Swansea; Friday, 03 August, 2007

With my clothes barely dry from the trip to Scandinavia I headed back out on the road, this time to the wilds of South Wales. The journey was uneventful up until Cardiff, at which point the train waited in the station for nearly 30 minutes as some idiot had driven their lorry into the bridge that the train was supposed to go over, and for safety reasons the line had to be shut and the train diverted, unfortunately the driver did not know the route that we were being diverted by, so we had to wait for a driver who did know the way to arrive!

Eventually we arrived into Swansea 55 minutes late (and annoyingly 5 minutes before the entire journey would have been free!). I had looked at a map before I left of how to get to the hotel from the city centre, but I had forgotten how to get from the station down towards the seafront, and I couldn’t be bothered to go wandering, so I hopped into a cab out to the hotel. I’m glad I did, as the hotel proved to be slightly less the city centre hotel that was advertised on their website. It was a good mile from the city centre, along a road running next to the docks, that appears to be a mix at present of derelict docks buildings awaiting destruction, empty wasteland, and new gleaming office blocks being built.

After checking into the hotel and dropping my stuff off I headed back out and walked into town, taking nearly 30 minutes to reach the edge of the city centre, and then spent another 30 minutes wandering around the city centre. After a while it became pretty obvious that the centre of Swansea is an identikit town, you could be in any large town anywhere in the UK, the shops are all the same, the restaurants are all the same, and the large groups of people getting plastered on a Friday evening are the same.

My wanderings took me to the bus station in time to catch a bus out onto the Gower peninsular to Mumbles. The bus itself wandered around the back streets for quite a while and it was gone six by the time I arrived in the Mumbles.

I wandered along the sea front for about a mile and a half from Oystermouth square to Mumbles pier. I climbed up the cliff path and walked along a little further to bracelet bay. The whole way along you have the stunning views back across the broad sweep of Swansea bay.

After taking in the views I found a bus stop and caught the bus back into town and went to look for some dinner. Sadly, I had forgotten, in the peace and tranquillity of the Gower peninsular, that this was the first Friday of the month, and consequently there were a very large number of people who, at 8pm on the first Friday after payday were getting off their faces (thus proving that Binge drinking is a British problem and not a English problem!).

After walking past several queues for restaurants (and a similar number of revisited dinners that were decorating the pavement), I decided to cheat and go to where there would be nobody else dining, a small hotel a mile and a bit out of town!