Yes, this is a Duke of Edinburgh award hike account, and will as such, contain a long bitter rant about the horrendous conditions that Prince Phillip unwittingly surrenders hundreds of young people to every year, in the name of personal development. If you don't want to bother with all my complaining (yes, I'm a soft Southern woosie-boy) then skip to the summary, and be content with laughing at me.
If you are unaquainted with the Welsh countryside, then let me paint you a picture.
Imagine, if you will, an idyllic rural scene, with small farmsteads, sunny hillsides and friendly locals. Now, increase the height of each hill and depth of each valley by 200%, remove about 80% of the farms, pokerdot the scene with sheep, and sprinkle liberally with sheep poo, (which, let me assure you, takes so long to decompose, it seems like there are twenty times more sheep than there are, since foot and mouth prevention wiped out a substantial number last year.)
After you have added the sheep and poo, remove the sun, replacing it with some nice oppressive clouds and a thin layer of mist at about head height, coat the ground with dew, remove the green grass, and add tussocks of grass that have evolved the durability of granite. Soak the ground with sufficient water so the sheep are ankle deep in mud, and shower with rocks.
If you're still following, you have some idea of the background scenery to the story of my life of the four days from last Thursday to this Sunday.
Incidentally, if you have some sort of idea of what a glacial valley looks like (think U, not V) then you'll be better able to understand what I mean by steep-sided valleys later.
And if you have a rudimentary knowledge of Wales then you may be interested to know I was just a few dozen miles east of Aber, in the hills of the Plymlimon range.
It all began innocently enough on the Wednesday evening as the minibus drove into Dylife, and we set up our tents in a pleasant enough field by the road, joking amongst ourselves about the sheep poo, and wondering what tomorrow would bring.
We strode confidently down to the pub, and enjoyed our last proper meal in civilisation.
Thursday dawned bright and clear. But not in Dylife. In Dylife, it dawned like most Welsh days. It was foggy, chilly, and utterly unpleasant. We packed our tents up, and were ready for the road by 7:30. After some last-minute advise from our supervisors, we set off cheerfully, knowing that it was summer, and the weather wasn't likely to get worse (HARR HARR). Today we were walking 24km, the farthest of any of the four days, but it was the first day, and we were feeling fresh.
That feeling lasted all of an hour, before we came upon a small river valley up which we had to walk, and the path marked on the map had disappeared into the void. After climbing two fences, crossing a raging stream, and climbing the valley side, we eventually reached the crest of the hill. And then the rain began. Oh well, we thought to ourselves, we have waterproof jackets, trousers, rucksacks, and smiles (cheesy grin for the camera now, we all love PR) - its no big deal.
Four hours later, trudging along an ex-glacial valley floor we had changed our minds. It was lunchtime, and we were huddled under a rock outside an abandoned farmhouse trying to get food from our bags without getting our spare clothing pissed on. (btw, have you noticed, in life, literature and mythology - nothing good ever happens in a river valley? Nothing.)
We got lost. At that point, my soft nancy-boy feet were already hurting, and I came closest to abject misery than I have for a looong time. (Ah, my sheltered life)
Having found our way out of the valley of the damned, we spent twenty minutes finding a place to ford a river we needed to get across. Its an interesting fact that the Welsh seem to abhor bridges. I crossed more fords last week than I had even seen before in my life.
I ended up jumping a couple of metres (pack and all) onto some nice sharp rocks to half-way, and then wading the second half.
We climbed a short hill, and found ourselves in a forest, as planned. With no track to follow, which was not planned. We sat in a small woodland glade, which under different conditions could have been pretty, enchanting, and home to a respectably-sized clan of faeries. That day, it was home to a respectably-sized clan of small blood-sucking insects, a couple of rainbathing frogs, and six weary, footsore and bemused travellers.
Resorting to our very last method of escape - our navigation training - we took a bearing, and followed a path that would at least take us out of the woods.
Forty minutes later, having slogged up a wooded hill, knowing full well we were taking the wrong path, we emerged from the forest about a kilometer from where we should have done. We handrailed along the woodland edge, until we came to a stream which led to our campsite. This was a brilliant strategy but for three things: the 60° angle of slope which we had to climb down, the fact that the stream was buried in moss, and utterly invisible to the eye (but not, as it happened, to the foot, which found it rather successfully), and the trees, which made a direct path downwards very much an impossible task.
At length, we reached the bottom of the hill, found a place with more flattish grass and less poo that its surroundings, and put up our tents in the rain. Hiding in our tents, we praised the gas trangia cookers over their meths counterparts (they ran out of fuel before boiling water...), and set to with a lovely boil-in-the-bag chicken casserole.
The first day was over, and I think if the others had been anywhere near as bad, I would have gone home the next day. I was utterly fed up of walking, and too lazy to want to struggle on bravely.
The second day dawned as misty as the first, but with more promise of dryness.
A thought struck me: If I didn't do the next three days, I would have to do four days some time in the future. This was even less of an attractive prospect, and kept me going for a good few hours. I uttered a few hasty prayers to the Almighty to keep the rain off for the duration of the hike, and followed the group up the hill to where the minibus would meet us to free us of our rubbish bags.
At the summit, we were releaved of our rubbish, given fresh water, and had some blisters treated. This was a lengthy undertaking. And off we went again. This day was supposed to be a shorter walk, (only 20km) and spirits were high.
I can't claim to remember very much of Friday, because the human mind has an amazing ability to blank out periods of sustained pain, but I do recall crossing many many field systems, climbing one gigantic hill (is it a mountain at 1000 feet or 1000 metres? - this was 1000 feet exactly, and we went straight up the side.), and I do remember ending up on a track that led the final 3km to our campsite. At which point, the heavens opened as the can only in Wales. And possibly Ireland. God was evidently choosing to ignore my prayers, or rather, as the devout would have you believe - answer them in a way that you might not like (Me: please God, don't let it rain on me? God: RAIN RAIN RAIN)
And thus we trudged into the second campsite, high above a waterfall, under which it was suggested we shower. You gotta love this DoE humour.
After 48 hours without a proper lavatory, most of us at this point took use of a trowel, and discovered the pleasures of shitting outdoors, with a hole in the ground and a rock to hide behind. We had to wait for a break in the rain, but as soon as it arrived, we were out and mooning the sheep to relieve the pressure that boil-in-the-bag food can build up inside the intestines of healthy teenagers.
The third day dawned cold but clear, and with less mist that we were used to. Saturday was back to 24km again, and we were climbing the highest peak in the area (Plymlimon itself) as well, just before lunch. For the first time that week, the sun smiled on us as we climbed the hill in the morning, and we were filled with its radiant light, and the joy of being alive. Which did a little to counteract the now constant pain shooting through my feet with every step, as if every single nerve cell was ablaze with the heat of Hades.
After a few more hours of numb space where memory should be, and we reached a small forest which we had to cross to get to the foothills of Plymlimon. Oh well, no problem, there's a nice big track leading in, get to the T-junction, go left. Easy. Ho ho ho. How we laughed when the left turn led us right into the middle of the dense Christmas Tree plantation and stopped. Instead of going back, as would be sensible, we soldiered on, and decided to take a bearing to the edge, and follow the most discernable path to the edge. This turned out to be harder than it sounded, and a couple of people rediscovered their allergy to fir trees.
When we emerged with a triumphant shout, we found our supervisor, who had taken the correct route through the forest, and taken about six minutes to do the journey that had taken us twenty-five. After verbally abusing both him and the makers of OS maps for a good five minutes, we took a photo of the lovely scenery, now visible due to the unusual scarcity of cloud cover, and turned to walk up the ridge that led to the peak of Plymlimon. It was a surprisingly gentle slope, but its sheer length had us eager for a rest at the top. We took a few photos of the panorama of Welshness around us, and sloped off to the next hill.
The next few hours passed in a flurry of down-up-down-up-down-up, and we came upon another forest. No problems this time, as a clear, driveable path went right through to lunch. By this time, of course, we were running about an hour late, thanks to that previous forest, and a late start, but it mattered not because we were going to lunch at a picnic site with proper toilets!!
At least, that was the general feeling until the first rally-car shot past us on the single lane track we were walking along. By the time we had been knocked into the ditch by the fifth rally-car, we were beginning to get annoyed, and were regretting not learning the rudiments of Welsh, so as to be able to understand signs that say (for instance) "Keep out: Rally in Progress".
After lunch, we made our way across some more fields, and towards some more hills. Probably. I dunno, I wasn't really concentrating by then. Down some roads, keeping our minds off the pain with the every amusing "What country am I thinking of" game. You know, the one which gets really really tedious after about ten minutes, but you carry on playing anyway, in the hopes that someone will be interesting and choose some Caribbean nation nobody has ever heard of...
We had planned to pitch camp that night near a disused mine, but the local farmer was not in residence when we arrived, and in an astoundingly moronic piece of logistics, he hadn't been informed that we'd be coming through. So we were packed into the minibus and taken off to the campsite we stayed at the first night, in Dylife.
This meant our fourth-day route would be longer, but "easier" apparently. We had a good evening that day, and cooked outside for a change. Of course the warm weather meant that mosquitoes were everywhere, but some mozzy repellant and a smoke screen that could down a horse soon sorted them out.
On Sunday I woke at 4:30am, with water dripping from the roof of the tent onto my head. We had planned to rise at 5:30, so I huddled under my sleeping bag, and tried to keep warm for an hour. Then we awoke, emerged, and were ready to leave camp by 6:45 to complete the final 12km and reach the pub at the end by lunchtime.
After brushing the ice off the tent (no really! September 1st, and there was ice on the tent), we walked up the hill into the rising sun, watching the valley behind us flood with light as the sun rose over the hill. The weather was fine, and by the time we reached the summit, we were down to t-shirts and just one pair of trousers.
We skirted a forest, waded across a bog, then followed a road through some farms to the pub in Trefeglyws. The only other high point of that journey (which was marred by a now constant pain all the way up my left leg...) was a brilliant comment from one of the farmer's wives who spoke to us as we passed through her fields:
"I'm sure that's not a public footpath, I've never seen anyone coming through there before". - Which kinda summed up the popularity of Welsh hill-walking in my opinion.
We arrived at "The Red Lion Inn" at 11am, one hour before the pub opened for lunch trade. We took the opportunity to doff boots, and relax in the sunshine. We changed. We laughed. We wrote down the experience before our brain's auto-censor came in and wiped it clean. The supervisors turned up at 11:45 with our record-books signed up to say we had been through hell and survived. We laughed some more. We tentatively examined our feet.
We ate sausage and chips. We drank vast quantities of beer, and water. We got in the minibus. We recoiled from the smell of 6 sweaty, dirty bodies who hadn't washed for half a week. We laughed some more. We were going home.
We got back to school at about 19:00. The sun was just setting. I got home.
The past 4 days slipped into oblivion, and the last remnant of my trek now I'm typing this up on Monday night is two very sore feet. I'm still blaming my boots.
You think I'm exaggerating don't you. This is why I'm not joining the army...
If you stopped reading near the beginning, please, I beg you, start again now, as I attempt to summarise 4 days of pain, rain and not much gain in as few words as possible.
I have:
4 horrendously sore patches on my feet
3 weeping blisters
2 gaping friction wounds
1 sprained muscle
a very smelly sleeping bag, rucksack, rollmat, set of clothing.
a newfound respect for sheep.
substantially fewer plasters and painkillers.
I can nearly walk again now.
And the question you must be asking, as I surely was for a large proportion of the time: Why? Why? Why, why, why?
Well, I'm buggered if I know. The expedition is one of the five tasks required in order to be awarded the Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Award. The other four, though taking much longer, are very much easier. 18 months community service, 12 months of a "skill", and 6 months of a sport. And a week's residential course somewhere with people you have never met before.
All these I would do all over again in order to avoid another four days in the most desolate parts of Britain.
I think, to answer the question "why?", I must admit to the whole DoE exercise as being a way of point-scoring for universities. It apparently shows all sorts of great qualities that its good to have. I guess it does. In the end I was walking to prove to myself that I could do it, and I wasn't wholly a net-junkie slob who could do nothing else but type and click all day. Well, that and the threat of doing it again...
So that was how I spent the latter half of that week. I am throwing my boots away, and will get new ones. I'm never walking that many days in a row again. And I have added another place to my "places I will willingly cut off parts of my body to avoid revisiting" list.
Oh yeah, and I have to write this experience up in such a way to give the impression that I enjoyed it. Then I get my book signed again. Yay.
Ben Weaver
Sept. 2002
|
