Day 13
Goodwick to Pwll Deri: 9 miles
Curse of day: BT (the British Phone Company)
Reason: Really? Read on.
The Best Thing About the Morning were the Puffin Mascots
Staying in a hostel can sometimes be wonderful - and sometimes your roommates. . . Well, let's just say that this morning I slept particularly well, because there wasn't someone in the bunk bed attached to mine who 1) coughed repeatedly in the night so hard that it shook the bed, 2) got up ten times to go to the bathroom during the night, again shaking the bed, 3) stayed in bed past checkout time making anyone else using the room with the lights on impossible, and, possibly most importantly, 4) farted (rather, shall we say, emphatically farted, like she had a proximity alarm set or something) dangerously adjacent to my face while I was being forced to crawl around the bottom bunk of a bunkbed with someone else in it to find my things in the dark in the teeny tiny space left to me thanks to said bottom bunkmate.
None of these things happened to me the second night I slept here. I have nothing to say either way about the first night, except the 'what happens in the shared hostel room stays in the shared hostel room' code goes out the window when you refuse to recognize there is someone else in the bed attached to yours. I don't care how posh your accent is.
Anyhoo, I woke up after my second night feeling refreshed, and like I was ready to hit the road again. Of course I'd booked this hostel far in advance because of the Bank Holiday, and so I was actually now a day behind hiking where I was physically sleeping, having left off in Day 12 in Goodwick. So I had to take one of the three busses a day that stopped at the out of the way bus stop a 20 minute walk down the hostel's access road.
No problem, 10.16 is the perfect time for a bus. And look at me, I scheduled to call P at 10am (so my personal little Aberdyfi travel control center could tell me whether I had a place to stay in St. David's, how the luggage transfer was going, and where to go the next day, as I have no phone and there's absolutely no signal and no wi-fi here, as it is pretty remote) - and there's a phone booth there. How perfect.
I get to the 'phone booth' at 10, get out my calling card and P's number like it's 1995, pick up the phone, and there's no dial tone. And then see the sign saying they are removing this phone because of lack of use. Then see the qualification that if I'd like to know where the nearest phone is, I should call x number.
Seriously BT? I'm out in the middle of nowhere, and I'm resorting to a pay phone, and you think it makes sense to tell me to find another payphone they should call some number to find? Should I just yell the number out really loud into my hand while holding my thumb and pinky out and someone will tell me where a phone is?
While I can guess that not many people used this particular pay phone - I can also guess that those who did actually really needed it. So it's great that you have a faux pay phone that doesn't actually connect to anything, so people in distress can get the full range of emotions, from that small glimmer of hope to the complete 'what am I going to do now' sense of desperation. Don't just get rid of the phone booth, just disconnect it to make sure people still think they could in theory use a pay phone if their mobile ever lit on fire.
Of course I wasn't in terribly desperate need, but I felt bad that P thought I'd be calling, as on the other end he doesn't get a signal in the house so I imagine he was standing on the street corner waiting for the phone to ring. I also didn't have any idea where I was supposed to be going tomorrow, and now wasn't sure how I was going to get in touch with him since his phone would just go through to voice mail if he stayed in the house today.
I'd say I was terribly worried, except I'd be lying. I pretty much immediately resigned myself to the fact that this was going to be annoying, but could turn it into a fun goal of the day, since I didn't have much else to do besides walk anyway. Also I turned any anger entirely against BT and the response to technology in general, where it belongs. But maybe I'll explain all that (as well as explain the reason why I'm not carrying a mobile phone with me - which of course would have negated the problem) some other day. Like one of the days where I have to walk past oil refineries and waste treatment plants near Cardiff.
Sufficed to say, the bus came, it was decorated with anthropomorphized puffins dressed in baseball hats, shorts and striped shirts, and I got on and watched the first three young American women I've seen in a long time as they tried to use their phones to figure out which stop they were supposed to get off at, and rather than just ask the bus driver to be sure to let them know where they were supposed to get off, waited until someone else (me) asked the bus driver if there wasn't a stop with a grocery store at it that I'd seen yesterday to themselves ask the bus driver a question about where they were going (answer: many, many stops back, and the bus will come back the other way in half an hour).
Then I asked my way around to two non-working cash machines (I'd only had enough cash for bus fare to Goodwick on me, and there's no place anywhere remotely near the hostel to get money), finally found a third one that worked, and also found a working (albeit cobwebbed) phone booth where I left a message for P that I would call again at 5, then 6, then 7, until I got him. And I repeated in like 10 times in case the connection was bad. Problem solved. Of course I didn't know where I'd find a phone at any of those times, but that's just another goal to achieve today.
Onward, to 6000 year old backyard burial chambers and Strumble Head Lighthouse
Since I'd gone out of my way to find a bank machine, I then proceeded to get lost finding the trail (this is in answer to anyone who wonders how you can get lost on a path that follows the coastline). I did, however, take a trail that led me through an alley behind people's houses and eventually to three 6,000 year old burial chambers.
The monumental effect was lessened slightly by the laundry lines covered in very brightly colored underwear, but then I decided that that was just a good sign that Poltergeist was definitively not happening here. They might have built this housing on ancient burial mounds, but no one cheerfully washes underwear in color-fast soap, and then hangs it out in perfectly regimented rows like that if in the evenings the ghosts are talking to their daughter through the tv. So good for them.
Also, I don't know how to work this in to the plot here, but just then a woman carrying a giant turtle on a bamboo mat ran into me. It was certainly random enough that I feel like just throwing it out into the blog like this fits the whole overall feeling of the event itself.
And so on I walked, past an inexplicable British Gas giant silver bucket torch monument, out of sight of Goodwick, past more tumbling rock-scapes, past the monument that commemorated the point of the last invasion of Britain (by the French, as I mentioned yesterday) past a giant orange rescue boat racing out to sea, and then past a giant orange rescue boat towing a small yellow boat back towards the harbor. I saw seals that I thought were seals, seals that I thought were rocks but then ended up being really giant white seals, seagulls, a few west-coast Canadians (people, not seagulls), three men in wetsuits doing backflips off of sea cliffs, a lone man standing on top of a giant stone outcrop, and a forested spot filled with rope swings that could have been cute but creeped me out a little. And I saw one new flower that I hadn't taken 50 pictures of already.
When I got to Strumble Head Lighthouse a few hours later, the sun suddenly came out - it had been hot and humid, but cloud covered, all day. And I'm sure it would have been lovely in the clouds as well, but even in weak sunlight the clean white lines of the lighthouse on its inaccessible series of islands made a lovely picture. And it being a Bank Holiday, there were actually a surprising number of people taking said picture. Of course at the moment I'm used to seeing people in groups of two or three at a time - seeing 20 people at once seemed like a lot.
Another day, another night at the hostel
It was still another two miles from the lighthouse to the hostel, but somehow I got a burst of energy and pretty much jogged most of the way while listening to cheesy old Italian pop songs. When I got to the Pwll Deri area, the views approaching the tiny white building on the cliff were even more stunning than the views of the cliff from the tiny white building. Unfortunately there was still a bit of sea fog making the full view a bit difficult, but this is really a shockingly well set place to stay - assuming you don't need a phone.
Luckily for me, as I got their precisely at 5pm when I was supposed to call P the kind people of the hostel let me use theirs (with signal and everything!). And I'm guessing that's why I wasn't really worried in the first place - it all usually works out in the end here.
