Staycation gorge

One family's tips on how to travel the world without leaving home, much. This post takes us to the Grand Canyon, via Somerset's immense Cheddar Gorge, and is by Nicola Baird (also see www.homemadekids.co.uk)

We're in Wiltshire house sitting for a while (this is a brilliant way to holiday cheaply). In fact just swapping houses for a night gives you a sense of living quite differently. Pat Barker, winner of the 1995 Booker prize, calls time spent in another person's house (so long as that family isn't there) "a holiday from adult life". In the more recent Double Vision (Faber, 2003) a character enjoys: "The mere fact that the house was not his gave him an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling. He seemed to be wandering around between the chair legs while items of furniture loomed above him, mysterious with withheld significance. They made him feel insubstantial, these rooms with their carefully selected antiques, the fruits of years of settled, successful endeavour, and yet the feeling was not entirely unpleasant. Like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears, he had a sense of danger and transgression."

I have to admit that my lack of action with the vaccuum cleaner - despite today's full timetable of dawn to dusk rain - makes me feel edgy too... What will my friend Julie say when she surveys her house after her holiday?

But yesterday there was sun and a chance to enjoy a day trip to the Cheddar Gorge which splits the Mendip Hills, Somerset. I'd never been, couldn't even imagine what it looked like, but the Gorge with it's dramatic views enhanced by old grass, sheer rock faces, wild scrub, colonising ash trees, real climbers,magical stories and "British Primitives" (aka goats) and soay sheep browsing is as good as a wonder of the world. Comparisons include the Grand Canyon and any drama cliff coastline - Italy's Amalfi coast say (except there's been no sea here for millions of years) or maybe some spot in Albania or Croatia.

Way back the gorge was home to a spectacular river, and inside the carbonifeous limestone are some amazing caves. We toured the Gough Cave with its frozen waterfall, rough scratched mammoth cave painting and at the very back the huge dome space nicknamed St Paul's. Cooper Cave has lured in TV's Time Team, been home to a shepherd and his family in Victorian times, and no doubt was the ultimate in designer living for people in the Mesolithic Age.

Cheddar Man is a must see. It's Britain's oldest complete skeleton (approx 9,000 years old) and was used in 1997 to make DNA tests that show there's still a descendant of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer living in Cheddar today - a history teacher called Adrian Targett. Amazing thought, and one which the small Museum of Prehistory spends time encouraging visitors to think about how much this disproves the notion of God. In case that's not enough brain meat there are also three skulls on display providing absolute evidence of cannibalism in the Cheddar cave network.

The downside is Cheddar Gorge, once cheese, mills and shepherds, is a real tourist trap. Every village building sells tacka-tack rubbish, postcards and snacks probably no different from Wookey Hole nearby (except at Cheddar Gorge dogs are truly welcome, thank you!). It's also expensive - a family ticket is around £40 plus a car parking fee. You can of course just take a walk to Jacob's Ladder which is up the Gorge (on the National Trust land) for free, but paying lets you see the caves, and that's what we wanted to do in our borrowed Fiat car.

I was impressed by the amount of people employed by the Cheddar Caves & Gorge company (no doubt for low wages, but the staff were invariably friendly, mixed ages and seemed to take some pride in working in such a honeypot). I also really enjoyed the onus on nature conservation at the site - we saw a buzzard and heard tales of 10 different types of bat, breeding peregrine falcons and a family of nationally endangered water voles near the mill pond.

It is also the true home of the Cheddar pink (a flower) and of course Britain's best-loved, and best-known cheese. We bought a slice of some cave-matured "authentic" cheddar from the Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company (£22.95 per kg). Irresistible after seeing it stored under lock and key during our tour of Gough's cave.

You don't just have to look and learn, or guzzle on the various cafe menu options as there's a place you can learn to cave, climb and abseil - and perhaps do something a bit dirtier and more challenging than just learn - at the Rock Sport centre.

After a summer spent feeling rural, I felt Cheddar Caves & Gorge had hit a potent mix that suits every sort of tourist, and perhaps even locals too. The next plan is to fit a ski lift from top to the bottom of the gorge, an ambitious £2 million idea, that if carried out would certainly gives British staycationers a taste of the Alps. I can't wait to go back...

Gritty world tales

In 2007 Pete, Nicola, Lola and Nell spent three months travelling around Britain in a low-carbon way. We're home now but still like to travel, and blog about it. This post is by Nicola.

Part of the year I teach feature writing to university students. this is a real pleasure and has enabled me to meet many very lovely, bright and ambitious young men and women on the cusp of their careers. It's a kind of virtual travelling as I get to meet people from places I doubt I'll go to. For all of us it's about realising everyone has different norms.

When students do a feature assignment for class I always say "write what you know". This year I'm regretting it. Many of my students have interviewed friends/ family/ acquaintances who have harrowing stories about family life around the world.

Life changing journeys
From Nepal there's the misery caused by students lured to the UK enrolled into fake colleges, or Visa Factories, who then end up in debt and with no chance of getting the promised degree.

From Nigeria there's examples of the causual violence inflicted on girlfriends and wives because it's OK for men to be seen to be the boss.

From Bangladesh there is the problem of arranged marriages leaving young women, new-to-Britain (often with no friends and no English language skills) trapped with violent husbands and consentingly mean mother-in-laws. If these women manage to leave these husbands and divorce they are shamed and shunned by their own family, destroying their lives if they even can get a ticket home. They are also stuck if this happens within the first two years of their marriage/visa as the UK rules mean they cannot get any support from the state. Any unfortunate woman with a baby would be in a horrific situation.

There's the Albanian girl who knows her life will be mapped out for her. She may be a student know but you get married before you're 24 or that's it, no man will want you.

Or in India, the semi-Royal-behaving family who was so angry with their daughter's choice of boyfriend that they packed her off to the UK and then faked her death in a car-crash. This is a particularly harsh story as the girl was treated like a princess right until the moment her family realised she had been a friend of a Moslem man. Clearly she didn't realise she was living in a gilded cage and had misjudged the love her family had for her. Daddy loved her but only if she did what they wanted, which isn't love at all is it?

And there's another story from India recalling the clashes in 2002 which left 1000s dead in a city on the "other side of the bridge". For the Moslem teenager on that side the experience was scarring enough to bring on post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet his contemporary, a Hindu girl, remembers the three months of curfew on her "other side of the bridge" as a happy time with far more leisure and indoor activities that she almost misses now the troubles are over.

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen
It's a right set of misery pieces, all written so well. And I so hope my students can take these ideas and shake them up and make an effort to change things. At the very least I think we all deserve safe homes, and yet for so many women this is painfully not the case. My students' writing show the world as cruel and unfair - and yet their own generosity, happy spirits and kindnesses demonstrate another path.

Here's a good luck message to anyone baffled by the things going wrong - the lost housing deposits, the fake colleges with dud courses, the family or cherised boyfriend/partner turning against you. I hope things will get better for you, and that you have the skills to share your stories. I've never read about the stuff my students chart in my favourite newspapers, but I cannot tell you how many times I've read about how to reuse a plastic water bottle, what film to watch or summer festival fashion tips - useless, simplistic journalese.

I guess the message of this piece is that when you travel - anywhere, even out of your door - try to see if your friendship can ever help people too proud, or confused to admit to the pain their nearest and dearest are giving them.