Trip #10

Flights – Eight flights 15 days

Kilometres flown –36,611... from Melbourne to Sydney, Sydney to London via Bangkok, London to Dublin, Cork to London, London to Sydney via Bangkok and Sydney to Melbourne

Total Kilometres flown in 2011 – 128,797km

Hotels – Trinity Capital Hotel (Dublin), Conrad Dublin Hotel (Dublin), Monart Spa (Enniscorthy), Longueville House Hotel (Mallow), Imperial Hotel (Cork), St Pancras Renaissance Hotel (London), B&B Weymouth (Weymouth)

Total number of hotels in 2011 –31

New stamps in my passport – Two, one when I arrived in London and another when I touched down in Dublin

New countries – One, Ireland, which takes my total to 49...one more and its the big five-oh!

Next, it's a domestic trip, down the Victorian coast to Warrnambool.

Middle East relations

I SAID farewell to the UK about 14 hours ago, and now I’m occupying a seat in the Qantas Club at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport waiting to reboard my British Airways 747 for the final eight-hour hop back to Australia.

We’re here for a couple of hours – just enough time to do a spot of duty-free shopping at King Power – and it’s nice to really stretch the legs after being snuggled up on a premium economy seat for the first part of my flight home.

During the walk from my plane to the Qantas Club I saw something that made me smile.

There’s a section of the airport where aircraft can rest during long stopovers, so they’re away from the terminals and not occupying precious – and expensive – space at one of the gates, and it was here that I saw an El Al plane parked right next to an IranAir Jumbo.

Something you don’t see every day, Iranians and Israelis sharing common ground – even if it is just a bit of concrete at an Asian airport.

Jurassic journey

MY time in the UK is coming to an end and today, the last before I head back to London tomorrow and catch my BA flight home, was spent exploring England’s very own Jurassic Park.

I didn’t have to travel far to step back into pre-historic times, with Weymouth sitting smack in the middle of the Jurassic Coast which is a significant stretch of shore that runs from Swanage to Exmouth and was England’s first natural World Heritage site.

The Jurassic Coast is a 154km stretch of land beside the English Channel, running through Devon and Dorset, that has "rocks recording 184 million years of Earth’s history" giving visitors an insight into the Triassic and Cretaceous periods as well as Jurassic times.

While some people walk great sections of the shoreline – the South West Coast Path is a 1000km long trail that offers a "continuous coastal adventure through the World Heritage Site" with options for longer hikes or shorter strolls – I did the section between Weymouth and Lyme Regis by car.

There was lots of opportunity to stop during the drive to enjoy the magnificent views that appeared when the road rolled over the summit of a coastal hill, and I could also divert to visit some of the pretty villages found in the part of Devon.

There was a longer stop at Lyme Regis, a quintessential English seaside village where the shops were full of buckets and spades for sale so younger visitors could build sand castles and a Lifeboat station sat next to the harbour.

That was what I expected an English seaside village to look like and there was a line of bathing boxes painted in pastel shades flanking the boardwalk, a beach with pebbles rather than sand, and lots of shivering children dressed in their togs trying to ignore that fact it was far too cold to be considering a swim in the sea.

Down Weymouth way

THE weather may be cold, but the days are long, and today the best thing about that is walking around town after dinner and seeing all the Weymouth locals heading out for a twilight sail.

Here are some photo's taken around Weymouth's harbour late one summer's evening.

Sail away

ANOTHER day, another Olympic venue.

Today I’m in Weymouth, the seaside settlement a three-hour drive from London on the Dorset coast.

Weymouth doesn’t have any trouble attracting holidaymakers, and this is a favourite spot for domestic travellers looking to spend a few lazy days by the beach in summer when the town’s population of 17,000 will double during the warm months.

But this time next year, when the Olympic and Paralympics sailing competitions are be held in Portland Harbour and Weymouth Bay, that already elevated summer-holiday number is expected to jump even higher with visitors from around the world converging on the town.

A number of England's waterside locations asked to host the sailing, but this yacht-obsessed Dorset community was chosen because it had 1000ha of sheltered water in Portland Harbour and easy access to Weymouth Bay.

The Olympic competition will be based in the Weymouth & Portland National Sailing Academy, a world-class facility on the site once occupied by a Royal Navy air station, and this time next year the apron and docks in front of the building will be clogged by sail boats of all shapes and sizes.

According to Chris Knight, who runs the Academy, the Olympic sailing competition won’t stretch the facility or the community because the site is regularly used for the biggest international regattas.

"The bigger boats will be out in the more testing water near the white cliffs, and the windsurfers will be inside the harbour," Chris says while standing on the Academy balcony.

"The Games isn’t that big when it comes to the number of competitors, but it is big when it comes to the number of officials and media who will accompany the event, and we will take over some of the businesses that surround the Academy during the Olympics to accommodate everyone.

"We are trying to make the competition as spectator friendly as possible, and there will be lots of spots on land where you can stand and watch the activity on the water."

By the way, history buffs will be interested to know that this was where the Mulberries – the giant concrete blocks that were bolted together at the D-Day beaches to make the artificial port needed to bring supplies ashore during the Allies invasion of Europe – were assembled before being towed across the Channel to France.

And you can just see one Mulberry still in the port, it wasn’t needed in 1944 so was left behind in England and now it makes this port a living museum as well as a popular sailing spot.

Olympic dream

THE last thing I did before leaving London this afternoon was head out to Olympic Park in Stratford to inspect the precinct where next year’s Olympic Games will be held.

Every month the Olympic Delivery Authority – the organisation tasked with building the London 2012 infrastructure that will eventually hand everything over to LOCOG to run the event – does media tours every months and I was in the English capital in time to do one of the behind-the-scenes excursions.

With London 2012 just over a year away the Olympic precinct is already 90 per cent finished and the Olympic Delivery Authority’s head of design and regeneration Jerome Frost, who escorted our media tour, explained ``the big venues are complete but the grounds are not done’’.

Jerome explained his organisation had been given £9.3 billion to get everything to do with the 2012 Games up and running – that money would have to pay for all the building work and transport system as well as provide security during the Olympic and Paralympics events – and that it had only spent £8.3 billion.

"Not only are we on target, but we are a billion pounds under budget," he said with obvious pride.

"When we started in 2005 our aim was to try to get it built and ready for testing one year out from the Games and we have almost achieved that.

"Olympic Park is a 450ha property, including the Athletes Village which will have 12,000 homes that will be sold after the Games, and while we have generally used British-based architects that wasn’t the intention.

"London 2012 positioned its bid around the redevelopment of East London, to take the opportunity to link a very depressed area back to the city and start a longer regeneration program, and the legacy after transition will be a new urban place.

"Stratford is the in the 2 per cent of the most deprived wards in England, and while the legacy will be great the Olympics has already done a lot for this community with 25 per cent of the 12,000 people who are working on this site coming from this area.

"And of that 25 per cent, 12 per cent of that was previously unemployed, 199 have completed apprenticeships, and 160 women have found careers in the building trade."

We started our tour by driving past the handball stadium, a low brown box that will become a multi-purpose after the Games capable of hosting concerts and conferences, and then to the squat white building that’s been put up temporarily to host the basketball competition.

It was decided during the planning phase that the Olympic Park didn’t need two permanent stadiums around the same size to host both the handball and basketball competitions, so one arena was created to me moved to another location after the 2012 events.

The basketball venue is owned by the company that built the structure, and they will sell it after the Games and move it to a new location, but before then the best players in the world will pound the boards in a structure that’s a PVC skin covering a steel frame.

As the tour continued we crossed a bridge in the middle of Olympic Park and Jerome explained the area was basically a wasteland before the Olympic redevelopment started, a landfill site that was filled with rubble from the Blitz, so a lot of cleaning had to be done before building could start.

"We removed 10m of rubble from across the whole site, and then we replaced it with clean dirt collected during the Channel Tunnel dig," Jerome explained.

"This part of London took a beating during the Second World War, because it was so close to the docks which were bombed constantly, and we did find a few unexploded bombs here when we were doing the cleanup and excavations.

"The largest one we found was a 1 tonne bomb in the riverbed, but I must say we expected to find more than we did because of the amount of bombing here during the war."

Where Blitz rubble once rested around the river there’s now terraced gardens where spectators will pass the time between events, and so much attention has been given to the gardens that a team of scientists were given the job of growing plants that would flower in July instead of June which is when London’s gardens are typically at their best.

Jerome noted that a lot of energy had been put into creating the public spaces surrounding the venues because so many people were expected to use the space during the Olympic and Paralympics Games next year.

It’s expected that 2 million people will visit Olympic Park during the Olympic Games, the busiest day will be the second Saturday of competition when there will be 500,000 people in the complex, and that most of the guests will walking the 3.5km from one site of the compound to the other at least once.

The velodrome was our next stop, a building that was designed to let so much natural light into the cavernous space that training and even some competitions could be done without turning a single bulb on.

This curved building, which is higher at each end to accommodate the steep banks of the track inside, was clad in Siberian pine and then coated in a thick layer of rhubarb juice to prevent the wood from fading and weathering unevenly.

We then cruised past the Athletes Village, which is the only part of the Olympic precinct that looks like it still needs a bit of work with construction crews climbing over the cluster of high-rise buildings that will accommodated 16,800 competitors and 200 officials during the Games.

The Athletes Village, which will be carved into 2800 homes after next year’s Games with 50 per cent given to public housing and the remaining 50 per cent going up for private sale, was designed by 17 different architects with the hope the neighbourhood would look like it grew organic over a few decades rather than a few months.

There was an inspection of the main stadium, the place where the opening and closing ceremonies as well as the track and field events will be help, and while it’s currently formatted to hold 80,000 seats that will be reconfigured after the Paralympics to hold just 55,000 spectators.

"It has one third the amount of steel that was used to build the Bird’s Nest (in Beijing),"Jerome explained.

"It is much smaller than you would expect, but the advantage of that is every spectator is going to be closer to the action on the field than at any Olympics in the past.

"When you look at the main stadium everything you can see that’s painted while is part of the permanent structure, and everything that’s black is part of the temporary structure and will be reconfigured after the Games."

Our last stop was the Aquatic Centre, the building that has copped the most flak from design critics because it’s thought the temporary components of the building have compromised the architect’s creation.

The architect designed a curved and sloping roof to sit over the swimming pool, but to get enough people into to see the Olympic racing two temporary towers were added to each side of the building which completely changed the shape of the concept.

Jerome said he could live with the compromise because it meant they would get thousands of people into see the swimming and, when the seats were removed after the athletes had gone home, London would be left with a beautiful arena.

"Of all the Olympic venues it was the most complex structure to build," he said.

"The roof had to be built on stands, and when we removed those stands and the roof settled it dropped almost 50cm and flattened out  more than we expected, but we couldn’t have done that event five years ago because we worked it all out with modern computer modelling."

In the afternoon it was good bye to London and hello to Weymouth, but the Olympic theme continues because this is the place where the sailing competition will be held in 2012.

And tomorrow I get to test my skills on the Olympic course with a morning of sailing.

Jamie's place

DINNER tonight was at Jamie’s Italian on Upper St Martin’s Lane in the Covent Garden.

"I should have been Italian," Jamie Oliver said when the first of his affordable Italian restaurants opened in the Oxford in 2008.

"There is such diversity in lifestyles, cooking, traditional and dialects – this is why, as a chef, I find this country so exciting and what inspired me to create Jamie’s Italian.

"(Covent Garden) is our flagship central London site, (it’s) a beautiful diverse place and the restaurant reflects the hustle and bustle of the `neighbourhood’ just perfectly."

Now there are 18 versions of Jamie's Italian around the UK, with another five opening during the British summer, and you can't make a reservation to eat at the Covent Garden establishment on a Friday or Saturday night until the start of September.

Just for the record I had the crab & squid ink risotto – "black, creamy rice with hand-picked Start Bay Devonshire crab and crunchy herb breadcrumbs" – and, for dessert, the Tuscan "Eat & Mess" which was described on the menu as ``fruit-rippled meringues with cream and summer fruit berries’’.

London's most unique...

AT lunchtime today I found what has to be London’s most unique toilet.

It’s the bathroom at Sketch in Mayfair and, rather than having one for the boys and another for the girls each with a long row of stalls, these toilets are set inside a collection of enormous shiny eggs in one big room.

The facilities were located at the back of the building, with one set of steps lit by blue lights climbing to the left and another flight illuminated by pink lights going to the right, and when I reach the top I found this assortment of oversized eggs with basins placed strategically to wash my hands.

Sketch, which occupies the building that was once the Christian Dior headquarters in Conduit Street just around the corner from Savil Row, is actually a collection of bars and restaurants created by Michelin-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire.

We had lunch in The Parlour, which is regularly described as ``one of the quirkiest places in London to take tea’’, and after having cauliflower soup –the bread was served in a basket made from Lego – we feasted on a plate of macaroons for dessert.

By day The Parlour is a great little lunch spot, where diners recline on antique furniture while consuming dishes that are best described as traditional but with a twist, and at night this spot becomes a cocktail lounge where London’s beautiful people hand out until the wee-small hours.

St Pancras perfection

ACCORDING to Trip Advisor there are 1060 hotels in London.

While some have been operating for decades, like the Savoy and Dorchester, others have only been welcoming guests for a few months and one of the new kids on the block is the subtly opulent Renaissance St Pancras which has only been operating since the middle of May.

While this hotel is technically a baby, it has a long and colourful history thanks to the building it occupies.

The Renaissance is set inside an almost theatrical structure that first opened in 1837, and it was built by the Midland Railway Company as part of its London station in the suburb of King’s Cross to accommodate those passengers starting and finishing their journeys at St Pancras Station.

Famous British architect Gorge Gilbert Scott – he drew up the plans for 800 of the churches and cathedrals that were built in the UK during the Victorian era – designed the monumental red-brick building and, the story goes, he let his hair down after having to be conservative on another project.

He was commissioned to create a design for the London’s foreign office around the same time the Midland Railway Company put him to work and when his gothic design was rejected by the government, and he was asked to submit something of a more "more classical" appearance, he used all the rejected flourishes to create the magnificent railway hotel.

It was, is, and will continue to be the one of the English capital’s greatest gothic structure.

"It was an extreme example of a railway hotel, it was the Midland Railway Company showing off," explains Caroline Drayton, the head of public relations at the new St Pancras hotel.

"All the materials used in the construction came from the English Midlands, everything was brought to London by train."

The redevelopment of the old railways hotel, which had sat empty since 1935, was even more impressive because it began before the Eurostar service began using St Pancras Station.

First 67 private residences were constructed in the upper floors – one, two, three and four-bedroom apartments that sold off the plan in just a month – and then the handsome five-star hotel was created.

There are now 38 suites in the old building, with the wing known as The Chambers because that was how Victorian guests referred to the property, with another 245 rooms in a new tower called Barlow House that copied Scott’s design down to the finest detail.

"The extension was built at the back of the building," Caroline explains during a tour of the hotel.

"British Heritage would not allow it to be constructed unless it was in keeping with the original St Pancras hotel, which is the external look of the building, because that structure is grade-one listed.

"Now Barlow House is also grade-one listed, and that’s by association because it is an extension of this original part."

Each of the 38 suites in The Cambers is unique – the best use of the existing space had to be made when carving up the floors to accommodate the luxury rooms, so no two are the same – but each dwelling is modern and elegant with a serene colour scheme.

The Grand Staircase is the most famous part of the Gothic building, and it was used in a Spice Girls' video during the years it was abandoned.

"The Victorians changed the decoration scheme frequently, so we found layer upon layer of wallpaper when we were renovating the space," the PR director explains.

"British Heritage came in and looked at what was there and advised us on what to bring back and while the tiling is original, the carpet is an exact copy of what was down there before, and the fleur de lis is a copy of the 1901 pattern."

The space the expansive lobby now occupies was once a road, still taking traffic as recently as 2004, and in the 19^th century horse-drawn taxis would come through to drop people at the booking office.

The booking office is now a bar, with all the original woodwork decorating the cavernous space, and because the lane was always covered the roof in the lobby is authentic with stone pavers and granite slabs have been used to recreate the "original pavement".

The other space worth mentioning is the Royal Suite – the sizeable apartment that sits on the first level near the Grand Staircase in what was once the original railways hotel’s posh Veranda Ballroom – and it costs now £10,000 to inhabit the four-bedroom dwelling that has a vast open-pan living and dining area.

I was lucky enough to stay in The Chambers and I appreciated every chapter in the building’s history when I relaxed in room or walked the long hallways.

As a Chambers’ guest I had access to The Chambers Club, the hotel’s executive lounge, and it was a quiet and graceful place to have breakfast or afternoon tea, or just sit and check emails while enjoying a drink between meetings.

From my suite on the third floor I had to walk down the Grand Staircase to get to the second level, then along the main corridor, and finally down another set of steps into the Chambers Club.

This second staircase sat inside a big picture window, which looked across the St Pancras platforms and the Eurostar trains arriving and departing, and every time I walked down the sweeping steps that were covered by a plush scarlet carpet the timber creaked and groaned under my feat.

And that's exactly what you want from an historic hotel – handsome elegance, modern comfort, and a few steps that groan with age and experience.