A few weeks ago we went to this place called Torquay, which is a small town on the coast.
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It was right on the ocean, and it was full of old people, and everything was really tacky but still pretty and quite touristy.
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| Okay, it was absolutely gorgeous. |
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| And chock-a-block full of old people |
Torquay was definitely a little different from other places I've been to in England. For example, there was more than one joke and costume shop along the main shopping stretch. We visited the Torquay museum then Kent's Caverns and spent the rest of the day walking along the beach and up and down some giant hills.
I think, however, I will always remember Torquay as a place of anthropology nightmares. As my friend Lauren described it, it was all very antiquarian. I found it simultaneously both enraging and amusing.
Apparently this is where Agatha Christie is from, which would be interesting to me if I had ever read an Agatha Christie novel ( #uneducated). The museum we went to had a section that was dedicated to her, although it mostly contained old photographs and copies of her books. My favorite was they had a copy of one of her books originally titled "Ten Little Niggers" but later changed to "Ten Little Indians". I love that they were willing to censor her title but only upgraded it from 'very offensive' to 'still marginally offensive'. (I just learnt from my friend Carrie that it was eventually changed to 'And Then There Were None' and the original title was based on a nursery rhyme: crazypants)
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| Lauren took a sneaky photo of it, breaking all the rules |
I was quite excited to visit Torquay because it is a bit of a center for prehistoric finds. It is home to this place called Kent's Caverns that have the oldest human remains ever found in England. One of the other highlights of this museum were some really cool fossils of prehistoric animals like mammoths and sabertooth cats.
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| Foot! |
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| Just some rocks |
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| Of course, an old Victorian toy in the natural history section, no underlying message here. |
The most cringe-worthy section was all about explorers and discovery. It was like it was from a different era... and it was directed towards kids!
I'll admit I'm pretty sensitive about the issue of cultural appropriation and the unethical and harmful nature of portraying different native peoples as objects that need to "discovered" like some kind of exotic bird. In total, its just a very outdated way of looking at the world. I tend to overreact about these kinds of things but it makes me a little crazy.
After that we visited Kent's Cavern. I was super stoked, and it was really cool to visit an old cave where they had found the oldest human remains in UK.
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| Two terrible pictures of one of the coolest things I've ever seen. For some reason, on display upside-down! |
That is a 31,000yr old mandible !!! Holy Monkey!
The tour of the cave was directed towards bored school children, so there was a surprising focus upon what pictures the different stalactite-stalagmite looked like.
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| This supposedly looks like an old man... but I can no longer tell how... |
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| I think this is maybe supposed to be a dragon? notice the orb on the upper right side! GHOST! |
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| In a cave!! The shadows on my face are very cave-goblin |
One thing that drove me crazy though, was how throughout the tour the guide kept saying that early humans shared this cave with other cave-dwelling animals at the same time. Like the humans were huddled around their fire so the hyenas and cave-bears wouldn't get them. This sounds crazy to the point of being impossible. Why would a group of people choose to live with a bunch of human-eating wild hyenas?? Though it does make "Ancient man" (...sigh) seem way more bad-ass: "Hyenas could at any moment try and eat one of us?--Bring it!!"
At the end they had one of my favorite things when visiting anywhere: Life-size dioramas!
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| Helping cook some Hyena |
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| Invisible lantern in some old-timey archaeology |
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| Old-timey surveyor |
After the caves we took a long walk along the beach, and it was stunning! Victoria's beaches are great, but they don't come close to these.
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| Vista alert! |
Finally, to make the day complete we got cream-teas at a pub.
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| That is a bowl full of clotted-cream and a bowl of jam. For like two tiny scones. Worth every heart attack. |
