After breakfast we picked up our campervan with two single beds. Turned out they were for gnomes. Luckily we did fit in if we converted to a double bed. The owner had bought all new household stuff. Ready for take of.
Dropped in at Tesco's for supplies. Had to get a discount card and a phone number, which was not easy, but after some All Blacks stories with the right person, all was arranged and we could buy enough supplies for the first days.
Met up with Peter and Floor, our old friends from the Netherlands. We got lost together several times at previous holidays, so what could possibly go wrong on this holiday.
Well, the first thing that went wrong was my ticket for the ferry from Oban to the Isle of Mull; for the wrong date. Everything was fully booked. But we were told that there was another ferry, I just had to make a big detour, that's all.
First we visited the ruins of the picturesque Kilchurn castle
and the lovely St. Conan's kirk.
Just before Oban Nienke and I headed north for our detour. It was actually a very nice drive through a great landscape. Over a single track road, but nobody else had a wrong booking, so the road was desolated. A brief stop at one of the many lakes (a lake is a loch).
Funny letterbox at one of the sparse houses in the area. When we arrived at Lochaline the restaurant was closed (they forgot to tell google) and the local pub turned out to be a social club with some very shady local figures. Nienke kindly asked the captain of the ferry if it was OK to take the last ferry instead of waiting for the first one the next morning (which was stated on our ticket). With only two other cars on the ferry it felt like playing football in an empty stadium. And so we arrived at the Isle of Mull a day early.
After joining forces with Flo and Peter again we visited Duarte castle. Many locals in Te Horo beach have links to the MacLean family who has been governing the castle and it surroundings for centuries. The MacLeans are fertile like rabbits. They live all over the world. We made some pictures of the flag, tartan and cemetery for our friends at home with the Scottish MacLean genes.
We camped on a remote beach. Flo and Peter's campervan is rather small to accommodate us four, but we managed to stuff ourselves in our vehicle for coffees, diners and some games. Mah yong and some dice games (no money involved).
Climbed the hills behind the beach, as you do as men. Nice view over the beach and the mini village. You can see our vans nicely parked together.
Still struggling with jet lag I was up early for a stroll along the shoreline.
Next day we visited Iona. An island where the vikings had some nasty encounters with the local monks. I guess you understand how that ended. The abbey has been rebuild and stands proudly looking over the island and the sound between Mull and Iona.
Some of the ruins had not been rebuild. Here is the door to the old wine cellar I believe.
Very nice beaches and rock formations. The loop walk I could remember from earlier research wasn't as loopy in the end. We stranded on boggy paddocks while several sheep were laughing at us. Back the same route again. In the village the ladies headed for the craft shops and the gents for the pub. From the deck we had a proud feeling when a big tall ship with the Dutch flag anchored right in front of us.
The day ended well in the Keel Row, the only pub in Fionnphort (pronounced 'finnyfort'), where the ferries would leave. That fire was so nice.
Nienke took a nice photo from the camping at the farm where we stayed the night.
The next day we sailed out for the puffins. We were not allowed to go to Staffa (major work was going on at the jetty there), but we headed for Lunga. The island on the picture is is Bac Mòr, or Dutch cap island. Still not sure if that was a joke.
An there they are.
One of the main reasons to go to Mull, to go and see the puffins.
The weather gods were very kind to us. What an amazing day.
Thousands of puffins, razor blade heads, shags in all sizes and colours and lots of other birds with names a 63 year old brain can't remember.
Shaggy, blocking the path.
Two razor blade heads with hundreds of thousands other birds in the back ground.
A video shot by Nienke.
Even the local variety of the bottle nose dolphins came over to greet us.
Staffa island, three layers of rock, the result of a huge volcano eruption millions of years ago. The middle layer basalt rock. This layer is one of the main reasons people live on Mull and Skye. Almost all old houses are build with stones from broken basalt pillars. They have a lot of flat sides.
'This is a one way road isn't it? I hope?'
Driving on the Isle of Mull is not as easy as you'd think.
We found an beautiful spot to free camp in Knock. We even managed to gather enough wood for a small BBQ and fire. There was only one other camper on the beach, and we'd seen that one before in Uisken. Graham clearly liked remote overnight spots, like us. To emphasize that he came over to talk to us Dutchies and share some whisky (a dram of whisky). Great stories as well. There must be hundreds of wild deer around. We did not see a single one.
Nienke's evening picture of our campsite.
Driving in remote Scotland is not for the faint hearted.
We once again free-camped, this time at Calgary beach. There was a nice sculpture park nearby which we really enjoyed. All during the day you hear cuckoo's everywhere, so nice.
Sometimes you can be lucky and unlucky at the same time. When we arrived in Tobermory the annual folk music festival was on. Lucky us. Unfortunately that meant that all the potential camping spots were occupied. Bugger. Found a spot about 15 km further. Peter was so kind to offer driving us to this very nice festival. We visited 5 different venues and enjoyed the Scottish folk music. Bands like Tarran, Falasgair and the Tom Campbell trio are worth listening to.
We could not skip the tour in the Tobermory distillery. You can hear Peter thinking 'stop talking, let's go to the tasting room'.
Whisky humour in the sacred hall of the distillery, where their most precious whiskies were sleeping in their barrels. We could not touch or taste it, but the faint smell of the 'angels share' was in the air. The barrels needed to be behind bars because of the law. Weird laws they have here anyway. We did dome shopping in the morning and had a bottle of wine in our basket. 'Sorry guys, but we are not allowed to sell alcohol before 10am in the morning' (it was 9am). After 10 (am !!!) it is alright and you can get drunk........
Not the nicest of weather, but still, a happy bunch in front of the famous 'Harry Potter bridge' at Glenfinnan.
Found an amazing camping in Invergarry, quite a bit of the road, but with great amenities. And a bit of a surprise.
Peter! See that deer! He did not. Probably because you do not expect it.
Had a nice game of mah yong in the van. Better than the dice games, as the van der Steur family has problems keeping the dice on the table.
This is the Eilena Donan castle. Apparently you just have'it's a 'must visit' castle. So we did. It's full of portraits of the 23rd chief of the MacLeod clan. Another clan that spread like rabbits. Lots of presents the officers of some army gave him. The lack of medals was quite striking for such important officers. Victors write their own history, but there was little proof of the heroics of this clan. The rest of the castle was filled with diorama's of how it used to be. Like the kitchen, with a few live size dolls and all the stuff they could find in the local charity shops.
We moved on to the Isle of Skye. The pouring rain could not stop us from visiting the Fairy pools, Because of the rain, the waterfalls were amazing. We did not even reach the real Fairy pools as we wanted to keep our shoes dry,. So we refrained from wading through the ankle deep stream blocking our quest for the famous pools. Pretty soaked to the bones we got back to the cars.
Next stop: the Tallisker distillery. Arrived 15 minutes before closing time. Not enough time to do a tasting. So we just bought a bottle. Not the one the bartender suggested (of course not the cheapest one), but a nice 10 year old single malt.
Nienke did point out that there were more interesting bottles, liked the one in the left upper corner. With a price tag of NZ $ 13,500.00 we thought that trying to bring a case of those back home in our soft suite case was just a bit too risky.
We spend the night at Tallisker beach. It was so windy that the the water from the falls was blown back up the rocks. It was the only night one of us did not feel so well. One of the local oysters must have been slightly of.
Dunvegan castle was full of portraits of the MacDonalds, again a lot of pre-1900 selfies and lists of their heroics, without any proof of it.
Beautiful gardens though. Even one with Nienke's favourite tree the Monkey puzzle tree.
Next stop: the Neist point lighthouse. Eh, traffic jam. Had to happen. They were doing some road works and had forgotten to put a traffic manager on site. The single road, with sporadic passing spots and dumb-ass drivers did the rest. The one young traffic guard managed to get us through after half an hour. The Isle of Skye is busy, very busy. The roads are small and bad. You really do not want to be here in summer time! A lady at a visitors centre told us the there are 12,000 people living on Skye. In the summer they have a million visitors, and more and more of them come in motorhomes. The bastards.
The walk to the light house was very cool. A big rock, sticking out in the ocean, with a lighthouse and some deserted buildings.
The flat area at the foot of the light tower was almost like a memorial field. Lots of people building little towers in memory of someone, or just because they could.
A monument of a glorious past time. The rusting remains of a crane, used to get supplies from a ship for the people manning the lighthouse.
Because people kept coming to the light house and the ongoing traffic jams, we decided to just stay at the car park and camp there for the night. Good decision. Eventually it did get quiet. Unfortunately a Frenchman parked his little campervan close to us. His van was so small that his three little daughters had to wait outside in the cold wind, while mam and dad were cooking. Of course we reported this obvious child abuse to the proper authorities., By now they will have been deported back to France. Well, we didn't, as we had no reception, but we should have!
Had a coffee at a great little hotel in Dunvegan. An artist had made these great animal head trophies from driftwood. Inspiration!!!!!!
We learned of the great power black out in Portugal and Spain through the English papers. Of course they singled out the biggest problems with that!
Portree was the basis for our last trip on Skye. A nice little town with quite a few restaurants and a small harbour. And a supermarket where we could buy dinner.
Dinner was a BBQ on the camping, in the sun, with some Argentinian Malbec. The jacket potatoes did not work out the way we envisioned. They were too big for our little fire. Far from 'al dente'.
Nienke found this nice chocolate bar from Cadbury. It gave some hints on how to divide it according to the efforts of the day.
Hugh's castle (Caisteal Ùisdean). That's it. No information, no signage, not even sign posting from the road. We just knew it was there and managed to find it. Probably not a popular guy. It overlooks the entrance of Loch Snizort Beag. The history writer probably had such a good laugh about the names that he did not bother to write more about it.
We found this jelly fish on the beach beneath Hugh's castle. Much more interesting. It's the cauli flower jelly fish (cephea cephea). It can get up to 60 cm diameter and is a delicacy in Japan and Chine. Of course. We had our mind set on diner in the Staffin Inn, so we left the carcas to rot away on the beach.
Boys will be boys. If you can climb to something higher than themselves, they will do it. The rock is called Balnaknock. The passage was quite narrow. Not sure why that big american woman wanted to try it, but it was quite amusing to see her trying to wiggle herself out of it again. It was only thanks to gravity that she managed to free herself.
This huge valley with lots of small and pointy hills was carved out by a big glacier in the past.I n the back ground you can still see the waterfalls, remnants of the huge ancient glacier.
It all looked like a scene from the Hobbit movie. Except for my lovely partner, not the main character in that movie.
A nice shot of some islands through the last remaining window of Duntulm castle.
Bit of a weird story. Apparently the owner had enough of the cold wind. He decided to move. He took most of the stones with him. Imagine being his moving company. Too bad they have a rule now in the UK that ruins need to be left alone. You are not allowed to buy them and renovate them. Maybe if Scotland finally dumps England and joins the EU we may think about this amazing spot.
We did the Airds walk to a small hut on the most northern part, part if the Skye trail. As the organic layer on top of the rocks is very thin (10-15 cm), they just had to scrape some dirt of the rock et voilà: an almost Via Appia like walking path.
Dramatic rocks at the end of the track. Nienke briefly talked to a Dutch guy who had made it to the hut (first come, first serviced). It looked all pretty cold for the night, so we quickly made it back to the vans.
So amazing in the UK, it's almost like a phone box needs to be in the most remote place. This one actually worked.
I nearly killed tow lambs, a pheasant and a calf. Spared their life by swerving in time. Besides, our fridge is so small, they would not have fitted anyway. And, we had our minds set on a nice diner in the Staffin Inn.
The impressive rock on the north side of Skye.
A picture for the company where Nienke bought her rain coat. Apparently they asked for it. Not sure if she gets a discount the next time. Fact is that more than one person has asked Nienke where the coat came from.
Beautiful view from Staffin. When we arrived at the Staffin campsite we aske what time the Inn would open and if there was live music. Apparently the Inn closed before the war (it remained unclear which war), but no food and no music. Coincidentally the messenger of the bad news had two ladies making all kind of burgers and even provided breakfast. Just not in bed. Have to say, the burgers were pretty good.
This is how Skye is nowadays. And it is not even summer yet. Busy as. We wanted to do the walk to the peaks of the Storr (the local mountain range). A déjà vu came over us. It was like the Tongariro crossing, where you walk in a convoy of idiots on toe slippers, without water, sensible clothes and of course the phone in the hand on speaker, so everybody can listen to what their family had for dinner.
A video shot by Nienke.
Driving in remote Scotland is not for the faint hearted.
Found an amazing camping in Invergarry, quite a bit of the road, but with great amenities. And a bit of a surprise.
That was our trip so far. We said goodbye to P&F and hello to the north of Scotland.
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