Day 4 - Dover to Brighton
We woke up around 5am, not quite having caught up with the time difference yet, so we decided to visit the Dover cliffs before the crowds arrived. Getting there around 7am we basically had the place to ourselves with only a couple of locals walking their dogs. We followed the cliff path admiring the chalk cliffs and the huge port below us, and we could faintly see France in the distance.
Our early start meant we had more time up our sleeve than we'd planned so we drove to Margate, the opposite direction of our originally planned route, to visit the Shell Grotto. The grotto is a series of 21 metres of underground tunnels discovered in 1835. It's unknown when it was built, by who and for what purpose. It's decorated with 4.6 million shells all over the walls and ceiling.
From there we followed the coastal road through Rye and Hastings to Eastbourne where we found ourselves driving through crowds who were there to see Europe's largest seafront airshow! There were road closures, detours, traffic queues and lots of buses. We seem to have a talent for finding ourselves in cities during major events that we had no idea about, like when we were in Budapest during the Red Bull airshow. As we drove through town we could hear the woosh of the planes overhead but couldn't see them from inside the car.
After Eastbourne we took the coastal drive which takes in the striking chalk cliffs of Beachy Head, Birling Gap and Seven Sisters. We stopped at Birling Gap to walk to the lighthouse along the cliff edges with their sheer straight drops down to the ocean. The edge of the cliff was roped off for safety but that didn't stop people from standing near the edge for photos.
The coastal drive from there took us through Seaford to our hotel on the Brighton foreshore. We checked in then explored the Lanes area behind the hotel. It was a little quiet as it was Sunday night, but there were plenty of eating and drinking places open.
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