Katy – Wales

Wales is gorgeous, I almost want to wait until I am on a computer where I can upload photos to talk about it because words just don’t do it justice. However, I’ll go ahead and get started and catch up with the photo’s when I can. Everything is green and rolling and we had clouds adding big puffy white accents to the sky during our stay. It’s almost like looking at a big quilt with the hedges and fences outlining the square fields in patterns across the hills. 

It only took two hours on the trains with one half hour connection to get to Abergavenny from Bath, which put us at our hostel, conveniently located right across the road from the train station, at one o’ clock. We dropped our luggage off, explored the premises a bit – I highly recommend this particular hostel it has a wonderful comfortable homey atmosphere that was wonderful for the entire stay, and then set off to walk to the town center. There was a tourist information center and Brecon Beacons National Park Center (sharing the same premises) at the very beginning of High St where we spent awhile looking at maps and information. Bryan agonised for a good twenty minutes on whether or not to buy a topo type map of the area for £6 before finally giving in and getting it. We went off down High St to see what there was to see and find the library next. The library is almost all the way through town down a little side street off the high street, really easy to find. Unfortunately, it was Saturday and it closes at one o’ clock on Saturday. By that time we were starving so we stopped at a little fish and chips place and I had my second experience of British fish and chips (luckily it was better than the first experience when I was disappointed in the fish – I expected anything that deeply fried to taste better than it did). It was between four and five o’ clock when we got back to the hostel and met some of our fellow hostel stayers. A father son duo (father of fifty-nine and son of twenty) backpacking around Wales for a two week vacation together. The son had just transferred from McGill College in Canada to the University of Austria in Vienna (or possibly the University of Vienna, I can’t remember) and was spending his summer in Austria. They were really interesting and we chatted for quite awhile, they made dinner and generously invited us to eat with them and we just kept chatting, eventually going to bed at one-thirty. Consequently I didn’t get up until nine o’ clock the next morning and we got a late start. We eventually set off to walk up Sugarloaf, the “mountain” to the north of Abergavenny – stopping to get some stuff for lunch at Tesco’s, the only local grocery store. We learned from the checker that since it was Sunday Tesco’s was only open until four, it was a little before noon at that point and I wanted to make dinner for everybody that night and reciprocate for the dinner from the night before. That gave me four hours to hike and then get back to do the grocery shopping. I’m a very slow hiker, so I figured I would hike as far as I could get by two o’ clock and then turn around in order to have plenty of time to get back and shop.

It was a beautiful hike, the first bit walking through the town was almost level and pretty easy walking, with lots of scenic houses and cricket grounds. We eventually left the houses and started walking through fields and seeing cows and horses – in one case hiking around the horses through a field, crossing stiles from one field to the next. Part of the hike was also along a narrow little road with tall hedges on each side so all you could see was a little slice of sky above. When we started walking up the actual hill it was through the Deri fach, which means small oak woodland. It was lovely but we were ready to stop and eat some lunch and a bit astounded that there were no logs or anything anywhere to sit on, and the ground was wet and not conducive to sitting on comfortably. We had almost given up hope of eating lunch when a bench finally appeared on the side of the path.

I was looking forward to coming out of the woodland and getting into the greenery on the top of the ridge, I wouldn’t have been so naive if I had had any previous experience of gorse and bracken. Bracken looks like ferns, very tenacious, nasty overgrowing ferns that you have to fight your way through, making you think longingly of having a machete to hack them to pieces. The way we were going had been a path at some point in the distant path and enough of the trail remained that we kept going. As we kept walking up the bracken got shorter and shorter and started being interspersed with heather, which is a really pretty plant of deep green with light purple flowers. It was getting on toward two o’ clock by then and I was wondering how far I would be able to go, the point of Sugarloaf was right in front of us, getting closer and closer with every step but still far away. At first I thought I would just see how close I could get to the top, but then I was so close to the top I wanted to get there and a) be able to say I’d hiked to the top and b) see the views from the top. They were unbelievable, definitely worth the hike. And there was a constant buffeting wind at the top that was really refreshing after making it up the last steeply vertical stretch. We stayed up there for about twenty-five minutes resting and looking at all the different vistas, Abergavenny to the south and a ring of other mountains (I think the Black Mountains) to the north. There are sheep everywhere on Sugarloaf, even the top, it’s actually kind of cool to be walking up a mountain/hill and have sheep bleat at you randomly while you walk. We didn’t start walking back down until three o’ clock and since I couldn’t keep up the technique of “falling” down the hill at all the steep stretches to get back to Abergavenny, it was after four by the time we were back among the houses. However, we had taken a wrong turn and didn’t know where we were when we came out in the town again from the residential area. Fortuitously I went into an Esso station to ask how to get back to High Street and discovered the station stocked a small number of groceries, enough to come up with an imaginative dinner. Pasta, a chicken dish (which I unfortunately can’t remember the name of) which turned out to be an Indian dish and very very spicy, bacon, canned peaches, canned mandarin slices and canned corn. It actually all went together really well, I mixed the pasta (called Eliche) with the bacon and the chicken dish for a sauce and then served everything else on the side with some bread and cheese as well. The dad actually ate enough of the spicy pasta dish he started sweating, I was shocked when everything got eaten – I was sure there would be extra. The guys went up and played pool after dinner, Bryan kind of got hooked on it he said. He and I played again a couple of nights later and he had actually gotten pretty good in just the one night of playing, I’m a really bad player and he beat me handily at two games. We went to bed pretty late again that night and I got up again just in time the next morning to say goodbye to our dinner companions when they left to catch a train to Paddington Station.

Since I was once again a bit sore from hiking the previous day, I took that day off and made one trip to Abergavenny to spend a couple of hours at the library writing posts and then did the delayed grocery shopping. Taking everything back to the hostel to put it away before going back to Abergavenny to spend the afternoon just walking around and then walking back again in the rain when the clouds finally broke. Bryan didn’t get back from his hike until around seven, although I learned he had actually just hiked up Sugarloaf again and then discovered at the top that the bread he had with him had started molding and the ham didn’t smell quite right – he fed either just the bread or both to the sheep and then came back to Abergavenny since he didn’t want to try to hike any farther on an empty stomach. And then spent an undemanding afternoon, on the same empty stomach, reading in the library until they closed. He had located a book there that he wanted to buy in Bern but forced himself not to because it was a little too expensive. He was starving when he got back and practically scarfed up the bread, apple and cheese I sliced up for an appetizer. We managed to go to bed a little earlier that night, but by now we were in the habit of sleeping in and didn’t get up any earlier.

I’m running out of time so our final day in Wales will be the next installment.

We’re in London now and a bit overwhelmed by the number of things we want to cram into the four days we will be here – luckily a lot of the things we were hoping to see, specifically the British Museum, have free admission and it is pretty easy to decide which things to see when some are free and others, like Madame Tussauds, charge £20 admission. It’s going to be non-stop until we get on the plane next Monday.