Dear Beast Crew

April – September 2006

Well jolly hockey sticks and a very good afternoon to you from Great Britain.  Thank you to all our family and friends for looking after us for the past nine weeks whilst we have been waiting for the Beast to travel via Singapore and South Africa all the way to Buenos Aires in Argentina.

Then there was two.  Greg and Alexis have bee deserted by their fellow travellers so we are heading off by ourselves to Buenos Aries to start the next leg of our trip.  We will update you after we struggle with customs to get the car back.  We will then have to reconstruct the car with wheels, roof rack and Maggiolina before we head off over the Andes into Chile and then head south to the end of the earth and Tierra del Fuego.  We will tell you how we battle with our lack of Spanish, the alpacas, altitude sickness and the enormous steaks (not too great for Alexis the vegetarian!).

Hasta Luego Amigos! 

Notes from Great Britain and the United Kingdom:

• The United Kingdom is a political union made up of four constituent countries: England, Scotland, and Wales on the island of Great Britain, and Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom also has several overseas territories, including Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. The Crown has a relationship with the dependencies of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands; they are part of the British Islands but not part of the United Kingdom.
• Great Britain covers an area of  23.5 million hectares.
• The UK has the fifth largest GDP in the world.
• The British Empire by the end of the 19th century consisted of one quarter of the earth’s surface. 
• Ben Nevis is the highest mountain in the British Isles at 1,344 metres high (4,408 ft).
• The UK has more than 1000 islands.
• As of 2004, 9% of the UK's population was an 'ethnic minority'. Of these, 48.9% were from the Indian subcontinent and around 22.7% were black Caribbean or African.
• British petrol prices have now reached over £1/litre (around AUD$2.40/US$1.89).  http://www.petrolprices.com.
• Fertility rates for 2005 give an average number of 1.80 children per woman in England and Wales.
• 390,000 people in the UK stated their religion was Jedi (as in Stars Wars) in the 2001 census.
• In 2001 the Census collected information about religious identity. Just over three-quarters of the UK population reported having a religion with more than seven out of ten people saying that their religion was Christian (72 per cent). After Christianity, Islam was the most common faith with nearly 3 per cent describing their religion as Muslim (1.6 million).
• Total British oil reserves were estimated at 3.0 billion tonnes at the end of 2004. Of these only 0.5 billion tonnes were proven. The total includes an estimate of between 0.4 and 1.8 billion tonnes of resources which have yet to be discovered, but which may exist in areas of the UK continental shelf.
• The UK developed land accounts for 1.8 million hectares, water bodies 0.3 million hectares, semi-natural land 7 million hectares, intensive agricultural land 10.8 million hectares and woodland 2.8 million hectares.
• The alcohol­-related death rate in the UK increased from 6.9 per 100,000 population in 1991 to 13.0 in 2004. The number of alcohol-related deaths has more than doubled from 4,144 in 1991 to 8,380 in 2004.  Men aged 35 to 54 had the highest death rate in each year.