Wales of a time

The four days over Easter we road tripped around again with Olly in his luxury new 2009 Audi. We arrived in Rhyl (top north of Wales next to the coast) just before midnight, and could barely tell that we were there. At night it looked much like any other place in Britain, the only exception was that people had a slightly different accent and road signs had welsh translations on them. We stayed the night at Olly’s flat and found he had the largest backyard we have seen since being here. I said to him that you could fit 12 London flats on that patch of land!

Easter Friday
The morning was a little wet, as expected with what everyone says about Wales. In saying that, everything is very green. We found Wales much like home with how green the landscape is, the space, the hills and sheep and gorse. It was a lot more like home than Ireland is, especial with their passion towards their number 1 sport, Rugby. And also the amount of fish and chip shops we saw.
The 1st stop of the day was a place called Llandudno (Ll is pronounced with a C)(the welsh have a lot of L, G, D, and F’s in their words and a lack of vowels). It was very much like Brighton, a packed old seaside town with colourful houses on the waterfront and a Pier. After checking out the pier we climbed a hill near by overlooking the North Atlantic Ocean. We then headed for Conwy to check out the old walled city and Conwy castle next to the river. All I can say is that it was the best castle I have seen so far in our travels.

Conwy Castle- was awesome to look at but I didn't manage to get a photo from outside!

The design and location was awesome and beats any of the castles we have seen in Ireland and England. Next was a quick visit to a place that has 58 letters to its name called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. It was a quick stop just to get a photo of this town’s name! It actually translated to ‘St Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio of the red cave’. The next stop was Beaumaris castle, and I tell you that these Welsh knew how to build nice looking castles. This was another unused medieval castle ruin, but the fact that you could walk inside the walls of the castle was pretty cool. It was amazing how the light just disappears when you enter the walls, like going into a cave. Smelly and damp like a cave to, and also had interesting long drop toilets…
We checked out the town of Beaumaris with UK’s oldest house, and then checked out a 6th century old monastery we spotted in the distance. Caernarfon castle was next on the list. Unfortunately it was closed. But being considered highly recommended because it was one of the worlds best medieval castles, we figured it wouldn’t have been as cool as the last two castles, as this one would have ha d a bit of money pumped into it to from tourism to flashen it up. Never the less it was cool looking from the outside.

Day 2
We got up early, by our standards, to climb Mt Snowdon in the famous Snowdonia national park. Mt Snowdon is 1000+m, the highest mountain in Britain and Wales (not including Scotland according to the Lonely planet book, because Scotland does have higher mountains and this fact would devalue the great Mt Snowdon…). For us Kiwis, we’d consider it a big hill, but we found we couldn’t really treat it as this. Everyone look over dressed in mountain gear for an oversized hill, while a friend of ours mistakenly did the hike in jandels and shorts! It took us over two and half hours to get to the top along a rocky track, but the view was worth it. It was amazing watching the huge line of English and Welsh make their pilgrimage up there. We realised afterwards that we haven’t ever climbed anything this high before…wow….

View of the lakes on the way up Mt Snowdon

Finally at the top of Mt Snowdon

View from the top - 1000+m Mt Snowdon

Day 3
Understandably we started the day off being quite tired and finding muscles we didn’t realise we had. We headed towards south Wales via the supposed beautiful west coast (the awesome white sand beaches we could spot from the Plane going to Ireland). We stopped off at a west coast town for lunch and were impressed by the pastel coloured houses in the town, but disappointed by the ugly stone beach. We had a stopover to check out a recreation of some ironage village. We then made our way down to a small town called Fishguard and had a quick look. It did get prettier. Next was St David’s, named after Wales most well known patron saint, equivalent of St Patrick for Ireland, and St George for England. We then drove to the nearby White sands beach where it actually was sand and beautiful. Unfortunately we had run out of time to see anymore of Pembrokeshire’s famous coastline. It looked like Coromandel without the Pohutakawa trees.

Cool waterfall on the way south

Recreated Ironage Village

Finally! A sand beach!

We had to find accommodation on the last night in Wales, but the selection of cheap hostels or any hostels at all were minimal compared to Ireland. We discovered why as we drove around; there are heaps of camping grounds. It seemed that every 5 minutes driving you’d spot a camping ground. We settled for a hostel near Tenby, an old army barracks.

Day 4 – Easter Monday
We enjoyed a traditional Welsh cooked breakfast at the hostel that morning, finding it was no different to an English, Irish or a Scottish breakfast! We headed towards Cardiff, stopping off to check out Wales 2nd largest and ugliest city, Swansea. We travelled inland and found the country side to be really beautiful as it was coming into spring. It was interesting to see how greener it was in the south compared to North Wales. The country side was stunning, as it looks like our green North Island without pine trees, but with nicer green trees and shrubs. We eventually got to a place called Tintern, which featured a cool run down old abbey. We headed to Cardiff afterwards and saw the Millennium stadium from the outside and Cardiff castle from the outside. It was the cost of Cardiff castle that kept us out. So we sat outside it and waited for our train. We didn’t find Cardiff very exciting at all, it was plain, quiet and dirty, but this could have been due to the fact that it was Easter and no street cleaners had been.

Tintern Abbey

Jam in the Abbey

Outside Cardiff Castle

A spring in our step

Things are starting to warm up here. We have put away the winter coats and gloves now, but there is still a bit of chill in the air. Summer is around the corner!

We have been to one of Gordon Ramsey’s Restaurants for our 4th year wedding anniversary. We found it to be nice, but not fantastic….although we wished we could have afforded a Michelin star one.

Dining at a Gordon Ramseys Resturant

We have also checked out the Cambridge vs Oxford boat race, which is a big national event, and it happened to start just down the road, where we stayed with my cousins, Putney Bridge. We watched the start, all of 2 seconds of it and then went back to the pub to watch the rest of the 16 minutes. It was bit of a non event watching it live, but an excuse to go enjoy the spring sunshine.

We have had to live through the G20 protests/riots, which were hyped up by the media. Because Jam and my companies were in central London we were told to dress down in mufti. It was quite cool that morning when I switched the telly on to see that Obama was arriving at 10 Downing Street just down the road. Nothing really serious happened, just a bunch of people angry at the greedy banks for stuffing other peoples lives up, which is fair enough.

Press and crowd waiting for Obama

The hockey season has ended and our team managed 2nd in the league, so promotion for next year…although I didn’t manage to contribute any more than 5 games this season! We went to my clubs end of season hockey ball, and it was one of the most awesomest nights ever. One thing I love over here is that when the brits get dressed up for an event, they do it properly. Black tie actually meant proper black bow tie and dinner suits. Had to spend a bit but everyone looked fantastic!

Now we’re looking forward to Wales for Easter.