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Olympic torch to visit all corners of Britain

Dunya News

The journey will take the Olympic Torch to some of Britain's best-known tourist spots.

The aim of the 70-day torch relay ahead of the 2012 London Games is really very down to earth to bring the flame close to ordinary Britons and their homes, organizers said Monday.The main target is to get to as many people as we possibly could, said Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London organizing committee, as he announced the full route of the relay.That means devising a route that covers over 1,000 villages, towns and cities across the country including Bready, a sleepy Northern Ireland hamlet of just 93 people.I think its definitely going to bring good business, which is always a bonus, said Eamon Nugent, who works at a hotel on the outskirts of Bready. The torch convoy will certainty be a big spectacle there the village is so small it takes just around 15 minutes to walk around it, he added.There will, of course, be plenty of photo opportunities. Starting on May 19, 2012 at Lands End, a wind-swept corner in Cornwall, southwestern England, the torch will go pass lighthouses, ancient castles and historic sites like Hadrians Wall. It will be carried in a steamer across Lake Windermere in the Lake District, on a row boat on the Thames, and on horseback and chair lifts elsewhere. There is even a stunt to transport it by zip line off a bridge.In total, the 8,000-mile itinerary will allow the torch to travel within an hours journey of more than 95 percent of Britains population of 62 million people, Coe said.Next years torch relay will be relatively modest compared to the one that kicked off the Beijing Games. Organizers decided to keep the relay within Britain apart from the lighting in Greece to control it after chaotic scenes marred the international relay in 2008, when human rights protests in London, Paris, San Francisco and elsewhere disrupted the journey.
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