An Introduction

This is an account of my travels, void of anything even remotley resembling a tour.  I don't have any problem with tours, I just really don't like them very much.  I know a great deal of this is probably down to the way that tourists love to make themselves incredibly visible and incredibly annoying in all the parts of Australia that I treasure.  But there's something more to it than that I believe.  Think for a moment if you will of a young child, given free reign of Disneyland by his or her parents (or for the sake of this metaphor, a more cultured yet simultaneously safer Disneyland free from any of the hazards associated with heavy machinery or child abduction).

To think for a moment that a child might wait calmy for thirty minutes for those parents or some other adult to usher them onto a bus, that drives around seemingly aimlessly for the entire day, only to stop every so often to remark of one ride or another "Here is the Pirates of the Carribean ride, doesn't it look fun?  Yes? Well no time to ride it, we've got other rides to see!" seems utterly ludicrous.  And that to me is a London Tour bus, giving you a one window view of a thousand sights in one of the most incredible cities in the world only to get stuck in traffic on the turn off to Northumberland Avenue. 

But this is precisley what we tend to do, we lose the part of our brain that says to us 'Thats shiny! I wonder what that is?' and trade it for 'Show me something shiny and tell me what it does, here's £40'.  I, on the other hand followed my nose, wore holes in all my good socks and spent much more than that following up every stupid local rumor that sounded halfway interesting, thankfully some turned out to be precisley what I was looking for. 

So that's what this is, an account of my travels void of anything even remotley resembling a tour or common sense.  Though I like to think of it as proof that with friendly people, good looks and lots of walking you can always find something more interesting than the London Eye.  Or alternatively you can get lost in Covent Garden and walk around for two and a half hours.  It's a toss up.