The Big Wales Trip - Penrhos Isaf Bothy
DATE 19.09.2013
Posted by Matt | Filed under snowdonia
http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/bothy-details.asp?bothy_id=103
When Mark and Alan reached my house on the morning of our long awaited trip, a tough decision was made to scrap our plans for the Isle of Skye and instead head for Wales. Five days of rain in Skye or 5 days of sunshine in Wales? It made sense!
Our first stop in wales was the town of Dolgellau to pick up some supplies (which we initially pronounced as Doll-ger-loo but later found out to be spoken Doll-Ge-Fli). Beer and water bought we set off in the car through a forest just outside the town.
We were looking for a bothy i had come across online and Finally after taking several wrong turns down some overgrown tracks we found it. We were instantly surprised at how big this one was. It had a barn, a huge wood store and an outdoor dunny. It did remind us of the cabin in Evil Dead though and many other horror movies based in woodland cottages.
As the other two started to unpack and get comfortable I took a look around upstairs. I found a purpose made wooden platform for us to sleep on but sitting on at the back of this platform was a large transculent bottle. I knew what the liquid inside it was but my inner voice always tell me to sniff these things. Yep! It was piss! Dark, stale, rancid piss! Obviously I wasn’t going to gasp aloud. This nasty pong needed to be shared. I called Mark and Alan to come upstairs and see the bedroom. ‘There’s a bottle over there lads, must be some sort of cleaning fluid. It has a lovely lemony zing to it. Give it a sniff’. I enjoyed watching their faces screw up just like mine had. Ha!
Anyway, once we were unpacked, Mark got to work on the Fire and we brewed up and had noodles for dinner. It got dark pretty quickly so we shut the doors to keep the warmth from our fire in and lit up some candles.
Later that evening we went outside and fooled around with torches and my camera. We managed a pretty lame light painting of something coming from the trees. I think it’s an alien (see photo). The sky was clear, the stars were out and without even a breeze it was deathly silent.
When our evening came to an end, we set out our sleeping bags on the wooden platform upstairs.
