Newcastle

Chapter 9

The visit of Newcastle
on 2nd August 2004

Scribe and Photo by Website Kang

" Don't bring coals to Newcastle " , but according to the report of the local newspaper, exactly Newcastle today imports coals for their development. Newcastle is not mentioned and recommended in the traveller's book " Frommer's Great Britain " which we had relied on for the trip. However, it is beause Drug Buster has a daughter Cynthia who is now an officer in the Agricultural Department resides in Newcastle, and it is logical that he wished to pay her a visit. In addition, Sing Sung has a business association with the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, and of course he would like to pay a visit to the place. It is o k to the rest of us as Newcastle is just another English town.

As some of the flatmates had not returned from holidays yet, Cynthia agreed to let us put up a night at her place. We reached Newcastle at midday, by taking a coach trip from Edinburgh. The coach station at Newcastle is pretty new, and it won't take us long to reach Cynthia's place which is quite near to the station. Her place is situated in the middle of busy commercial area and hence shopping is very convenient. After we had got things settled, we went ahead to the University of Northumbria to pay a visit. Incidentally, Cythnia is also a graduate from the University. We took some photos there and declared ourselves graduates from the school of backpacking. Sing Sung went to visit the director of International Marketing, and we roamed around the University. The next important thing to do was to book coach tickets to London. Again, Garfield wanted 8 am ticket so that we could reach London early, but finally we settled at 10 am so that everybody would be more comfortable including our host as we reckon it was good enough if we could reach Victoria Coach Station by 5 pm. We did probe the possibility of travelling by train, but it was more expensive and inconvenient. When everything was settled, we just relaxed and roamed around in the city especially Cynthia's Flate mates insisted that they would prepare a home cooked dinner for us. The dinner was indeed very good with the cooks directly from India, and one could imagine how hot the chilli was! It even surpassed the standard of Garfield as you could see the steam coming out of Garfield's head while he was enjoying the food. In fact everybody enjoyed the food, each had a serve of two big plates of rice.

Next morning, Cynthia and her friend were kind enough to prepare us grand breakfast with fish crumpets and eggs. It was so much that we packed the remainder which proved handy as our lunch for the coach journey. Cynthia and her friends saw us off at the coach station.

The journey to the Heathrow airport was pleasant but with a bit of anxiety at times. The traffic jam at certain part of the coach journey made us worried that we might not be able to reach on time thinking that perhaps Garfield was right. Anyway, we still reached Victoria Station at 5.00 pm, and we think that the coach driver had already taken the traffic jam into consideration. The tube journey was not easy as it happened to be in the busy hour and the tube was fully packed most of the time and especially at certain stations, communication failure due to the result of recent storm, caused the slow down of the tube and at a certain point we thought we might have to detour to avoid the troubled station. That meant to waste more time. Luckily, it was a false alarm, and things turned well and we reached Heathrow Airport by 7.00pm. Our flight was 9.00pm. Sing Sung made a phone call to Paddington Police Station, London to enquire the case of the snatch thief and the police said they did not catch anybody and could not do anything further. They regretted such unfortunate incident would happen and wished Sing Sung good luck and a pleasant journey home! So Bon Voyage! finally we boarded the plane. It was another 13 hours flight plus the lost time, and we reached KLIA at about 6.30pm on 4th August last.

Home sweet home, no matter how far do you go, " home " is still the best place. Confucious says: " Gold nest, silver nest, it still cannot be compared to your own doggy nest at home.