Fe es i i Gymru

Mae pobl yn siarad Cymraeg a Saesneg.

Mae tren gyda locomotive yn mynd o Rhymney i Gaerdydd ddyth Llun i ddydd Gwener. Oh I give up! This view of the Monday to Friday peak hour loco-hauled train from was taken from my hotel bedroom window. Cardiff Central station is a few hundred metres away to the right.


This is St Mary Street which becomes High Street in Cardiff. Typical UK grime is very visible in this pic.

My hotel was a couple of hundred metres to the right. On the night I arrived I went left by mistake and got very lost. Although not immediately obvious from this shot, there are very few street signs at intersections in central Cardiff. There are however signs to all sorts of tourist attractions - not very helpful when you just have an address.

Rather less grimy is the Norman Keep in the centre of Cardiff Castle. The castle is located at the end of High Street, just out of view in the previous picture. (It was when I reached the castle the previous evening that I knew I was lost).

From Cardiff Central station you can catch a
to many places, including Cardiff Bay, where you will find the new Welsh national assembly, various touristy shops at the marina, but more importantly you will find
- not to mention a
- in the Doctor Who exhibition at the convention centre. The current revival of Doctor Who is, of course, shot mostly in Cardiff and surrounds.

After seeing Cardiff Bay, I returned to Cardiff, picked up my bags and jumped on another After changing at Shrewsbury I finally ended up at the rather attractive town of Machynlleth.

I stayed at a pub called the Wynnstay Hotel (not visible in the above picture). It was a rather fun old pub with narrow hallways and random steps and nothing quite matching. Apparently the hotel restaurant is well regarded. I can't say I was particularly impressed. I should probably just have had dinner at the local chinese takeway!

Machynlleth is a rather nice looking town and I would have liked to have time to explore more. I am told that there are lots of good walks around the area.

As it was, I just walked to the station the next morning (Sunday morning) for my next leg, which was to be another train onwards to Minfordd. The following picture is not a train. It is something you probably wouldn't expect to find in a country town, but there you are:


This is a train, and is what you find if you wait a while on the upper level platform at Minfordd. It is, of course, the world famous Ffestiniog Railway.


The next picture shows the rather remarkable landscape at the northern end of the railway. This is Tanygrisiau, just a short distance from the terminus at Blaenau Ffestiniog. The lake is man-made and a backup for the hydroelectric system.

This is one view of the main street of Blaenau Ffestiniog. It is a nice warm (high 20s) Sunday afternoon. The joint Ffestiniog/Arriva Trains Wales station is out of picture in a cutting on the right and the red building in the centre a small SPAR supermarket, which was open. I bought a pre-made sandwich and some fruit and sat in the town square (behind me) for an hour or so and listened to local teenagers nattering away in Welsh.
I'd mucked up reading the timetable and had 3 hours to kill before the next onwards train from Blaenau to the coast at Llandudno. Rather to my surprise I found there was a bus service running. I took a mini-sized bus down back down the mountain (rather faster than the train), through Minfordd again and onto Porthmadog. Time for another supermarket food break (this time at a rather large Tesco) and then I grabbed another bus, this time a full-sized one, on to Caernarvon.Bus at Carnarvon, about to depart for Bangor.

More interesting at Caernarvon is the Castle, seen here at the end of a street with Welsh and European flags much in evidence (no Union Flags though!).


My bus into Carnarvon was running rather late, and so was I. I had no time to do anything much more than take a couple of photos at a trot, and then pelt back to the bus station. Next stop Bangor, across the road into the station, and then on a very long train stopping all stations to Manchester via Llandudno, Chester and Warrington.

So that was Wales. I will go back again and this time spend a couple of weeks. Do some walking, hire a bicycle, go up Mount Snowdon. All sorts of things to do :)