Pugsworth in Wales
My time in Wales began with another riding adventure, I arrived by train in Rhyll on the north coast at about 5:30 with about 10 miles to ride to my host for the next two nights. It took ages though to find a phone that worked so by the time I set off it was already beginning to get dark. After a couple of wrong turns it was completely dark when I got to Denby and I still had to find my way through the town and another three miles beyond. This took a few more wrong turns and by the time I was on the right road out of town I was well overdue and now riding in small country lanes with no street lights in the pitch black, an erie feeling when you´re riding off the beaten track where you´ve never been before. Ultimately it´s a recipe for getting completely lost, which is what happened. After riding around for about three quarters of an hour looking for the right turning, and going through the same very steep valley a few times I started knocking on doors to ask for directions, but no one was home. When I did find someone they had no idea of the address I was looking for. They only remaining thing for me to do was to keep going, so I did and just when I thought I´d run out of options a car pulled up beside me. It was my host Ron, so I accepted the lift and all was well in the end.
The adventure of getting there proved to be well worth it though and I had a great couple of days again enjoying a family environment, this time in the context of a small farm holding. There wasn’t much to see in the local area so I spent my time learning about there way of life raising two young boys and managing the farm. Ron also works as a traditional timber framer, building houses etc without nails and it was interesting to see how this was done and help him apply limestone plaster to the wall of a garden shed. The ride back to Rhyll was much more enjoyable, leaving in daylight. From there I rode along the north coast of Wales to Conway Bay (a great bit of bike track along the coast on a fine day), caught a train to Bangor and then another nice bit of riding across a spectacular channel to the isle of Anglesey, the northwest tip of Wales and a world of its own.
On Anglesey I stayed with some old family friends from our time in Papua New Guinea who I had not seen for 13 years! It was great to catch up on old times and Chris who had always been a fan of animals took me to work with him at the local rubbish dump. His job is to prevent the seagulls from landing on the tip – using a hawk and a peregrine falcon! So that was a bit of fun watching and helping him train and exercise the birds, including one kill which the hawk made towards the end of the day. Apparently it is mandatory for all tips in Britain to have some sort of seagull deterrent and employing a couple of falconers is a pretty effective way of doing it. The seagulls are never far away but it was actually a matter of hiding for while so they would come close enough for the hawk to get a kill where we could collect it afterwards.
From Anglesey I rode south past Caernarfon’s impressive castle and into Snowdonia National Park. I’d heard many good things about Snowdonia but there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself. The mountains are beautiful, rugged and green with streaks of purple, red, orange, yellow etc. There were little mountain towns like Beddgelert that reminded me of Bright. It was getting a bit cold on the bike but the beauty of the valleys still made for some great riding and I did a couple of walks with one of my hosts.
Between Snowdonia and Pembrokeshire the scenery was not so spectacular. Wales is hilly all the way but in a steeply boring way. It’s a really bad place to ride a bike because the roads still mostly follow the pre-car walking routes which simply took a straight line up and down over all the hills, no matter how steep. One person even told me they used to bring early model cars here to test the power of the engine on some of the steepest slopes. I still enjoyed myself though, gaining a great sense of the more simple laid back life of people in rural Wales. I was also blessed to find a string of good books on rainy days. My reading ranged from ‘The story of language’, to a fascinating book called ‘the wisdom of crowds’ where the author put forward the theory that if you take a broad and diverse enough number of people and ask them to solve the same problem independently, the mean average of their solutions will be the best one. On the fiction side of things I spent a wet day reading the complete series of Tintin and found a book of short stories, called ‘Ah sweet mystery of life’ by one of my favourite authors Roald Dahl which turned out to be a sort of third part to his autobiography, telling odd stories from his latter life settled in Oxfordshire. I even picked a up copy of the New Internationalist and found an article on Gandhi written by two of my friends back home! So travel brings a diverse range of experiences, even on top of scenery and people. In fact browsing my hosts book shelves has become one of my favourite activities.
My time in Pembrokeshire though was definitely dominated by scenery though. The coastline is amazing, rugged rocks and cliffs for miles but changing all the time with different types of rocks and cliff formations. I also had a couple of nights in hostels, the first since Dublin after a string of four weeks staying with my family and then various hosts. From Pembrokeshire I skipped the south coast by train for a night in Cardiff. By this stage in the trip I’m well over castles and while, like Caenarfon, this was impressive, I didn’t bother paying to go in. The bay was nice though. Like many other old harbours it has undergone a recent ‘docklands’ development. I’ve now seen these in Melbourne, Tokyo, London, Edingurgh, Dublin, Cardiff, Barcelona and Alicante and can definitely say that Cardiff is the best one, the only one I’ve really liked actually. All the rest have gone completely overboard with fancy new apartment and office buildings and turned the place into another modern concrete jungle. Cardiff has new apartments and offices too and is not exactly a natural green area, but it has left a lot more open space, with pleasant paving stone designs that, like the new buildings retain some of the historical character of the area, with an effect that – well I liked it anyway, renovation without completely starting over.
And that was pretty much it for Wales. From Cardiff I spent a couple of days in the Brecon Becon Mountains, but was hampered from seeing much by weather and the highlight was joining my hosts at the local cinema club to see Hotel Rwanda, a film I highly recommend. Then it was back to England…
The adventure of getting there proved to be well worth it though and I had a great couple of days again enjoying a family environment, this time in the context of a small farm holding. There wasn’t much to see in the local area so I spent my time learning about there way of life raising two young boys and managing the farm. Ron also works as a traditional timber framer, building houses etc without nails and it was interesting to see how this was done and help him apply limestone plaster to the wall of a garden shed. The ride back to Rhyll was much more enjoyable, leaving in daylight. From there I rode along the north coast of Wales to Conway Bay (a great bit of bike track along the coast on a fine day), caught a train to Bangor and then another nice bit of riding across a spectacular channel to the isle of Anglesey, the northwest tip of Wales and a world of its own.
On Anglesey I stayed with some old family friends from our time in Papua New Guinea who I had not seen for 13 years! It was great to catch up on old times and Chris who had always been a fan of animals took me to work with him at the local rubbish dump. His job is to prevent the seagulls from landing on the tip – using a hawk and a peregrine falcon! So that was a bit of fun watching and helping him train and exercise the birds, including one kill which the hawk made towards the end of the day. Apparently it is mandatory for all tips in Britain to have some sort of seagull deterrent and employing a couple of falconers is a pretty effective way of doing it. The seagulls are never far away but it was actually a matter of hiding for while so they would come close enough for the hawk to get a kill where we could collect it afterwards.
From Anglesey I rode south past Caernarfon’s impressive castle and into Snowdonia National Park. I’d heard many good things about Snowdonia but there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself. The mountains are beautiful, rugged and green with streaks of purple, red, orange, yellow etc. There were little mountain towns like Beddgelert that reminded me of Bright. It was getting a bit cold on the bike but the beauty of the valleys still made for some great riding and I did a couple of walks with one of my hosts.
Between Snowdonia and Pembrokeshire the scenery was not so spectacular. Wales is hilly all the way but in a steeply boring way. It’s a really bad place to ride a bike because the roads still mostly follow the pre-car walking routes which simply took a straight line up and down over all the hills, no matter how steep. One person even told me they used to bring early model cars here to test the power of the engine on some of the steepest slopes. I still enjoyed myself though, gaining a great sense of the more simple laid back life of people in rural Wales. I was also blessed to find a string of good books on rainy days. My reading ranged from ‘The story of language’, to a fascinating book called ‘the wisdom of crowds’ where the author put forward the theory that if you take a broad and diverse enough number of people and ask them to solve the same problem independently, the mean average of their solutions will be the best one. On the fiction side of things I spent a wet day reading the complete series of Tintin and found a book of short stories, called ‘Ah sweet mystery of life’ by one of my favourite authors Roald Dahl which turned out to be a sort of third part to his autobiography, telling odd stories from his latter life settled in Oxfordshire. I even picked a up copy of the New Internationalist and found an article on Gandhi written by two of my friends back home! So travel brings a diverse range of experiences, even on top of scenery and people. In fact browsing my hosts book shelves has become one of my favourite activities.
My time in Pembrokeshire though was definitely dominated by scenery though. The coastline is amazing, rugged rocks and cliffs for miles but changing all the time with different types of rocks and cliff formations. I also had a couple of nights in hostels, the first since Dublin after a string of four weeks staying with my family and then various hosts. From Pembrokeshire I skipped the south coast by train for a night in Cardiff. By this stage in the trip I’m well over castles and while, like Caenarfon, this was impressive, I didn’t bother paying to go in. The bay was nice though. Like many other old harbours it has undergone a recent ‘docklands’ development. I’ve now seen these in Melbourne, Tokyo, London, Edingurgh, Dublin, Cardiff, Barcelona and Alicante and can definitely say that Cardiff is the best one, the only one I’ve really liked actually. All the rest have gone completely overboard with fancy new apartment and office buildings and turned the place into another modern concrete jungle. Cardiff has new apartments and offices too and is not exactly a natural green area, but it has left a lot more open space, with pleasant paving stone designs that, like the new buildings retain some of the historical character of the area, with an effect that – well I liked it anyway, renovation without completely starting over.
And that was pretty much it for Wales. From Cardiff I spent a couple of days in the Brecon Becon Mountains, but was hampered from seeing much by weather and the highlight was joining my hosts at the local cinema club to see Hotel Rwanda, a film I highly recommend. Then it was back to England…
posted by James Tonson | 12:41 am
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