Wales

Always looking for an opportunity to improve on being ‘stingy at Stonehenge’, today definitely was our day.

First of all was the excellent (free/ included) full breakfast at our 500 year old politically incorrectly named ‘Black Boy Inn’ accommodation.
We then immediately headed off in the direction of Llanberis (20 mins) to catch our train to the top of Snowdonia - the highest point in Wales.

The backpack was carefully loaded with provisions/ water / spare clothing / frozen lamb roast etc. as we knew this could be an epic climb of Himalaya proportions.
The first job was to park and of course pay for that very privilege.
There was a parking area right near the train station at £11 for the day, but by a quirk of GPS input error, we ended up at another parking area - fully 90 seconds further walking distance away - for just £6 for the day. Chalk up a win.

Heading in to the ticket office, I got our two pre-paid tickets - and then a partial refund of the ticket prices! It turns out that the train can only go up to the 3/4 station of Clogwyn as there is still trackwork happening on the last section.
“If you want to get to the summit, you will have to walk up the last section” I was told in a curious mix of Welsh and English. (Note: At this point I was congratulating myself on having almost mastered the Welsh language, as last night I downloaded and partially studied the free version of the ‘Welsh For Dummies’ App I had found online.)

No problem, I thought - we are all set for a good summit-push today, having acclimatised accidentally over the last 2 days by somehow managing to book accomodation at ‘Black-Boy’ many floors above ground level with no lifts.

The day was partially cloudy. From the train station, our summit target looked to be just above cloud base height up there in the jet-stream. Potentially challenging, but we were well prepared for what the mountain might throw at us.

We began our ascent on the cheapest ride of the day (The early-bird 9am in the diesel powered train - later trains, or the steam powered train cost more. Yet another win.)
We eventually arrived at the stratospheric heights of Clogwyn station where the air was noticeably thinner. Before we left for our summit attempt, I wanted to check with the train driver if we could come back on any train once we had descended back to Clogwyn.
Our friendly train driver explained to me in Welsh that it would be fine for us to do exactly that - or so I thought.
(My understanding of the free ‘Welsh for Dummies’ course led me to believe that when a Welshman shakes his head, he means ‘Yes’. Perhaps in hindsight I should have upgraded to the paid version of the App as it would seem that the ‘free’ version could have been misleading.)

We loaded up the backpack, checked all our mountaineering equipment was in order and climbed up into the swirling mists that now enveloped us. Like a latter-day Mallory and Irvine, we made steady progress up the Western Cwm, then traversed across to the Hillary Step, the South Summit, picked our way along the last stretch of the summit ridge and then finally - we were on top. Was that Tibet we were now looking down into?

In 1984 Greg Mortimer and Tim Macartney-Snape were the first Australians to summit Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen - now Loss and I had summited Snowdonia in a similar fashion. Amazing. I have sent details of our climb to the Guinness Book of Records and am awaiting their confirmation of our epic feat.

Now the task was to make it back down to the safety of Clogwyn station and our promised ride back down the mountain from my Welsh speaking train driver. On arriving there, we saw a sign (in English) that clearly said you could only go back down on the same train you had gone up on - and unfortunately ours had left long ago.

I approached the train driver - not my Welsh speaking friend - standing beside his shiny STEAM engine - and in very plain English he told me if we wanted to ride down the mountain on HIS train, it would cost us another £22 each as we had missed our preassigned train.
Clearly my crash course in Welsh was not as thorough as it should have been, but being determined to make this one of my stingiest days yet, we shouldered our loads and down-climbed the 8km foot track to Llanberis far below.

Next it was off to a FREE museum just up the road - the National Slate Museum. Sounds fascinating, doesn’t it? Well, it was actually very interesting. Wales produces some of the world’s finest quality slate, with the best quality being turned into roofing shingles which currently sell for about £4.50 per shingle.

Of particular interest was a demonstration on slate splitting and cutting. We got chatting to the craftsman after his demonstration and he told us an interesting story of how ‘Sydney saved his bacon’ when he used to work as a slate cutter in a commercial quarry.

There had been a slump in demand for slate shingles in 1999. The bosses wanted them to keep producing, as they were on a very rich vein of high quality slate. The finished product was being stockpiled on a scale never seen before, and when after a few months of this the boss called all the workers in for a meeting, they thought they were going to lose their jobs.
“Good news, lads” he said. “You’re not going to lose your jobs. We’ve just sold the entire stockpile last night. It seems that Sydney in Australia has just had a massive hailstorm and they need every last one of our slate roof shingles”.
So, all those blue tarpaulins on roofs in the Eastern suburbs many of us remember gradually gave way to new, job-saving slate tiles from Wales.
Every cloud has a silver lining.

In addition to this, he gifted Loss the little coaster he had hand fashioned during the demonstration. This saved us buying one in the gift shop at a cost of £12 - how many wins can you have in one day?? At least one more, as it turns out.

We decided that we would economise on dinner tonight and cook for ourselves in our kitchenette. We stopped at the grocery store on the way back to Caernarfon to purchase the ingredients, which came to the grand sum of £11. This was another significant saving, compared to last night where we had eaten at the restaurant across the road which advertised their ‘2 meals for £12’ special deal.

Can a day of frugality get any better than that?Les mer