Isle of Man

The Isle of Man is principally known for the TT race and motorbikes in general – indeed the first thing I was asked about when telling of the plans for the trip was about the TT. To answer your questions right off the bat, yes, we went round most of the TT track (on a bus, it’s just the main road around the north of the island…), yes the roads are incredible (or try here), yes we think the racers are even bigger lunatics than before and no, I am not in the least bit inclined to get on a motorbike for a lap of the island.

The thing you may not realise is that the Isle is both a company and personal tax haven and, unlike the UK, there is no death duty. The consequences of this are a little unusual. For example, there are banks everywhere – many of them big multinational banks that don’t even have an office in Sydney.

Inequality of wealth is also very visible. While the average house looks, well, average and often quite run down there are lots of houses of the super-rich; sitting on the train we went past one house which looked like a renovated castle complete with a personal boating lake and private small railway that could be used by the owner to take friends around the property. One of the locals pointed out another house to us (we originally thought it must be a hotel) which the owner built to accommodate their grandfather clock collection, reportedly the largest collection of its kind in the world.

Walk through any of the harbour side suburbs of Sydney and you will see more expensive cars than you will here, but you will, from time to time, spot a very expensive Aston Martin.

But in contrast with this most people on the Isle seem to be struggling. Every street we walked down had at least one house for sale, and streets with rows of for sale signs were not uncommon a lot of which are run down looking townhouses and apartments. There were piles and piles of thick magazines and newspapers on real-estate available at the airport. Usually the most optimistic of publications, they were talking about the huge number of properties available, that many houses had been on the market for a long time, and that sellers should consider lowering their high expectations. The average asking price for a typical 2 bedroom terraced house was around 250,000 GBP, quite a bit higher than similar houses near coastal areas of England.

This wasn't the only time we saw four houses in a row for sale

The main source of employment for the locals is tourism, mostly from the UK mainland and tourism generally has been declining steadily over more than the past ten years, particularly as longer distance holidays have become so accessible for people living on the UK mainland. The jobs market used to be bolstered by the banking sector but this has also declined since the GFC. Yet the tourism campaign of the Isle is still clearly focused on British tourists – apart from the TT. Therefore they are trying to sell the British a lot of what they already have, history, rolling hills, old-world trains, and unpredictable weather.

If marketed properly the Isle could have a lot of appeal to international travellers, with its many beautiful port towns, rolling green hills that finish in tall cliffs which dive into the ocean, friendly people, ruined castles, steam trains, old lighthouses, and many hikes, bike rides and kayaking to suit different experience levels.

All in all, we enjoyed our time on the Isle of Man. The people are lovely, scenery beautiful and the roads amazing. We just hope the available food improves.

Rolling hills: check, stone walls: check, sheep: check.