Power from the glens

I had to wake up too early on Tuesday morning, because the bus was supposed to be leaving the offices of Wild on Scotland at 8:00 am. We had a very long day in front of us.

So, I paid the previous day, woke up early, and headed out. It was raining a little bit, and I ended up getting a taxi in front of the bus station. It dropped me near the offices in the Royal Mile with plenty of time to grab a coffee, pay for the tour and meet some of the people going on the tour. Most of the people were going on the 4 day trip to Skye, and there were only 5 of us going to the Orkneys. A couple of people joined us. They were going to travel up to Ullapool and up there join the bus going back to Loch Ness, before returning the following day to Edinburgh.

Our guide was called Budgie, and he was really patient with all of us. I should say that the group was most peculiar. By the time we joined with the people coming from Skye, there was two Australian girls, 1 Italian, 2 Catalan boys, 1 girl from Germany, 4 couples from Zaragoza, myself (from Bilbao) and a girl from Malaysia. The German and the Malaysian girl used to hang on their own, and there was a couple of "interesting" arguments later on.

Anyway, we got on our way out of Edinburgh and poor Budgie kept explaining stories about the different places we were travelling through and nobody was listening. He went through a quick who-is-who of the Scottish kings (I guess the Braveheart film did a poor job of explaining what was life back in the Middle Ages) and tried to explain about the Jacobites in order to leave something in our mind before having to explain everything at Culloden field. I swear I could listen some snoring.

We got lost near Perth, and had to turn around before arriving to Hermitage Forest for a quick walk along the river. The water was brown due to the turf fields upstream, and Budgie showed us a small viewing platform, complete with mirrors and a balcony over the river. It was built back in the XVIIIth century by the duke of Athol during the Ossian folly. There was a wave of romanticism across Europe, and the poems of the ancient warrior (supposedly discovered by James MacPherson) swept over writers as Goethe, emperors as Napoleon or musicians as Schubert or Mendelssohn. The pavilion was named in Ossian´s homage. Years later it was discovered that those ancient rhymes didn´t exist.

From Hermitage we continued on our way to Inverness. We stopped at Pitlochry to grab something to eat. A nice, small place in that mock Victorian-Scottish style from the end of the XIXth century. We had to stop at Inverness to pick up Meike, the German girl, and then we took the road to Ullapool. There were a couple of stops on the way at Rogie Falls and Corrieshalloch Gorge. At this last stop we had to walk over a hanging bridge to get to the other side and some good photo ops, but there was a whole bus of German retirees walking and standing and jumping on the bridge, and I am not really fond of that kind of things. If they were planning to die, they could wait until I was long gone.

We drove along some pretty impressive dams. The land had that desolate feeling of the highlands, small bushes, scrubs and stones and a big, big sky. The drive down to Ullapool was similar to a few I had driven down in the Cork coast of Ireland.

Ullapool is a small town where the ferries from Skye stop. There are a few pubs, a small fishing harbor and a good chipper. We met the people from Skye at the parking place from the supermarket, swapped bused and got on our way to do some shopping for dinner and breakfast. The Wild on Scotland tours work on a kitty basis. You put some money before leaving and everyday there is a trip to the supermarket to buy the food for the day. We planned on having burritos and salad for dinner.

When we got to the hostel, we found out that our booking hadn´t been kept, and we were moved to another place, the Ceilidh Place, that didn´t have a kitchen. Budgie gave us some money so that we could go and have dinner on our own, and we dropped our bags. I shared a double room with Chiara, the Italian girl. We went for a walk along the harbour and met my first seal swimming there. We had dinner at the chipper place, scampis and chicken breast and afterwards it was time to get to bed.