Day 107: Brecon Beacons National Park

No UNESCO sites today, just a free day for exploring the local area of the Brecon Beacons, one of the most beautiful parts of Wales. But sadly for us, despite the perfect weather we'd had yesterday, today dawned wet, windy and miserable. Typical UK weather, really. We mooched around a bit in the morning hoping things might change, but no such luck.

Eventually headed out for a late breakfast at a cafe about 5 minutes away, then headed for our backup plan: the show caves! These are real natural caves, enormous formations (long, not cavernous if that makes sense), but have been dressed up a bit. Lots of health & safety stuff like smooth paths, hand-railings, lighting and so on. Was a bit tricky to tell in places what was original and what wasn't.

But overall the caves were very impressive, lots of formations to check out with all the stalagtites and stalagmites and so on. Was interesting hearing them tell the story of the caves' discovery too by a pair of explorers in the early 20th century.

However, the caves park was generally aimed at kids, and for some reason they had giant fibreglass dinosaur statues scattered around the place. A little odd! Some of them would move slowly, but most of them were static. I assumed that some dinosaur bones and stuff had been found in the caves, but no mention was made of it so maybe not!

Finished with the caves, we headed back out to find it was still drizzling. The rain was coming and going so we decided to chance our arm with a short hike to a waterfall near our cabin. We had the choice of either doing a 40 minute walk from our cabin, or a 10 minute walk from the car park; obviously we chose the latter given the weather!

Still drizzled quite a bit, as the rain was fairly steady, but we managed to get down and back without too much of a soaking. Certainly not like tropical rain at any rate! The waterfall was quite nice, though Schnitzel didn't seem overly impressed with his walk through the mud.

Back to the cabin where we hibernated for a few hours before heading out again in the evening as the weather had lifted a bit. We drove back along the road we'd come in on 24 hours previous, looking for a nice walking track up near the top of the hills rather than down in the valleys where it would be muddy.

Eventually found an old disused railway line - the tracks and machinery were long gone, but the flattened strip of earth remained, so we followed that for a couple of kilometres out to a lake and back. With more rain closing in, we retreated to a nearby pub for dinner: apparently one of the best for food in Wales! Happy to report it was very good - I had a chicken breast stuffed with sun-dried tomato and mushrooms, while Shandos had roast lamb.

Off again tomorrow!Read more