Lilac Tinted Views: Exploring Wales: The Llyn Peninsula

So it's been a while since I did one of my "Exploring England" posts... Partly because I haven't really been in England very long and when I'm here in London the weather is just not compelling me to step outside the comfort of my four walls to explore! But alas, I found a reason... My really good friend Koki needed someone to go with her to explore the Welsh coast as part of her site analysis. She does architecture you see so we usually go on these fun trips together. Remember the beautiful sunrise on Barry Island? Yeah that was with her too.

I guess it'd be incorrect to call this post Exploring England then because this time we were in Wales, the Llyn Peninsula to be precise! We set off from London on what was possibly the longest journey I've ever made within the U.K. Our exact destination? I little village near Abersoch, North Wales. The journey doesn't usually have to take such a long time but with the train tracks being completely wrecked by the rains and flooding, ours was an 8-9 hour journey! Nothing is too long with the company of a good friend to chat to and some music to keep you going and eventually we arrived at the long winding hilly roads of Abersoch.

The next morning was our exploration day and the original plan was to walk as much as the pilgrims trail from one end of the peninsula to the other. Going from Abersoch to Aberdaron. It's about 80 miles long or something crazy if I remember correctly so there was no way we were going to complete it in one day. What started off as tidy but windy roads soon evolved to muddy sticky paths but the initial 45 minute walk to the coast was well worth it!

We arrived at Hell's Mouth (Porth Neigwl), a popular destination for surfers and thought we might walk the Llyn coastal path from there. I'm not sure if you can tell from the picture below but the tide was nowhere near far out enough for us to even dream of walking along the beach to far down and so we had to abort the mission, it seems the tour guide we spoke to before starting our walk didn't know as much about the tide times as we'd hoped and neither of us fancied challenging the currents of the sea!

Luckily for us, it was during the school run hours and we managed to stop a guy taking his kids to school to ask him for directions to Aberdaron. He kind of looked at us like we were a bit crazy and pointed us to "a mate of his who has a taxi". You see, I put that in quote because being a city girl I would rather walk the entire length of my journey than walk up the road to a strangers house and ask him if he's "the mate with the taxi". It just sounds like something out of a horror movie, it really does. But alas, we weren't in a city and with nothing but farms around us and no phone signal we had little choice but to venture to "the house with the taxi man".

It turned out to actually be just a guy with his taxi and he was quite happy to take us through the scenic route to Abedaron which meant we stopped loads and took tons of pictures of the views. You can actually see a really prominent part of the peninsula and the coast looked so beautiful! It really was one of those "had-to-be-there" moments because unfortunately I only had my iPhone camera with me to try and capture the beautiful landscape. I think it did an alright job though.

We eventually got to Aberdaron and were greeted by a pretty empty beach and dead town. Apart from the weather not really being decent enough for anyone but the hardcore surfers to be on the beach the whole town is also very seasonal with all their shops and coffee houses opening up much later in the year. It was nice to go when it was quiet though because it felt like we had the whole world to ourselves sometimes. We even saw the chapel that the famous poet R.S Thomas used to preach at right by the coast.

We played on the beach for sometimes, skipping across little rivers and finding all sorts of really interesting rocks before we decided that it would be best not to get carried away and attempt to finish the rest of the trail from where we were. Especially as we had just taxi'd it all the way from one end to the other, essentially cheating!

We climbed till we reached the highest point we could get to without feeling like we were about to drop right off the cliff and into the waters below and on the way up we found the remains of a Roman/Celtic house or something.

Welcome to my humble abode!

And right there from the top we had a perfect view of the two islands Ynys Gwylan-fawr and Ynys Gwylan-bach, that marked the end of the pilgrims trail, there used to be a monastery there where they would all congregate at the end of the walk! Please don't ask me how to pronounce those, I spent the whole trip asking different locals how to make the elusive "ll" sound as in "Pwhelli". Apparently you raise the sides of your tongue to the roof of your mouth and blow out... So much more difficult than it sounds!!

Finding the two islands was definitely exciting until we saw these stairs waiting for us to make our descent back towards the beach and the sleepy town of Aberdaron. You see, I'm not exactly scared of heights but I definitely don't like them. This was definitely one of the worst parts of the walk for me, I kept imagining myself slipping and rolling all the way down to the end. Morbid I know. Luckily that never happened.

By the end of this walk it's safe to say we had worked up a decent sized appetite and so we headed to the only open pub and got ourselves some free dinner before heading back by bus to the even more quiet village of Abersoch.

The next day we were up before the sun had a chance to rise fully and commenced our journey back through the farms and trees and all the way to the high rises of London town.

My favourite picture from the trip? Definitely this one! I love all the purple and plum in the picture and couldn't resist taking some of the stones home with me. I'm really considering putting this picture into the blog banner but we'd see what happens...