I’m in Cardiff, or Caerdydd, now. Well.. I sort of had a little alteration regarding my travel itinerary. I have not gone to St Ives at all but have instead decided to go for some windsurfing fun over the weekend. I left the hostel in Penzance on Friday to walk the roughly 16 miles from Prenzance to Land’s End, which was just a fantastic trip!

First I was walking alongside the coast via Newlyn and Moushole, then I decided to go a bit land-in and walked up to the little village of Paul where opposite the cementary I was greeted by an old and grey-bearded roaming dog who would then

accompany me for the next 4 or so miles to Lamorna.. I don’t know if he was just looking for comradeship or if it was hunger keeping him around, but he really cost me some nerves at times. He almost got run over by a car one time only to then go on and cause another car to almost collide with a vehicle coming down the other direction when he wouldn’t understand to at least not walk in the middle of the bloody road.. As nice and adventureous our short companionship was I felt rather lucky when some twenty minutes and several people shouting at me and blaming me for not keeping “my dog” under control, I eventually managed to get a policeman in ca passing car to stop. It took the constable a good fifteen minutes to chase and arrest my doggisch road-safety enrisking friend. A last “goodbye, comrade!” wandered my mind but this was definitely the better of our two journeys for that slightly dim vagabond.. Still he got me into some talking with the locals later on who were keen on knowing why a constable with dog was standing by the road in the middle of nowhere.. Sadly I didn’t have all that much time for chatting and so marched on. I still had to catch the five o’clock bus back from Land’s End to Penzance in order to make it to Coverack for the night – this is where I was going to spend the weekend windsurfing. One thing I have to say though is that the landscape around Cornwall really is astonishingly beautiful! It’s really great walking all those little hidden footpaths across fields, over loose walls and through weird stonecirles, passing by medaeival graves and every now and then an amazing view off the cliffs and down the sea… Finally then I arrived in Land’s End, my feet hurting and my head blurred from all the nice things I saw on the way there..

Now Land’s End itself wasn’t really what I had expected. Even though I knew that

they had a shopping centre there and that one’s got to pay for having their picture taken before that famous waymarker, I was shocked of how much the Lonely Planet must be right in judging Land’s End as well as John O’ Groats (which I’m still hoping to see in a while) as being solely massive tourist traps. There’d been about three or four houses which I could imagine people living in, the rest of the place was formed by shopping centres, a big playground for children and some exhibitions, one of which was the Doctor Who exhibition. Damn it, this place is really breathtaking! If only it wasn’t scattered with all these shops and that! At least one can still imagine how it must have been without all that one day gone by..

Anyway, later the day back in Penzance I received a less than happy message as I was told by the local Computer Repair Store that the SD Card out my camera was totally broken, nothing they could do, all my 500, probably more, pictures of the last week were gone.. hum! But o’ well, that won’t put me down now! So I hopped onto my bus to Helston, there onto another down The Lizard to Coverack where I had booked a Windsurfing course for the weekend. I really miss that place, which happens to be just a little village with half of it’s cottages or even more being holiday homes of the rich, but nevermind, people’ve been extremely friendly and, surprisingly, very trusting. I was able to book beds, dinner, the surfing course, all without any deposits, I’ve not even had to give my full name for anything.. For both the B&B’s that I stayed in I could just have walked out without paying if I would have wanted. Wonderfully refreshing! The first day there unfortunately was no wind whatsoever. But Robin, the guy who’s running the local windsurfing centre, got out some sit-on-top kayaks and let us have fun in the waves, without charge. He also switched my course dates to Sunday and Monday. Sunday was nice, but Monday even better.. We’ve had winds of force 4 to 5 and waves so high when one was in the depression between them you couldn’t see them! I spent the whole day fighting with the sea and every now and then when I was able to stand the wind and not taken down by a wave either, able to stay on my board for a couple of minutes, I felt like having ruled over nature! I’ve certainly got to go back there one day and do this again! It was so, wow, it was like back when you are a kid and you just don’t worry about anything…

Since yesterday I’m in Cymru (Wales) now, but leaving aside the many bilingual roadsigns and leaflets, havn’t heard a single word of spoken Welsh yet.. I hope that I’ll be able to hear some as I go for the smaller places farther north in Wales.. Today however I just took a day off, I read Elaine Long’s “Jenny’s Mountain” instead of actually doing something.. I never had thought I could like such writing, but well… well, well.. Guess I have deserved not only resting my legs for today but the brains and any remaining sense of sophistication as well – cheers!