Wales baa-baa
Wales is to England what New Zealand is to Australia. It is a community that mostly thrives and survives on farming and tourism. The Welsh are a very lovely people, if not a little quiet at times.
Saturday
Spring has sprung and there are lambs everywhere, following after their mums, running across fields. But there are just so many of them, every field is full. Despite such a pleasant vision, ones thoughts uncontrollably turn to a rack of lamb rotating on a spit almost ready for eating. Those were our thoughts of hunger on the way to our first night’s accommodation, which resulted in an imaginary meal of mixed grill combined of all the animals we saw on our way – lamb, beef, rabbit, and Welsh boar. There was almost a talk of involving the little rascal mole, with their holes popping up all over the fields, and Kenny’s description of a mole including the ‘small, gold rimmed round glasses’ they wear (a la Wind in the Willow if you didn’t guess).
Kenny was our rather eccentric Scottish tour leader who grew up in Wales, but of course the eccentric ones are often the best and most fun. He didn’t disappoint. We began by stopping on the side of the road next to the Thames for an important bit of historical information and photo opportunity. If you lined up the red phone box with the Battersea Power Station you are immortalising the design work of one Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Quiz question number one, we were told.
Getting to know you was Kenny’s fun game, but luckily not involving standing at the front of the bus with the microphone. Instead, we all had to go and sit next to someone we didn’t know and have a chat for a minute, before he called out swap, and on it went until pretty much most of the bus knew each other. It was nice and informal, and it was amazing to hear how the majority of us were Aussies or Kiwis living in London and working and travelling. The closest I got to home was James, who lives in Springvale. There was also an American girl Kelsey, who was nice, a Polish girl Mira (we had a Mira, Mara and Mary) and a Swedish couple.
It only takes three hours to drive to Wales, and we crossed over the bridge stopping to look at Chepstow Castle before heading on to Tintern Abbey, where the monks have been for centuries. We decided not to pay to go in, and sat outside enjoying ice creams before discovering that if you walk down alongside the river the path takes you to the side gate where we were able to see the ruins for free – ha ha! We headed into Cardiff for lunch, five of us branching off to get fresh pork rolls with apple sauce (you’ll be disgusted to hear what I ate all weekend – slap on the wrist for no vegetables!) and wandering around the city centre. We jumped on the tour bus for a quick whiz around the city, packed to the brim because Cardiff were playing the froggies at the Millenium Stadium, which is in the centre of town.
We had just enough time to pop into Cardiff Castle, which accumulates four different periods of architecture – Romans, Anglos, Vikings and Normans – before jumping back on the bus, stopping to admire the Blaernavon Coal Mine and then on to the Brecon Beacons National Park where we climbed a bloody huge mountain. Now, Haggis had absolutely all of their buses out on tours this Easter weekend, so they hired one which had to come with a driver – Hammad – even though Kenny usually drives while using a microphone attached to him. So Hammad drove us through some interesting places – between a really narrow arched bridge, under a bridge we had to check before we kept going, and to the carpark of the national park, which he never actually made it to. He could have, but the road was narrow and we ended up getting stuck in with several cars sitting and waiting.
So we all jumped out while he parked the bus elsewhere, and we had an extra mile of uphill to walk before we got to the carpark, the base of Mount Sugarloaf, which we then proceeded to hike. It wasn’t quite climbing, but it wasn’t a steady walk either. The last hundred metres we took at such a slow pace, together as a group going that little bit further for two minutes and then stopping again. I was able to keep within the first ten of the 30 people until the very end, and even then I was still nowhere close to the last people.
Lija couldn’t go further than the carpark because of her knee and the incline, and the fact we half bush-bashed through the brush to get to the top. Each time we stopped the person at the back of the line had to take Kenny’s Welsh flag and drive the group from the front when we had rested enough. The last hundred metres were the hardest for me. I literally had to push myself, one part of me convinced I could go no further and the other determined to prove it wrong. It was sweet victory over the devil angel when I got to the top, and was more than happy to turn my camera over to Kenny who photographed me at the top of the summit, with a trig point of 596 metres.
There was no mucking around – it took us four hours to get from the bus to the top and back down again, so as I was walking down with some of the boys I was amazed to see the sun still up. After all, my watch said it was already past 7pm. The walk down was the ‘easy’ way, around the side with a spongy lane the whole way back. Adam, Liam, Angus and I were in the first lot to make it back to the bus, and we almost thought we’d lost a few, anxiously waiting for them to come around the corner.
Luckily our accommodation for the night was at the former Great Western Railway Hotel, now the BlackSheep Backpackers, just down the road in Abergavveny. Similar to my living quarters, pub on the ground floor and hostel upstairs and down. Kenny knocked back a Brains, the local Welsh beer, in less time than it took Lija to get a drink and she was only second in line to him. I must say, I’ve never finished a cider so fast, we were all needing something cool after that hike. Kenny’s words were, we’ll sort out the rooms later, grab a drink and relax first. We were the only group in there apart from the locals so we sat around with drinks, our bags dumped all over the pub. They brought us snags and chips and we hawked them down, watered but unfed as yet.
Once stuffed, literally and in all senses of the word, we freshened up (Kenny told us his mum taught him all ladies would be happy travelling so long as you tell them where the washrooms are – too right) and went back downstairs to the tunes of Tanky. A big man, with a few teeth missing, appropriately nicknamed, but damn he could belt a tune out on karaoke. In between our musical talent, we asked him to sing Johnny Cash, Elvis and Jimmi Hendrix. If you’d closed your eyes, you could have been listening to those artists yourself.
The rest of us had the karaoke thing downpat. Loud songs, off-key singing, ramblings with the microphone, and forgetting to watch the words on the screen when you don’t actually know them. But it was a good night and we slept damn well after that hike.
Sunday
We were promised a full English Breakfast an hour after driving if we didn’t want the mass produced cornflakes and toast at the hostel, so when we pulled up into the town of books, Hay-on-Wye, the first thing we went looking for was food. Most of the shops weren’t open yet as it was an Easter Sunday morning, but we found a nice little cafe that did a full English, complete with a pot of tea. Kiwi Fraiser sat with us chatting, before we headed off to check out Puzzleland, that was for my benefit, but once we went in it was treading on unsteady ground as Lija found the bear section. I nearly thought we’d have a re-enactment of Colchester, where Lija came home with the Leah bear, but luckily that wasn’t to be.
We had a few hours so we wandered through the antique shops, and the many many book shops – Bill Clinton was to have said that Hay-on-Wye is the Woodstock of the literary mind, bless ‘im. There were about 5 book stores to every 7 shops, but my favourite one was the last we went into. All of the books were fairly recent and selling for £1 – £3. I kept my spending to a minimum of two, although I (and Vecmamma) could have been like the grandma at the counter, who nearly bought the whole store – but just think how much she saved, 95% of the price in most cases!
Luckily we weren’t the last to get back to the bus – that honour fell on two other girls, who had to do one lap of the bus denoting a frog and an elephant. We stopped by another castle, which is pretty much what Britain is like, you can be driving along and all of us sudden out of the treetops is an old wall or a castle tower or the whole castle if it has been well looked after. Most are uninhabited structures fading away, but some have been strategically picked to be restored for tourists and students.
The view of the Pontcysyllte Aquaduct was just as amazing as the view from it. A structure that took ten years to build from 1795, designed by Thomas Telford as his first piece of architecture, the aquaduct feeds water from the River Dee so the canal boats can cross the bridge with the towpath (for when the horses would pull the canal boats before motors, now a pedestrian footbridge) next to the trough. It is perfectly safe but that didn’t stop me from holding my knuckles and walking as though on a tightrope to the other side.
We stayed overnight in the Snowdonia National Park, with the highest hill Mount Snowdon. We were at a lovely little farmhouse where the wife ran the group bookings for accommodation while the husband looked after the farm. Once we saw the size of the chickens we added them to our mixed grill fantasy or at least the barbeque we were having that night for dinner. These chickens were huge – the size of a school backpack stuffed with books, at least. Their barbeque was perty fancy too, a little octagonal hut with a chimney and three different size grills you can flick on and off the coals easily.
We bought two packs of charcoal ‘just in case’ and a team was put together to cook the meat – patties, snags and chicken wings – lay out the tables, and butter the bread (Kelsey and I did a good buttering job). When it was finally ready these were the people who got to eat first, then whoever wanted to help with the dishes could eat second, and the bloody lazy ones could go last (in Kenny’s words)!
Our lovely hostess had also made us some salads and a pasta salad, so we all had enough for seconds. On reflection we probably shouldn’t have had seconds but we were absolutely starving because although the coals went on at 6pm, we didn’t eat till half past eight, and we had already started our drinks as we sat around chatting (we’d had a planned stop in Llangollen for drinks and nibbles as the farm was in the middle of nowhere) so the idea of seconds appealed at the time.
Everyone disappeared for a while, myself included. I went and fell on my bed feeling that extra patty sitting on my stomach, and after I sent a reply text to work I managed to fall asleep without thinking about it. I woke up half an hour later feeling better and vowing never to have seconds again, and went out to sit in the little hut warming around the fire. When we were down to a group of about 8 of us, Kenny literally chucked the second bag of charcoal on the fire and we sat waiting for it to collapse. He had to help it along a bit with his lighter, and within 5 minutes the whole bag crumbled into a heap and began to heat up.
Monday
That was the snuggest bed I’ve slept in for a while. We passed the border into England and reached Chester by 10am, a nice sized town where we stopped to walk around the Roman wall, see the beautiful cathedral and grab some lunch (ham, cheese and pineapple toastie for me) before jumping back on the bus. This was the critical day, as all the workers would be heading back to London for an early start, so we had to have our timings right to miss having to sit in crawling traffic back in to the city centre.
Every man and his dog decided to go to Stratford-upon-Avon today, including us. It was totally opposite to my visit last month, which was cold and quiet with a magical Shakespearean aura. Today was busy, chaotic, sunny and fast. Kenny took everyone on a whirl wind taste of Stratford in the hour, from birthplace to deathplace and the main statues in town of Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth, Hamlet and a few others, right back onto the bus.
We hit the road, snoozed back to London, I read, and just before we hit the outskirts Kenny told everyone to grab pen and paper for the quiz. Gee, and we thought he was joking! There were thirty questions but a few had extra points, maybe another 5 or so, and he didn’t do easy questions. How high was Mount Sugarloaf? 596metres. When was Shakespeare born and died? 23 April. Who was playing at the Millenium Stadium when we were in Cardiff? Toulouse and Cardiff Blues. Lija and I both managed to get 25 points, but different questions right/wrong. We were in the top 5 I think. Angus, the lawyer, got the highest at 34 ½ and won the fabulous Welsh flag that we carried all over the country. Kenny was really impressed because he said most of his groups don’t get over 19 (our lowest score) and some finish with 6 or 7 points. My favourite question was what happened in 1664, 1665 and 1666. The answer? Kronenberg, the plague and the great fire.
Tags: Travel
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