Brecon Beacons, day 5

Waterfall walks today. Southwest of Brecon, there's an area around the village of Ystradfellte with a large number of falls. On our last visit we took in probably one of the largest falls, but my blister situation prevented us from seeing any of the others. This time round, my boots were more broken-in, and I was using a balm that C got me on my heels. Judging from the lack of problems I've had on this trip, the latter seems to have been pretty effective.


Anyway, we did two separate walks the first a quasi-circular one close to Ystradfellte that took in about five relatively large falls, including the one we did last time. Though it wasn't the largest, the highlight was one waterfall which actually allowed us to walk behind it. That was pretty impressive. While we'd been hoping that yesterday's wet weather would have upped flow rates, it still didn't appear to be going at full speed, but it was still well worth the rather steep trip down the valley to see it and get behind it.


The second hike was a few miles to the south of the first, and a more linear trail that took us back up the river to a succession of falls. They were all really good, especially the final one, but by this point waterfall apathy was beginning to set in. It seems like no matter how cool something is, and I'm a big waterfall fan, seeing ten of them in a row in a single day does tend to remove the shine a bit.

One amusing aspect of the hikes was that we kept meeting the same groups of people on the trails time and time again. One couple (plus their dog) we met about four times, so it became a running joke between us. This isn't really all that surprising given that the falls are both the main attraction for the area and that they're necessarily all linked up on the same rivers, but is still gave us a sense of deja vu to repeatedly (re-)meet people we thought we'd last seen going the other way.

This evening we delved into the house's video library with U.S. Marshals, the non-sequel sequel to the much better received 1993 film The Fugative. The box blurb scrupulously avoided suggesting it was a sequel (presumably on intellectual property grounds), but couldn't resist saying "If you liked The Fugative, you'll love this". One would think that the identical-but-for-Harrison-Ford cast might permit the charade to be dropped, but apparently not. Anyway, while certainly an inferior film, it wasn't at all bad - though its carefully twisted plot stuck sufficiently tightly to convention for us to deduce all but one of its key details by about five minutes in. The detail that we missed stemmed from our steadfast conviction of the guilt of a character played by a UK actor with a dodgy American accent. You just can't trust those dastardly Brits.