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On Monday night I finally fulfilled my dream of going for a walk on the M25.

The atmosphere was surprisingly jovial. By chance the guy in the blue mini had stopped just behind his driving instructor.

Definitely looking forward to having a five minute walk to work.

OK, so I lied a bit in the last post when I said adventuring was postponed until autumn. Last Sunday I thought I’d go for a late afternoon mini hike between Henley and Cholsey, hopping over the Thames at Wallingford.

Such a peaceful evening! Here’s a lane crossing the Ridgeway trail which I was following towards the end.

Just before I took this photo I had a baffling encounter with a cycling Frenchman. He asked me if I had seen the “Stone of History”. I must have looked confused because he repeated the question. I hadn’t and he pedalled off on his way. I wonder if he ever found it.

Last Saturday I went for a walk around the Roman ruins at Silchester which I first visited way back in 2010. I spent a while trying to take photos of a yellow cereal plant. Maybe it’s wheat. This was my favourite:

It’s been a bit too hot for extended adventuring recently. Also work and moving house seems to be taking up most of my time. Never mind: exploring resumes in the autumn!

It occurred to me recently that despite living in Maidenhead for nearly six years I’ve made hardly any forays southwards, except the occasional visit to Windsor or Staines. Yesterday I decided to rectify that and bravely strode across the M4 into uncharted lands (over a bridge, mind you).

I walked roughly parallel to the M4 from home to Wokingham, which I’ve never visited before. After a while I remembered the reason I don’t go this way much: the land is flat and featureless; footpaths are few and far between; and where they do exist they have a habit of terminating unexpectedly on busy roads.

Here’s a path through some farmland which was fairly typical of the scenery. Lots of horses around!

Wokingham is mostly famous for having the best quality of life of anywhere in the UK, and being at the bottom of the social deprivation league table. The town itself was a bit underwhelming. The most interesting feature I found was this Victorian town hall.

Feels like ages since I’ve been out exploring. Largely due to a combination of illness, house purchasing, and it being just too hot. So yesterday I went for an adventure around the Wiltshire market town of Marlborough. If you’re a connoisseur of quaint English towns you’ll love Marlborough. A photo would be useful here but there aren’t any unfortunately due to camera troubles. :-(

Afterwards a did a sort of loop around the Ridgeway to Avebury via Barbary Castle. This route felt pretty optimal in terms of distance and local scenery so maybe I’ll try it again in another season.

Oh noes! Vegetable scrubbing carrot’s eyes have fallen out! No need to panic though as I performed emergency surgery using some glue.

I’ve wanted to visit Shropshire ever since I saw some photos of the hills along the border between England and Wales. However it’s unreasonably difficult to get there from where I live at the moment: either a four hour train journey or a long drive up the M40 and around Birmingham. So as it was a little stressful at work when I got back from Taipei and the weather was nice I decided to take a few days off and make an expedition of it starting from Newport in Wales.

Originally I intended to walk the whole way but that proved to be a bit impractical given the time available and the difficulty of finding cheap places to stay vaguely on-route. So instead I did a couple of sections by bus, green on the map below, which turned out to be a good way to see some interesting places.

The first night I stayed in a very cheap hotel in Newport: I guess it’s not a popular holiday destination despite this excellent promotional music video. Moving swiftly onwards I caught the train to Abergavenny and walked over the eastern part of the Brecon Beacons through the ominously named Black Mountains to Hay-on-Wye.

Hay-on-Wye is a bit twee and more than a little bit posh. The most striking feature is the number of second hand book shops: the town hosted its world-famous book festival just a week before. Leaving there I followed the river Wye for a bit to the hamlet of Erwood where I caught a bus to Llandrindod. I had intended to walk as far as Builth Wells but I was still somewhat tired from the previous days trekking so I decided to have a rest day of sorts. Good job too as it gave me time to explore the town.

Llandrindod Wells was once a popular Victorian spa town but now there’s little except a large number of hotels and some beautiful buildings. The architecture has the wonderful uniformity of a town thrown together in less than a decade. This hotel is one of the more imposing examples:

The spa itself is in a small wooded park near the centre of town. The iron-rich water is said to cure anaemia. I tried some: it was foul.

The next day I travelled by bus to Knighton via Kington (easily confused) on the border with England. In Kington they were having a 60s themed summer fête. While the traders were setting out their stalls a charming geriatric MC rambled enthusiastically over the tannoy. My favourite quote was

They say if you remember the 60s you weren’t there. I remember it. But then I had a job: I was a weekend hippie.

Delightfully English (or perhaps Welsh?). From Knighton I was actually in the original goal of the Shropshire hills. I walked north through Clun to the small village of Wentnor where I stayed the night. The terrain is very Cotswold-ish: rolling hills and quaint villages. Quite a contrast to the mountains in nearby Wales.

On the last day I walked the length of a huge hill called the Long Mynd. Lovely views all around but it was bordering on unpleasantly hot. From there I wandered to Craven Arms, where there isn’t much to see, and caught an over-priced train back home.

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As you might have gathered I spent the last week on a work trip to Taipei. I’ve never visited Asia before so this was pretty awesome! I flew out with another guy from work on Friday evening so we had Sunday and Saturday evening for sightseeing. Sunday was mostly spent wandering around the city, visiting temples and other sites, and then riding the Maokong Gondala to a tea growing area on a nearby mountain. Unfortunately the view was mostly obscured by mist and rain.

The first four days it rained constantly. Never torrential but was more of a persistent heavy drizzle. This actually turned out to be a bit of a blessing, especially for our sightseeing day, as later in the week when the sun came out the 33 degree with near 100% humidity outside was almost unbearable. 20 degrees in light rain was comparatively pleasant.

Exploring by night was a lot of fun. We visited a couple of night markets which you can see in the photos below. It felt quite safe being out and about and everyone was really friendly. No drunk people either, which is more than can be said for the flight back to England.

On Wednesday evening, the first dry period, we went up the Taipei 101. It’s only the third tallest building in the world but claims to have the fastest elevator. On the 91st floor there’s an open air viewing gallery which was remarkably pleasant given the temperature at street level. Here’s the view out over the city:

Although I’ve been learning (written) Chinese for ~18 months I only know simplified characters which I thought wouldn’t be much help in Taiwan. But I was pleasantly surprised that I could read quite a lot of signs, metro station names, etc. Often you can apply transforms get the simplified character you know from the traditional one. E.g. 言, 門, 金, etc. are all replaced fairly consistently when they appear as components in other characters. Menus were a bit of a fail however: turns out knowing “beef”, “lamb”, and so on doesn’t really help knowing what the food actually is. At least you can avoid things containing 足 “foot”, 头 “head”, and other suspicious body parts.

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The wearing-a-mask-when-ill thing is such a good idea. I wonder what it would take for it to catch on in the West.

So my work trips have taken a turn for the exotic and I’m in Taipei all week visiting a contract manufacturer (more on this later). The hotel has the very latest innovations in toilet technology!

Looks like a normally toilet at first glance but behold the highly complex electronic control panel!

Thankfully full instructions are provided in multiple languages.