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A couple of weeks ago I took off out of the city with a friend of mine. A couple years back he bought a second-hand transit van and for a few months worked on a conversion into a live-in 'incognito' (looks just like any old van) motor-home, for trips like ours. He's kitted it out with a double bed, shower, toilet, 3-hob gas stove, and some seating area as well. We took off and spent a week wild camping along the mid-West Coast of the UK mainland, driving out of London mid-afternoon on a Friday. Work has been intense this year - the adjustments to remote working and the context of the pandemic and how it's been difficult to live a social life within that, and also just the intensity of work. So I was keen to leave as much digital, tech and urban behind. The only electronic item I took with me was my mobile phone. I had thought about taking a laptop for movies in case we got any rainy nights, but he had a laptop just in case so I just stuck a few films on a thumb-drive and off we went. In the end, we didn't end up using the laptop at all.
I took my tent, and the plan for me was to identify some decent spots to go wild camping, for my friend to park up his van and crash in that overnight, and for me to find some nearby space to pitch up my tent. Work had been so intense that I'd hardly found time to do much research, but luckily I'd identified a few spots online, by searching through wild camping community tips & locations. We arrived just as night fell, and as we just had moonlight to guide us we hit the dirt path that headed to the first location I thought looked like a good spot. I couldn't have been luckier with this find: we parked up in a small non-descript dirt-road cul de sac, next to a little bay with its own beach, an old ruined structure, and a coastal path alongside some cliffs that was perfect for me to pitch my tent. In the course of the week, I got really good at putting up my tent in the dark - as I'd pack the tent up each morning just in case we were found [note for all folks not from the UK: wild camping is permitted in parts of the UK but you often have to ask for landowners' permission to do it, and it's not always guaranteed that you won't wake up to an angry landowner kicking you off their land, so it's best to keep the whole process as invisible as possible - which also adds to the joy].
We stayed 4-nights on the coast and then headed inland to some mountains and spent the rest of the week there. On the coast we rented wet-suits and went surfing, went cycling down the beaches, went for some walks on the rocks and seafront, and done a little bit of trekking inland as well. At night, we'd get a little barbeque out of the van and sit by the bay and cook something on the open fire, and we'd drop a bag into the cold ocean with some bottles of beer inside to chill it. A couple of nights were nice enough to take a (very cold) plunge in the sea as well.
The time spent in the mountains was the highlight. We went scrambling up a mountain path (only a grade I scramble - but still tough), and encountered some quite difficult gullies in foggy conditions that we had to scale. This was exhilarating and terrifying, but so rewarding. The next day, we went scrambling and trekking through an old abandoned slate quarry and mining town. This was absolutely incredible - loads of tunnels that still exist running through the mountain and quarry that you can, if careful, navigate entrance to and explore caverns. We walked through one tunnel to find a small waterfall out of an adjoining tunnel within an inner cavern, opening up into a larger cavern inside the mountain - pure bliss and wonder. We spent about 8-hours in this location, going further and further up the mountain and discovering different dimensions of the old mining landscape; workers buildings, industrial buildings for slate-cutting, all on high cliff sides overlooking the moody landscape. Everything free to wander and explore. Really quite dangerous (there were a handful of climbers and abseilers elsewhere on the site too) and all the more thrilling for being somewhat wild like this. At the end of the day, we took a plunge into a nearby glacial lake, freezing cold and exhilarating, before crashing and driving home the next day.
A highlight of the trip was the blessing-in-disguise of the failure of an electrical circuit in my friend's van. We couldn't work out what was up with the electricity but we had limited means to charge mobile phones or anything, so we largely kept things powered down and harvested electricity when we'd stop in a pub or somewhere, and just use the phone every now and then for photography or for GPS or a bit of research into different locations to camp/park.
I stayed in the tent most nights but two nights I crashed in the floor of my friend's van, when there was no feasible space to plot a tent or when the wind was too strong (two days in the middle of the week were a bit stormy and we couldn't do too much more than hole up wild-camping in a mountainous region and just watch the landscape and feel the wind rocking the van in the night).
I'm back in the city now. Back at work. And I'm trying desperately not to forget the exhilaration and the feel of the salt water on my skin from jumping into the ocean in the night, waking up in a tent next to a roaring ocean on the cliffs, the thrill of sleeping outdoors in an unknown place, the intensity of scrambling the mountainous regions, the escapism of exploring the abandoned quarry, and the fresh water of swimming in glacial lake waters.
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Some music highlights from our getaway playlists:
Loudon Wainwright III - The Swimming Song
Do Make Say Think - 1978
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Fingertips
Asian Dub Foundation - Jericho
Boards of Canada - XYZ
Paul McCartney - Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey
The Mountain Goats - Palmcorder Yajna