Issue 143: Shiny Happy People

Alf Alderson was enticed to South Carmarthenshire by a local tourist board promotion – but did the riding live up to the hype?

Words Alf Alderson Photography Alf Alderson vs Discover Carmarthenshire

Sometimes the best riding is right on your doorstep and while you may not always know it, you can be sure your local tourist board does. Check out their website and you’ll see pictures of shiny, happy people looking very lovely on sunny, dusty trails and handling their bikes with the kind of style and grace the rest of us can only dream about. At day’s end, with many kilometres of trails crushed beneath the mud-free, knobbly tyres of their glistening steeds and their finely honed bodies scarcely having broken sweat, our heroes and heroines will stash their remarkably clean machines in their brand new campervan and adjourn to sip a refreshing local craft beer in the welcoming hostelry of their choice before dining on the finest cuisine (locally produced, of course, and organic to boot), eventually retiring to a bed the size of a barge before sleeping peacefully to rise fresh and sparkling and do it all again tomorrow.

And you, too, could be like them, simply by visiting the same trails.

If only…

The beautiful ones

Yet we all fall for it – the idea that given the right combination of bike, trail, sunshine and the coming together, just for once, of our limited skills and technique and we too could look just like the shiny, happy ones. And even better, our mate will catch this miraculous metamorphosis on camera for our adoring Instagram followers to marvel over. 

This thought was, somewhat foolishly, uppermost in my mind as I set out with my pal Paul for the singletrack and forest trails of south Carmarthenshire after receiving a press release promoting the riding in this neck of the Welsh woods from Discover Carmarthenshire. I’ve been riding at Brechfa since the early ’90s, but had never been to some of the other areas being pushed by the PR bods. The promotional material all looked so mouth-watering, I easily persuaded Paul that we should spend a couple of days exploring what was on offer (rather than our usual day visits) as well as treating ourselves to a night at the estimable Bear Inn in Llandovery.

The only downside to all this was that we were travelling there in late November, which, as anyone with half a brain knows, is not the optimum time of year for trying to emulate beautiful people on beautiful bikes on beautiful trails.

Mud or St Tropez?

So it was that we turned up in Paul’s beaten-up old van on a driech, early winter’s day with dense grey cloud hovering just above the summits of Crychan Forest’s highest hills, and spots of rain being carried on the breeze. Dragging our bikes from the van, and Gore-texed against the elements, we didn’t look much like the lithe, bronze-limbed bike heroes in the PR images; although, to be fair, we wouldn’t have looked much like lithe, bronze-limbed bike heroes even if it had been mid-summer, due to our permanent lack of two essential features – litheness and bronzeness…

We set off from the trailhead at Esgair Fwyog, the riding easy-peasy and not at all challenging, confined as it was to forest fire roads, although we were occasionally beckoned by sinuous snickets of singletrack winding their way through the trees to who-knows-where. But easy was all we were after, given that we had only a couple of hours before the sun set (had we been able to see it); an amuse bouche, as it were, before hitting Brechfa Forest the following day.

Within minutes we were plastered in mud and lost. Of sunshine and dust there was none, but somehow we were still smiling and enjoying ourselves. The mud – hey, this is Wales in late November, what else do you expect? And the lost – hey this is two parsimonious idiots in late November using a 20-year-old map and paying no attention to where they’re going, what do you expect?

In addition to being the owner of the ancient and moth-eaten OS map (I’m resolutely old school when it comes to navigation), I also had the camera, so it was decided I’d take the pics and Paul would be the model – a sensible choice given that he’s a better rider than me. I’ll get some nice arty, monochrome winter shots, I thought. Capture the atmosphere, that kind of thing; who needs sunshine if you’ve got good trails and ‘atmosphere’.

Not Sterling Lorence

Irrespective of good trails and ‘atmosphere’ the result probably wouldn’t encourage many people to flock to Crychan Forest and would be unlikely to have my Instagram fans – all eleven of them – getting too excited, and yet it all looked so good at the time. Not to worry, we’d get a second chance the next day at Brechfa.

In the meantime, we got ourselves unlost and started enjoying loops based on numbered signposts within the forest that led us from the gloom of deep wooded valleys to airy lookouts where much of Carmarthenshire could be seen stretching away into the distance.

As the winter gloaming began to gather around us, we cared not a jot, for the riding was fun and easy and we were happy in the knowledge that good beer, fine food and a warm bed awaited us at day’s end in nearby Llandovery. What’s more we’d discovered some easily accessible fun trails previously unknown to us that offered plenty of scope for exploration, not to mention those ribbons of mysterious singletrack just begging to be examined. We agreed that, come the summer, a two-day trip to Crychan with campervan, bikes and beer would be in order. 

An easy sell

We got back to the van just before dark where my border collie provided an effusive greeting; once a regular companion on bike rides, Finn is now, alas, too old to run alongside me, but seems content to wait in the van while I ride and then enjoy a walk afterwards, which also provides me with a useful ‘warm down’.

We then headed to nearby Llandovery and The Bear Inn to encounter the kind of experience that the tourist bods don’t really have to try too hard to promote; an effusive welcome, a cold beer, an excellent meal (they specialise in veggie Asian-themed food and it really is wonderful) and a comfy bed. These are the kinds of things that will make any mountain biker smile and come back for more, and I was even allowed to have Finn stay in my room. Hotels like this are doing the PR people’s job for them.

As was the weather the next morning – yes, it was quite literally bright and sparkly, the brightness coming from the sun in a clear, cobalt-blue sky and the sparkliness coming from the frost on the trees and hedgerows. The sub-zero temperatures meant that we’d be well rugged up, unlike the beautiful people in the promo pics, but this is as good as it gets in winter Wales and the scenery was actually looking something like the images from the PR department, even if we weren’t.

Leisure athletes

Time to get the camera out again – how could I fail to capture some winning images in conditions like this? Quite easily as it happens, because I’m not a professional photographer with thousands of quids worth of kit and an assistant with a massive flashgun, and Paul is not a pro rider. But as we scooted around Brechfa’s praiseworthy Raven trail, I was convinced that if I hadn’t got a cover shot, I’d definitely got a double-page spread, thanks to the top-notch trails; a mix of exquisite singletrack through deep, dappled woodland, long climbs that lead you to magnificent views across some of the quietest landscapes in Wales and some of the finest descents in the whole country.

Throw in early winter sunshine warming our backs and offering lovely combinations of light and shade and all was well with the world, particularly when we discovered some sections of ‘hidden’ singletrack we hadn’t noticed on previous visits to Brechfa and which added a little more adventure and excitement to the ride. 

When we finally decided to call it a day we were happy fellows indeed, although, alas, we were not fellows who looked much like the dudes from PR land, as I discovered when I uploaded the day’s pics to my laptop. They say the camera doesn’t lie, and it certainly wasn’t telling any fibs in this case with its images of two slightly overweight blokes well past their prime pootling along on their bikes in a manner that couldn’t be described as anything other than ‘leisurely’. It would be hard to imagine anyone looking at images of us on our bikes and deciding ‘I’ll have some of that mate!’. Using these images in any PR material would have riders heading in the opposite direction, toot sweet.

But this was beside the point really – the fact that I’d failed to capture our adventures in a way that resembled the PR pics was a tad unfortunate, but nowt more than that, since the promotional material that had encouraged us to spend two days blatting around the trails of south Carmarthenshire had done its job, and then some.

While it’s a sad fact of life that few of us will ever resemble the guys and gals in the bike mags and videos (even if we had a professional camera team tagging along), what we can do is look at the pics and vids, go ‘Wow!’ and then head off, hit the same trails, ride our little hearts out and have oodles of fun.

So, really, it’s a big thanks to the shiny, happy people, their shiny, happy bikes and their shiny, happy photographers – the glamorous images they’d put together had succeeded in getting Paul and me out onto our bikes to discover new trails, rediscover old trails, enjoy top-notch Welsh hospitality and decide that, yes, we are definitely going back for more. Which is exactly what those PR people set out to do. Win-win all round I’d say.

For routes, places to stay, eat, and MTB Trail Thrillogy: discovercarmarthenshire.com

The Bear Llandovery: facebook.com/thebearllandovery