The second base camp in our whirlwind Welsh tour was Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. But before we reached the country's southwest tip, we swung by Swansea, whose most famous resident is most likely Dylan Thomas. I agree with the poet's assessment of the place as an "ugly, lovely town," with romantic ruins like Swansea Castle tucked in among mismatched metallic skyscrapers, including a British Telecom building (top left). The airy Swansea Market had a lot more character, but unfortunately, most of its vendors were on Sunday break (top right). Instead, we found some pre-lunch treats at the Marina Market, where stalls are set up right next to the statue in the square named after the city's native son (bottom).
Following in Thomas' footsteps, we headed west to one of his hangouts, The Mumbles, "a rather nice village, despite its name." We hit the end of the road at Mumbles Pier, where we enjoyed a snack of to-go pies from the market (top left). At the end of the pier, from the Mumbles Lifeboat Station, we could look back on Swansea (top right). We also could look over toward the Mumbles Lighthouse, which illuminates the entrance to Swansea Bay (bottom left). Indeed, the vistas were so inspiring that I even agreed to climb up an enormous rock, just to get a better view (bottom right).
Sadly, this was our small dose of Gower Peninsula, "one of the loveliest sea-coast stretches in the whole of Britain" that became the country's first Area of Natural Beauty. We hurried on toward Laugharne, where Thomas lived as an adult. On our way, we took a wrong turn and got distracted by a memorial in Burry Port, where Amelia Earhart landed when she crossed the Atlantic (left). After a short detour, we finally found the grave where the poet's body was interred after he died during a literary tour in New York (right).
Before his death, Thomas lived with his wife and kids in the Boathouse on the River Taf (top left). A few meters down the shore sits his Writing Shed, through the windows of which the poet was inspired by his surroundings, in such poems as "Over Sir John's Hill" (top right). In "Poem in October," he describes the "heron-priested shore" as he walks through the town (bottom).
In a rookie mistake, I booked us a hotel, Greenhills Country House, in what I thought was Tenby, when actually it was in St. Florence, a French-imbued village 5 miles inland from the borough's main town. The morning after check-in, we had some time to check out the coastal town, with its colorful harbor buildings (left) and crumbling Normal walls (right).
We returned to the city later in the evening, so we could check out Harbwr Brewery. (The w in the Welsh language is a vowel that sounds like oo, as in booze.) The brewery has cleverly built a classy tasting room in an old warehouse behind The Buccaneer Inn, its traditional pub on the main drag (top). After testing everything on tap, including its flagship M.V. Enterprise pale ale, we headed to the Hope and Anchor for dinner. Our main dishes of local seafood, mussels for me and fish for TJ, would've been plenty (bottom left), but I couldn't resist getting some Welsh cawl as an appetizer, which was hearty enough to be a meal on its own (bottom right).
We deserved our repast because we spent the day doing a 10K coastal walk around St. Davids peninsula. We started a bit inland at Porthclais Harbour, then cut across the craggy landscape until we reached the Pembrokeshire Coast Path (top left). Much to my dismay, it was the wrong season to see any seals, but we did stumble across remnants of a 19th-century copper mine (top right). We also saw some of the coast's islands (bottom left), an ancient hillfort, and numerous rock formations left behind from the region's volcanic past (bottom right).
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