As we ventured into Snowdonia National Park and road signs went from English to bilingual to ulimately Welsh-only, we made our way to a campsite recommended by the guidebook for easy access to hiking routes. Basically, a farmer's field in a barren, windy, and cold river valley, with nothing else around. The farmer was lovely though! But somehow that didn't help regreting the choice of campsite when 7pm would always find us lying inside the tent with most of our clothes on, in sleeping bags, watching the ceiling. Here's the valley.
To avoid our usual pitfall - doing too much on the first day - we chose a nice guidebook-recommended 2-hour track the next day. The walk took us from the campsite to the two Carneddau peaks, Carnedd Dafydd and Carnedd Llewelyn. They are named after the last Weslh king, Llewelyn, and his brother Dafydd. Here are the two peaks below.
Not sure what happened there (thanks, guidebook!), but it took us 5 hours and it was one of the most difficult hikes, especially the descent, very steep and entirely on scree (see from above and below). I wondered at the time why there were no tourists on these peaks, the only people we encoutered were elite Royal Marines training their socks off on this route.
On the way to Conwy we stopped in Llandudno, a very touristy resort by the seaside, but with lots of nice cafes and a gorgeous beach. Here, we stopped at the Great Orme Mines - and this was FANTASTIC!! Ancient copper mines dating 2 milenia B.C., of an unbelievable scale seeing that they only had bits of bones or shells to dig with. The complexity of galleries makes a joke out of most 19th century mines.
We had postponed it, but now we were going to do it. It was going the day for the hike up Snowdon. Several factors, among which having slept in the freezing cold farmer's field, the full carpark by the Snowdon ascent path, and general grumpiness amongst our ranks saw it postponed to the next day. Thus began another day of castle-ing. The Caenarfon castle, where we also stopped for Roman fort ruins.
And after that we drove across to Anglesey, and saw Beaumaris - town and castle. The town is very nice if not a bit pretentious. The caslte was never finished so it is not as tall as Conwy or Caenarfon, but it was much emptier so we had a chance to explore all the corridors, towers, and galleries without bumping into tourists (pesky tourists!) all the time. The other cool thing about the castle is that it's surrounded by water - proper fairy-tale medieval setup.
What do you think happened the next day?... Well, this time we finally got our act together and hiked up Snowdon. It didn't rain on us, but unfortunatelly it wasn't clear either.. Well, we got a bit of a view and had an opportunity to be silly at 1085 meters.
Both lakes below Snowdon are linked to numerous myths, some of monsters lured there to destruction by vengeful maidens, some about King Arthur and Merlin, some about Llyn Glaslyn being the lake where Excalibur is to be found.
By this time, we had given up on the cold farmer's field and moved to grassier, sunnier lands in a campsite in Beddgelert, the nicest village with a couple of pubs with delicious food. But then again after days of packed noodles, packed rice, and packed lukewarm soup cooked on our little hiking cooker, any properly cooked food would have been blissful.
On the last day we went for a walk in the Aberglaslyn gorge. A very beautiful walk through the gorge, and up the hills covered in Welsh mining history.
At the end of the walk we finished by Llyn Dinas, a beautiful lake by the legendary Dinas Emrys fort, a place of old British and Arthurian legens.
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