shoes and jeans and began taking dumb pictures, trying to fashion ourselves after dramatic poses of the Victorian era. But the paths were more like rivers of mud and we slid and slipped along the edge of the cliffs. After seeing our fill of the cliffs and realizing our jeans were covered in mud (I had already fallen once), we decided to turn back so we could get to Canterbury. We walked down the pedestrian path without incident and took the bus to Canterbury.

There we checked out another old castle, this one much smaller and filled with beer bottles and trash, before going to the Cathedral. As luck would have it, we arrived about 5 minutes after it closed for visits. A little disappointed, we took pictures of the outside and snuck inside the exit doors for a quick look. We tried to figure out where Thomas Beckett met his end, but we couldn't find his tomb or anything. It was getting dark and we rushed around town to see a few other landmarks, including the West Gate Towers. I had my camera up and was about to take a photo when two guys posed in front of me and asked if I wanted to take their picture. We thought they were making fun of us, but they kept chatting us up. They were from Kosovo and were nearly pleading with us to go get drinks with them. We declined (repeatedly) and told them we had a train to catch (which was true, even though we were still an hour early when we turned up at the station). And that is when our trip returned to normal.