I think it had been baking inside me for a along long time now – this need to travel. The last time I really traveled was with Anand to Hampi, Gulbarga and Bidar many many years back. Of course since then I have traveled much, but nothing that had the sense of rawness that this weekend had.

This weekend I traveled to Cornwall. I grew up in Cochin which is a little costal town in Kerala, India. Cochin is a very beautiful place, but it is also, like many places that one grows up in a place that doesn’t let you realize how beautiful it really is until you have left it. Since leaving Cochin I have mainly been living very far away from the sea. So now that I was in England I looked around for the best piece of coastline I could find and decided to visit it. The best piece of coastline I heard of, as recommended to me by many people, was Cornwall. And so sometime mid last week I decided on a whim that I was going to Cornwall. Cornwall is the south eastern tip of England and is famous for its rocky , cliff lined coastlines.

The journey to Cornwall would be 12+ hours by bus from Cambridge because I pretty much had to travel all the way across the country. Not caring much for the strain of the journey, I decided that I would leave Friday night arrive on Saturday morning and leave Cornwall on Sunday night and arrive back at Cambridge on Monday morning by 9.00 and then show up for work. Needless to say, I did, though there were many points in the trip at which I felt I wouldn’t make it. And this being Monday evening, I haven’t had any sleep yet and my feet are killing me. But I loved it, every bit of it – even the hard hard parts.

If you have got your head messed up when you were really young and have read Bach and Pirsig and kept that sense of aching inside you – and then you watch a movie like the Motorcycle diaries and it stirs up everything – then at some point you just have to let it all go and travel and see if you really have it inside you to do so. I think this trip to Cornwall was a little sampler for me – to see if I have it in me – I think the answer is yes.

So this blog entry is a travelogue of sorts of this amazing weekend. Needless to say, I have many many pictures as my witness.

This was the plan – board the bus to Penzance, get off at St Erth and catch a local train to St Ives. Start walking to Pendeen from St Ives. That was supposedly 21km according to the guide book I had. I booked a little bed and breakfast at the Radjel Inn at Pendeen. The next day I would catch a bus to Land’s end and walk to Porthcurno. From there I would catch a bus to Penzance where I could cath my long distance bus back to Cambridge. That was the plan.

I arrived at St Ives by about 10.30. St Ives is beautiful – the sort of place I regret so much having to rush through. If I ever go back to Cornwall I hope to spend a day or teo just enjoying St Ives. It’s a little rocky coatal town with very scenic winding narrow roads and several beaches and lots and lots of seagulls.

Seagulls are interesting birds – if you have never had the chance to see lots of them up close before you are in for  treat. It was interesting seeing this one squaking at a sign that said “Don’t feed the seagulls”. Every now and then you would see a fat seagull with the personality of a duck wobbling up to you. I remember asking one of them if it had had any self respect and if it had heard of Jonathan and it left looking rather offended.

I sampled some of the traditional “Cornish Pasty”, got myself a sandwich and some bottled dribnk and I was off. Like the guide book (which is titled “Walking in Britain”, and I highly recommend it – expect I think the book is written by athletes of some sort) the walk was rather strenuous. 21km may not sound like much but winding up and down these cliffs by the sea it is really something else.

Every hour or so you would see another human being – but that aside all you see are miles of open grasslands and rugged cliffs and a beautiful blue green sea. If you break a leg or sprain your ankle you and pretty much finished unless someone comes by and finds you. I started out only by ~12.00 and sure enough I didn’t make the walk to Pendeen. After almost giving up several times along the way and once getting my feet caught in some bog I made it to Treen. I was out of food and water at it was about 6.45. I was sure I couldn’t manage any more. Treen was this little town which pretty much only had only one street and a dozen or less buildings. Most of the buildings were bed and breakfasts and there was one hotel! All in the is little place. And whats interesting is that the prices were very high! It seemed like it was popular place for people to give up.

There was this one person how I had crossed paths with several times during my walk who knew someone locally and managed to get a cab from somewhere. The town itself had no cabs or public transport. Hence I got a lift to Pendeen. I had a shower at the Radjel Inn (a nice place to stay if you are looking for a place to stay at Pendeen) and got myself some tradition Cornish mead and dinner from a local meadery. I slept like a log that night – esp considering the long days walk and the fact that I had got no sleep on the overnight bus.

The nest day morning, after a great breakfast I walked ~2miles to the lighthouse at Pendeen. At 9am its foggy and beautiful. There was a middle aged couple there peering intently out at the see – a little later the lady walsk up to me and ask me if I would like to see to a basking shark “Everyone should see a basking shark at some point in their lives” she said. And so I did.

I caught one two hourly bus that passes through Pendeen and got off at the Land’s end aerodrome. I heard (got a pamphlet at St Erth  railway station) that said that they sell rides for 29 pounds in a little Cessna. At the aerodrome they said that they need atleast two people for a ride or that I would have to pay for an additional child’s ticket for 15mins in the air. Seemed steep. Then it struck me that I could do something better – and I did – I got myself a  half hour training flight for 69 pounds. So I flew my first Cessna 172 (my first aircraft of any sort) on Sunday the 15th, June, 2006. It was brliiant – we flew all over Cornwall in those 30mins. I got to do most of the takeoff and landing by myself as well with instructions and occasional corrections by the trainer co pilot. I now have a little “Trial Flying Lesson” certificate on my desk that I am very proud off. My instructor was friendly guy named Ben who patiently answered my many questions about the aircraft. It was beautiful – you treat it well and the aircraft flies itself. It even has little landing light which are handy to scare the seagulls J

After my flight I caught the next bus to Lands end. Lands end is apparently the most scenic part of Cornwall – rightly so. However the guide book said that the walk from Lands end to Porthcurno is about 3.5 hours (and I remember I could do their walk the previous day). However it turned out that the last bus was two hours away and the bus driver told me that I could make the walk in less that two hours easily. Oh boy! I grueling one and half hours later I back away from the cliffs. This walk was scary – every now and then you are walking along a little much trail (like those in the middle of a paddy field – if you have ever walked through a paddy field you’ll know what I mean, with a steep rocky drop on one side). There were an occasional Jonathan and Fletcher to give me company.

After a while I could not keep up the pace and the focus and chickened out. As with all things in life, when you are doing something for an objective instead of the sake of doing it, your fears and difficulties multiply. I started to walk away for the cliff and cut across some fields and ran into some women who had a real map (yes, I didn’t have a real map – yes, I am slightly crazy). I seemed like I was less than half way there to Porthcurno and there was only 25mins to 5 when the last bus was. I hurried along and 15mins later reached a main road that said that Porthcurno is only 1.25 miles away. And I was pulling my last bit of energy together and started getting annoyed with myself for being so attached to the failures of reality and car came along and I had my ride to Porthcurno. A very friendly elderly lady who had been to India and said “At some level I know that some part of me is Indian” – I didn’t know what to say. She drove a little out of her way to drop me at Porthcurno.  I reached there few minutes before 5.00 in time for the bus and by now so thoroughly annoyed with myself for clinging so desperately to safety.

So I decided to do the only obvious thing, forget to bus and go sit on the beach. And I did just that and walked to the Porthcurno beach and say there till felt at home with my sense of struggly for having reached the place. And so a half and hour later when I headed back I noticed other troubled people trying to find a cab or some way to get out of there. I wasn’t overly bothered – would I miss my bus back from Penzance? Maybe. But then again maybe not – and sure enough there came the bus that I expected at 5.00 – a little bit of miscalculation and little bit of delay – but it was there just in time to pick me up when I had so conveniently finished with the beach.

Again I didn’t sleep to well on the over night bus back and I kept thinking of the ocean and cliffs and the wind. And I thought things I could say to myself when I had been weak at many times in my life and things that I could say to my friends when I had seen them weak. A trip like this is a very real experience, the beauty, the fatigue, the cost of a mistake, the realization if your own mortality are all very real things. This is the sort of trip that cut away many layers of flak that you accumulated on your thinking leaving you fresh and exposed and stronger.

Maybe I will do Cornwall again – maybe during this stay in the UK or maybe at some point later in life. Also now I have two places in the world that I would like to live the later years of life away from everything else – both may not happen, but its nice to know they are there – Bidar, Karnataka and Pendeen, Cornwall.

26^th Monday June 2006.