june 2017
51° 44' 14.7516'' N 5° 17' 57.5196'' W
i’ve always felt like i was missing out by not getting a car while i was living in Wales. sure, the infrastructure is great, but i would argue that exploring Wales is best done without waiting around for buses or trains.
having missed numerous opportunities to do so, my mother travelled to Wales in june to check on me… and check the local fauna. as a science minded person, my mother had already researched Wales rigorously. her goal? see the puffins from Pembrokeshire. simple.
but it all had to be done by means of public transport. as you travelled further from the welsh capital and closer to Skomer Isle, the official home of the puffins, your options dwindled - the roster of busses was fairly thin. the last major checkpoint of our journey had been Milford Haven, after which we boarded an arbitrary bus, hoping it would drive us to Marloes. the bus did in fact take us to Marloes, a tiny village a few short miles away from the famous Marloes Sands.
leading up to the boat trip to Skomer, we walked around the coast. prominent locations such as Little Haven, Broad Haven or Sandy Haven had been part of our scouting list and we weren’t disappointed on any occasion. strange feeling the entire area gave off - it had all the facilities of a developed country, but the serenity of some remote island, lost in the middle of the ocean.
Skomer, the culmination of the entire ‘expedition’, had a surprisingly mystical element to it. it had to do with the puffins, these clumsy, parrot-like birds which turned out to be much smaller than I had envisioned (30cm?). but their size wasn’t it - the puffins displayed no sign of fear in the presence of humans. in fact, standing in their way as they walked their ancestral pathways would simply result in them stopping and looking around curiously. where collective existence takes precedence over the individual and the behaviour of an entire species is slowly chiseled over the course of aeons, i imagined the puffins thought about this as a completely unprecedented, unthinkable event - these pathways would have been written in their genetic code through iteration and were an integral part of the birds’ dream-like state of existence. the coming of a sentient creature to stand in their way would have been a severely disruptive event. nevertheless, the birds would swiftly return to sleepwalking as the human obstacles walked out of their way, with their inbuilt knowledge propelling them to impossibly narrow crevices along the rocky cliffs of Skomer.
there would be nothing new about the shock of traveling back to a populous area after an incursion into relative wilderness, so i’ll spare you the story. all i’d like to say is just how much i miss Cardiff sometimes - i did back then, though i was only away for a few days; i still do now, years after moving away. maybe the endgame is to move back to Wales after all.
june 2017
51° 44' 14.7516'' N 5° 17' 57.5196'' W
i’ve always felt like i was missing out by not getting a car while i was living in Wales. sure, the infrastructure is great, but i would argue that exploring Wales is best done without waiting around for buses or trains.
having missed numerous opportunities to do so, my mother travelled to Wales in june to check on me… and check the local fauna. as a science minded person, my mother had already researched Wales rigorously. her goal? see the puffins from Pembrokeshire. simple.
but it all had to be done by means of public transport. as you travelled further from the welsh capital and closer to Skomer Isle, the official home of the puffins, your options dwindled - the roster of busses was fairly thin. the last major checkpoint of our journey had been Milford Haven, after which we boarded an arbitrary bus, hoping it would drive us to Marloes. the bus did in fact take us to Marloes, a tiny village a few short miles away from the famous Marloes Sands.
leading up to the boat trip to Skomer, we walked around the coast. prominent locations such as Little Haven, Broad Haven or Sandy Haven had been part of our scouting list and we weren’t disappointed on any occasion. strange feeling the entire area gave off - it had all the facilities of a developed country, but the serenity of some remote island, lost in the middle of the ocean.
Skomer, the culmination of the entire ‘expedition’, had a surprisingly mystical element to it. it had to do with the puffins, these clumsy, parrot-like birds which turned out to be much smaller than I had envisioned (30cm?). but their size wasn’t it - the puffins displayed no sign of fear in the presence of humans. in fact, standing in their way as they walked their ancestral pathways would simply result in them stopping and looking around curiously. where collective existence takes precedence over the individual and the behaviour of an entire species is slowly chiseled over the course of aeons, i imagined the puffins thought about this as a completely unprecedented, unthinkable event - these pathways would have been written in their genetic code through iteration and were an integral part of the birds’ dream-like state of existence. the coming of a sentient creature to stand in their way would have been a severely disruptive event. nevertheless, the birds would swiftly return to sleepwalking as the human obstacles walked out of their way, with their inbuilt knowledge propelling them to impossibly narrow crevices along the rocky cliffs of Skomer.
there would be nothing new about the shock of traveling back to a populous area after an incursion into relative wilderness, so i’ll spare you the story. all i’d like to say is just how much i miss Cardiff sometimes - i did back then, though i was only away for a few days; i still do now, years after moving away. maybe the endgame is to move back to Wales after all.
