July 25 - Welsh signs. Easy to understand if you speak welsh.
The next stop was Cardiff, where again the
weather was less than pleasant although the welsh were. It’s a bit surreal (as I think most people
find), coming here with the dual language signs on everything... We were running out of time, so apart from
wandering around Cardiff Bay and seeing where Doctor Who and Torchwood were
filmed (OK, I’m a nerd!) and going to the Doctor Who exhibition (yes! I’m a nerd.
But real daleks!) we didn’t do a lot here and spent most of the day
driving around the small country lanes.
This had a lot to do with some odd decisions our Satnav chose to make
and driving on a (two way) road that is bounded on both sides by hedges and
definitely only has space for one car, while being laughed at by passing
farmers for a couple of miles was something of an experience.
July 25 - Cardiff Bay. I know Torchwood HQ is around here somewhere...
Anyway, we ended up going to the national
showcaves (or Dan-Yr-Ogof caves as the Welsh call them). I’ll talk about these in a bit of detail,
first because they were very interesting, and secondly because they were a good
example of unnecessarily mucking up a nice tourist attraction. There are three large caves that are open to
the public. They are all part of a much
larger network that extends more than 10km around the nearby hills and they are
stunning really. Which leaves me at something
of a loss to explain why the people running the site have felt it necessary to
firstly fill the caves with plastic models of explorers and cavemen, pipe
Pachelbel’s Canon in D thorough them, and then fill the area above the caves
with dozens of fibreglass dinosaurs.
Complete with looped commentary broadcast over speakers saying things
like “some were very large, while some were small.
July 25 - Dr Tash escapes from the Daleks again...
Some ate only plants, but other fearsome ones
ate meat...” and so on. The caves are
interesting by themselves!!! You don’t need the dinosaur park!!! It actually reminded me a lot of the
fibreglass bear that used to be near Beauty Point in Tasmania (for the 2 or 3
of you out there who know what I’m talking about). Anyway, feeling slightly bemused, we set out
to navigate our way through the newly created floodplains in Gloucestershire
and Oxfordshire our way to Oxford.
