There’s a certain kind of equilibrium you can fall into online. For about seven years, mine consisted of playing a punishingly realistic military simulator called Arma 3. I logged something north of 3500 hours, which, if you do the math, is a frankly terrifying slice of a human life. The strangest part wasn't the time sink itself, but the social structure that enabled it: I, a doctor from India, while still in India, somehow became the regular mission-maker and Military Dungeon Master for a group of several dozen or so very British men, women and children. I suspect they saw my obsession (a holdover from a childhood fascination with army men) as a kind of useful, directed pathology, and were happy to outsource their fun to it.
In this realm I answered to “Dover.” As in Benjamin Dover, a nom de guerre whose elegance is inversely proportional to its maturity. After enough years of Brits yelling “DOVER, WHY IS THERE A T-72 IN THIS VILLAGE” or “DOVER, WHY ARE THE PLA AIRDROPPING IN GERMANY” at my disembodied presence, the name started accreting mythic properties. So when a free weekend and seemingly discounted train tickets collided, I decided to pay pilgrimage: go to Dover, see the white cliffs, stare down France, and try not to fall off anything important.
Things started going wrong in a way that felt both predictable and deeply informative about human variance. My friend and I had a plan: 9 a.m., a specific train platform in south London. My model of the world holds that a plan between two people, especially one involving pre-booked tickets, is a settled fact. It has inertia. My friend’s model, it turned out, required a final handshake protocol - a morning-of confirmation call - without which the previous agreement existed only in a state of quantum superposition. I discovered this when my call at 9:02 found him mid-shower.
He arrived half an hour later, and we set off. The English countryside is lovely in the way things are when you have no responsibility for their upkeep. I have a photo of myself eating a sandwich in the town of Sandwich, an act of such low-grade recursive humor that it might have been transgressive in 2009.
Then came the second, more significant system error. An hour into our journey, my friend consulted a map and discovered that our train was, in fact, headed to the wrong side of Kent. Not a fatal error, but one that would cost us another hour in detours and connections. It’s strange how robust modern infrastructure is; you can make a fairly significant navigational blunder and the system just gently reroutes you, albeit with a time penalty. A hundred and fifty years ago, we would have ended up in the wrong village and had to marry a local.
Dover, when we finally arrived, turned out to be perched like a giant chalk apostrophe at the edge of England’s run-on sentence. The town has the air of a place that was built to do something serious with ships and then woke up one morning and realized it was quaint. A castle loomed over the harbor like a very large, very literal metaphor about who was in charge of what. My friend and I debated whether owning a castle in medieval England gave you street cred or just a crowded calendar. This prompted a brief, speculative argument on medieval sexual economics. He posited that the local lord must have had a hundred wives. I countered that, as a Christian noble, he was likely constrained to one official wife for appearances, and ninety-nine plausible deniabilities, likely undocumented liaisons with the wives of the local fishermen. We failed to resolve this.
Taxis were scarce because of the ferries. The queue of wheeled luggage migrated like an urban wildebeest herd, and our driver supplied a continuous commentary whose themes were: tourists, how they ruin everything; the French, how they ruin everything else; and immigrants, how they form a handy third category (while, you guessed it, ruining everything). It was an impressive performance, both for range and volume. Our taxi driver continued complaining that the tourists who appear to be Dover’s primary fuel source were a nuisance who clogged the roads. This seems to be a common paradox in tourist economies. My friend, who is Indian, contributed supplementary remarks about other nationalities as if eager to prove his assimilation. I listened in the way one listens to a non-consensual podcast.
The short taxi ride brought us to the cliffs. And there it was. The sheer, improbable whiteness of it. France was a faint, hazy suggestion across the water, close enough that you felt you understood a thousand years of Anglo-French rivalry on a visceral level. It’s not an abstraction when you can see them over there, probably making better bread.
In the manner of men confident they could fight (and win) against certain species of bear, I idly contemplated the feasibility of swimming the Channel. I regretfully convinced myself that it would take someone far fitter than me, and that's if I wasn't stopped halfway by patrol boats and then hauled off on account of the color of my skin.
And this is where the second part of the mission began. My friend, who had planned this leg of the journey, had mentioned a “long walk.” I had stored this information under the tag “pleasant stroll.” This turned out to be a failure of definition. I was also, thanks to having planned a far less prolonged or adventurous trip, resigned to wearing shoes that could best be described as “smart casual.” They were the best £20 in the local Primark could buy, and had netted me about twice that value in unearned compliments. Alas, they weren't quite built for this task.
My friend, who is built like someone who moves pianos for a living, had brought a girl here a few months prior. He relayed that after a suitable period of walking, they found a "convenient cliffside depression", which I presume was a geological feature and not an emotional descriptor, where he proceeded to demonstrate the evolutionary fitness benefits of a high-protein diet and a consistent deadlifting regimen. This anecdote was presented as a proof-of-concept for his life strategy: that sufficient physical prowess can function as a universal solvent for problems like social awkwardness or, presumably, poor navigational skills. I must admit, I'm sold on the idea, and have decided to hit the gym like it owes me money when I'm safely back in Scotland.
The cliffs were busy in a friendly way. A family ahead featured an Indian child who had launched a formal protest against the very concept of walking. His mother, with the patience of a sainted logistics officer, attempted a cognitive-behavioral intervention: “if you keep your mouth closed you will be less tired.” This was technically plausible, decreased oxygen demands from reduced speech; improved nasal breathing efficiency, and completely incompatible with childhood. He escalated to the International Style of Wailing. His father trudged on, wearing the expression of a man silently modeling the trade-off curve between making it to the viewpoint and the cost of carrying twenty-five kilograms of despair. I was touched, if it wasn't for the fact that I was still stroller age when I was last here, that might well have been me.
It seemed half of Asia was haunting the cliffs that day. We counted nationalities like rare birds, there went the French (and very many of them), those two ladies were Ukrainian (my friend insisted on his heuristic that if they looked Slavic but were ugly, they must be Russian - I am unconvinced that this technique works well), more Indians, Bangladeshis, and multiple miscellaneous Middle Eastern families. My friend had opinions on what the implications were that only the latter seemed to have more than two kids per party. I am studiously neutral on the topic. There were no shortage of dogs around, in all shapes and sizes. If anyone cast negative aspersions on their presence, it wasn't where I could hear them.
The path along the cliff edge was not a path. It was a slick, compacted layer of chalk that glistened with a light dew. It felt less like walking and more like trying to find purchase on a lump of flaky soap the size of a county, with loose pebbles to taste. Every step was a fresh negotiation with gravity. I was forced into a sort of low, wide, careful shuffle, the kind of movement you see in videos of robots learning to walk. My friend, in his sensible trainers, occasionally glanced back, his expression a perfect blend of sympathy and the quiet satisfaction of a man whose choices have been vindicated.
But the view. My god, the view. To the right, the world just ended in a blaze of white. Below, the sea was a churning, complex grey-green. The wind was a constant, solid thing, a physical force you had to lean into. While we'd been resigned to a moody English afternoon, the sun graced us with its presence, and declined to stop even as we began overheating. The end equilibrium, with the wind wicking away moisture and heat, the sun cooking us, ended up being quite pleasant.
We stopped for an impromptu photoshoot, because we live in the fallen world. The cliffs obligingly produce Instagram content with minimal coaxing. My friend, whose triceps have their own personality, benefited from the presence of a competent photographer, which would be me, the author. I managed to take the kind of photos that would secure sponsorships from protein powder brands. He took photos of me that say “psychiatry trainee who reads a lot of blogs and owns exactly three good shirts.” Both sets came out well. The wind did the hair; the sky did the rest.
There is a lighthouse along this route, which is a piece of public infrastructure designed to make you think about metaphors. We did not go inside; we admired it from a fair distance with the correct amount of aesthetic gratitude and moved on. The harbor below was full of ferries cycling infinitely between here and Calais, like a giant mechanical metronome keeping time for European logistics. Standing there, you understand why people attempt to cross in inflatables. Distance is abstract until you can see the other side; then it becomes a dare.
Eventually, we realized we had no hopes of making it to the end of the cliffs without missing our train back, and turned back with only mild regret. I'm confident we hit the highlights, and we intended to, on our way back, revisit the ones we had only passed.
About halfway, the path offered us a moral dilemma in the form of a fork: one way hugged the cliff edge with magnificent views and suggestive erosion; the other retreated inland through more reliable ground and fewer ambulance reports. We chose the edge this time. It felt virtuous to make an offering to the gods of scenery. The chalk in places was undermined, forming caverns that looked like dragon mouths. If there were signs warning you not to go too close, I didn't see them. Every hundred meters or so, a tourist hung over the void for the sake of a better selfie.
Our return trip involved a dip down, diverging from the main tourist trail. This was the most scenic bit, despite the stiff competition. My friend gleefully pointed out the infamous hollow, and I gave it a wide berth while keeping an eye open for used condoms. It was a good spot, just about hidden from the taller cliffs, and unlikely to be observed on the cold, foggy day he'd brought his lover around.
We quickly discovered that our divergence had been in grave error. The shortest path lead straight up the valley at about a 45° angle, closer to 60 at some parts. The well marked route tapered into a desire path, one that involved plenty of dirt of dubious structural integrity. I'd have few qualms about calling it the most difficult fifty meters of my life. There was a very reasonable risk of tumbling down and breaking something, and I quickly became cognisant of why we hadn't seen any other tourists venturing this way.
Both of us were gassed by the time we made it through. It became abundantly clear that my friend was not fond of cardio, and I can only sympathize. But it only got worse: the route to civilization involved a heavily overgrown trail, and the vegetation seemed to be entirely stinging nettles and more obviously thorny bushes. I was Benjamin Dover, being well and truly bent over by the landscape.
My friend had divested himself of his jeans and coat, both for the heat and to maximize the visibility of muscles during our shoot. This made his journey far more precarious than mine, and for the first time, I was genuinely grateful for the thickness of the chinos’ fabric.
We did make it out, coated in dust, some mud, but with only minimal stinging. I'll chalk that down as a victory, and there's no shortage of chalk in these parts.
Summoning our previous taxi driver, we made haste towards the train station. The conversation seemed happy to reprise the manner in which it started. My friend informed our driver that he was a Reform voter, and I was entertaining myself with the notion of piping up to (falsely) proclaim that I went for the SNP.
We had half an hour to kill, and opted to do so at a very conveniently placed pub. The bartender treated us with unusual suspicion, insisting that we pay for both meal and drink up front. This was, as he explained in a rather defensive manner, because there was an unacceptable rate of people dining and then dashing to the inconveniently placed station right across. He mildly softened this blow by stating that he wasn't implying that I would do such a thing.
I was inclined to believe him, until I noted a group of Americans at the next table. They were discussing what the bill might amount to, which is strongly suggestive of not having to pay upfront. I suppose I can't blame people for actually using Bayesian priors, even if it's to my detriment.
We demolished our lunch, while I entertained my buddy with the same anecdote about overly benevolent/touchy feely (and drunk) Scottish matrons in the last town I was residing. Despite our best efforts, the pub lunch was too substantial to finish before the train was due to arrive, and we elected to wait for the next one.
I had been eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table, primarily in a bid to identify accents. Were the Americans a united group? The younger couple had a clearly Southern twang, which made me update towards South Carolina, the older sounded vaguely Texan.
Eventually, curiosity got the better of me. I waited for a lull in the conversation and asked them outright. They told me that they were, in fact, family: the older two lived in Colorado, and the younger (son and daughter-in-law) in North Carolina. I was informed, with mock-seriousness, that confusing a denizen of Colorado with a Texan was a Capital Crime.
They, as many others do, remarked on my unusually American accent. I launched into the usual explanation: a prolonged period of time spent in California at a formative juncture. We got to really chatting. They had just crossed over from Calais, I intended to visit Texas this year for a wedding, if life and visa delays didn't intervene.
For once finding myself to be the most well-traveled in the party, I helped them get to grips with their two week long and rather flexible itinerary. I scared them off the Tate, making sure to describe in vivid detail my own experience, while lauding the Natural History Museum, albeit with a caveat to pack plenty of water. I was very touched to find that the older lady commiserated with me on the topic of the proper size and disposition of T-Rexes (she had even heard of Sue!). She revealed that she had multiple degrees in Ancient History, and asked me whether it was wise to engage a tour guide while visiting the British Museum.
I believe I was correct when I claimed that this wasn't strictly necessary, given that YouTube could easily suffice, and that she seemed to be more qualified to be the guide than any she could pay for.
I spoke about my aspirations of shooting feral hogs in Texas. She revealed that her father had hunted them professionally, and I could only congratulate him on finding a career with such inherent job security. The damn bastards never seem to stay dead.
I was further entertained by her ribbing her (fully grown) son about his adolescent habit of subtly diluting the vodka to disguise his theft of the same. She had a very rude shock when, during a dinner party, she found out that mere tap water and olives don't make for a good martini. Her son spoke about his time at Virginia Tech, he scandalized his mother by finally disclosing the multiple shenanigans he had gotten into, some involving burning sofas, others, the cops.
Our conversation was far ranging. Topics included my warnings about sticker shock in London, the latest Superman movie (the older gentleman was named Clark, and we were in Kent), whether the American or Indian soccer team was more abysmal, the feasibility of reclaiming an ancestral manor abandoned by their distant ancestors when they fled to America in the 1600s, my desire to escape to the States, their invitation for me to come stay with them at the BnB they run during their retirement, the sheer cold of the Colorado climate, the inadvisability of drinking while up in Denver (I thanked the son for saving his parents from such peril).
They laughed, and said I was one to talk, given that I was only having a coke. I told them to please tell my mother the same, were she to ask, because the color of the drink belied the significant amount of vodka it contained.
Overall, a very good time, and I was sad to bid them goodbye when our train was finally due. I really don't understand why American tourists get a bad rep, they always seem like the sweetest and most genuine souls.
Another train, and some reliance on the genuine kindness of random railway personnel who were willing to turn a blind eye to the fact that our tickets had expired, and I'm back in the safety of my bed. It was a good time, and I genuinely feel that Dover might be the highlight of this vacation of mine.
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Notes -
Accurate. Texas has annexed large amounts of Colorado, and many locals are less than pleased. In part, it goes back to this observation:
However, many of the Texans have moved from the category of "tourist" to "occupying force," hence the less-than-fond attitude by many Coloradans towards Texans.
Sounds like the American version of calling a Baden-Wurttemberger a Bavarian. (I am not an expert on German regional politics, but Germans have confirmed that "Bavaria is the Texas of Germany" is a good approximation of the regional stereotype.)
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Texans and Coloradans are annoyed by the influx of Commiefornians, is there a part of the country that actually likes its neighbors? Haha
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