Day 95
Pontllyfni to Trefor: 6 miles
Song of the day: 'Pilgrimage' by REM
Reason: I'm basically hiking the ancient pilgrim route to Bardsey Island - as far as I understand it, I'm practically a saint at this point.
I realized something today. As I was walking, I suddenly realized that whether or not I like a place may be directly correlated to how difficult it is to get around in (or to) said place. So rural Italy, northern Maine, Zanzibar, these are places that are difficult to navigate but that I really like.
So what that means is I must really love the Llyn peninsula, where I'm starting to hike today. This tiny little peninsula used to be the home to Catholic pilgrimages to Bardsey Island (three visits equals a visit to Rome), and now is home to fields, cliffs and scenery. Oh, and it took me longer to get to the trail than to hike it.
To be fair, that's actually because I (knowingly) failed to book anything in advance during the last week of summer holidays, when there's also a giant music festival (Festival No. 6) in relatively nearby Portmeirion at the end of the week. Combine that with the facts that my back still hurts from Anglesey so I'm not willing to for real camp right this second, and that, again, this peninsula is basically farmland without any accommodation and you end up where I am - in a glamping pod in someone's backyard at the absolute most isolated end of the peninsula because that's what was available and as close as I could get, and did I mention I totally ripped my back.
Now, on the one hand - it's awesome. I'm living in my own little pointy-roofed shed in the totally crazy garden of a guy who makes furniture and timber frame houses literally at the end of the earth. It's isolated and lovely and my shower has a gigantic mosaic in it. On the other hand, the roads barely fit my two door car, and to get anywhere it's pretty much forever to get to even a secondary road. Also I didn't have a lot of choice, and I'm really not yet (in terms of walking) quite this far down the peninsula. Maybe if my feet didn't have gigantic blisters on them I'd be farther, but as it stands this is where I am.
So anyway, that's how I found myself driving 45 minutes to sit in traffic in Pwhelli, which by the way is still another 35 minutes to the town of Trefor, where I was parking and catching a bus to Pontllyfni (actually to Y Swan - which by the way is actually only 20 miles away, at the most), that, by the way, I had to wait an hour and 20 minutes for. I don't love the whole 'commute to the trail thing', but I didn't really have a choice. At the very least I'll be walking in to where I'm staying shortly. I hope.
So although I left home sweet pod at 10, I didn't actually start walking until 12:45. Lucky for me I hadn't planned too long of a hike today - because of a rather inconveniently placed mountain that makes transport along the next part of the walk even more difficult (I won't go into it, you'll just be confused), I decided to just get as far as I could around Trefor and tackle the elevation change (in the form of the highest point on the Wales Coast Path) tomorrow.
Oh yeah, and I'm walking on a highway
Oh, and did I mention that today's walk was largely along a highway? The A499 to be precise. The constant tremendous zoom of cars flying by a few feet away is always terribly relaxing.
To be fair, however, I couldn't really imagine a nicer highway walk. This has to be as good as it gets - the sea on one side, a giant mountain range rising up on the other, almost makes you forget the constant traffic cacophony. Almost.
But really the best part of this whole scenario is my feet. So like I mentioned two days ago, my shoes barely have any soles left, so all this walking on hard top paths has really been killing the balls of my feet - so I bought some inserts and other padding, which helped tremendously. But of course, with every action comes an equal and opposite reaction, and in this case that meant that my feet sitting a little higher in my shoe caused my heel to rub differently than it has for the last 90+ days, and thus, giant blisters on the backs of my feet.
So in addition to the other parephanelia under my feet I added blister pads to the back. And also duct taped both shoes because the left one is entirely cracked in half at this point and the right one has small pieces falling off and I keep finding relatively large stones shoved up where there are bits missing. Anyway, as soon as I started walking today I realized something was rubbing wrong on both feet and the blisters were being abraded - not good. Being the ever flexible solutions-oriented person I am, I realized I was wearing my really long hiking pants (for my British friends, I'm talking trousers, not my really long hiking underwear thank you very much). These hiking pants (again, not hiking underwear) appeared just long enough that if I tucked them into my shoes I could probably use them for padding too. And so I did, and continued along my way with both shoes duct taped and with my pants tucked into them. And although I look like I'm sleeping in the street, I don't care because it totally didn't hurt at all.
There were even things to see
Halfway along the walk I got to Clynogg-Fawr, a town dominated by the 16th century church of St. Beuno, built on his sixth century foundations (if you recall in Pembrokeshire, in the 6th century Wales pretty much had saints coming out of its ears). The church itself is pretty large - as befits the patron Saint of North Wales and a rallying point for thousands of pilgrims travelling to Bardsey Island.
It also befits the enormity of St. Beuno's most well-known saintly deed - mainly, saving a woman's life after a suitor, angry that she wouldn't marry him and instead wanted to be a nun, chopped off her head. So, you know, St. Beuno pretty much earned that sainthood, since saving the lives of ladies with no heads is a pretty big deal. If you're wondering she also became a saint, St. Winefride, because of course she did.
Anyway, the church itself is great - large arched windows letting in lots of light, an intricately carved 15th century rood screen separating the clergy from the parishioners, one of only two remaining Celtic sundials, and, my favorite, a whole wing devoted to informational signage.
In this case, most of the signage was dedicated to St. Beuno himself, the history of the Bardsey pilgrimage (the route I'm following is essentially the ancient pilgrimage route) - including 20th century pilgrimages, and the history of the parish. But there was one series which I found really interesting, and which I have to admit I'm not entirely sure I understood correctly. They were about Canada.
Specifically, a part of Canada just south of the Arctic circle, where three adventurers went to try to live one winter in the early 20th century. Guess what happened. I'll give you a hint - apparently the diary of the young Welshman on the trip ultimately gained a small amount of notoriety in Canada, and is compared with the diary of Sir Robert Scott, of Cardiffian South Pole fame.
If you guessed 'they all died' - yes, you win. From what I gathered, an 18 year old member of the local gentry went with his uncle and another adventurer to try to live in the Barren Lands (I think that's what they were called, and that I'm not confusing Canada with something George R.R. Martin says is North of the Wall) for a winter, while searching for radium for the Canadian Government. They hoped to survive on the caribou they could catch during the annual migration. Unfortunately for them they went too slowly and the caribou had left by the time they got there - and the 18 year old actually outlived the other two more seasoned adventurers by a month (I'm going to assume how that worked out, without being more explicit). When their corpses were found they also found a note that said 'in the stove' - which is where he'd put his diary.
Now, this was poignant on it's own. But then there was this other part, about someone else from the town finding out about a later expedition to recreate the same trip (assumedly without the whole starving to death part). This part I'm still not sure I understand what they were talking about. But let's just say for the next hour I played out a rather funny made-up scene in my head, between several American 'adventurers' and one Welsh guy in northern Canada in the late 1970s.
Welshman: 'Wow, I mean, it really is such a coincidence that I found out about this trip!'
American Guy 1 [Looking askance at American Guy 2]: 'Yeah, it really is. Totally. Hard to find good cover. . . I mean, good hiking companions these days. Glad you came along.'
Welshman: 'Hey, d'you see that over there? What's that shiny thing over on the horizon? There's no civilization up here - what on earth is that!'
American Guy 3 [nudging American Guy 4, while turning the Welshman in the opposite direction]: 'Shiny thing, what shiny thing? Here, Welshman, according to my charts, I think just before they died they went around this way over here. Here, let's go this way.'
Welshman: 'But the . . . Oh, ok.'
American Guy 4 [whispering into a walkie talkie]: 'Can you read me, over? May have made initial sighting. Red Delta 3, I repeat, Red Delta 3. Over.'
Twenty minutes later
Welshman [dragging along a protesting American Guy 3]: 'Hey guys - whatcha doing? What's all this?'
American Guy 1 [jumping up from a position of studying something close to the ground]: 'Huh, what?! Nothing. Making a fire. Or, ice fishing maybe. Ice fishing? Those guys, uh, ice fished, didn't they?'
Welshman: 'Well, yes, they did - but are we even over water right now? Hey, what's that you've got there on the ground? What does C.C.C.P. stand for?'
American Guy 1: 'Uh. . . Well, we don't know. We're totally just as surprised as you are buddy. [Nudging other American Guys] Right guys? What is this thing, am I right? [everyone nods slowly] Hey Welshman, what do you think it is?'
Welshman: 'I don't know, it looks like a plane, like something crashed here. . . But that can't be right. Hey, wait a minute, here's a crazy idea, did you guys hear about that Soviet satellite that fell out of it's orbit - oh my gosh, do you think that's what this is?!'
American Guy 1 [pushing a small box under his backpack with the toe of his boot]: 'Wow, maybe you're right! That could totally be it - what a crazy, uh, coincidence, finding something like that here.'
Welshman: 'What's a 'Geiger counter'?'
American Guy 1: 'A what now?'
Welshman: 'A 'Geiger counter'. That blinking thing you just pushed under your knapsack says 'Geiger counter' on it. What is it?'
American Guy 1: 'A thermometer. You know what, I think we should get going.'
Anyway, like I said, I'm not 100% certain what was going on in this panel - something about a local man in the later 20th century finding out about an American expedition going to Canada to recreate the original trip from the diary - and finding a crashed Soviet satellite that everyone was worried had gigantic amounts of radiation coming from it. I'm pretty sure that the above is not at all what happened (and in fact I'm fairly certain the story about the Welshman from town was separate from the Americans trip, I don't think he went with them, but it was kind of confusing) but I did amuse myself with an ongoing dialogue about the four American guys pretending a mass spectrometer had something to do with a Catholic denomination that worshipped the rainbow for like, the entire rest of my hike.
There were also gigantic mountains, a lovely beach, views back to Anglesey and a stiff short hike around a headland where I decided to walk backwards along a giant cliff so the downward pressure of my body didn't pop my blister - but mostly I was focused on amusing myself in northern Canada. I'll get back to reality tomorrow and focus on Wales (I promise, because the views here are stupendous!).
