The Isle of Wight is one of the least spoilt places I've ever been to within the bounds of the UK. Its relative inaccessibility (there's no bridge, you have to take a ferry) probably explains some of that. To get to the Hops Festival at Ventnor Botanical Gardens we had to take a bus to the railway station, a train to Southampton, another (free) bus to the ferry terminal, a ferry to Cowes ("What's brown and smelly and comes out the back of Cowes? The Isle of Wight ferry"), another bus to Newport and another bus to Ventnor. The Isle of Wight has one bus provider and considering the size of the island a £10 all-day ticket is pretty good value for money. Because the Hops Festival itself was a pain to get to the plan evolved as we travelled, growing to encompass en-route visits to a variety of pubs recommended by the Campaign For Real Ale's Good Beer Guide 2010.

(Need pound coins in a hurry? Buy your ferry ticket from a machine using a note. It has no slot to dispense notes as change.)

The Red Jet passenger ferry is a reasonably pleasant journey although I'm sure if it was part of one's morning commute the safety announcements would become irritating. Cowes is a beautiful, twisty little seaside town with very narrow roads which buses should not be capable of navigating. Newport is a lot bigger and more conventional. It has shops and a cinema and that. The buses are quite nice although the poor suspension is a cause for complaint: on the narrow IOW country roads it is not unlike being dragged along the road in a metal box with no wheels. Is there a reason for this? Wouldn't customer comfort be a prime concern in bus construction?

We were held up briefly behind a horse and carriage with a newlywed couple in it. Congratulations, you two whose names I don't remember. It looked like a field had been rented for the reception. Both of these looked like beautiful ideas but I have to be honest it was lucky that this September day was so pleasant. Marriages should be arranged under the assumption that they'll take place in a storm. On a whim we got off the bus in Wroxall and visited the Four Seasons pub, which was a pleasantly quiet and warm-atmosphered establishment famed for its food. H and I were too hungry to look further than the burger and chips on the menu and while they were tasty enough I guess our haste might have cost us some much nicer meals. Oh well.

Navigating primarily using H's iPhone we got off the bus just above Ventnor and trekked west along a cliff road in front of a series of seriously nice-looking houses. Retirement housing, I opined. This was the furthest point on the island and probably the least convenient for access to the mainland and possible jobs based there. Like I say: unspoilt. Youths and louts have to stay closer to the city. The rest retreat to the south coast and sit in the sun all day.

For a while we were probably lost but then we found a road down through the trees towards the sea and wound our way back east where eventually (without passing through any kind of clear barrier) we entered Ventnor Botanical Gardens where the festival was going on. If you wanted wicker, organic chutney, or information about bats, this was a bonanza, and the band was genuinely pretty good, but the much-promoted newly-premiering beer on tap wasn't much to speak of. We slouched around staring at the plants and mulling over plans for Christmas and New Year's Eve, then headed on east back towards Ventnor itself. On the way I collected some mini doughnuts, which were manufactured by letting a toroidal blob of batter drop into a pan of fat and then move along a little wire conveyor belt, exiting just as they were done frying. We also caught some of a local cricket match in which one team - I forget whether it was the home or away team - had just begun their inning and was being soundly thrashed, two wickets for two runs.

When you see suspiciously narrow zigzags on the map, that's a hint. The coast road being named "Steephill Road" is another one. Phew. When you get to the actual Ventnor sea front the place looks like something out a Disney feature film, all fishing boats and cute little seafood restaurants and painted cottages with front gardens full of sand instead of grass, all with lavatories and motor vehicles and other unsightly reminders that we're in the 21st Century tucked away out of sight somewhere. Like a theme park. The Volunteer pub at Ventnor was quite difficult to find (H's phone's 3G reception was hit-or-miss). The place itself is tiny and when we got there it was like walking right into a sitcom already in progress. Early to mid afternoon and the place was full of characters who had blatantly been sat on the same stools throwing the same banter backwards and forwards for ten years and rising. A white terrier wandered around the floor peering disinterestedly at people's shoes-- its attention was impossible to attract. An old man wearing the most appallingly brightly-coloured woolly jumper the average human retina can perceive walked in and created chaos by ordering something other than his usual, which (having already been poured) had to be redistributed. H and I sat and drank Ram Rod and watched the spectacle, largely ignored by the locals, almost as if shielded from them by glass.

It's probably quite a nice place to drink if you happen to actually come from Ventnor and drink there every day for years and years. We moved on.

We hoped to stop at Shanklin and try the Chine Inn which is supposedly a spectacular place to enjoy a pint on a sunny day like Saturday 25th September was, but H's phone found it too late and the bus had already meandered its way to the far side of the town. (Straighten your routes, Southern Vectis, you'll never get anywhere at that rate!) So we stayed on it all the way to Ryde by which time we were quite hungry again. The Simeon Arms took quite a lot of finding and when we got there we decided not to order food because this was just like the Volunteer except bigger, darker, and less pleasant. Again, a local could make something of it, but for transients navigating by a book, there must surely be better pubs that CAMRA could have picked out. Beer: still not great. And now we were getting hungrier.

We pootled back to the bus station along the north coast of the island, with the Portsmouth and its Spinnaker Tower visible across the Solent. An enormous cruise ship which we had seen docked at Southampton on our outbound journey that morning was headed east out to sea. It was a full moon. No pictures, my phone takes terrible pictures at night. We found no obvious pizza sources on the way so we ended up getting on the bus and heading back to Newport (which took forever. The island is deceptively large - it's about an hour wide by bus). Newport had a Pizza Hut which was short-staffed and promised an hour wait for food, so we took the bus back to Cowes. Cowes had no obvious pizza outlets but Co-op was still open so we nabbed some smaller edibles and jumped on the ferry. In Southampton we wandered for a while looking for a Pizza Hut which had apparently disappeared before realising that if we hurried we could catch the earlier train home and running for it. H is in better shape than me and made it; luckily the ticket barriers were wide open which meant I could literally jump onto the train just as the doors were sliding closed, something I've never done on national rail before. Finally at Base Pizza near Winchester railway station we found what we were looking for. Figuratively speaking. The place makes terrible pizza. Mine came back more or less uncooked, with sloppy passata and unpleasant slippery cheese. The topping basically fell off it. Don't go there. It's not good. We took the bus home (lucky timing; these are like gold dust after hours in Winchester).

Overall evaluation: the Isle of Wight is a lovely place to spend time but CAMRA's pub and beer choices are questionable. It was a good weekend anyway.