Wales day 3

The next morning Celine caught a train back to Leeds and Ben and I headed on our way to a place near Tenby in Southern Wales to stay with the parents of Christine, a girl that we had briefly met at Swing dancing lessons. We started out with a cheap and nutritious breakfast from Summerfield’s of Apple turnovers, glazed raspberry rolls and orange juice and then boarded a bus to Aberareon. Our initial plans were to take an eight hour train trip back into Enlgand to Tenby, as this was the only available option on the internet, but Nia suggested just using local busses which proved to be twice as quick and cheap. It also provided us with what would have to be the most picturesque bus ride I have ever taken, with farmland on one side of the bus meeting jagged cliffs on the other going down to the sea. We stopped for an hour in Aberareon because Ben found out in his book of Great Britain that it is home to a world famous ice-creamery, however as it turns out it was only open in summer, so had to be satisfied with a walk around the dock and through the main street. From Aberareon we travelled to Carmantheon and then to Tenby, where I called Jo, Christine’s sister to tell them that we would arrive soon. As we had a one hour wait for the next bus we decided to check out the village, starting with the tourist information centre. The lady there seemed very excited to speak to us, but said there wasn’t much to see in Tenby during winter. She was wrong though. Just through the centre of town we walked onto a beach that would still be called beautiful if it were on the east coast of Australia. It was wide and sandy (no stones) and met a blue sea with proper waves. Firstly our attention was grabbed by the fort that was built on a small island just off the shore, but then Ben spotted something even cooler – caves! So for the next half hour or so we climbed in and around the caves in the rock face looking over the beach, and as a result missed our bus by less than a minute, so we spent another hour exploring the town centre and examining railway times for the following day. After we caught our bus, armed with rudimentary directions from Christina, we managed to find the right house, and were greeted with some tea by Jo, who told us that she and her Dad and some friends were going to have a Welsh folk music jam session tonight at a pub and that we were most welcome to join them if we wished. She then served up some fantastic vegetarian curry when family friends Gwilian and Claudia arrived who are 60 or 70 year old leading Welsh landscape and still life painters. Since we found out that Chicken Tika misala is England’s favourite dish during the intro week pop quiz Ben and I have been wanting to have some curry here, and this certainly did not let us down, it was beaut.
Jo studied folk music at Newcastle university and plays the fiddle and banjo. One of her fiddle friends picked us up and we all drove to Carmantheon via some narrow twisty roads with built up hedges on either side. Once there we entered an old pub and joined a circle of people sitting around some tables with various instruments such as drums, guitars, mandolins and a harp. We were then introduced to Mr Cooper, Christine’s Dad who bought us a drink as well as a fifty or sixty year old lad who I was sitting next to called Simon Hedger. Simon has lived in a nearby valley for 25 years paying rent from a farmer by working one day a week for him, the other days of the week he spends carving things out of wood, with chainsaws. Later on this year he is going to the world championships for it. When he is not carving, he is writing songs to go to the music that the people in the group perform, each telling stories of Welsh history, such as ‘the last coal mine in Wales’. He has written over twenty, and has them all memorised and none of them written down as he has dyslexia. When everyone was playing he would start singing in his deep raspy voice and we would all join in for the choruses. Towards the end of the night, he told a story to the light accompaniment of a mandolin and harp, all about the ancient family of man and how they survived. This later lead him into telling me and Ben about his theory on Stonehenge, that it is actually an ancient animal trap. After a solid couple of hours of music we travelled back with Mr Cooper, and went to bed upstairs in the great big house in beds in Christine’s old room nicely warmed up with electric blankets.