Day 11
Moylgrove to Newport: 9 miles
Friend of the day: Ghost, the Graveyard Cat
Reason: You followed me around a graveyard for an hour, but tried to look like you weren't following me - true cat-style
So, if you don't know the movie Cool Hand Luke, or aren't otherwise familiar with southern U.S. 1960s chain gang slang (of which I assume Cool Hand Luke was an accurate portrayal), the title of this blog post means it was freaking hot today. Much like a new chain gang member cutting grass in ditches the side of the road with some kind of giant rake thing, I was afraid of getting bear caught (i.e. falling down unconscious from heat exhaustion).
Possibly you're skeptical that it was actually hot here. After all this is Wales, which might as well be Ireland, where everyone who knows anything knows it's cool and rainy literally all the time. And didn't I literally wake up freezing every morning I camped last week, and made P bring me the Cleveland Browns fleece blanket and long underwear? Well, maybe it's not usually hot. But it was absolutely 100% roasting today. A day in May.
I heard one woman tell a guy who was gardening in her yard with no shirt on, who looked like he was covered in an inch of sweat, that this was Spanish weather, not Welsh weather.
I asked the guy at the awesome Art Coffee Shop in Cardigan how often the weather got this hot - and he said never. Then he ran off to buy a loaf of bread from the baker down the street because someone (somehow unexpectedly apparently) ordered toast with their breakfast. He came back about 10 minutes later and the customer was really starting to wonder where his toast was.
An older man I met on the trail said he had been hiking in Pembrokeshire during the drought of '76 (I nodded and pretended I had any idea what he was talking about) and said that this was just as bad, if not worse, than how hot it had gotten then.
It was easily nearly 85F or 90F degrees, and with probably 90 percent humidity. Which of course meant two things. First, I was sweating like a pig, if pigs sweat primarily from their faces like I do. My body seems to really like to expel all the sweat from my face rather than any other part of me, which is really disgusting for everyone involved. So I had again reinvented my Welsh flag headband. Last seen as an armsock to protect my arm from sunburn, it was now a throat covering to prevent both further sunburn and the passage of sweat from my head to my shirt.
On a separate note, everything I own is really starting to smell wonderful, let me tell you.
But second, it meant that the views were gorgeous. Perfectly blue skies, sun reflecting (extremely painfully) off of all the sea surrounding me on all sides, meant that whenever I could open my eyes without gobs of sweat dripping into them, the scenery was great.
How to spend a morning in Cardigan
Since I had only hiked Cardigan-Moylgrove yesterday, today I took the bus to Moylgrove. Of course there were only three a day - I had some grocery shopping to do so I didn't want to take the 9am bus, and so I had a few hours to kill before the 12.30.
I spent these doing the entirely uneventful and totally boring things that make up (in my opinion) 75% of travelling - i.e. waiting. I always think it's funny that people find travel so interesting when so much of it happens while sitting around waiting for busses.
In this case, I went to the aforementioned Art Cafe, where I planned to stay longer, but then I suddenly got the idea that the people at the table next to me were firefighters, and given yesterday's situation I thought it better if I just got up and left before someone recognized me.
I then went where anyone would go next - to the graveyard. Or more specifically, to the 19th century graveyard with the super-shady willow trees and cool breezes running off the river and the cool stone walls easily (and of course respectfully) sat on far more comfortably than the benches in the sweltering heat. I knew it was a good idea when a cat had the same idea for how to cool off that I did (although the cat's idea involved more spreading himself out and rolling around on various gravestones, where my sense of propriety made me think that was a bad idea, even if a particularly comfortable-temperatured one).
But eventually I got impatient and went to the bus stop just to make sure the bus that was already there wasn't the bus I wanted. I was told by the bus driver that the bus I wanted was half the size of a normal bus, had decorations all over it (including it's name the "Poppit Rocket") and that I would, and I quote her here "have absolutely no street cred left at all if anyone saw me getting on that bus."
I of course was unaware I ever had any street cred, much less Welsh street cred, so I wasn't concerned.
Anyway, me and my closest 70 something and teenager friends eventually caught the bus (the former taking it home, the latter going to the super-popular "Poppit Sands" Beach), and I of course was the only person getting off at Moylgrove.
Not much happened
I was kind of annoyed because I had to add an extra mile to my hike because Moylgrove is actually inland, but it was the closest I could get. So down I went to the secluded sheltered inlet that used to be a port for the inland town, and is now (I think) some type of lovely conservation area.
I won't go into much detail here, because really, almost nothing happened besides my nearly sweating myself into an early grave, as I went up and down and up and down and up and down the sometimes exceedingly steep hillside paths (I did see an awesome natural arch, and also the 'Witches Cauldron', but you can take a look at the pictures). That is, until about 3 hours in, I ran into what I termed in my head 'A Welsh Roadblock'. That is to say, the path I was on was blocked by 5 or 6 horses.
Normally, of course, you just walk around things like this. But in this case, they were all in a line on the path, the last one was directly in front of the gate I needed to go through, and the path cut across a ridiculously steep hill where I couldn't really go to the right around them without falling to my death.
I thought about going up to the next field, but the fence above the path I was on had two lines of barbed wire on it, so that seemed like a bad idea. So I decided to slowly, and quietly, try to make my way through them. They didn't move as I got closer, and some of them even seemed to close their eyes (maybe pretending I wasn't there), and so I thought I could maybe walk just a slight ways to my left toward the barbed wire fence and nudge around them without really touching them.
This seemed to work, and they didn't move and I even got a few pictures. Then I got to the end, and noticed that the last horse, a giant white one, was really only a foot or two in front of the gate. I couldn't see how I could open it without touching the horse. The horse was also casually holding up a rear hoof - I thought potentially preparing to take aim at me should I try to walk behind it.
I decided to try to ease my way behind the horse, and jump with all my might over the gate should it make the least movement. I looked at my hands and decided I needed them free, and so without thinking took my walking stick and flung it over the gate. Pretty much as soon as it left my hand I realized my mistake. The stick made a loud clattering noise when it hit the path on the other side, and the white horse whinnied, reared up a bit, and basically let's say started stampeding into the other horses down the path.
That honestly scared the heck out of me (I may have screamed a little), but it also conveniently solved the problem - the horse was no longer in front of the gate. I assume because of the heat, the horses had the shortest stampede in history and were just down the path (but I was just happy that they were no longer in front of me nor were they tumbling down the hillside), so I quickly slipped through and shut the gate while the white horse turned around to glare at me, I assume annoyed that he hadn't been able to get a good kick in.
And the rest is history
As I said, not really much else happened. It continued to be hot, I continued to sweat profusely. I was very excited to see the massive Newport Sands beach, overlooked (well in the distance) by the Pentre Ifan burial chamber, that I'd visited a few months ago.
I nearly got knocked off a path of bare rock by tremendous amounts of wind, I scuttled on a path through a golf course hoping not to be killed by a stray ball (and was flustered that I literally could not figure out for the life of me where any such stray ball might be coming from in the first place, it was like golfing anarchy), and of course I saw a random 6000 year old burial chamber that appeared to be taking up a lot in a suburban development. No really, frankly I'm surprised they put the swingset in another plot.
I headed quickly for what turned out to be a very pleasant bare-bones hostel, and am now drinking a well deserved cider and eating particularly good vegetarian spring rolls in a thankfully very cool stone pub called the Golden Lion in Newport.
Not an eventful day - but a good one.
