Thankfully, the weather today has been excellent! Internet access (for free at least, for a cheap fellow like me) is scarce in this part of the world, and I’ve been scraping by as I go. However, it’s been a whirlwind of a trip, which is sadly unfortunate. I gave myself about two weeks to see England, but only three days to see Scotland! Now that the second day has just finished up now, I find myself wishing I had given myself a lot longer to see all the sights we’re whirling past.
After I posted last, the weather continued to turn for the worst. Pouring rain constantly, the bus getting stuck in ruts at times on tiny one-lane roads. At one point, we had to pass by a city bus out in the wilderness and we were stuck side by side for ten minutes, trying not to run each other off the road. The passengers in each stared across the 3 millimetre gap with some nervousness to the other bus’s occupants, and it was a rather tense moment because we could go neither forward or back. Obviously we did finally make it out though, but that gives you a hint as to what the road conditions were like. For most of yesterday and today as well on the Western coasts, we’ve been on one-lane roads.
We saw ancient stone cairns out above Dunkeld, a thousand years older than Stonehenge and aligned with the winter solstice sunrise. It heartened me that I got to see something truly ancient on my trip, since I had missed out on Stonehenge and will have to save that for another day. We squelched about in the muck in the fields…Scotland has a free-passage law that says that trespassing is non-existent and people can literally go anywhere as long as they don’t damage the land. These cairns, called the Clava Cairns, were covered in markings from ancient tribes and served mostly as burial or cremation tombs.
After making a quick stop by the Battlefield of Culloden, where Bonnie Prince Charlie almost met his end in an ill-fated battle in 1745 (a battle considered by many highlanders to be a pinnacle battle for independence from England), we arrived in the famous Loch Ness region. I didn’t realize that the lake was so huge, being 24 miles long and 750 metres deep…deep enough, said Michael, to fit every member of the human race inside and not even reach the top. However, it was still pouring quite a bit, and scaggy too, so we couldn’t see too far down the loch (not that we’d be able to see 24 miles to the end anyway!) and many people just stayed on the bus too. Determined as I was to at least partially experience the loch, I waded out into it. It was cold, very cold. I quickly waded back out again…Michael told us later that most of the time, weather permitting, people leap out into the loch and swim around for awhile. Maybe next year.
We then made the last leg of the first day’s journey up to Inverness, the “Capitol of the Highlands”…visitors to the city from other islands around the mainland must be happy to see a city that has two lane roads and more than one pub! It was tiny, compared with the Edinburgh lodging, but the team of us amused ourselves for the evening by going to a Thai restaurant that Michael recommended (and he came with us too so it must have been good, we figured) called Hootananny’s where we had some great Thai food (rather an odd combination of locale and food, I thought!) and just chilled and listened to…surprise surprise, a didgeridoo. Who would have thought?
Today we started off by heading to the Island of Skye, renown for its beauty and mountain ranges. This is definitely one area, viewed as the bus rumbled down the mountains towards it and the mountains reaching into the clouds and stretching far into the distance, that needs to be climbed by me, and sometime soon. Apparently the Macbackpackers group that I’m with now does 3-4 day trips into Skye, just for climbing, but I’m on more or less a whirlwind tour of Scotland and we unfortunately can’t stay very long at any one location. We dropped off some people at Skye and picked up some other hikers, had a snack at a pub and took some photos, and we were off again back into the Great Britain mainland. (Michael was quick to point out that Skye wasn’t part of “Great Britain” but part of Scotland solely.
Next the bus was off to the nearby Eilean Donan castle, which many Americans know because of its conspicuous role in being the backdrop for a movie a couple people have seen, a little clip called “Braveheart” – yes, it’s the backdrop that Mel Gibson and his pals are trooping out from, and there were some pictures of the movie set in there as well. It’s actually independently owned by the MaCrae family and not by Scotland historians so it was a few pounds to get in, but it was beautifully done and had an amusing kitchen with amazingly realistic wax figures of members of the household and the food that would have been eaten after its 1932 restoration. I know it’s silly to think about it from the Hollywood position, but it was cool to walk across the bridge and think “Mel Gibson was here twenty years ago and walked right here.” I think it holds the unofficial honor as the most photographed castle in Scotland too, and I can believe it, too. I certainly added my own camera to the countless others that have surrounded it.
We made a quick stop by the Glen Coe area and the simply incredible mountain range surrounding the road there. It’s a little bit past Ben Nevis, the highest point in the entire Great Britain range (at 1300 metres, compared to my Snowden 1085 metre hike) and it’s a ring of cliffs standing around 1,200 metres tall, all around the road and covered in trees and heather and waterfalls. I felt very, very small standing there surrounded by the cliffs, with the tiny bus look like a dot of white against them as I hiked a ways away from it. It’s greener here than the Rocky Mountains, but a lot taller and more majestic than the Appalachian Range too. I really enjoyed seeing it, and it’s another one of those “if only I had more time” sort of things for me…I want to climb Ben Nevis now, too.
For the last stop before we reached our 2nd night lodgings of Oban, we stopped by a little castle, out of the way, near the little town of Appin. It sits on a tiny island off the shore. However, this castle is unusual because it goes by two names. It’s castle Stalker to some, but to millions around the world, it’s more famous as “Castle ARRGGHHhhhh” from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. Even though we could only spend 10 minutes there or so, and we were 200 metres away from it, I was tended to leap the fence (testing those pro-trespassing laws) and prostrate obsequiously before it. For a longtime Monty Python fan, seeing the very place where Arthur and Lancelot were refused entry, for the second time, and looking across the river and seeing the hill where the peasants and soldiers (almost all of them extras from Appin; what a lucky job!) assembled was a dream come true. But once again…a lightning trip this has to be and so we were back on the bus in a few minutes. Michael honked the horn at me; I looked up and everyone was back on the bus and watching me and laughing, I had been leaning on the fence staring at ARRGGHHhhh as everyone else left. I breathed a heavy sigh and rejoined the group, staring back at the castle longingly. Someday, someday…
Soon we were in Oban, and after grabbing some mince pies with some travel colleagues, we decided to see the local sights: McCaig’s Tower, which was a charitable job by the McCaig clan chieftain for 3 out-of-work stonemasons to build a tower in the dead of winter, inspired by the Roman Coliseum. It was never finished though, so it became a garden for the city. After snapping some shots of that, we moved on to the spooky, abandoned ruin of Dunollie Castle which has the honourable distinction of not having any guardrails, security, or any annoying things like that. It’s an ancient castle, almost destroyed now, and covered in vines and ivy and holes. We climbed around in it a bit, but as it was beginning to get dark and the stairs were both slippery and steep, we decided we should leave before it got too much darker.
The last day comes up soon, and it’s now half past midnight! Stirling tomorrow!