Holiday II: Channel Islands
Aug. 19th, 2018 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livLast year I didn't manage to have a proper summer holiday at all, since I was in the middle of changing jobs and moving across country. So this year jack encouraged me to get my act together and actually go away for a week with no plan other than to be tourists.
I ended up picking the Channel Islands, mainly based on browsing The Man in Seat Sixty-One and looking for cool places we could go without flying. So we had most of a week exploring Guernsey, with a couple of days in Jersey at the end, and it was delightful.
It is probably just about possible to get to Guernsey in one day from Cambridge, but you'd have to start painfully early. So we ended up staying overnight in Poole to catch the midday ferry. The crossing was a bit choppy, and I was seasick, which never happens to me. After getting slightly lost wandering residential streets in the drizzle, due to using Google Maps ineptly, we arrived at St George's B&B, which is actually 10 minutes walk from the town centre and the port. We had this rather cool mural visible from the window of our very generously sized bedroom:
Our first day in Guernsey we did what I always like to do in a new place: took a walking tour with an expert guide. We had an enjoyable and informative two hours, learning about Guernsey's weird status as a Crown possession but not actually in the UK or, to my surprise, the EU. This led to lots of interesting history with Guernsey generally taking the British side in wars with France, while making money by privateering and facilitating trade between the warring states, as a well-placed neutral (officially so, by Papal Bull) territory. And to the modern situation where the Channel Islands are a tax haven and much of their economy is about the international finance industry, with access to the EU and voluntary compliance, but not enforcement, of regulations. We had to do quite a lot of climbing streets like this:
The tour ended conveniently at the Guernsey museum, which is high quality with a particularly well put-together exhibition about local folklore, and a couple of sweet little galleries. By mid-afternoon the sun had come out, so we took a bus to the nearest bathing beach, L'Ancresse, and sat looking at the sea:
We took a (normal public transport) bus right round the perimeter of the island, to look at more stunning coast views before we got back into town for dinner. We were so excited about the sea that on day 2 we booked a two hour guided kayaking activity. The weather somewhat let us down as it was grey and rainy for most of the morning, but the kayaking was still excellent fun. Also surprisingly exhausting, so we didn't do a whole lot more tourism after that.
Wednesday we took the ferry to Jersey, and spent a pleasant afternoon pottering around the main town, St Helier:
We checked in to the Hotel de Normandie, which rather exemplified all the reasons I prefer mid-range B&Bs over cheap hotels, but had an absolutely lovely location just across the road from a seriously gorgeous beach, where we spent much of the evening gazing out to sea before walking round the bay back into town for dinner.
Our one full day in Jersey we somewhat messed up the transport; I wanted to go to the neolithic site at La Hougue Bie, which is served by buses but very infrequent ones that were further messed up by a street fair taking place at the eastern corner of the island. We spent a lot of time standing in the rain in Gorey:
But got to the site eventually, and it was worth the travel hassle. There's an absolutely amazing, completely intact 6000-year-old Passage Tomb you can basically just wander around in, attached to an informative museum that explains the prehistory of the Channel Islands. Built on top of the tomb's mound is a Mediaeval chapel, with the remnants of pre-Reformation murals. They're working on, but haven't yet completed, a neolithic building reconstructed without using metal tools:
There's also a memorial on the site to the people who were forced to work in labour camps during the Nazi occupation of the islands, building the massive fortifications that the Germans put all over, including the bunker at the site. I have strong views about memorials to victims of the Nazis, and this one got it right: mostly lists of names and eye-witness descriptions, nothing arty or touristy. It's harrowing, but I'm somewhat glad to have seen it, because much of the rest of both Guernsey and Jersey have this weirdly romantic presentation of the occupation. Everything in St Helier is Liberation this and Liberty that, and Guernsey is a bit less in your face but still a lot of almost nostalgic stuff. I had known there were British concentration camps in the Channel Islands, but hadn't realized the scale of slave labour and deportation to the death camps on the continent.
Our last morning in Jersey we managed to squeeze in a somewhat rushed visit to the Jersey museum. We learned more about their constitutional weirdness – Jersey has its own parliament which doesn't have any political parties! And some cultural history, including an explanation of the shift from mostly French-influenced culture to more English and anglophone culture in the late 18th and early 19th century. Nowadays Guernsey is definitely English, with good tea and bad bread available everywhere, though Jersey seems a bit more French (our final meal of the trip was proper Bréton crêpes with cider, which we ordered in French), and its traditional patois is slightly more prevalent, with a few thousand speakers and lots of signage. The museum also has a really cool merchant's house, whose contents were auctioned off in a massive bankruptcy sale, which they've chosen to reproduce.
So yes, that was a lot of fun, and a very good mixture of learning cool new stuff and relaxing. I was right to prioritize spending time in Guernsey; I did that partly because of the book I love which is set there, The book of Ebenezer Le Page by GB Edwards. But Guernsey seemed a much more distinct place, whereas Jersey just seems like any old prosperous south coast town, albeit with some really lovely vistas. I almost wish we'd stayed on Guernsey and taken trips to the smaller islands in its Bailiwick, and skipped Jersey altogether. Not that I regret what we did do, I had a really lovely time, and it was so nice to spend lots of uninterrupted time with my husband.
jack encouraged me to get my act together and actually go away for a week with no plan other than to be tourists. I ended up picking the Channel Islands, mainly based on browsing The Man in Seat Sixty-One and looking for cool places we could go without flying. So we had most of a week exploring Guernsey, with a couple of days in Jersey at the end, and it was delightful.
It is probably just about possible to get to Guernsey in one day from Cambridge, but you'd have to start painfully early. So we ended up staying overnight in Poole to catch the midday ferry. The crossing was a bit choppy, and I was seasick, which never happens to me. After getting slightly lost wandering residential streets in the drizzle, due to using Google Maps ineptly, we arrived at St George's B&B, which is actually 10 minutes walk from the town centre and the port. We had this rather cool mural visible from the window of our very generously sized bedroom:
Our first day in Guernsey we did what I always like to do in a new place: took a walking tour with an expert guide. We had an enjoyable and informative two hours, learning about Guernsey's weird status as a Crown possession but not actually in the UK or, to my surprise, the EU. This led to lots of interesting history with Guernsey generally taking the British side in wars with France, while making money by privateering and facilitating trade between the warring states, as a well-placed neutral (officially so, by Papal Bull) territory. And to the modern situation where the Channel Islands are a tax haven and much of their economy is about the international finance industry, with access to the EU and voluntary compliance, but not enforcement, of regulations. We had to do quite a lot of climbing streets like this:
The tour ended conveniently at the Guernsey museum, which is high quality with a particularly well put-together exhibition about local folklore, and a couple of sweet little galleries. By mid-afternoon the sun had come out, so we took a bus to the nearest bathing beach, L'Ancresse, and sat looking at the sea:
We took a (normal public transport) bus right round the perimeter of the island, to look at more stunning coast views before we got back into town for dinner. We were so excited about the sea that on day 2 we booked a two hour guided kayaking activity. The weather somewhat let us down as it was grey and rainy for most of the morning, but the kayaking was still excellent fun. Also surprisingly exhausting, so we didn't do a whole lot more tourism after that.
Wednesday we took the ferry to Jersey, and spent a pleasant afternoon pottering around the main town, St Helier:
We checked in to the Hotel de Normandie, which rather exemplified all the reasons I prefer mid-range B&Bs over cheap hotels, but had an absolutely lovely location just across the road from a seriously gorgeous beach, where we spent much of the evening gazing out to sea before walking round the bay back into town for dinner.
Our one full day in Jersey we somewhat messed up the transport; I wanted to go to the neolithic site at La Hougue Bie, which is served by buses but very infrequent ones that were further messed up by a street fair taking place at the eastern corner of the island. We spent a lot of time standing in the rain in Gorey:
But got to the site eventually, and it was worth the travel hassle. There's an absolutely amazing, completely intact 6000-year-old Passage Tomb you can basically just wander around in, attached to an informative museum that explains the prehistory of the Channel Islands. Built on top of the tomb's mound is a Mediaeval chapel, with the remnants of pre-Reformation murals. They're working on, but haven't yet completed, a neolithic building reconstructed without using metal tools:
There's also a memorial on the site to the people who were forced to work in labour camps during the Nazi occupation of the islands, building the massive fortifications that the Germans put all over, including the bunker at the site. I have strong views about memorials to victims of the Nazis, and this one got it right: mostly lists of names and eye-witness descriptions, nothing arty or touristy. It's harrowing, but I'm somewhat glad to have seen it, because much of the rest of both Guernsey and Jersey have this weirdly romantic presentation of the occupation. Everything in St Helier is Liberation this and Liberty that, and Guernsey is a bit less in your face but still a lot of almost nostalgic stuff. I had known there were British concentration camps in the Channel Islands, but hadn't realized the scale of slave labour and deportation to the death camps on the continent.
Our last morning in Jersey we managed to squeeze in a somewhat rushed visit to the Jersey museum. We learned more about their constitutional weirdness – Jersey has its own parliament which doesn't have any political parties! And some cultural history, including an explanation of the shift from mostly French-influenced culture to more English and anglophone culture in the late 18th and early 19th century. Nowadays Guernsey is definitely English, with good tea and bad bread available everywhere, though Jersey seems a bit more French (our final meal of the trip was proper Bréton crêpes with cider, which we ordered in French), and its traditional patois is slightly more prevalent, with a few thousand speakers and lots of signage. The museum also has a really cool merchant's house, whose contents were auctioned off in a massive bankruptcy sale, which they've chosen to reproduce.
So yes, that was a lot of fun, and a very good mixture of learning cool new stuff and relaxing. I was right to prioritize spending time in Guernsey; I did that partly because of the book I love which is set there, The book of Ebenezer Le Page by GB Edwards. But Guernsey seemed a much more distinct place, whereas Jersey just seems like any old prosperous south coast town, albeit with some really lovely vistas. I almost wish we'd stayed on Guernsey and taken trips to the smaller islands in its Bailiwick, and skipped Jersey altogether. Not that I regret what we did do, I had a really lovely time, and it was so nice to spend lots of uninterrupted time with my husband.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-19 05:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-19 05:54 pm (UTC)How much easier do you think it would have been if you'd had a car on Jersey and Guernsey, not including driving it down to the south coast to get there? Appreciably?
(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-19 09:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-20 03:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-08-20 03:55 pm (UTC)