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| Tresaith. |
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| New Quay. |
The next day we visited the Vale of Rheidol. We started with Devil's Bridge, a really impressive place. Interestingly, the legend about why the first bridge was built (the devil built it for an old woman, of course he wanted her soul in return, trying to trick her - "the first living being crossing the bridge is mine!" - but the woman was to smart, sending her dog over the bridge first!) is very similar to the one I know from the Teufelsbrücke in Switzerland. There are many places called Devil's Bridge all over Europe. The one in Wales is special because it's not just one bridge, but three, the second built above the first, the third on top. It's amazing, as is walking through the gorge beyond it. Later this day we followed our guide book's recommendation and took a tour at the power station of Cwm Rheidol Reservoir. It's a hydropower plant, actually the largest in Wales and England. In our case, the 45-minutes tour was a private one as there were no other visitors at this time. We enjoyed it very much!
In Aberysthwyth, we planned the rest of our stay and decided to find a place somewhere in Snowdonia and go for day trips from there. Again, we were really lucky, we found the Fairhaven Guest House in Betws-y-Coed.Again we took our time to drive to our next destination, stopping in Dolgellau for lunch at T.H. Roberts Coffee Shop. They don't have a website, but I can really recommend their Welsh Rarebit (with leek)! And their coffee is fine, too. Later that day we stopped in Harlech to visit the castle and swim, the beach is just breathtakingly long and really beautiful. Harlech castle is a nice place, too, up on a rock above this great beach...
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| Harlech Castle. |
In the evening we arrived in Betws-y-Coed and checked in at the Fairhaven. This is by far the nicest place we stayed at in Wales (not Betws-y-Coed, but the Fairhaven!). It's a B&B, family-owned, but you stay in a separate part of the house. The bedrooms are really cosy and you can see that there's someone who really cares about their guests - lovely decorations, nice furniture and everything is clean and tidy. We felt at home from the very first moment. Betws-y-Coed is a village, not big, but because it's famous with tourists, there's everything you need (nice cafés, a supermarked, restaurants, and seven outdoor shops).
Well. It's time to write something about the Welsh language. I'm fascinated by languages, always have been, maybe that comes with being Swiss, growing up in a mult-lingual society. I don't know. Before I met my colleague O., I knew that there's not as many vowels in Welsh as in other languages. That turned out to be not exactly true, as the Welsh don't care about this lack, but take some consonants and use them as vowels instead. A "W" for example - they use it a lot and almost never in the way you'd pronounce it as non-welsh person. Irritatingly enough, street signs in the south of Wales are bilingual (English on top, Welsh below) - and street signs in the north tend to be bilingual (Welsh on top, English below). Welsh is nothing like the languages I know, but it sounds nice and friendly. What I like a lot are onomatopoetic words (and the word onomatopoetic =) - and there are quite nice ones in Welsh - and I really like this little video:
So - on our first complete day in Snowdonia, we scrambled up Tryfan. I didn't know there's a mountain called Tryfan in Wales and I never tried scrambling before, it's not what we usually do with our mountains in Switzerland. You may have noticed that I call the Welsh ones "mountains", although many people might make fun of them because they are not exactly high. But you have to take into account that climbing them means you start from sea level (more or less) and the peak is around 1000 meters higher. This is not to be underestimated. We might have higher mountains in Switzerland, but you can't start to climb at sea level. And climbing 1000 meters is not bad.
Well, we'd bought a guidebook for hiking in Snowdonia, and the last two tours in there were scrambles. They looked great and were advertised as suitable for "beginners", for people who like to hike but are not used to scrambling. While Monsieur used to go rope climbing, I'm not as experienced, but definitely not a beginner when it comes to hiking. We felt well equipped and the guidebook said it was an "easy scramble". We made it up there, and we had fun doing it, but actually - the "easy scramble" was not at all easy. I don't want to go into detail now, but I was wishing for a rope climbing up some parts of it, and I didn't allow myself to imagine what could happen. Yes, it is possible to scramble up there, but it's very much possible to fall and hurt yourself badly. At least now I know why Snowdonia Mountain Rescue is so busy. We met a family up there on Tryfan, they were not at all equipped for climbing a mountain and asked us for "the easy way down". I was shocked by how careless people can be.
But the view from the peak has been awesome, and Monsieur even climbed Adam & Eve, the two famous rocks on top of Tryfan - you can jump from one to the other. I wasn't able to climb up, I'm more the short-legged mountain goat type.
The next day the weather was not so nice and we decided to drive north towards Llandudno and Conwy. Both are probably nice places when the weather's fine, I remember them to be quite grey and a bit sad.
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| Conwy Castle. |
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| Llandudno. |
On our last full day in Snowdonia we decided to climb Snowdon. With its 1085m it's the highest mountain in Wales, and there's a lot of different routes you can take to the top (including the railway =). Walking up, we soon saw that we probably had started too early in the morning. The fog that surrounded us for most of the way up and while we were up on top had disappeared when, after eight hours, we returned to our car. It was a great tour!
The last day before returning home we spent on the road: back to Cardiff. Everything went well, after two weeks driving on the wrong side of the street (and sitting on the wrong side of the car...), Monsieur was used to it and it only took us a bit more than half a day to get back to Cardiff.
In the evening, we met O. again. He took us to zerodegrees for pizza and beer (really great beer I have to say!) and for another beer to Gwdihw. "Gwdihw" means owl, by the way, and it's one of the most beautiful onomatopoetic words I've ever encountered - It really sounds like an owl when they say it =)
I'm not going to say much about our trip back home, as it has been quite stressful (including a bus that was on the timetable but didn't run, half an hour delay of the first flight and running through Schiphol Airport in order not to miss the second flight - oh yes, and finding out in Basel that only one of our backpacks had made it, the other one was still in Amsterdam).
We really had a great time in Wales, we met a lot of incredibly nice people (no, I don't mean you, members of Cardiff Bus staff...), drank wonderful beer, climbed mountains and swam in the sea more than once, something we absolutely didn't expect. Wales is _so_ beautiful! We'll be back, some day, we still want to cross over to Worm's head and visit St.Govan's Chapel (thanks to the british Army for not letting us do it this time...). So much more to see there!
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