| Just a few miles inland from Port Talbot is the Afan
Argoed Forest Park. Its pretty big and I took my mountain bike down there
recently to check out it's superb trails.
There are essentially three way marked ones. The 'Green' easy one,
an 'Orange' middlin difficult one now called Genesis, and a 'Red'
difficult one known as 'The Wall'. Your intrepid just turned 'fifty
several' reporter did Genesis and The Wall and a bit more in six hours of
tough, but exhilarating cycling. |
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I arrived mid morning and tried to fathom out
the route without really knowing where I was going. |
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So I just climbed and climbed but mostly on
wide forest trails. This was not what I had come for. Pretty enough, but
hardly challenging. |
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There are some very pretty cameos all
along the route, which at this point was an old railway line. |
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Not quite as steep as it looks, but it was
at the top of a big climb. |
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Behind me, the ruins of a small chapel sat
incongruously in a little field. It must have been a long tough journey to
Chapel.
No wonder it is in ruins now. |
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This was the view back towards the starting
point many hundreds of feet below. It was a lot tougher than it looks. I
actually had to get off and push, which is very unusual for me. |
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Even higher, now I was trying to follow a
route that I had downloaded from the Net. I got lost. Hopelessly. So I sat
and recovered and devised a new strategy: follow any downhill trails with
a bike symbol. |
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Thats better! I had discovered The Wall,
Afan Argoed's Red Route. Lots of fun, fast and furious downhill stuff. |
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The best bit was that the site is so huge
that you hardly see anybody else. Excellent stuff. |
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I'm afraid the photographic side of me kept
calling, there was always something worth snapping. |
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Back in the car park, I devoured a couple
of bananas and a litre or two of water from my 'camel back' whilst other
cyclists were using their laptop technology in a bonnet top situation. |
| Clearly one of the top biking
centres in the UK, I enjoyed it all enormously. As my wife would
say, 'you're just a big kid!' |
