There were a few announcements to make at the start of our June monthly meeting. The annual draw for a bursary to Denman WI College was made and the winner was Annie Panton. Tickets for the National Federation raffle were on sale and an appeal was made for books and plants to sell at our summer garden meeting in August and also for good quality raffle prizes.
Our attention was drawn to several arts and crafts activities to be held shortly in the Berkshire area and also to a literary lunch at Denman College.
Our very talented Ruth Daniel has entered the WI Golden Jubilee Competition and has made a pennant with an Olympic theme ; it is made of cloth with a most striking design for which she has copyright. Good luck to her.
Our speaker was Mary Bryant, a feisty and articulate woman who with her partner embarked on a 9000 mile bicycle tour visiting 15 countries and 3 continents. It had been her lifelong ambition and having retired could see her objectives more clearly. So in 2002 they set off on bicycles made specially for the trip. After the ferry to Calais they crossed France and via southern Europe made for Greece, Turkey and from Istanbul took a flight to India and thence to Burma where they followed the course of the Irrawaddy marveling at the ancient temples on the way,
The main focus of her talk was S.E.Asia. Vietnam they found stunningly beautiful with a highly literate population; Laos a very poor country relying on foreign aid as did Cambodia which was desecrated by years of war. One of the big tourist attractions in Cambodia is the huge old temple complexof Angkor Wat, the largest religious building in the world dating from the 12 th century.
Everywhere was full of interest as displayed on a slide show, Strange to us with our obsession with Health and Safety were the ramshackle buses and taxis filled to the scuppers with people and animals lumped together , insde, on the roof, clinging to the sides and even on the driver's lap and frantically overtaking each other at breakneck speed on bumpy dirt roads. What a nightmare!
Of course they found the going hard on these roads . And their bicycles were weighed down with sleeping bags,tents and utensils , the tyres often sticking to the road in the heat. But they triumphed and their experiences are recorded in Ms Bryant's book “Four cheeks to the wind” .
The next meeting on July 6th will feature a talk on “ Mercy Ships “
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