Day 96
Trefor to Nefyn: 9.5 miles
Best spot of the day: Nant Gwytherin
Reason: It reminded me strongly of the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute. If FSI was made of cute stone cottages, and set in a gorgeous valley with stunning views of the aqua and teal Irish sea. But they both teach languages.
Back to the Mountain
So, I started the day in Trefor, which has a landscape dominated by the mountains of Snowdonia. Most close by are the three peaks of Yr Eifl, or 'The Fork' - the highest points on the Llyn peninsula. These peaks tower over the town, and of course I have to pass right over them. On the peak closest to the sea, you can clearly see an old quarry building. But the most notable manmade feature of the three peaks is Tre'r Ceiri, 'The Town of the Giants' at 1500 feet up on top of the second highest peak.
The Wales Coast Path actually cuts between the two peaks and thus doesn't go all the way up to Tre'r Ceiri, but you can see its outline from below. Apparently it was still inhabited during Roman times, and the difficulty getting to it means that there are still significant remains left. There's evidence of 150 hut circles - and some of the walls are several meters thick.
Everyone on the Llyn peninsula suggests you go there. As do I - but not from personal experience. Of course, not wanting to make the extra diversion off to the hillfort, I made do with walking down below. Down below still being several hundred meters up, and thus passing along the highest point of the Wales Coast Path. Even without seeing the hill fort, the views here were incredible. Although I was struggling with a camera that doesn't want its lens to open anymore, I still managed to get decent photographs. Once I got to the saddle, the views stretched all the way from Holy Island in one direction to the south coast of the Llyn peninsula in the other - and I could see several mountains stretching inland into Snowdonia National Park.
Cardigan Bay here I come
And passing through the saddleback, I finally felt like I was starting on the final leg of this walk. Three and a half months in, I could see (sort of) the area where I started. After Llyn, I just have to pass through the peninsula above the Mawddach Estuary, and then I'm on the peninsula Aberdyfi's on, and I'm done.
But I didn't have much time to think about this because a Welsh man saw me struggling to take pictures with my supremely broken camera and asked me if I wanted a picture of me with the scenery. Telling him just not to touch anything at all on the camera and maybe it would work, he got a decent picture for me. We then spent the rest of the walk down toward where his car was parked chatting.
Being immediately from the area, we talked a bit about how safe the Llyn Peninsula was. Apparently 'compared to Caernarfon', Llyn barely had any crime at all. Of course I hadn't realized Caernarfon was such a den of crime in the first place, but here apparently you could leave your car window open and nothing will happen (which I learned was true entirely by mistake the next day). We talked about how I'd planned my hike (I hadn't really was all I came up with) and how much history there was to Wales.
We talked about the nearby language school and I said how I'd wanted to learn Welsh but hadn't had a chance. When I mentioned the person in Caernarfon who'd apologized to me for speaking Welsh with his in his own home and I noted that if I were in Italy, I'd expect two people to speak Italian to each other, he laughed and told me that the 'English sometimes get paranoid' - which I thought was funny.
He was going a little bit too fast for me though - so I told him I needed to walk slower and held back. At which point his young son, of course, asked me what I thought about Donald Trump. When I asked him the same question back, he said he didn't know, but asked if I had heard that North Korea had shot a warhead over Japan - and he hoped we wouldn't be starting a World War III. He was 11. Maybe. So that wasn't depressing at all.
The FSI of Wales
We said goodbye at the top of the Nant Gwytherin Valley - this is the language school the father had been talking about. The valley itself is extremely deep - and it's ringed by what used to be quarries and quarry scars. Parts of the valley walls are forested, parts are sheer hillsides, and walking down the hairpin-turn road to the bottom had to be one of the most beautiful parts of my whole time on the Wales Coast Path. It was all purple and green and silver, fronted on a narrow strip of the Irish Sea, and every angle was beautiful.
So, Nant Gwytherin apparently means Vortigern's Valley - Vortigern being the Celtic king who made the red dragon the symbol of Wales. He'd asked his wizard Merlyn for help with a little Saxon problem he'd been having, and the wizard told him to dig up the ground near his castle. When he did, he found a red and a white dragon fighting. When the red dragon won, Merlyn told him that meant the Celts would win out over the Saxons. Since that point the red dragon has been the symbol of Wales, and Vortigern is supposedly buried in this valley.
As I mentioned, the valley is now home to a Welsh language school - and when I looked around, the green lawns and neatly organized quads of buildings really couldn't help but remind me of the Foreign Service Institute in the U.S., where our diplomats are taught languages and take other relevant courses. I guess there's just something about language schools - because this used to be a quarrying village (that really doesn't have terribly much in common with FSI, but I couldn't help but be reminded of it anyway).
I went inside to have lunch in the cafe, and enjoyed an Aberdaron crab sandwich and, with my trip coming full circle, the Cwrw Llyn Brewery Red Ale I'd loved when I visited the brewery here this winter. The fact that the latter was served in a hard-fought Welsh 'Peint' glass made it even better. As did the glass-fronted dining room overlooking a gorgeous Irish Sea view (something FSI clearly lacks).
People thought he was crazy, but apparently he got a small cadre of like-minded people who wanted to turn the crumbling village into a language school. Worried about losing a bid for ownership among several interested parties, his quest was helped first by BP being denied permission to store barrels there, and (likely unknowingly) by John Lennon. John Lennon, of course, seeing the plight of the local hippies, decided to take it upon himself to buy them land in Ireland to relocate to. So that obstacle removed, the founder's group bought the buildings, restored them, and have rejuvenated the area into a lovely place to learn Welsh, full of poetry, small statues and very interesting artwork. So thank you John Lennon. And probably the guy who started the language school. But for my mother's sake I'll say mostly John Lennon.
Once I'd finished up my lunch, I wandered down to the beach in front of the valley, which just kept getting more and more scenic as I went along, and as the clouds drew back to reveal blue sky and even bluer sea. Even the remains of the old quarry seemed picturesque against this backdrop (although I imagine it's a different story in winter).
Of course what goes down into a valley must come up out of a valley, so the rest of the walk was a little on the arduous side. But cresting the sheer hillside and quarry that backed the area was really worth it - the views were, like I said, still some of the best I've seen. Luckily for me, my camera seemed to want to semi-function here - or at least I managed to take about 200 pictures by manually trying to shove the focus into place - which stopped working almost exactly when I lost sight of Nant Gwytherin behind the hills. It took me a little while to walk off the red ale I'd had, and suddenly I noticed the sun was beating down harder than I'd thought - but after a few field walks, a tiny bit of forest and some navigation through very thick patches of mud, when I finally approached the end of the day (in Nefyn) I could see the peninsula with Porth Dinllaen on it in the distance.
I was really looking forward to walking into this picturesque scene tomorrow.
