Slaying Dragons

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If there's a country in the world that is as fanatical about rugby as New Zealand, it's Wales.
The All Blacks usually play the Welsh in Cardiff most Novembers and having seen on television the fabled atmosphere of the Millennium Stadium, I have always told myself that one day I would have to experience an All Black-Wales game there for myself.
Well, five years after moving to London, that day has finally arrived.

As with most big events in the UK, one has to have their eye on the ball to get tickets, which is a good thing we had Sag. His research and organisational skills managed to get us twelve tickets!
I had marked this year as the year I would finally go to Cardiff for an All Black-Wales game and it seemed I wasn't the only one - there was no shortage of takers for the twelve tickets and in the end the twelve tickets were a shortage themselves.
Just about everyone I knew was going - most of whom have appeared at least once or twice in this blog - and when combined with friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, the total posse numbered well above thirty.

Joining me on the Friday night train journey from Paddington were Sag, Sarah, Claire, Kev, and Corb, who some of you may remember was the friend I visited in Basel at the start of the year. I hadn't seen Corb in about eight months, of which six of those months has seen Corb based in Guangzhou, China, which was pretty cool. I'd like to be seconded somewhere for work - the experience of living somewhere new but with your company taking care of most of the hassle that goes along with it. It was good catching up with Corb again.

Depending on how you look at it, the train journey to Cardiff was one of the worst, or one of the best I've had in the UK.
First Capital Connect - yes, I am naming and shaming - had quite clearly oversold the train to the point where once all the seats were taken, everyone else on the train was crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisles. Our group ended up being splintered across one carriage although Corb and I managed to stick together with Kev in close attendance. The next two hours were going to be pretty uncomfortable.
This was made bearable however, by a phenomenon rarely seen on commuter trains. Because people were so tightly packed in shared suffering, people actually started talking to each other. We kind of helped things along as we had already had a couple of beers before boarding the train, and before we knew it, we had made friends with just about everyone at the front of the train, laughing and joking away. We even started playing drinking games with strangers. Good times.
At the start of the journey, a teenager by the name of Sean was pointed out by Corb as he started on a full bottle of vodka.
"Heeyyyyy, he's looking to have a good time tonight!" exclaimed Corb to the raucous laughter of our new-found friends.
Half a bottle of vodka later, and the teenager is spilling his drink all over me while slurring generalisations about Asian people. By this stage, he was hammered and I was stuck in the seat next to him which was highly annoying to me, but highly amusing to the others.
So like a sandwich, the middle of the journey was the best bit, bookended by cattle conditions at the start and a drunken teenager at the end.

Our hotel for the weekend was the large, new, but cheap Future Inn, located in Cardiff Bay. Cardiff Bay is the result of a huge regeneration project of what was derelict land in the 1980s.
Now the area boasts cultural landmarks such as an opera house and a science museum, hotels and restaurants, and flash new blocks of apartments.
In saying that however, it wasn't the most lively place - in fact you could say it was pretty dead, being quite far from the city centre.
Waiting for us at the hotel was Nikki - Kev's other half who you may remember from Milan, the other trip made in this blog specifically to see an All Blacks game - and Kev and Nikki's friends, Tim and Donna, yet more Kiwis in town for the game.
Waiting for me and Corb was a queen size bed to share - the result of the scarce accommodation available for the weekend. It would be a source of amusement for the others all weekend.
With a big day and night of drinking ahead of us, and being so far from town, we all settled on a drink at the hotel bar followed by an early(ish) night.

While a cloud of All Blacks fans descended upon Cardiff, another black cloud was already awaiting us.
As we enjoyed some magnificent hash browns as part of our hotel breakfast, we watched the typical wet, Welsh weather outside. In fact it was a bit more than the usual rain that was falling that particular weekend, as flooding in Wales had in fact held up our train. On the train back to London, we saw the full force of the floods on the scenic countryside, as fields resembled lakes just like they did on my recent trip to Cambodia.

Anyway, it wasn’t a day to be sightseeing outside, so after breakfast it was straight to the pub. Even at noon the pub was packed with rugby fans warming up for the game. Even at noon there was a DJ in the pub pumping out karaoke classics such as “The Final Countdown” and “Livin’ On A Prayer”. I guess they don’t get a lot of sunlight here, so perhaps they thought it was 12am rather than 12pm.
Joining at the pub was John and Joy (first seen in this blog in Athens, and again in Newcastle), and several more friends of Claire and Sag – our Kiwi posse was building up nicely and the good times flowed along with the beer, as we watched South Africa’s narrow win over England at on the TV set.

Now moving a large group of people is difficult and frustrating at the best of times, but when people have had a few, this magnifies the scale of the task somewhat. In the midst of people needing to go to the bathroom, some people agreeing to get food, some people thinking there was no time to get food, eggs erroneously being added to noodles, trying to sell an extra ticket to the match without luck, and the rain still pelting down, things got a bit out of hand – to the point where we were all separated (but luckily having all got our tickets) and all sprinting through the rain while simultaneously eating noodle boxes with chopsticks, desperately trying to get into the stadium to catch the national anthem and the haka.

Now some of you might be wondering why the anthems and the haka is so important – I mean, as long as you catch the game it’s all good, right? Wrong.
My Scottish colleague had told me that when a stadium of Welsh rugby fans sing “Land Of My Fathers”, that “it will make the hairs stick up on the back of your neck”. From what I had seen on the television over the years, I was hard-pressed to disagree with him. It was to be akin to a religious experience.
Also a religious experience is the haka – if you’re a New Zealander lucky enough to get yourself tickets to an All Blacks game, you just do not miss the haka. It would be akin to sacrilege or treason. Thus why Corb and I were sprinting through the rain, noodles in hand, stitches developing.
As we finally sprinted up back of the stands and entered the stadium, the first emotion was relief – the teams hadn’t come out yet – the second emotion was awe as the 80,000-seater opened itself up to us.
As we take our seats we look over and see John and Sag at the section entrance motioning us for our beer order. It was then time to take it all in.

The Welsh national anthem was indeed magical and did make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. In saying that however, I still didn’t think it was a rousing as the Italians singing Il Canto degli Italiani in Milan.
As for the haka, the All Blacks surprisingly brought out Kapo o Pango. With all due respect to the current Welsh team, the ABs usually only bring Kap o Pango out for the really important games. Perhaps this was a gesture of respect to the Welsh, who are after all the Six Nations champions, and who have arguably the most passionate fans in the world.
I would say that New Zealand and Wales are like kindred spirits in terms of the way both nations like to play their rugby, the passion both sets of fans have for the game, and the mutual respect that both nations have for each other. While we performed our ‘special’ haka for them, they responded in kind by amplifying the sound of our haka around the magnificent auditorium that is the Millennium Stadium.
No other nation does that – for example the English prefer to put no microphones around the haka and let the crowd drown it out with “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”. No respect.
The mutual respect goes for both sets of fans – the Welsh fans sitting next to me actually went out of their way to wish us good luck, not something I have ever seen from any other nation’s fans.
I found the Welsh in general a very friendly and hospitable bunch – whether it was the people sat next to me in the stadium, fans that I ended up talking to in the club later that night, or the locals chowing down at the Burger King at the end of the night. Even their jolly, tuneful accent sounds friendly.

In terms of the actual game itself, the Welsh probably kicked the ball at us too much and we made them pay. By half time it was 23-0, and a real shellacking looked on the cards.
The Welsh didn’t seem to be getting the rub of the green with the refereeing decisions either which never helps but it didn’t stop the Welsh leading a spirited fightback in the second half which was drawn 10-10. Final score: 33-10.
The Welsh were winning the Six Nations when we had bought our tickets for this match and back then a mouthwatering contest between the world and Southern Hemisphere champions and the Six Nations and Northern Hemisphere champions was highly anticipated. As Wales’s form dropped off horribly in the games preceding the All Blacks match, it was admittedly a little disappointing and in the end it was a handsome victory for the All Blacks.

So now it was time to celebrate the win!

It wasn’t just Kiwis out for the night – among our posse was Joy’s Welsh friend Sian and her sister. Sian had seemingly taken over the direction of the group which I am sure came as a relief to Sag, and we ended up at a place right opposite the stadium called Zero Degrees which had some interesting made-on-site beers including a mango number which was nice, but probably not something you could drink all night.
With Sag slipping on his way back from the bathroom – feet in the air and landing on his arse cartoon-style – and the girls encountering a girl in the bathroom so wankered that she dropped her phone down the loo and accused another girl of releasing a fart that she had in fact let go herself - we took these events as cues to leave Zero Degrees and get into our next place before the queues got too big.
And it was still bucketing down!

There were plenty of “valley girls” out for the night – people have been telling me they’re roughest girls in the UK – and it was difficult not to agree with some of the girls I saw walking around. Quite a few of them decided that shoes weren’t necessary despite some streets resembling rivers, and quite a few of them also decided that boob tubes and miniskirts were all the clothing they required despite the incessant cold and rain. You could say we saw a few whales in Wales.

Our next port of call was somewhere that I probably wouldn’t frequent in London – Tiger Tiger. What it was though, was big enough to get our huge posse in, and playing a good variety of music that everyone knew. Like McDonalds, sometimes it’s good to know exactly what you’re going to get and sometimes it is exactly what you need - dirty and greasy.
The place was a proper rabbit warren, to the point where I didn’t even have mobile reception. It had two levels and three different dance floors, one of which was the retro “Groovy Wonderland”.

By the time that we had got in we had already been drinking for the best part of about ten hours – so of course the most sensible thing to obviously do is buy a whole bottle of Jaegermeifter and several rounds of Skittlebombs.
Oh and when Gangnam Style came on dis shit was off da chain yo!
Yeah, it was fair to say that we may have overdone the rugby celebrations just a tad that night…
We left around 3am (I think) and things were still pumping, still busy, so Cardiff’s nightlife gets the thumbs ups.
Because of the rabbit warren that was Tiger Tiger I only got text messages from my friend Anna – also in town for the rugby – who we were all trying to meet up with all weekend, too late.
Kev and Nikki and a whole other posse of Kiwis were with her and they all ended up at a place next to the pub we were at all afternoon.
“I won the limbo here!” was just one of the texts I received once I got out of the club. A good night was had by all.

I was ruined the next day. It was like Newcastle: Part II.
Normally, I would be all about at least having my customary walk around the city and checking out the main sights, but most people just wanted to get on the next train back to London and to be completely honest, so did I. There wasn’t really anything on Cardiff’s list of sights that really jumped out at me and we saw some of the main landmarks when we were out at night so on to the train we went.
This would probably go down as one of the least touristy and least photographed trips ever to appear on this blog.

The main thing to see in Cardiff was the Millennium Stadium and we were lucky enough to see a game inside it – another destination and event ticked off the list.
Where to next?

Wela i chi!,
Derek

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Photos

Inside The Millennium Stadium
With a capacity of 80,000, it is a mightily impressive stadium.

St Mary Street
The main pedestrian shopping drag in Cardiff.

Me & Corb
Corb came here all the way from Switzerland!

Cardiff Castle
Cardiff's most popular tourist attraction. We just walked past it on our way to Tiger Tiger...

Outside The Millennium Stadium
As impressive on the outside as it is on the inside.

The Haka
We were surprised that the ABs did Kapa o Pango - they usually save it for 'special' occasions although perhaps a match against the Six Nations champions on their home patch can probably be regarded as a special occasion.

Flames!
To mark the teams' entrance onto the field.

The Action Begins
It was pretty one sided and the ABs were 33-0 up at one stage and it looked like it was going to be a cricket score. The Welsh cam back strongly in the second half however - final score 33-10 to the ABs.

And It Sails Through The Posts!
Aaron Cruden sends another kick sailing through the posts. Having now seen an AB vs Wales test match at the Millennium Stadium, another personal ambition has been realised.

Da Boyz
Corb, Sag and John at the Millennium Stadium.

Zero Degrees
Cool bar we visited after the game.

Tiger Tiger
John busting a move in Tiger Tiger on what was a drunken, Skittle-bombed, Jaeger-bombed night.

The Crew
This was only some of the crew who descended onto Cardiff for the game. Sarah, Claire, Joy, Sian and Corb.

Welsh
Can't read it.

Cardiff Train Station
Cardiff's delightfully art-deco train station.

Cardiff Train Station...Again
I am clutching at straws here. Has to be the least photos I've ever taken on a trip. That is what happens when you're either drunk or severely hungover for the entire trip.