lindoig1

[lindoig1]

My other blogs

I have created a separate blog for each of our trips and if you are interested, they can be found at lindoig.tumblr.com, lindoig1.tumblr.com, lindoig2.tumbler.com - and hopefully, there will be numerous more in the same series - lindoig3, lindoig4 and so on.  Naturally, the blogs all start at the bottom and each later posting appears further up.

[lindoig1]

For some reason, my title didn’t appear. It was supposed to say ‘The end of the line for this time!’

Thursday Day 99

We started our Big Red Bus tour and completed the Red line in the morning. It was a big loop around the city and the commentary was excellent. It took a bit over two hours and we got off at the second last stop so we could have lunch in Temple Bar – the food and entertainment area in the centre of the city. (We decided not to take the bus to the last stop because that was right near our hotel – but we did that later in the day.)

We used the bus trip to orient ourselves a bit and to prompt us as to the best places to go back to. We had lunch in Boxty using a 2-for-1 deal for Red Bus ticketholders and then walked to Trinity College a few hundred metres away. Heather was interested in seeing it and it was quite interesting. She couldn’t see all the things she wanted to, but apart from soaking up a bit of campus atmosphere, we saw a really fascinating display in the Geography Department. It was mainly about the geology of the area but had several related topics, including palaeontology, most interesting. I wanted to have a look at Merrion Square, described on the bus as an area scrupulously preserved in its original Georgian condition – but I was disappointed. I am not sure that there would have been a kids fun park in Georgian times, but it was mainly trees and lawns with lots of people having picnics. I saw a few birds – and perhaps the biggest rattus rattus I have ever seen – just a bit smaller than a kangaroo. It was stalking some song thrushes, but it never caught them while I was watching.

We then hopped back on the Blue line bus to take us back to our hotel, traversing much of the same route we took on the Red line – at least the second half of it. Unfortunately, the commentary on that was really poor, often contradicting the commentary we heard in the morning. The guy identified the Irish Bank headquarters as the Houses of Parliament and when we got off, I mentioned it to him and he got a bit snaky, claiming to have said the building was the original Houses of Parliament, something I still don’t quite believe.

Back at our hotel, we went across the road and bought a pizza for dinner – claimed to be the best pizzas in Ireland. If so, some of the rest of Ireland’s pizzas must be pretty ordinary, but it was the first pizza we had eaten for at least 4 months so we didn’t complain too much.

Friday – Day 100

Day 100 – a milestone, but our last day before heading for home.

We headed out to catch the Blue line on the Big Red Bus, but had to wait a while so went into the nearby Writers Museum for a while. It was starting to rain, but we were interested in the Museum anyway. It was pretty expensive and we felt we didn’t have time to do it justice anyway so we just had a long discussion with the woman on the desk instead. Ireland has many famous authors and poets and the Museum honours quite a lot of them. It hopes to double in size over the next year so if we ever go back, we might invest in the new bigger and better museum, but not this time.

We caught the Blue line and the first half of the tour went to quite different places than the Red line. It started with the cemetery and a surprising number of people alighted to tour the grounds, visiting the final resting places of many of the more famous residents. We didn’t and went on through some of the older residential areas and past their main stadium, stated in the commentary to be the third largest in the world. (It isn’t, even the MCG which is rated 10th is twice its size!)

We got off the bus in the centre of the city and had lunch at Madigans, a pub in O’Connell Street. Back on the Red line to take us to their Dead Zoo – the natural history/animal museum where we spent an hour or so on the ground floor looking at Irish flora and fauna. It had a large display of birds, but I though most were poorly curated and didn’t look much like the ones we saw in our real life travels. There was another floor upstairs that I had a very quick walk through while Heather rested her sore foot. I only spent 10 minutes there but noted that Aussie animals appeared to be well over-represented – a fairly comprehensive selection compared with specimens from other areas of the world.

We had intended going to another archaeological museum next door, but we were just too tired so went back to the river where we had our drink yesterday – and did it all again. We then had a VERY long wait for the next bus to take us back to our hotel. They advertise a 15 minute service, but we waited 40 minutes and when we mentioned this to the driver, he got a bit snippy and said it was a 30 minute service. There were numerous other misrepresentations in their advertising about live v recorded commentary, multi-lingual access and do on so I eventually emailed the company and drew attention to the discrepancies. I haven’t heard back from them, but given that the Irish service is managed from Denver in the US, it is not surprising.

Back in the hotel, we did our final packing to come home and ate dinner in the hotel.

Saturday/Sunday Days 101 and 102 – the trip home

Up early to get our 8:30 cab to the airport and check in. We had decided to come home on Premium Economy tickets and that proved a good decision. We were able to jump the queue and had a lot more legroom and perhaps better cabin service. I have always liked Cathay Pacific and this was no different. I found the configuration of the seat a bit uncomfortable on the first leg to Hong Kong, but once we deciphered how the controls worked, it was better. We were treated royally on the flight and had a couple of hours to kill in Hong Kong before boarding the other leg for home. Hong Kong is a huge airport and we had some trouble finding out way around. We had to catch the train to another terminal to go through yet another security check and then a train back to the gate where we caught the plane home. There was another detailed check where we had to open and display all our carry-on stuff in the airbridge before boarding but it was then all go to get home. Again, being Premium Economy passengers, we had no queues at Immigration and were soon awaiting our baggage and heading out through Customs to meet our driver to bring us home. We had picked up 14 hours on the way home and it was a little after midnight here when we got home – a very welcome sight despite some serious jetlag.

I may post some pics and some overall impressions at a later date, but we are still assimilating some of our experiences and have hit the ground running with lots of things to do at home. Already planning our next big excursion for about this time next year so summarising any key impressions from this trip may need to wait for a couple more weeks.

[lindoig1]

The last few days in our campervan

Sunday. Day 95

I have just realised that for about the last month, I have been quoting the incorrect day and day number. Today is actually Sunday, 5 August, making it Day 95 of our trip but it is too hard to go back and find out if I just got the numbers wrong or if I actually failed to report on our activities on a day early in July. Sorry if I have confused anyone – apart from myself.

We went for a walk around the park after dinner last night and found that it was more than twice the size I thought it was. It has a basketball court, football oval and other grassed area (hurling is big in Ireland), fishing in the creek (some kids were catching trout pretty successfully), a darts area, big sandpit with sit-on mechanical diggers, a big old-time museum village with blacksmithy, bakery, butcher, kitchen, stables and so on - about 10 sheds with displays, several incorporating witches, Frankenstein characters and so on. The farmer has really made the most of the area and it would keep campers and their families enthralled for weeks.

Not a lot to comment on today. It was 11:30 before we left and we stopped for lunch at 2:00 at pub near Tramore. We followed the coast where we could, but without a lot of success, then skirted Waterford on the motorway to get to busy Wexford and on our campsite. Our skepticism about Irish signage, maps and the reliability of our GPS was further reinforced a couple of times today with the GPS delivering us into another farmer’s backyard early in the day.

Only two more nights after tonight and a couple of days in Dublin then the long trek home. I think we will both be happy to be home. It has been a great experience but pretty much hard work at times.

A couple of thousand miles ago, we bought a couple of books because we were running out of the books we had recorded. We put one of them away and swapped the other couple we had with each other, but Heather had nothing to read tonight so wanted the one we had hidden. I say ‘hidden’ because it took us well over an hour to find it. We both independently searched every item of luggage we had without success until Heather found it under some loose folders in a cupboard we had already searched. It was definitely not a seniors’ moment/hour and a half, nor even a ‘boys’ look’. It just magically materialised after we stopped looking for it.

We are at a place called Parsons Green near Wexford tonight and the kids are having a wonderful time in the park, but it is not a happy experience for us. There is a 5 metre length of corrugated black plastic pipe about 750 mm in diameter and the kids are rolling it around with several of their members inside. Lots of fun, but the 100 decibel squealing has been going constantly for over two hours and it is beyond a joke. Two girls in particular are competing in a shrieking marathon and it is almost 10pm. Heather has just gone out to try to quieten them down a bit - to avoid me informing the parents of their responsibilities. At least that has led to a couple of parents coming out to supervise and the screaming has abated a little. Great too that the incessant barking of a score or more of dogs has quietened. Maybe they need some sleep too.

Monday. Day 96

Today is the last day of the Bank Holiday weekend and everyone is packing up and heading for home. In fact, the roads were busier today than at any time on our trip - and the drivers concomitantly insane. As we got closer to Dublin, the chaos increased, but we tried to keep out of it as much as we could. We were within about 30 kilometres of the centre of Dublin a couple of times, but kept to minor roads and avoided the crush a bit.

There are very few pullovers anywhere in the south or east of Ireland - not that the rest of the country was good, but it is almost impossible to find a place to stop anywhere away from the coast except in the centre of the towns. They are not the places we wanted to stop anyway and even along the coast, places big enough to take more than 1 or 2 cars are rare and those that do exist have gantries preventing anything more than about 1.9 metres high getting in.

This meant that we drove longer distances with fewer stops, particularly as we got nearer to Dublin, but we did a big loop along a less coastal road, heading north, then northwest, north again and back southwest through the spectacular Wicklow Mountains National Park to Roundwood where we camped for the night. The National Park had a few larger pullovers and in one valley in particular, we stopped for photos a couple of times – it was just so spectacular with the steep-sided mountains and a large lough nestled in the bottom of one end. Quite extraordinarily beautiful.

Tuesday Day 97

We drove back through the wonderful Wicklow Mountains National Park this morning and took a little more time than we did last night. It had been fairly late so we drove through fairly quickly yesterday, but we took more time going back and it was even more beautiful today. We got out and walked in a few places and the view was quite breathtaking. In one place, there was a wonderful old thatched dome-like house like the ancients used and we took some pics of it – but it was a complete fake. It was only half a house and the back was simply a flat wall of fibre-board with a couple of steps up to a door. It turned out to be part of a film-set that will be used in making a movie in the coming weeks. All very cute, but a little disappointing too. Having said that, it was perched on the side of the valley and the view was stupendous – a very long glacier-carved valley, brilliant green with a blush of purple heather, numerous other wildflowers and all quite spectacular with a big lough filling almost half the basin.

We were trying to get to the Bog of Allen, a place Heather had found mentioned on a brochure. We had a lot of trouble finding it, but it was worth it. It is a wonderful place with an Information Centre where we spent a couple of hours and could have spent more if they hadn’t wanted to close for the day. The Centre is on an arable island in the middle of a large bog with floating bridges to enable access by vehicle. You can’t see a lot as you drive in, but it was apparently purchased long ago to enable grazing and forestry but is now a conservation area. We had a personal tour through the expansive museum area with the volunteer on duty. It took well over an hour as we were the only visitors that day and he was very passionate about conserving bog areas. He certainly convinced us of their importance and the problems of peat exploitation. Peat grows at a maximum of 1mm a year and they have been excavating several metres of it with massive machines for years causing all sorts of problems with water conservation, water table levels, acidity, disastrous changes to natural flora and fauna and so on. It was a very interesting time and they also have a wonderful big conservation (and vegetable) garden outside and we had a walk around that too. I saw some interesting birds (including one new one for us) and Heather had a long talk with the volunteer gardener about many of the plants growing. We were very glad we had persevered in finding the place and would recommend it to anyone.

We stayed at Camac Valley on the outskirts of Dublin overnight. We had to pack absolutely everything up and do a bit of cleaning in preparation for returning the van to Bunk next morning. There was another Bunk camper parked near us in the vanpark and the couple from there came across for a yarn. They were from Adelaide and were just on for a chat with some fellow Aussies. Their experience had been a lot different from ours, but they travelled mainly in the east and weren’t as adventurous as us. They had their van for another couple of days, but interestingly, we saw them in the street in Dublin a couple of days later and they were on the same plane as us from Dublin to Hong Kong and we saw them again on both ends of that trip. We were anxious to get on with our packing so we were happy enough when they returned to their camper after an hour or so chat.

Wednesday Day 98

We had a quick breakfast and packed our last minute things early because we were supposed to return the van to Bunk by 10am. Unfortunately, it took us over two hours to find them. There were two possible addresses provided in our hire document – one in Swords Road (about 6-7 kilometres long and they didn’t give us a street number) one in Old Airport Road (another long road without a street number). We stopped and asked a couple of people for directions when we thought we were near the place and they helpfully gave us incorrect directions. The Bunk website was more than confusing and even when we rang them (several times) they were unable to tell us how to get to where they were from where we were. We had just reached the point of saying that we would park on the side of the road and they could come and find us when one of our phone calls tripped a memory of one of the mis-directions we had been given earlier in the morning and I put 2 and 2 together and figured out for myself where we had to go – and I still got it wrong initially, but arrived safely after many unnecessary kilometres driving. We managed to return the van and unload our gear as it started raining so we had to take everything into the office until our cab arrived. It took them quite a while to get copies of the paperwork from Scotland to enable us to finalise the hire, but we managed it eventually and we didn’t have to pay any extra for the scratches we inflicted on the vehicle. I had quite a list of faults and problems with the van, but they weren’t really interested – they just had to prepare it to hire to someone else, faults included, and said we should just email the issues to their head office for them to decided what to do about them. I did this as soon as we got to our hotel and got an email back after we arrived home thanking us for the feedback. We had really enjoyed our experience in the camper, but it had sometimes been a bit of hard work so we weren’t entirely unhappy about handing it back to them. Obviously, our own caravan is much better than the camper, but what we saw was great, particularly the Highlands in Scotland but there were many beautiful things all along our journey. We drove 5500 kilometres in the 5 weeks with the camper so we certainly saw a lot.

After settling in at our hotel, we went out for a walk to the heart of Dublin a couple of kilometres away. We decided to buy a 2-day ticket for the Big Red Bus – the double-decker Hop-on Hop-off service we have used in numerous other cities, but we decided to start it the following day. We sat down for a drink on a boardwalk on the edge of the Liffey River and noticed a nearby boat tour and on the spur of the moment decided to take the tour. By luck, we got the last 2 tickets for the day and the trip was outstanding. It was only about an hour, out to the mouth of the river and back, but the young chap doing the commentary was great. He talked solidly throughout the whole tour and was entertaining and full of information and stories about everything we saw. It is up there with one of the best tours I have every been on. We had a drink in an old Irish Pub and then walked back to our hotel where we had dinner and crashed into bed after so much unaccustomed walking.

[lindoig1]

Bank Holiday Long Weekend. Days 92 and 93

Friday. Day 92

We started the day with a short drive to Mizen Head, the southernmost point in Ireland. We can say that we have been there, but not that we have seen it. The fog was a real pea-souper with visibility down to maybe 50 metres. We could have paid $25 to walk through the shop out to the invisible lighthouse but we spoke to a couple who were coming back and they said they couldn’t see anything. At least we can say we went to the most northerly, westerly and southerly points of both Scotland and Ireland if that counts for anything.

We retraced out steps and went to Crookhaven, another quaint little harbour town on a nearby point that rivals Mizen Head’s southernmost claim and it was clear and beautiful there. We could see Mizen Head across the inlet, but it was still almost completely shrouded in fog.

We followed the coast to Skibbereen and by then, the fog was long gone and it was warm and sunny, perhaps 23 or 24 degrees. What an amazing radical change from the dismal cold, rainy last couple of days!!! We ate lunch overlooking the sea again and a little further along, we came to a village on a tidal estuary with thousands of birds including hundreds of curlews and black-tailed godwits, 4 different gulls and dozens of oystercatchers, among other species. I walked along the foreshore and took a few photos and we drove around the bay for a couple of clicks before continuing our coastal odyssey towards the end of the Wild Atlantic Way.

We followed the signs attempting to get to Galley Head and got quite lost - the signage in Ireland is often quite confusing, not to say completely misleading as often as not. When trying to find a vanpark, we had to go via Clonakilty and the signage again led us completely astray. We eventually found the park but it was fully booked. It turns out that this weekend is a bank holiday (long weekend) and withe the best weather forecast being the best for ages, everyone is on holiday and everything is booked out. We made some phone calls and eventually found one 50 km back the way we had come, just north of Skibbereen! We set the GPS to take us there and promptly found ourselves in a farmer’s backyard after already driving through someone else’s backyard. The farmer redirected us in almost indecipherable Gaelic (may have been Irish, but it was hard to tell) and the GPS then took us to the right place over the strangest narrowest laneways that seemed to crisscross half the country. The park is a real family place with lots of gear for kids and a hands-on experience with sheep, goats, cows, donkeys, ducks - you name it. It is a working farm, but has lots of baby animals for the kids to pet.

Saturday. Day 93

We started the day by making a series of phone calls trying to find a vanpark where we could stay tonight. Heather eventually found one at Clonmel and believe it or not, it is NOT a long, long way to Tipperary, only about 30 clicks.

It was warm to hot all day and not a sign of fog anywhere.

We drove on slightly more major roads as far as Clonakilty without getting lost along the way, then followed the Wild Atlantic Way to Ballanspittle and thence to Old Head (you can’t put one on young shoulders!) despite once again being misled by the signage and having to backtrack twice to find it. We didn’t know what Old Head was, but it turned out to be quite interesting. The ‘Head’ was a Golf Course, guarded by a uniformed guy who opened and closed the huge gates just long enough to admit the richest of rich members. But quite a few cars were parked outside so we did too and took in the view. There were the remains of an old fort, part of a castle that was sold to the golf club in 1970, but the cliffs were the main attraction. It was quite scary for me. High cliffs, well over 100 metres, with absolutely nothing to show you where the edge was until you are looking straight down. A few crazy people were scrambling around where parts of the cliff had collapsed and just seeing their antics was giving me the wobbles. Simply insane. But the view from several metres from the edge was still pretty awesome so that is where we stayed!

Back on the main road was a visitors centre so we called in for a look. It was mainly a mechanism to extract more euros from the tourists, in the guise of a memorial to the people lost when the Germans sank the Lusitania. Interestingly, there was also a column said to be the official start of the Wild Atlantic Way. For us, it was the end rather than the start so we took some pics as evidence of our completion. It is supposed to be 2500 km long, but we took more than 3000 with all our detours. (And we clicked over 3000 miles today as well, now about 40km short of 5000 km.)

To celebrate our achievement in completing the WAW from end to end, we treated ourselves to lunch at the nearby pub - roast pork to make up for the Sunday Roast we missed out on a week ago. We toasted our success with a fine NZ Sav Blanc.

We wound our way through some lovely countryside, skirting the big city of Cork by using the motorway for 15km, and went inland to our campsite. Amazingly, it is another kids farm and other attractions similar to last night’s digs, but on steroids. As well as the animals I listed for last night, they have pigs, tiny ponies, several species of deer, guanacos, about 20 varieties of chooks, several ducks, can’t recall what else. The area is much bigger than last night and there is a small river with an operating waterwheel, a hand pump and boat rides. They also have pony rides and horse and cart rides, crazy golf (a lot of that here, whatever it is) and a large ‘pay to see’ area that I can’t describe because I haven’t paid. All of that seems accessible to anyone, but for people staying in the park, there are also several pool tables, a TV room, table tennis, games room and so on. It is a big park, totally chockers and no wonder, with all they have here for families.

An observation about Ireland...... On the entrance to almost every village, there is a sign indicating the value of the Lotto Jackpot applicable to the village. It seems that %most communities run a local lotto that jackpots from one week/month/whatever to the next. I have seen figures as low as 300 Euros and as high as 18000. No idea how it works, but it probably means that the money is kept within the community with lucky families benefitting from the jackpots without anyone losing huge amounts in any particular month.

The fences in rural areas, I.e., nearly everywhere, are also deceiving. I have mentioned the drystone (and occasionally mortared) walls dividing up the fields. But there are also fences immediately on both sides of the road but you can rarely see them. They are completely encased in brambles, weeds and shrubbery so you have no idea if it is a stone wall or a wire fence. Also, is it 10cm from the edge of the road or a metre and a half. We have passed many tractors mowing the edges with vertical mowers, but they also presumably only trim the outermost branches rather than risk a confrontation with a stubborn stone structure. These mowers only mow the bottom metre and a half of the brambles, enough for lots of the very small cars, but leave long branches trailing halfway across the road for campervans and other higher vehicles to try to negotiate with a stream of traffic approaching on a road barely wide enough for a car and a half. I am dreading the damages bill when we return the camper on Wednesday! Having said that, quite a lot of our driving today was through tunnels. - couple of short brick ones and many kilometres of green tunnel where the trees on either side of the road meet overhead in a ‘Bells of Saint Clements’ archway, mile after mile, sometimes almost spooky dark, sometimes with enough sun filtering through to make it a delightful drive.

[lindoig1]

A really long post - a whole week. Days 85 to 91

Friday. Day 85

Quite a pleasant and enjoyable day today, despite nothing in particular as a standout. It was almost noon before we left last night’s lodgings after a slightly frustrating night. The park was a bit noisy and until almost 11:30 there were kids running riot throughout the park. A few vehicles came and went and then a truck with flashing strobes came in and there was a bit of commotion near our van. I think it was a breakdown truck, but by the time I got up and went to explore, it was leaving. We had a bunch of kids surrounding our van so once they were sent home, things quietened down - blissfully until nearly 9am.

We traversed a little of the same road as yesterday but then cut south around Lough Derg heading for the motorway and the Limerick bypass. We decided that we needed to do a bit more shopping so detoured to Adare - that turned out to be a very busy little village with a very big traffic problem. We eventually escaped the traffic jam and found a park a couple of blocks away from the supermarket. There was a sign on the supermarket indicating that there was free parking at the rear, but a car was parked across what was the only possible entrance and there was no parking area anyway. Seems pretty typical of a lot of things in Ireland - don’t believe the signs! The supermarket was definitely not of the ‘super’ variety so after exploring the poor selection and high prices on offer, we returned to our camper and left Adare well behind us. Instead, we regained the motorway and headed on to Newcastle West where we found a Tescos and stocked up there. One good thing here is the choice of prepared meals. They are generally plentiful, tasty, nutritious, affordable and with a good range to choose from. We have eaten well even if a few more ‘home-cooked’ meals would be welcome.

We ate our lunch at Foynes, including Cornish pasties from Tescos - we have had them a few times and they are a favourite with both of us.

There are lots of castles in Ireland. I reckon we pass at least 3 ruined structures per day that we think were originally castles as well as maybe 10 or 12 signs advertising castles off the road - presumably all with admission fees associated with them. We have visited none of them.

We found a caravan park at Ballybunion or Ballybunnion, depending on which of the diverse plethora of signs one chooses to prefer. Getting in was a bit of a challenge, but a guy finally showed up and told us to follow him and he would find us a good site in the almost empty campground. Following him was a challenge because when I did, he was just turning around to go back the way we had come and I was blocking him. All was sorted out and he was very friendly. He had worked in Sydney for a couple of years when he was younger but he thought it was a big country so we might not know his mates from those days. Everyone in Ireland knows an Ozzie and thinks we might know them too.

He showed another camper van in after us and parked them not far from us - alas, they got bogged! Fortunately, the manager had a Toyota Landcruiser like ours and he soon dragged them out and repositioned them immediately adjacent to us. All campers seem to be front-wheel drive, simply insane as far as I can see. It has got us into a bit of minor trouble several times - why wouldn’t you have your driving wheels where the weight was? Getting around some steep hairpin bends is almost impossible with the front wheels spinning like crazy with all the weight dragging you back down the hill.

There was a circus in town in and we were tempted, but eventually decided to just move on.

Saturday. Day 86

Another interesting drive today. We continued south aiming for the most western point in Ireland AND Europe. Not quite there yet, but we are camped in the westernmost camping area in Europe tonight - at Murreagh on the Dingle Peninsula. It was almost noon before we left Ballybunion after completing (with a tiny weeny bit of cheating) probably the hardest Sudoku we have ever attempted.

We lunched on more pasties overlooking Tralee Bay and then went through Camp, intending to follow the coast around to Dingle and thence to the westernmost point. We followed an extremely steep, narrow road (if such a narrow track can be called a road) to the end of the road at Brandon Head, high above the ocean with fabulous views in all directions. We had to return quite a few kilometres on the same road to get back to the Dingle road and passing a few dozen cars going the other way was often pretty scary with nowhere to go further left without dropping off the 500 foot cliff. We eventually found the Dingle road and followed it for 20-odd clicks, everything getting higher and more spectacular as we went. We ended up in a tiny lay-by with a dozen other cars in what appeared to be either the nevee of a huge glacier or the caldera of a massive volcano. The mountains towered around us in more than a semicircle, very steep and rocky with a decent waterfall and stream cascading onto and around the edge of the layby. We took quite a few pics and then noticed a sign indicating the any vehicles more than 6 feet wide or over 2 tonne should turn around NOW because they would not be able to proceed on to Dingle. The road had been pretty scary, but seeing our van is about 8 feet wide and may probably go over 2 tonne, we had to trek all the way back to Tralee to find an alternative route to Dingle. It is a quaintly named pretty little town, but a very busy one with no possible place to park. I drove around while Heather became the tourist bureau’s last customer for the day, just as they were closing the doors, and this enabled us to find the great little vanpark where we are tonight.

Appropo of nothing, I was going to mention (a week ago) a strange phenomenon in quite a few of the forestry and national parks. They have lots of wooden tables with bench seats attached much like ours in Oz - but they provide BBQs on all the tables - metal plates bolted to the tables with wire grilles over them and firewood to boot. People light their fires on the plates and cook on the grilles. Needless to say, there are a LOT of severely burnt picnic tables in Ireland.

Sunday. Day 87

We intended driving around the area today and having Sunday roast lunch at the pub so that we had all morning tomorrow to go on a cruise around the Blasket Islands. When we enquired though, we found that the weather predicted for tomorrow was not good so there would be no cruises then. OK, we will do the one this morning - but it was booked out. In the end, we did the afternoon cruise and it was great! We had an abbreviated drive around in the morning and ended up at the Ventry Bay wharf an hour or so before the cruise was due to go. We went to a nearby pub for lunch then back to the wharf for the cruise. It was a zodiac ride out to the boat - all very exciting for the other adventurers, but old hat to we veterans of about 50 such rides in much worse conditions in the last month or so - and a heap more in terrible conditions 2 years ago.

The cruise was interesting. The landscape was pretty amazing from the boat - big sea caves, precipitous cliffs, huge jagged rocks and wild seas crashing over them. Although we didn’t see much wildlife, the trip was wonderful under a sunny sky. There was a 2 to 3 metre swell, but nobody got seriously seasick. We saw a few seals popping their heads up to look at us and we encountered a pod of at least six Risso’s dolphins - very close to us and said to be quite rare. We only saw 5-6 species of bird, but at least one of them was a new one for us and sent me back to rethink some of my assumptions about what we had been seeing in the last week. Fortunately, I think all my assumptions were confirmed as valid.

The cruise was about 4 hours and we went quite a long way out to sea to the west so when we were ashore again, we drove to the westernmost point of Ireland - and Europe, if you exclude Iceland from Europe. We chose not to climb the final (steepest) part of the ascent to the peak of the headland, but still reckon we got as far west as we could go. We stopped off at a few places as we went further around the area and walked to the top of a high hill on the next headland around. The views were stupendous and with a bracing breeze, it was an enjoyable, if a little exhausting, excursion surrounded by wildflowers and rocks. Many of the rocks seemed to be standing stones, a sure sign of ancient habitation going back at least 2500 years.

Seeing we missed going to our intended pub for lunch, we went there for dinner instead - excellent food to top off a great day.

Monday. Day 88

We started the day by a quick circle around the local area, then followed the coast to Killorglin on the Ring of Kerry - a circuit of about 200 kms. It was very scenic, particularly the coastline with some great wide beaches and lots of bathers - and lots more sunbathers. It was windy and a lot of the sea was quite choppy so we were glad we weren’t attempting the Blaskets today!

About halfway around the Ring, we found another Ring - the Skellig Ring, so we drove around that as well. The Skellig Islands had been on our original plans, but having done so much the same on our cruise, we decided to miss them. The Blasket cruise goes quite near the Skelligs - they were always easily seen on the horizon - so driving around the Ring so close to them sort of complemented the experience.

We continued around the Ring of Kerry and the Wild Atlantic Way and stopped at Cathair Daniel overnight.

An interesting and often highly frustrating aspect of Ireland is that many/most of their parking areas, even those that are little more than lay-bys along the road have gantries across the entrances with maximum heights under 2 metres. We can only imagine that they are designed to prevent campers from using them overnight. It really prevents people like us from pulling in to take in the view or to simply stop for 10 minutes for lunch.

Tuesday. Day 89

We continued around the Ring of Kerry through Kenmare to Killarney. I thought the road between Kenmare and Killarney outstandingly beautiful, but a nightmare to drive. It was the narrowest we have been on and there were heaps of cars and buses so it was quite a challenge.

We arrived just before noon and I parked in a big area that I subsequently found I had to pay to park there - after Heather left with all our Irish money. Heather went to the Tourist Bureau to find out where the hostel was where she and the kids stayed 34 years ago and to book us a tour to the Gap of Dunloe. I ended up in discussion with a parking inspector who graciously agreed to ignore the breach in the circumstances as long as I wasn’t there when she came back. Fortunately, Heather arrived before she did and we fed the meter and went off together looking for a place to buy an Irish SIM. The first place didn’t have any affordable deals so referred us to 3 again - the mob who had hitherto been less than helpful. Nonetheless, we eventually signed up with them for a data package costing 3 Euros a day. They sound as rapacious as Telstra, is that is possible.

We booked into the caravan park Heather had arranged through the Tourist Bureau (the tour people needed to know where to collect us from - over $A60 a night, plus another couple of euros for a shower. Very basic facilities indeed.

We ate lunch in the vanpark then had a drive out to Fossa where the youth hostel was where Heather and the kids stayed in 1984. It brought back memories for Heather and we both had a look around inside and out before returning to the vanpark where I found that one of my hearing aids had stopped working. The left one is fine, the right one simply doesn’t work and I find that wearing only one is quite disorienting. I tried all sorts of things and finally had an online chat session with Oticon, in Ireland, the agent for the manufacturers. They promised to ring me the next day, but I am writing this at 8pm next day and haven’t heard from them - not only because my hearing aids aren’t working!

It started raining overnight so things weren’t looking brilliant for our tour, but we were determined to do it anyway.

Wednesday. Day 90

What a day!!!! We were up early so we could be ready and waiting when the tour people came to collect us. It was raining pretty consistently, but mostly fairly lightly so we were still (absurdly) optimistic. The Gap of Dunloe is still virgin territory to me, but it is a narrow, high pass through a steep range of high mountains - something of a geological freak as well as a historical tourist attraction if I understand it correctly.

They arrived 20-odd minutes late just as Heather was ringing to find out where they were. A couple of stops on the way and we were taken up to Kate Kearney’s Cottage where the actual tour starts. The first part is 11 kilometres up the mountain with choices of walking (most people did), cycling (none of our group did, but quite a lot of others did) or going by horse and trap - our choice. We stood in the driving rain while they harnessed a horse and attached the trap and they got Heather aboard before deciding that we had to go in a different trap with a different horse (no reason given), so we stood around a bit longer while they went through the same process. All aboard, by now pretty cold and wet, with just a tarpaulin over our knees and off we went. The scenery was truly spectacular even if I have said that once or twice before - truly spectacular, but hard to see through the rain and mist. We had to keep facing back the way we had come because the wind was driving sharp needles of rain into our faces and eyes. We were well rugged up with winter warmers and raincoats, but we were soon soaked through despite our precautions. The rain simply ran off our hats, down our necks, drenched all our clothes and eventually filled our shoes. Are we all having fun yet? I was surprised how many people were walking, riding and trapping up the road, but more so how many cars were doing it too. We had no idea there was a drivable road, but we saw at least 100 cars on the way. Way to go for us next time.

The sheep were purple, blue, red, green, orange, black and white. As we discovered in Scotland, they colour-code them for some reason, but in the streaming rain, the colour ran and they were all brilliantly and quite risibly parti-coloured.

The mountains were incredibly steep and rocky with avalanches of water cascading down in hundreds of places. Yesterday, the whole are was completely dry. They have apparently just suffered a terrible 8-week drought and desperately needed the rain - it was just a pity that it arrived on the very day we wanted it to be fine and warm.

We chugged along for a few kilometres with our driver encouraging the horse to give us its best, but at the foot of a really long steep hill, he asked us to get out and walk or the horse wouldn’t be able to make it up the hill. Each trap holds 4 people and we had a French couple in with us so the French guy and I had to walk up the hill while the ladies rode. Heather could not have possibly made the climb!!! I reckon it was a kilometre and a half of steep winding uphill climb, battling the driving rain and gales in our faces before the driver said it should be OK for us to get back in. We did so, most thankfully, before we passed out on the side of the hill - but before we really had a chance to recover our breath, there was a crash and the rubber tyre came off the right hand rim in several pieces. We all had to get out again and walk up to the next passing place where the driver tried to fix the wheel. Eventually, the French couple got a lift in another trap, but we were left standing on the side of the road, shivering in the blast, with rain belting down and the waterfalls growing in size and fury even as we watched. The driver rang for help and a car finally arrived with 3 guys in it and some tools. Two stayed warm in the car, but the driver was the trap-technician and he and our driver spend another hour unsuccessfully trying to fix it. The tools weren’t that great - the head kept coming off the hammer, the key piece of technology in use! All this time, over 90 minutes, Heather and I were standing on the side of the road wet and shivering, almost being blown or washed away by the elements. Like we were told numerous times, they really needed the rain.

The driver eventually gave up and decided to walk the horse back home and send a truck to collect the trap. We were given to choice of being driven through the Gap to the end of the road, or driven back to our van. Soaked to the skin and shivering uncontrollably, it didn’t take me long to opt for home. Had we elected to go on, the next part of the tour was a boat trip through three lakes in the National Park - all in an open boat with the rain continuing to pour down.

As it turned out, we weren’t taken back to our van, but just to our starting point at the Cottage. Heather randomly the tour organisers and they promised to pick us up in about an hour so we went into the pub/bistro and both had a hot chocolate to try to warm ourselves up a little.

They picked us up pretty much on time and took us back to our van where we converted it into a Chinese laundry with every item of clothing and the things we used to dry ourselves wrung out and hung around the van with the rain still coming down outside. Heather tried to ring the Tourist Bureau to arrange our promised refund but couldn’t get through so we eventually drove back into town and organised it in person.

We then lit out of Killarney and headed back down the Kenmare road that I mentioned yesterday. I said I thought it a challenge then, but it was much worse heading south with the mountains on our left and branches and even huge rocks encroaching into the very narrow roadway. There was a lot of oncoming traffic, including many buses, all of whom demand more than half the road. I reckon I must have changed gears at least 1000 times in the 27 km to Kenmare. Every day, either we or the approaching cars have to stop at least 100 times due to the roads being impassible two vehicles wide. This doesn’t stop many crazy people roaring through at ridiculous speeds requiring us to take rapid evasive action, often ending up scraping the car along the roadside shrubbery. I suspect we are going to get stuck with a bill for the scratches. I have to say though, that even with the rain and sometimes almost impenetrable fog, the scenery was awesome. In good weather, it would be quite mind boggling.

We eventually camped at Glengariff - $A70 a night, but at least the lukewarm showers were free.

All in all, the day was an unforgettable experience - not to be recommended and never to be repeated, but an experience nonetheless that makes us proud to have got through it, notwithstanding the aches and pains accompanying the aftermath.

Thursday. Day 91

Not much rain today, but fog of varying densities all day. A lot of the time, it lent a mystical, almost ghostly, touch to things, maybe even a little romantic as it closed in, shortening our horizons and giving things a somewhat eerie feel, aided by the deadening of the sounds around us.

We drove north again this morning, retracing some of our steps from yesterday, to Kenmare - is that the 6th time we drove through that town? On the way, we passed some of our photo stops from last night and it was notable that the raging torrents that evoked some excitement last night had already abated a little (but not much) since the rain had eases to a few sprinkles.

From Kenmare, we did the Ring of Beara, a loop road around the Beara Peninsula. There were some great views of beaches and rocky seascapes, wonderful mountains and valleys, but maybe the unusual geology fascinated me most. In a few places, the hillside (mountainside) looked as if it had been tiled with huge flat square grey stones and mortared with metre-wide slashes of dull green grass. It was a bit of a cruddy tiling job with all the tiles set at a slight angle to each other and not lined up quite symmetrically, but quite unique in my experience. In other places, the whole hillside was covered in smooth slightly convex rocks with just a few patchy areas of grass. Where there is more grass - more soil over the rock where grass seeds can take root - there are always sheep, neatly penned in with thigh- to chest-high stone walls. None of the fields (paddocks to us) are very big, maximum is perhaps 100 x 200 metres, so the hillside looks like a green draughts board, sprinkled like fairy-bread with multicoloured sheep. Another place had us turning around for another look in a place where photographs proved impossible. We had been driving through an area where the rock strata on the hillsides ran at crazy angles to the road and sky, but there was one particular crevasse running perhaps 200 metres or so from the road down to the sea with what looked like a 15-20 layer Dagwood sandwich of rock that someone had taken a giant bite from it. Each layer was a little lower than the last, but all had a concave profile set at maybe 15 degrees to the vertical, narrowing slightly as they got closer to the sea making it look like the inside of a ribbed funnel with only the bottom half showing. I know that is a weird description, but I can’t describe it any better without hand movements that don’t translate well in a blog! Enough of the geology - suffice to say that a lot of it was completely unique to us and more than a little/lot fascinating.

We ate our lunch (more delicious pasties) at the tip of the peninsula with Dursley Island a few hundred metres away by cable car, an experience we chose to forgo in favour of more spectacular coastal exploration.

Eyries was one village we went through and it was a complete surprise with all the buildings painted in garish reds, pinks, purples, yellows, blues, oranges, greens, you name it - a complete contrast with the drab greys and dull pastels (at best) we have seen in the last couple of thousand clicks. The next couple of villages were much the same, a tiny pocket of colour, albeit a bit gelati-like. And talking about colour, the flowers in Ireland seem more vivid than I recall elsewhere. In particular, the purple buddlia and the blue and pink hydrangeas seem much more brilliant that we have seen anywhere else. It may be the overall duller light or the constant background of green, but most of the gardens as well as the wildflowers all seem larger than life, leaping out at us as we whizz past in the car. Quite beautiful.

Along the route, we went through a few tunnels, mostly just a few metres cut through the bare rock but one was at least 2-300 metres long and as dark as pitch inside. I am not sure when they were cut, but I imagine it was in the days of the pick and shovel, without the benefit of explosives that might have collapsed the ceiling but definitely engineering triumphs, however created.

The Beara loop finished back at Glengariff where we stayed last night so once there, we cut south aiming fit the southernmost point of the UK. We haven’t got there yet, but we are camped about 2 kilometres away in the hope that we can get there tomorrow. It has been a very picturesque drive though and we will traverse a little of it again tomorrow.

[lindoig1]

Days 79 to 84 - Heading Further South

Saturday. Day 79

I really enjoyed the morning. We drove south to a place I had seen mentioned in a brochure: the Inch Wildfowl Reserve. It is basically a small isthmus, more a tombolo, with the ‘island’ circumscribed by an 8 kilometre walking track. There were thousands of swans, gulls and other waterbirds, even one Australian black swan, as well as lots of little bush birds. Heather sat in the car and sorted her photos while I walked a couple of kilometres in one direction, then back to the car and a kilometre or so in the other direction. I saw about 25 different species, including 6 new ones for us. We have seen so many different species in the UK that I don’t really expect to see a lot that we haven’t seen before, so it is a lovely surprise when we come across such great biodiverse places as this was. We spent at least a couple of there with me occasionally dodging the rain but I could easily have spent all day there if we hadn’t needed to move along.

We were on our way to the Letterkenny Shopping Centre to see if we could get to the bottom of our phone and internet problems, so when we arrived, we hkad lunch in a cafe and went to the 3 Shop. 100% unhelpful. ‘3’ in Ireland has no connection with ‘3’ in Northern Ireland so just cop it! Or buy a new SIM from us with no guarantee that we will be any better. I know that 3 has a poor reputation (and coverage) in Australia so maybe we were being a bit optimistic hoping it might be better over here. We then did a big grocery shop at Tescos and Heather managed to get her hair cut without an appointment so at least our day was good except for our phone problems.

We drove northwest to just past Dunfanaghy where we finally found a campsite. They are few a few far between in Ireland and I reckon we have had an average drive of 40-50 kilometres after we decide to look for a place to stop until we find one. Some don’t take motorhomes, some only have purpose-built onsite vans, some turn you away if you haven’t pre-booked even if they have room (go figure), and quite a few are listed but simply don’t exist. It certainly makes touring a much more difficult task than at home. When we have asked about this, we are told that not many people travel here (despite passing several hundred vans and campers every day) and those that do want to go somewhere and stay in the same place for their entire holiday. It is very different from other places we have been.

Sunday. Day 80

Talking about the differences in travelling or touring over here, we have noticed that, unlike Australia, none of the parking sites have water available near them and none have a sullage outlet. Very few even have bins nearby. Each park has one drinking water tap (sometimes impossible to use if the van you have hired has less than 2 metres of hose for filling your water tank), a central bin area where you are expected to sort everything into big recycling bins (there are NO bins for kitchen or other general waste, so everything ends up being mixed anyway), and one dump point (called a chemical waste disposal unit). Most people have big wheelable drums or other units for grey water and some parks have a spot for its disposal - but we were told it is fine to just empty our grey water anywhere along the road. Another interesting feature is that in most parks, you pay for your site - up to almost $A50 a night - then pay another $5 ‘coin/s in the slot’ for your 4 or 5 minute shower, sometimes too hot to actually get under.

We are in the staunchly Catholic south and we both find some of the religious icons in the town squares a bit confronting. Any town worth the name has at least one lifesize or bigger Virgin Mary diorama or crucifixion scene, usually painted pretty garishly and sited so you have to drive around it. They are really in your face and I find them a little disconcerting. Quite a few houses and other buildings, including public buildings, have similar structures in the front garden or yard.

Another slightly disconcerting aspect of the area is that all the signage is in Gaelic. Right across Asia and Europe, the signs were in languages other than English, but it was less important then. When you are driving and approaching a corner, it would be nice to know if you are turning into a one-way street or whether the Gaelic destinations displayed are where you want to go or not. Our map, GPS and phone apps are all in English, but the Gaelic for where we want to go doesn’t look anything like any of them. Also, they generally tell you the names of the villages in the next 5 or 6 km when the first town on the map is 30 km away.

We had a pleasant enough drive, but with little of particular note that day and ended up at a place called Easkey at night.

Monday. Day 81

Some of the scenery today was as stunningly beautiful as anything we have seen on the whole trip so far. We drove through some spectacular glacial valleys, one in particular that contained a huge loch (they are actually loughs in Ireland). The mountains curved away to the sky on both sides of the lough and we could see and hear numerous reasonably big waterfalls cascading hundreds of feet over the rocks. We stopped for some photos, having not seen another vehicle for 30 or so kilometres and suddenly it was like Bourke Street. Our little van was surrounded by about 5 other vehicles and another half dozen or more drove past while we snapped our shots. And another pullover a kilometre down the valley suddenly filled with another 7 or 8 cars. It was quite amazing - but not anywhere near as amazing as the valley itself. There were numerous other beautiful sights that day. We passed mountains of rock, bleak and desolate in the extreme, but in a romantic sort of way, and we drove along both sides of a long lough with brilliant wildflowers lining the road on both verges. A good deal more variety in the scenery today than any other day since we got the van and definitely the best part of Ireland so far.

We quickly moved into very rocky countryside, but more of that tomorrow when it got even more rocky.

More driving looking for non-existent vanparks before we eventually found one at Gurteen Bay near Roundstone.

Tuesday. Day 82

We mucked around, spending more time over our morning Killer Sudokus than usual so we had a relatively late start today cruising along the northern side of Galway Bay (I feel a song coming on......). Heather had cut our usual extra-delicious sangers that we ate overlooking the sea (again! - seems to be a pattern most days) and on we went through Galway into the Burren not far along the south-western side of the Bay.

The Burren is a spectacularly barren area with quite a high ridge of rock tumbling down to the sea. It has almost no vegetation at all until you get very close to the coast so you drive along with fairly smooth rock towering away several hundred feet on one side and patchy grass between the rocks to seaward. The geology is quite interesting, but it looks to me like hundreds of relatively thin layers of rock piled one on the other, often looking a little as if the top layers are dribbling onto the next one. Doesn’t sound very clear, but it looks a bit like the icing running over the edge of a many layered cake with a fresh layer of icing between each layer. We stayed at a pretty rudimentary caravan park at Fanor with the Burren rising to the sky behind us and a few hundred metres of rock and grass (and rabbits) to a fairly wild sea in front of us. It runs for quite some kilometres and there are areas where there is just a smattering of vegetation between the hillside of rocky outcrops with occasional huge boulders called Erratics that were left behind when the glaciers melted 11000 years ago. Very dramatic!

Wednesday. Day 83

We had another slightly late start, but cruised down the coast to Doolin. Heather and the kids went there 30-something years ago and loved the isolation - just a couple of quaint pubs and a small scattering of houses. Alas, times have changed. It is now a bustling town with lots of yuppie cafes, craft shops, upmarket pubs and quite a few houses, including lots of tourist accommodation. Early in the morning, Heather had said we should stop there and have a Guinness as one of those iconic things to do, but the closest place we could have parked to any of the watering holes would have been about 2 kilometres away. Coach loads of tourists thronged the street and cars were parked nose to tail on both sides of the road seemingly mfor ever. We drove through town hoping for a lucky break, but eventually abandoned any thought of a quiet drink even if a parking space had opened up. Another failed good idea!

Not to worry, the Cliffs of Moher were only a few clicks down the road so we could stop there for a look and a bite to eat. Wishful thinking! It was 8 Euros per head for seniors to park in the overcrowded parking area (almost $A30) and a long uphill trudge to see anything. There was a long queue to even get into the parking area and there were a couple of separate areas dedicated to the several dozen tourist coaches. Foiled again Moriarty!

We got out of the parking area queue and found another place a bit further along only to find that it was almost as bad. A couple more clicks down the road, we found a very minor road leading to the Cliffs of Moher Visitors Parking Area so followed the winding road close to 10 km through quaint farmland to a very small, very crowded parking area for only 2 Euros per vehicle. Unfortunately, our huge tiny camper van was too big for it, but the attendant opened a gate to a farmyard 50 metres back down the road where a few other ‘oversized’ vehicles were parked. It was a 2 km walk, all uphill, but gently so, over a series of stiles, always being aware of the immediately adjacent electric fences, gaily festooned with colourful wildflowers, closely accompanied all the way by fields of big fat cattle, up to the Cliffs. Definitely worth the walk - and a lot easier going back. There were quite a lot of people up there and on the way up and back, but we just took it slowly and Heather made it safely without a break other than to look at the flowers. We walked a little way along the cliff, but I didn’t enjoy getting too close to the edge like a lot of the other silly/brave people. There was a big watchtower or similar up there that we think it was similar to the one we saw at Malin Head - that was used for 200 years to communicate with passing ships and for defence purposes during both World Wars.

We headed inland from there, once again failing to find a couple of listed caravan parks until we got to Mountshannon on Lough Derg. This was one of the places that are designated as Pre-booked Vans only, but Heather managed to talk the owner into letting us stay.

Thursday. Day 84

We liked the vanpark here so much that we decided to have a lay-day and we have both quite enjoyed it. Heather’s ankle has been quite painful for some unknown reason today and it has been pretty noisy with some construction work going on, but it is quite a fascinating place - at least it is to me. I badly needed a haircut so my personal hairdresser and astute navigator did the honours after a delicious late cooked breakfast. Showers and some tidying up and it was almost lunchtime. I went for a couple of short walks around the park in search of birds - one new one this morning takes our tally to 128 new ones and 166 identified in total since we left home.

The facilities here are quite good, but rather strange. Toilets and handbasins in one building, showers in a completely different building. You get undressed for your shower only to find you have to get dressed again to put your euro in the slot in a meter outside the building. I needed a shave, but there are no basins in the shower block, so you have to get the sequence right. There are dozens of onsite vans and cabins here, many hidden deep in the trees so you can be 5 metres away and not know they are there. Others are clustered like a small village, all occupied by permanents with elaborate gardens, fences, ornaments, outhouses, garages, tool-sheds and so on. The lough is immediately next to the park and there are even a couple of cute little marinas or docks with a few dinghies and tiny yachts. There are numerous walks crisscrossing through the trees and many places you can sit by the water, you can even feed the swans if you want. People seem to have found their own secret dells to put their van in and fence it off from the rest of the park quite creatively - a very unusual setup, but also quite interesting.

I just decided to go out for another walk because it was getting a bit hot in the van and it started raining so I had to scurry back inside. The forecast was for rain all day and for all the next week, but here it is at 5:30pm before it started.

Maybe almost Happy Hour time.

[lindoig1]

Now for the ‘real’ Ireland

Friday. Day 78

We were driving along quite happily this morning observing the 30 and 40mph limits when I saw one for 80 - Kph. We had crossed the border from Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland without even a sign to mark it. We have been in Ireland (it’s official name) most of the day and it is every bit as beautiful as Northern Ireland. We are now travelling the Wild Atlantic Way! The roads are edged with red fuscias, and purple, white, cream, pink and yellow flowers of many descriptions. They all mingle together and are an absolutely wonderful riot of colour. Interestingly, there are very few blue wildflowers. We have seen one bluish-mauve bell-shaped flower, but I think that is all and there are not many of them either. The other place where the flowers are outstandingly vivid is in the villages. Most street lamps have planters attached to them as do most of the shops. Private gardens and most of the verges in the villages also have window boxes or large planters crammed full of brilliant blooms - a complete cacophony of colour, if such a thing could exist. Even in the caravan parks, there are boxes of flowers and all the more permanent sites are surrounded by numerous tubs of bright colour that stands out against the predominant green.

We called in at a few places along the road again today and went to Malin Head (not Melonhead!): the northernmost point on the island of Ireland. There is nothing special about places with distinctions like ‘the northernmost’ but it is just interesting to know a tiny bit more about the geography and to be able to say, even if just to ourselves, that “We’ve been there”.

We had a light lunch in a pub in Culdaff and just near it, Heather saw a house with a small shop in it selling knitting wool so we went there and bought some wool and needles so she can knit as we go along. She has wanted to do this all along our trip, but this was the first place we saw where she could easily buy the makings.

We continued around the coast during the afternoon and it was still very beautiful - but neither of us think it quite matches the Scottish Highlands. We had trouble finding a van park, but eventually rolled into one - only to find it was booked out. They rang another one a few kilometres away and reserved us a spot there, but would you believe, we couldn’t find it. They said you just go through the village and past the mill and it is on your left. We drove 3 or 4 km past the mill and gave up - but we had seen a sign for another one while looking for it so went back and eventually found it a few clicks along at the end of a very narrow lane. It was a very average park, but by then, we didn’t much care. Next day, we did find the one we were booked into - at least 5 or 6 km further out than we had ventured, just past a different mill!!!

[lindoig1]

Northern Ireland

Wednesday Day 76

Packed up and drove to the ferry terminal to take us to Belfast, Northern Ireland. We were first in line so when we could drive aboard, our nose was right up against the doors and we were the first vehicle off the ship. Belfast is a big city and Heather wanted to buy some wool and needles so she could do some knitting, but the traffic and the absence of parking in the city centre thwarted us so we just got back on the motorway and headed for the Causeway Coastal Route. We couldn’t find many places to pull off the road to catch our breath until we got to Whitehead, a pretty little town with a parking area adjacent to the beach - just the railway between the parking area and the sea. We made ourselves a cuppa and I explored the area a little. It was near an early quarry and the workers from those bygone days had let their gardens go wild so the whole quarry area was a riot of colour - cornflowers, buddlia, wild roses, yellow and white daisies, fuscias and heaps more, all in flower and blazingly bright in the sunshine. Heather explored a bit with me too. The quarry was allegedly home to many species of birds, including about 10 I have not seen so I went wandering and had high hopes - but saw nothing except sparrows and starlings.

We continued on our way and decided to make camp a little after 4pm, but the first two places were ruled out for various reasons and we went on to one at Cushendal. Unfortunately, the GPS couldn’t find it and took us inland to a different one. Again, the GPS took us a long way away from any parks at all, but we had seen a sign for one in a State Park as we went along. Very confusing signage, but we finally arrived still unsure if we could get past the boom gates until a lady showed us how to get in and said the ranger comes around in the evening to collect the money. We are waiting for him now and still don’t know how much it will cost us. It is a very nice place though with huge hills and valleys around us very quiet and the ablution block is probably the best I have seen anywhere.

Thursday. Day 77

We are now on our way again and still solvent. None of the van parks are cheap, average probably around $A45 a night and last night was no different. The park was associated with a huge picnic ground and car park, with several long nature walks starting from there. It also has a coffee house and shop and an excellent free exhibition pavilion managed by the Forestry Service and giving a mountain of information about the local birds and animals, geology, history, culture and so on. We spent an hour in it before hitting the road this morning and it was both entertaining and informative.

We were driving the Giant Staircase Coastal Scenic Route and it was spectacular. We only stopped at a few places, but the road follows the coast, in some places for kilometres only a metre from the sea with great beaches and rocky outcrops, little bays and quaint villages. In other places, it rises high above the coast with craggy mountains looking down on idyllic fields, stone villages and the odd castle, almost all in ruins. Everything is green - the Emerald Isle is for real and smothered in places with wildflowers. We called in at several places for a look and some photos, but the target for most people is the Giant Staircase and that was just too hard for us. There were people everywhere and all the car parks were full for kilometres around so in the end, we didn’t even stop. But we saw many other wonderful things along the coast, beautiful memories the images of which will stay with us.

We had a bit of trouble finding a van park again, but ended up at a huge one in Benone with ablution facilities about as good as last night’s.

[lindoig1]

The Mull of Galloway

Tuesday. Day 75

Yet another really lovely day for our last day in Scotland. We have both fallen completely in love with the highlands and the remote west coast in particular. We have been to the westernmost and northernmost point in the country and today we went to the lighthouse at the most southerly point - and it was beautiful. We were a bit late starting today with a relaxed morning and hitting the road at about 11am. We went south and sort of intentionally got ourselves lost on the Rhinn of Galloway: a hammerhead peninsula off Stranraer. We moseyed around on some very narrow farm tracks for a while, then headed for Portpatrick on almost equally narrow roads. It is a pleasant little town built around a small harbour and we walked around, visited the lighthouse and eventually ate paella for lunch at a cafe completely overrun with dogs. I have mentioned the dogs before, but it seems our ban on smoking could well be applied to dogs in restaurants in the UK. There was a dog or two at virtually every table and the proprietors provide at least one bowl of water for dogs at every table. Most were pretty well behaved, but I find the close proximity of so many canines a little off-putting when I am eating. Having said that, the paella was quite good, although we both commented that it is better at the South Melbourne Markets.

We then headed for the Mull of Galloway at the extreme southern tip of the peninsula - and Scotland. It seemed a long drive on such narrow roads, but was probably only 40 or 50 kilometres. At the end of the road is a lighthouse, but there are two ways to reach it from the car park - straight up the road or via a circular route that takes you right around the perimeter of the mull, perhaps a click and a half. We chose the longer route because it took us past a RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) display centre. It was a really nice walk with seats at a couple of lookouts, a few information panels, an ancient spring and quite a lot of little birds flitting around. The display was interesting enough with information about birds, plants and wildlife in general, but was a bit focussed on recruiting more members and/or donations. We, particularly Heather, spent quite some time talking about birds and plants with the guy on duty and got a lot of useful information. They had a list of all the birds seen around the centre and we had seen all of them except the linnet - so I went outside and immediately saw a couple of linnets!

Below the lighthouse, the sea was really dramatic. It is apparently just a tidal effect, but there was a huge rush of water no more than perhaps 30 metres wide racing through, hugging the coast, but as soon as it got past the headland, it spread out to maybe a couple of hundred metres of roiling water with many huge whirlpools, mini-waterfalls as one layer rolled over or under its neighbours, waves where the various eddies and areas of water intersected, but all really fast and wild for many kilometres out to sea - as far as the eye could see - and all around, the rest of the sea appeared completely calm. Very strange.

We sat in the car park and had a cuppa but by then, we had spent at least a couple of hours there and needed to get back to our vanpark for dinner. We drove straight back, quicker than we imagined because of all our meanderings on the way there - and having had such a big lunch, we rationed ourselves a bit for dinner.

[lindoig1]

Edinburgh

Once I have posted this, the missing days from my blog will be restored, albeit weeks out of sequence. I hope that I can now keep more up-to-date if our internet access becomes more reliable.

Monday and Tuesday in Edinburgh. Days 61 and 62.

The whole day was a bit of a joke. We had pre-booked two tours for when we were in Edinburgh, the first being an all-day tour to areas outside the city, including St Andrews. The cab to the city cost £10+ for less than 2Km - so we chose to walk both ways after that. Roadworks made it a very circuitous trip.

We waited around until the tour was due to start - 17 passengers, a guide and a driver for an 18 seat bus. Someone got the arithmetic wrong. Many apologies, but we will get another bus. An hour and 10 minutes later, our new bus arrives - also an 18 seater! Not to worry, we will dispense with the guide and the driver can be your guide. He admitted that it was years since he had been to the area and knew almost nothing about it, but so be it. His wife was due to produce a new baby so there were at least 10-15 phone calls from her on the way - and he answered none of them, even when we encouraged him to do so. He had been pulled in from another job somewhere and that accounted for most of the delay, but we never managed to find out why we couldn’t go in the first bus with just the driver - after all, that is exactly what happened anyway!

Because we had to swap buses, we lost the seats we had very deliberately chosen and I ended up in the middle of the back seat between a grumpy guy and his sister who wanted to chat when I didn’t. Heather was assigned the jump seat right at the front and neither of us had much of a view. Moreover, the bus appeared to have no rear suspension and every pothole or reckless move by the driver sent bone-juddering pain up my back - not to mention the muscles in my bum trying to readjust myself in the seat at every turn because there was nothing for me to hold on to! It was the ride from, maybe to, Hell.

We stopped for a few minutes in a fishing village, just long enough to jog the half kilometre or so back to the toilets. That was the only visit we had to any fishing village despite the tour being billed as the chance to absorb the culture along the coastal fishing villages. Back on the bus and Heather and I tried to swap seats, but Heather sat in the seat the brother had been in and he got really shitty. I tried to sort it out, but he cracked it and refused to sit at the back so he ended up in Heather’s seat and we were next to each other at the back, as uncomfortable as before, but at least together and we took turns in the middle seat.

The driver got lost a couple of times and spent about half an hour going round and round the same blocks in St Andrews until Heather used the GPS on her phone to guide him. He then dropped us across the road from Ye Olde Golfe Course, about a zigzag mile from the street where he said all the shops and restaurants were for lunch. We found a nearby pub and had fish and chips and a walk around the immediate area before the bus left for the next destination - Falkland Palace, a National Trust building, almost a castle, set in beautiful gardens - but the driver tried to talk everyone out of going in. He said it was expensive at £12.50 each and seeing it was so late, we wouldn’t have time to see much - and it really wasn’t much chop anyway. Nonetheless, we insisted and went in although most people just milled around outside. When we enquired how much it was to just look at the gardens, they said that the whole place was free for National Trust members like us and only £6 for people on our tour anyway! We had a walk around the gardens (and a couple of others in the group went in too when we told them about the pricing) but we could easily have spent a couple of hours there - it was so beautiful - but the driver said we could only stay 20 minutes - and then he was at least 20 minutes late coming back for us at that. The final stop was at a vantage point to take photos of the 3 bridges that he had missed on the way out of town. Having wasted well over two and a half hours of our tour due to the late start and the driver getting lost, we stood around there for 45 minutes while he just chatted with some locals - and we still got back into town by the scheduled 6pm. In other words, we had endured a pretty uncomfortable day with no guide and a driver who knew almost nothing and missed out on at least 3 hours of the tour due to incompetence. Heather emailed a complaint to them and they responded quickly, agreeing that the whole day had been a disaster and offering a full refund - which we accepted. Moreover, they said they would contact all the others on the tour and give them a full refund too.

Next day, we had another tour with the same company - a tour of the city sights - and nothing could have been more unlike the previous day. The bus was more comfortable and the driver babbled on constantly with interesting facts and stories about everything we passed. This was interspersed with an audio presentation by the owner of the company, again telling fascinating stories about many of the things we saw. It was a really excellent tour, diametrically opposed to the previous day’s affliction. We told the company too. Heather does TripAdvisor reviews on most places we go and gave them a big wrap for the city tour, but nothing for the St Andrews one. She had intended giving them a blast, but the company was so apologetic and refunded everyone’s money in full so she just stayed silent on that.

The city tour was just a half day tour, but I think I have already described in other posts my afternoon backwards and forwards to a Starbucks to get both our PCs working, only to find that the new one is really not up to the job at all. It is probably even a bit light to be a boat anchor.

Overall, Edinburgh was really just a big city that would take at least several more days to get to know enough to give it a tick or a cross. For us, the jury is still out on that.

[lindoig1]

Our cruise - Part 4 (of 4)

Saturday. Kirkwall, the Orkneys Day 59

We landed on a jetty is the busy little port of Kirkwall and jumped on the bus provided for a tour of the island. The trip took us to three places, starting with a drive through the town and out along the island past Scapa Flow to an ancient village that has been partly excavated and restored. It was quite elaborate but heavily regulated with dire warnings about stepping on the grass, moving any pebbles or messing up their smooth sand. We had a bit of spare time there so I looked for birds while others raided the gift shop. Back on the bus, we went on to another ring of standing stone: a much bigger one than we had seen earlier in the trip. It originally had 60 huge stones in the circle – a bit like Stone Henge in poor repair and on a smaller scale. It was pretty steep getting up to it and there were crowds of people but we found our way around with Carol giving us loads of information as we went along. I was less than completely captivated but having spied almost 100 white swans on the adjacent loch, I spent a little time watching them while others trekked around the circle more slowly.

The bus then took us to the cathedral in the centre of town and dropped us so we could look inside. The driver said he couldn’t park where he had dropped us but would park around the corner. We all went and looked at the cathedral – not that much different from others we have seen but Carol’s stories were interesting when we could hear them. There were several other tours in the cathedral at the same time and all the guides were shouting to be heard over the others – so nobody heard much at all. While we were in there, the Police closed the road outside and moved the bus along so we were left wandering around in search of the bus that wasn’t there. In due course, the driver came panting up to say he had to park across the other side of town – fairly close to where we had to board the zodiacs again so it was a longish trek across town to the bus for a very short bus ride to the harbour. Then we met the dragon lady guarding the port!!! Where are our authority cards? What, no boarding passes? No papers authorising us to board the zodiacs – despite having cruise staff and zodiac drivers with us? She had seen us come in when we arrived and recognised some of us – but no way we were going to get past her security checks to get off the island again. She said we should have collected a card from her when we arrived so she could collect it from us when we returned so she knew there were no stowaways – but whether she thought we would be stowing away on her island or pirating our own ship is a mystery. After a lengthy phone consultation with her boss, she agreed to let one zodiac, including the staff (and fortunately us), go to the ship to bring back a formal manifest identifying the people who were allowed to go back on board. Talk about the Gestapo – they were pussycats. Her view was that we should have all been kept captive on the island for the terms of our respective natural lives unless and until we could produce the permission cards that she knowingly didn’t give us when we arrived!

It was a ‘free afternoon’ and some people elected to buy their own lunch on the island and go shopping or sightseeing until the last zodiac – but we had lunch on board and did our packing and filtered some photos during the afternoon.

Late in the arvo, there were drinks and delicious nibbles on the foredeck with a local Scottish foursome playing and singing some Scottish songs. It was pleasant enough but the waves were making things uncomfortable and the wind was freezing so most people sat around for the musical hour before scurrying inside to hit the bar and warm up.

Dinner was also a bit celebratory given that it was the Last Supper and most people drew stumps early so they could finalise their packing, etc., in order to disembark early in the morning.

Sunday, 1 July – End of the cruise and our Wedding Anniversary Day 60

Up a little earlier and a quick breakfast so the business end of the trip could be finalised. Everyone had to pay their bar-tabs and return their gumboots, get their baggage unloaded onto the wharf and eventually go ashore in the big port and city of Aberdeen. There were line-ups of both staff and passengers for lots of sentimental farewells, some with promises to keep in touch or to see each other on future planned expeditions – I think some people will be on our Iceland and Greenland trip next year too.

It was a long walk with all our baggage to where we all individually had to organise a taxi to take us half a kilometre to the station where we walked another half a km or more to catch the train. Surely the cruise could have organised that better with some pre-ordering and cab-pooling! We have given them quite a bit of feedback and got a response from them so maybe for future cruises, it will work better.

We were soon on the train back to Edinburgh and I think my post about John O’ Groats a week or two ago contained a description of the rest of that day – shopping for a new PC and SIMs!

We went back to the same pub for our Anniversary dinner that we had gone to on our first visit to Edinburgh before our cruise.

I will try to write the final missing bit about our couple of days in Edinburgh before we collected our camper and then everything will be up to date.

[lindoig1]

Our cruise - Part 3

Wednesday. Shetlands I Day 56

An early start and into the zodiacs to a wet/damp beach landing. I set off with a few other enthusiastic companions to walk to the lighthouse 3 and a bit kilometres away. It was quite scary in places, often walking on the very edge of the cliff with hundreds of nesting fulmars and kittiwakes at our feet. It got steeper and boggier as we went and I decided not to go all the way – but eventually did anyway. The view is said to be fantastic from the top, but through the fog, all I could see were a few fulmars 20 metres away – and a couple of wrens. The wrens were a bit of a highlight because they are hard to spot and several of the islands have a slightly different subspecies unique to their own few square kilometres.

On return to the starting point, I had a look around a restored village, including a small fortified castle and a lot of underground houses and other structures. Heather had already seen this because she did the tour with Carol and gained a lot of information about it while I exhausted myself on the moors.

When we got back to the ship for lunch, I found that our PC was DEAD. I had used it in the morning and logged off as normal, but at lunchtime, nothing would bring it to life – but I have told the long version of this story in an earlier post from our time in Edinburgh (my John O’ Groats post). But this starts to explain why my blog has almost no photos in it – something I may or may not be able to rectify, but probably not until I get home again. This was doubly annoying because the ship staff wanted people to contribute photos for a booklet about the trip and I had a few that I thought might be worth submitting.

After lunch, most people, including us, had a short nap before we all embarked on another long zodiac cruise around the bird colonies. It was really great, but the sea was getting choppy, the wind was cold and the fog just kept rolling in. It would start to clear, but return thicker than before so the GPS became the essential tool to locate the ship again. It didn’t impede our view of the birds though – and there were thousands of them, gannets, fulmars, shags, cormorants, kittiwakes, gulls, terns, puffins, guillemots…….

After dinner, about half of us did a third landing for the day to visit a broche – a circular stone watchtower/fortification. It seems people enjoyed the experience, particularly the Scotch they were given, but Heather and I both stayed on board. We were cold and achy and I wanted to try to use one of the ship’s PCs to see if I could access the photos on my camera. It all got too hard though, so most of my pics are still on the memory cards.

Thursday Shetlands II Day 57

A long undulating overnight voyage to the southern end of the Shetlands and a pretty rocky couple of hours anchored before breakfast. They offered 3 choices for the morning’s activity – a very short stroll, a medium walk and a more challenging trek. We both chose the medium one of about 3km! It was a very pretty walk and our leader was a local plant specialist and Heather spent a lot of time with the group examining and discussing the wide variety of very beautiful flowers on the island. I stayed with them for a while, but spent more time wandering further afield looking for, and at, birds. I rejoined the group a little later, just in time to be advised NOT to go close to a small loch because for the first time ever, a pair of red-necked pharalopes were nesting there – and right on cue, they both wandered out and let us have a long-distance view of them. I saw one at Werribee a couple of years ago so was able to identify it immediately. It was some sort of special day for the people on the island and there was a display at the local school – along with numerous gooey cakes, biscuits and drinks, all made by the school kids during the week. The display was mainly about local conservation issues and was really quite good – obviously, the teachers gave the littler ones a lot of help.

We went back to the ship for lunch then all piled back into the zodiacs for an amazing cruise around, and in and out of, some phenomenal sea-caves. We saw some similar caves when we went into Fingal’s Cave a few days ago, but these were simply mind-blowing. Some went into/under the rocks for 100 metres or more and we went right to the end in some of them. Some had a collapsed area at the end so it was light, but others were quite dark inside. In one of them, we went in and in and in…… and eventually there was a bit of a glimmer, then a glow and suddenly we were out in the open again – the cave was a few hundred metres long, but went right through and came out into another inlet 100 metres around the corner from the entrance. We explored quite a few similar caves and each seemed more dramatic than its predecessor. It is simply astounding that so many similar, but all different, caves could have been formed in the same area – and more amazing are the forces that were in play to create them over so many thousands or millions of years. Some of them were like cathedrals inside with high arched ceilings, others were so low that we had to crouch down in the zodiacs to avoid braining ourselves on the rocks above. It was an almost religious experience winding our way in and out of the caves, being pushed and pulled by the waves and cruising the coast with seals popping their heads up beside us.

After a couple of hours cruising, some of us, including me, made a wet landing on the island and walked up and over to the other side while the rest, including Heather, took the zodiacs around the island to pick us up when our cross-island adventure was completed. It was a wonderful evening and the island was not too high so the walk was very pleasant.

Back on board, it was a BBQ dinner, fully catered, and everyone had to wear a funny hat. They had a big bag of hundreds of them and everyone chose something to make themselves look totally absurd. They played our sort of music on a boombox and soon everyone (not quite everyone!) was up dancing. Most people really got into the mood but I wimped out and went to bed and read while others retired to the bar and karaoked the night away. Heather went down to the bar for a while and said that some of the singing was great, but a lot of it was seriously less so, especially with a bit of booze on board.

Friday. Shetlands III and the Orkneys Day 58

We were up at 6:30 for brekky and in the zodiacs before 8am, heading to Fair Isle. Immediately we landed, I set off alone on a trek to North Light accompanied only by a great many wheatears, rock and meadow pipits, hooded crows and a variety of other avian friends. It was quite a trek, more than I had been led to believe, and I saw only one of the several promised new species. The climb to the lighthouse was strenuous, but I passed a few dramatic cliffs and delightful little lochs on the way so the effort was well compensated. I then set off cross-country to try to get to the airport where other new species had been predicted. Alas, the higher I climbed to the island’s central spine, the more fraught the skua attacks became. I must have stumbled into a rookery and they were dive-bombing me from all directions. I took a hard left and tried to get out of their territory, but it was still close to a kilometre over very challenging terrain before the raids abated. I subsequently attempted to reach the airport from 3 alternative directions, but each time, I was thwarted by aerial bombardments. I gave up and decided to use the shuttle service the islanders provided to ferry us around the island. Unfortunately, after standing around for half an hour, I gave up and walked most of the way until I saw Heather and many of our group watching the locals shear their sheep. We had been told on board that many things would not be open on the island because it was the annual sheep mustering day when everyone bands together to round up all the sheep from across the hills to shear them. Apparently, they do it in a couple of drives a week or so apart and all the sheep are tagged and colour-coded so each owner knows which ones are his or hers when the roundup is complete. All the sheep are corralled in a pen in the middle of the island and the owners haul out their own sheep one at a time and shear them, mainly using hand clippers, with just a few using electric clippers powered by car batteries. It was fascinating to watch and the care taken by some owners using just scissors to collect the precious wool was quite wonderful.

The fog descended as we went back to the ship so out came the GPS again so we didn’t miss the boat and sail off into the literal invisible sunset.

[lindoig1]

Our cruise - Part 2

Sunday St Kilda Day 53

It is apparently rare for the expedition ship to be able to land on St Kilda due to rough seas, but we were lucky and got ashore easily.

Half the group explored the village and surrounds with Carol while I joined the hardies that climbed to the top of ‘The Gap’. It was quite a climb! VERY steep and hundreds of metres high. At the top, there was a sheer drop to the ocean far below and I felt quite vertiginous whenever I got too close to the edge. Fortunately, there was quite a gale blowing me away from the precipice, but it gave me the shivers to see others in the group peering over the lip into the abyss without any hesitation. There were thousands of birds nesting on the narrow ledges below and at the top, we had to avoid the swooping skuas if we wandered too close to their nests. On the way down, we spent quite some time watching a pair of Great Skuas fighting with a pair of Arctic Skuas, apparently a territorial dispute. Their aeronautical skills were wondrous to watch and it all got complicated whenever one of our group wandered too close to the fray and all the skuas started attacking us. Once we removed ourselves, their private war resumed.

There is an ancient breed of wild sheep unique to St Kilda and they were roaming everywhere. We were warned not to get too close to the rams or between ewes and their lambs, but they all seemed very docile to me. But they pooped EVERYWHERE!

The whole island is dotted with over 1400 cletes. These are stone structures, usually domes, ranging from 2-3 metres in diameter to some twice that size, all with an opening on the uphill side. They were apparently used as storage areas in times past, but there were also stories about the locals hiding out in them when the raiders came, mostly bloodthirsty Vikings, and the entrances were uphill so the raiders virtually had to enter each clete to see if anyone was inside – and that put them at a disadvantage.

After our time on St Kilda, we returned to the zodiacs for a cruise along the coast before lunch. We saw lots of grey and harbour seals and, of course, there were nesting birds everywhere – mainly puffins, guillemots, shags and kittiwakes with a few fulmars and gannets cruising to see if they could steal a meal of an egg or a chick.

After lunch, the ship took us to some towering islands, really just 3 giant rocks (stacks), where Britain’s largest colony of gannets were nesting – over 60000 pairs of them and they filled the air by the thousands, giving us the chance for a myriad of great photos. There were many thousands of other birds too so it was a very exciting couple of hours as the ship cruised quite close to the islands as it circumnavigated them.

I saw a whale (the only one for the trip) and that got people pretty excited, but I think only a couple of others saw it, including the tour leader. I have absolutely no doubt that it was a fin whale – a perfect match for the poster on the bridge as well as the ones we saw off the Kurils 2 years ago, but the tour leader reckons it wasn’t big enough for a fin so it wasn’t recorded as such – but I KNOW!

After dinner, Heidi gave an interesting talk about the Seabirds of Scotland and I was delighted to note that I had seen all but two – and have since seen both of them, although I would still like a better look at the red-throated loons.

Monday Lewis Day 54

We had 3 different landings today, two of them wet landings. Actually, they were damp landings rather than wet – an inch or two of water, but only because they didn’t pull the zodiacs up the beach quite far enough.

The first visit was to an ancient ring of standing stones in the centre of a cross and avenue of other standing stones – something like a miniature Stonehenge with a lot of other stones arranged in rows around it. They are at least a few thousand years old and Carol had stories about every one of them. They were believed to have some sort of metaphysical significance and several of the group got into the spirit of it and imagined an enormous spiritual overlay and wanted to sing hymns or chant (maybe dance naked under the moon) and started singing the most cringeworthy rendition of Waltzing Matilda (would you believe) to the horror of us and most of the other busloads of visitors. I left them to it and went looking for photos and birds while Heather traipsed along to one of the other two sites the group explored – the third site was a couple of kilometres away and getting there and back meant many of them were late back to lunch – tut, tut!

The second landing had us exploring a reconstructed Stone Age ‘Black House’ at Bostadh. Mildly interesting, but the self-proclaimed guardian of the place was a woman whose interpretation of numerous aspects was in direct conflict with things Carol had told us. I found the house itself a bit claustrophobic with 30-odd people crowded inside, all trying to instil some sacred significance to her every utterance and with my scepticism in full flight. I escaped when I could and went tramping up a very steep and boggy valley to a spectacular sea loch at the end and spied the only raptor anyone identified on the entire voyage – a hen harrier. Brownie points to me because I got photos of it to prove the sighting.

After dinner, most of us (not Heather) went for a ramble on yet another part of Lewis and it proved a little challenging. It was VERY steep and quite boggy and I found part of it a little scary so I took a very circuitous short cut back across some quite different hills and got back to the zodiacs about the same time as those who didn’t wimp out. I was very happy with my ramble though and I am sure I didn’t expend quite as much energy (or nervous energy) as the rest of the group. (I was not the only one to wimp out – I had plenty of company on the way back across the mountains and moors.) The main thing the group was trying to see was the lobster holding pens. This is an area where two stone walls have been built across the loch to form two pens of several hectares each and the fishermen catch lobsters out to sea and put them in one or other of the pens until they are big enough and prices are high enough to reclaim them and take them off to market. This is obviously a time-honoured practice that goes back at least a couple of centuries.

Back on the ship, we had what was probably our rockiest night – but I am pleased to report that neither Heather nor I got seasick at any time during the trip.

Tuesday Sula Sgeir and North Rona Day 55

We had a little sleep in (until 7:30) today because we were staying on board for the morning. The ship cruised around the giant sea stack of Sula Sgeir, another huge gannet colony. The gannets were a major source of meat for the Shetlanders for many years and the bravest still visit once a year to collect the chicks just before fledging when they are at their fattest and tenderest. It is quite mind-boggling to imagine how they could possibly land and scale the sheer cliffs to a tiny ultra-rudimentary shelter built at the top that has been home to the most intrepid for 2 weeks every year for centuries. It scares me to even think of the climb, much less the dangling off the edge to capture and kill the chicks ready for plucking and cleaning and transport back to the main island – if a boat is even able to get close enough to allow them off the stack. Really creepy for anyone, but especially those challenged by scary 200 metre plus precipitous heights (me).

It was very foggy after lunch, but most of us braved the choppy conditions and went ashore on North Rona. It was a very slippery landing and re-embarkation long and challenging tramp across the island, dodging hundreds of territorial skuas. We trekked to an old oratory and village at least 13-1400 years old. It is mainly a lot of piles of stones almost overgrown with long grass, but a key archaeological goldmine for the scientific community. There is not a lot to see these days, but it is hard to imagine the deprivation and hardships experienced by the original settler, St Ron, who wanted to serve God away from the temptations of the hoi polloi. He took his sister with him to do all the work while he meditated, but it is said that he had impure thoughts after getting a glimpse of her ankle as she climbed a hill in front of him – so he banished her to a nearby, even less hospitable, island where she lived alone until her early death.

Heather sat that excursion out and probably just as well. It was a lot of hard work, steep climbs and a long and exhausting tramp through the fog in both directions. One of the most enthusiastic older women in our group slipped on the seaweed-covered rocks and hurt herself, fortunately not seriously, as we were reboarding the zodiacs for the return to the ship. This was another of the occasions when we found the ship in the fog by the use of GPS navigation – at 70-80 metres away, the ship was invisible.

[lindoig1]

Our cruise - Part 1

At last, I can post some narrative about our small ship expedition. It was about 11 days so I will post it in a few separate posts so none are too long.

Thursday. Setting sail. Day 50

Our expedition cruise started today, but boarding was not until 4pm so we took our time getting organised. A late breakfast, packed and reorganised our cases a bit, dallied a while and then walked down to the pub for lunch. It was threatening rain, but it held off and we enjoyed the walk, about 2km each way. When we returned to our friendly B&B, a French couple were just arriving so we let them in with our key. The manager was not there and after a while, they were getting a bit agitated until I found out they both needed a toilet urgently. I solved that for them by pointing out the guest toilet. I also explained the the manageress had told us that she may not be back until we were leaving and the French couple seemed happy to wait. It turned out that they arrived more than an hour earlier than expected and the manageress arrived back about the time they were expected anyway - just as our taxi arrived too.

We were on board by about 4:30 and soon settled in to our cabin, right at the front (forward) at deck level on the starboard side: an excellent position within easy reach of the bar, meals area, embarking and disembarking points and so on, but a bit noisy with the anchor and all the other machinery just outside our window. Most of the other passengers and some of the crew are Aussies so there weren’t too many new accents to cope with.

We had an introductory briefing and a lifeboat drill before dinner and set sail west out of Oban. We had an excellent dinner (all the meals have been great and more than we could eat - but we did anyway) and then a briefing about Iona where we were headed next day.

We all spent time on deck and on the bridge, taking photos of Scotland and birds and were tucked up safely in our narrow little bunks by 11pm with the evening light still streaming in our windows.

Friday. Iona. Day 51

Up at 6:30, only 3 hours too late to see a magnificent dawn. Feasted on breakfast (how do they get the bacon so crisp and delicious?) and got togged up ready for out zodiac trip to Iona. It is 11 degrees outside, but by the time we get rigged out with waterproof everythings, including gumboots, hat and cosy life jacket, we are sweating something fierce. Then we go out on deck and it is cold with a freezing breeze despite the sunshine and we are glad of the extra several layers of clothing, especially when the spindrift catches us as the zodiacs skim the salty water. Despite the warnings, it was a dry landing, and we dump our life jackets in the bag provided and within a few minutes, we are sweating again from exertion as we climb the inevitable hills to wherever we go. This is the pattern every day and despite how clever we try to be, we always seem to be a little too cool or a lot too hot once we are out on the Scottish moors or mountains.

Interesting about the wet landings. They warned us nearly every time we were to go anywhere that it would probably be a wet landing and reboarding of the zodiacs, but I think there were only two landings and one boarding when our gumboots saved us getting wet feet.

Every day, there are planned excursions, mainly to prehistoric or Neolithic sites, but mostly, I just wandered off on my own or with the shipboard naturalist, Heidi, and sometimes a few other foolhardy expeditioners looking for birds, hiking the wilds or simply looking for interesting things to photograph.

We had two or three zodiac excursions each day, usually to land somewhere and enjoy time ashore, but a few times, just for some sensational cruising along the coast. A couple of times, we all stayed on board the ship and it cruised around huge bird colonies on sea stacks, massive rugged mountains of precipitous rock inhabited by tens of thousands of breeding gulls, puffins, guillemots, kittiwakes, terns, shags, skuas and fulmars, all perched precariously on ledges no more than a few centimetres wide, huddling to keep their precious eggs warm and to prevent the predators or gravity stealing the unique life inside.

There is a lot of history wherever we go and although I found a lot of it interesting, it got a bit repetitious for me and I preferred the dynamic of just roaming around looking for things to discover myself, mainly birds, instead of having a story old to me. And although I have the greatest confidence in the storyteller (Carol, our highly experienced onboard stories were often just someone’s educated guesses about what it was people were looking at or how it was used or the possible lifestyle it indicated. It was by no means fanciful, at least most of the time, but nor was it often conclusively convincing to me.. in my complete ignorance, I could imagine scenarios (or is that scenaria?) different from those being put forward as broadly accepted by the experts.

It was birding and Iona’s Nunnery and Abbey in the morning (I hiked the 3 and a bit kilometres to the end of the island and back, taking in some great beaches, stunning countryside and identifying 20-odd species of birds) and after lunch we were back in the zodiacs cruising some gobsmacking caves and coastline as we circumnavigated the island of Staffa. Our little craft were able to get right into some sea caves, including the famous Fingal’s Cave, a veritable cathedral. Thousands of birds were nesting from a little above eye level to the top of the towering cliffs and beyond and being so close to the majestic rock face in our tiny rubber dinghies was truly awe inspiring.

We landed on the island and climbed to a great vantage point where hundreds of cute puffins were breeding. We sat around on the grass at the top of the cliffs and they cam in by the scores settling to land within a couple of metres of us, posing for photographs. I wandered off on my own for a while and found a few more birds so persuaded Heidi to do a bird roundup in the bar for anyone interested after dinner. The total count for the whole expedition to date was 34, of which I had seen 32. A really great start to our trip.

Saturday. Skye. Day 52

We landed on Skye and walked and climbed a few clicks along a largish loch and explored the hillsides. It was all just a casual if energetic stroll in a wonderfully pristine environment. Returning to the zodiacs, I stabbed my thumb on some rusty wire on the ‘safety rail’ and had to visit the ship’s doctor. A minor injury, but it got infected and is now only nearly healed 3 weeks later. It did mean that there. Were a lot of things that were hard to do without putting pressure on it.

We visited a smaller loch after lunch that had been an old Viking settlement and some explored the ruins while others, including me, walked right around the loch and up into the surrounding hills just looking to see what there was to see. I roamed far and wide, mainly on my own, and had a wonderful time.

The ship’s crew are part of a campaign to clean up a lot of the rubbish on the islands so they recruited everyone to collect rubbish and they loaded a truckful back onto the ship to be disposed of in Aberdeen. The island has a history of occupation going back over 2000 years so it was good to free it of some of the recent crap accumulated by 20th and 21st century visitors and storms.

I think that only Heidi and me were really keen birders although there were other who were interested and a little knowledgeable. In the main though, I think they wanted us to find the birds for them and pose them so they could take photos.

I had a sore eye and it turned out be a stye. I used to get a lot when I was young, but haven’t had one in 40 years until Istanbul and then on the cruise. I saw the doctor again and he gave me some antiseptic cream for both eyes and they are now pretty good again. A mystery why they erupted so close together after so many year without them.

[lindoig1]

Days 73 and 74

Sunday. Loch Lomond and still no monsters! Day 73

We drove south again, hugging the coast most of the way, but we went inland for a look at Loch Lomond. It had rained most of the night and virtually all day until around 7pm, so Loch Lomond was pretty misty. Nonetheless, we got out of the car for some photos and a look at more flowers. I had a close look at the Loch in case Nessie had snuck overland to a new hidey-hole, but no, she was not there either. I think she is a figment of someone’s vivid imagination and other people’s creative ingenuity who claim to have seen and photographed her.

Early in the afternoon, we got into a major traffic jam. Some clown from the US was visiting Glasgow on the very day we were trying to pass the Prestwick airport and traffic chaos ensued. The entourage passed us when we were waiting by the side of the road and I reckon it consisted of between 60 and 70 cars, plus a couple of dozen cop bikes. I think it c this was last night for a coffee and give me my pay cash. would have been a great day to commit a crime because almost the entire Scottish Police establishment was blocking side roads, parking areas, entire villages were left with no street parking. There were a few hundred rubberneckers by the roadside in groups of up to about ten, but it seemed a huge non-event to create such a hoo-haa. And he never stopped to say howdy to us! It probably delayed us and 20 or 30 thousand other people by up to an hour, but once they had passed, the traffic cleared pretty quickly and we continued our pleasant southerly journey.

Driving in the towns leads to a few awkward moments. On many occasions, I have rounded a corner into a street and had the horrible feeling you get when you find yourself going the wrong way in a one-way street. But it has always been simply because all the parked cars on both sides of the road are facing me. People park almost equally on whichever side of the road has space, crossing oncoming vehicles and driving in the wrong direction for a distance in the process. The other frustrating thing, mainly on country roads, is the tendency for vehicles, particularly tourist buses but some campers, to insist on using half our lane as well as their own. Near Loch Lomond, we were almost driven off the road 5 or 6 times by buses that were way across on our side of the road even where they had plenty of room on their left.

We camped overnight at a van park near Stranraer. I was desperate for a shower - I could hardly bear to sit near me on account of the smell. They have a cute little bar on site so we had a drink and watched Croatia go down to France in the World Cup semifinal. En route to the bar though, my shoes slipped on the wet grass on a low bank and I went crashing down in an

ignominious heap. A couple of little kids came running over to see if I was OK. In course of conversation next day, I mentioned that it as my big sister’s birthday and one cute little guy asked me to pass on his wish for her to have a very happy birthday. He is from an Irish/Scottish family and all the kids are cute and thoughtful.

Monday. A lay-day. Day 74

We decided to have a day off from travelling today. Heather did a big load of washing in the morning, including some clothes and our bedlinen and towels, and then found that the dryer wasn’t working. It was a fine day and a bit windy so things may have got dry, but there were no washing lines to hang anything. As a result, we decided to go into town to the laundromat to use the dryer there. Alas, the laundromat we were sent to was closed for renovations so Heather had to traipse right across town with the heavy bag of wet stuff to an alternative laundromat. We then went to Tescos to stock up on groceries and bought fish and chips to take back to the van park for lunch. We have both been hanging out for fish and chips for weeks so it was very satisfying even if the chips were well below par.

I took several trips to the loch a couple of hundred metres away during the day to try to identify more birds as the tide brought them closer. I also took a couple of longer walks along the sea wall to cover more bird territory and did see a couple of new ones. (For the record, I have identified 157 species on this trip, including 121 that we had not previously seen.)

In between all of that, I got the rest of my blog from our cruise written up and will post that in 3 or 4 posts as soon as I post this. As an extremely brief summary of the cruise, it was all very enjoyable, but we felt there were a number of things that could have been done better. We both felt that the natural history side of the trip (birds, mammals, sea creatures, plants, etc.) had been oversold in their advertising and that there was a much stronger emphasis on the archaeological history than the brochures indicated. I am not saying that we wouldn’t still have done the trip, but our expectations (and maybe some of our preparation) would certainly have been different had the advertising reflected reality a bit more closely.

After dinner, we went to the little pub they have on site for a coffee and then decided on a wee dram. In due course, the barman and a local bloke engaged us and we ended up in quite a whiskey-tasting half hour or so and another hour of conversation. He wouldn’t take any money for our 7 or 8 tastings so we felt obliged to buy another one anyway, so we rolled back to our little van quite cheerful!

[lindoig1]

Nessie is Fake News

Ullapool to Sheilbridge. Day 72

Another delightful day driving a big loop around north-western Scotland and down the coast a ways.

It is hard to find anything specific to describe our meanderings. We are basically heading slowly south on the west coast (or close to it), taking as many detours and loop roads off the main highway as possible. We usually drive at about 10-15mph below the speed limit, a bit faster on the motorways, and I always leave plenty of room in front of me to let people pass if they want to, and if there are more than a couple of cars behind me (or if the road doesn’t really allow cars to pass), I always pull into the passing places or parking bays to let them pass. But today, we were in a queue of perhaps 200 vehicles all travelling at 20mph below the speed limit for well over half an hour because a motor home up front ignored all the signs asking banners to pull over to allow other vehicles to pass. People like that give RVers a bad name.

We had lunch at Lochinver, a mile or two off the highway. Inver means estuary (so does firth) and loch means lake or almost any area of water, fresh or salt, and kyle means area of shallow water as in an estuary. All very confusing, especially if we add in all the other odd Scottish words, but Lochinver was a cute little jetty area with a few boats in a loch near the sea. Very quiet and quaint.

We camped at a small van park behind a servo at Shielbridge. There were a few other vans there, but mostly tents. There was a great creek that cascaded over the rocks and under an old stone arched bridge to a waterfall filling a deep pool just where it joined another similar-sized creek. It was really beautiful and I scrambled around taking a few photos of it.

Interesting that wherever we have been, whether people have a camper or a car and tent, almost all have a dog, often two, sometimes three! I reckon at least 80% of people are travelling with at least one pooch and all are welcome in any of the van parks we have seen. Personally, I don’t like dogs, but imagining having 2 or 3 of them sharing my bed in a tiny camper with me 24x7 sounds awful. Obviously, not so for the vast majority of vanners who sit over their happy hour with their dogs on their knees kissingl and licking them and demanding to be taken for walks. I don’t begrudge people who love dogs, as long as they keep them away from me, but the number of dogs and the immediacy of them in a camper puts me off a little.

Traveling here has taken us deep into English literature and the language in much of it, especially that written a century or so ago. We have seen hundreds in babbling brooks and dark woods, old stone cottages, forests of beech and larch, country laneways and hedgerows, rooks and robins, castles and keeps. There are daisies and buttercups everywhere and the heather and primroses and foxgloves (pink, purple or white patches, but never mixed for some reason) abound, just like Enid Blyton and so many others described. We use different terms - and have different things to describe - in Oz, but as we see things here, the language we grew up with resonates in our heads. Perhaps more wonderfully, the images the language evokes have become real and visible as we have gone along and the nostalgia of our youth has renewed itself in our current experience.

Down to Tyndrum. Day 73

Another wonderful day, but a few accidental miles further. We just kept chugging alonng, stopping and starting as we wanted, admiring the scenery - on both the grand scale and in miniature.

The country has obviously had a tortuous geological history. Many of the steep valleys we have driven through are very obviously the result of ancient glaciers and in some cases, you can still see nevee where the glacier started as well as the moraine where it melted. In other places, it is fairly clear that they landscape was formed as a result of volcanic activity, with both calderas and plugs seeming to be present. But the overall impression is one of grandeur. Massive rock formations, meandering snowmelt rivers, mountains and carved-out valleys. All quite awesome.

We did a few extra miles so we could say we had been to Loch Ness. It is a huge loch, but having seen it, I can now make an unequivocal assertion that the monster is a complete myth. We parked by the loch to take photos and look at some flowers and the only monster there was an empty can of Monster energy drink. The whole Nessie thing is fake news.

We had one wonderful detour this afternoon. It was only about 10-15 kilometres, but it was on a very narrow winding road, barely wide enough to keep all wheels on the tarmac, an avenue almost enclosed in places by the trees and bushes growing right up to the road. It went out to a tiny port with a ferry out to some of the islands and then wound its way along the lochs and pastures, past secret brooks with little cascades shining white in the gloom. Despite it taking barely half an hour, the whole experience was quite magical.

Quite by accident, we ended up in Oban again. Our Scottish trip started in Edinburgh and went to Oban where we started our cruise that eventually tok us back to Edinburgh to collect our camper and we have now done the reverse of our cruise on land and called in at Oban this afternoon. We hadn’t intended to, but took a wrong turning 5 miles out and had to retrace our steps/tyre tracks after doing a U-turn in Oban. We were trying to go to a caravan park and missed the turning. Once we were back on track, we found the caravan park - and found that it doesn’t take caravans. Despite the advertising,it only has upmarket cabins and doesn’t welcome the hoi polloi like us. We drove on another 20-odd miles to a biggish park where we checked in. It is all very nice, but grossly under serviced. Two showers and two toilets each for men and women to cope with maybe 100+ campsites. Thank heavens, we have our own facilities in our van.

[lindoig1]

North-west Scotland. Days 69 to 71

Tuesday. Day 69

It is just after noon and we have not long finished breakfast - eggs, bacon and baked beans with bread and butter. No toaster and the gas is so weak, it takes more than 15 minutes to boil enough water for a cuppa. Took ages to warm the eggs and bacon enough to eat, but they were delicious. It is so beautiful in Durness that we have decided to hole up in our mobile cubbyhouse for another day and just enjoy it. We snuggled in under the doona for an extra hour or so before the calls of nature could no longer be denied. It is very moody here with Scotch mist filling the air, almost enough to get wet if we stayed out in it. We had a little light rain overnight, but it is just delightfully grey and a tad dour today - but in a nice way. The clouds and cliff-enclosed bay below our hideout seems to accentuate the sound of the waves. It is really quite calm, but the sound of the low surf is funnelled up to us making it all quite exciting and emotional. Just lovely!

It is a good opportunity to write up about our cruise if I have time. We have already done some puzzles and plan to watch a DVD on our tiny machine that we brought from home, but hopefully, I will get to post something.

There is a lookout at one end of the bay and we walked out there before a late lunch and watched a few porpoises enjoying the water too. There was a mother and young and at least one other in the pod and they have been playing around just near us most of the day. We haven’t seen much wildlife apart from birds on this part of our trip so it was interesting to watch them. We saw one fin whale on the cruise, and one pathetic scrawny stoat, one otter and quite a lot of seals, but nothing else.

We had a drink at the pub in the late afternoon and tried to use their Wi-fi to log on. Logged on OK, but couldn’t even download email after that - yet another limitation of the PC. Also, I am having trouble with my iPad. It doesn’t display what I type. Miscellaneous characters appear, some don’t appear at all, some sequences repeat themselves over and over again. I am about at the limit of my patience with the available technology here.

It has been a lovely relaxing day, but I didn’t get any of our cruise written up.

Wednsday. Day 70

We drive about 120 km today, but made camp in a parking area overlooking the sea at Drumbeg, but we are probably less than 40 km from where we camped at Durness. We have been surrounded by grandeur and beauty all day, but have looked around exploring minor mini-minor roads and tracks. We went for a walk to the beach at a place way off the road (next to a cemetery) and ended up at a deserted pier down another dead end for lunch. There have been very few cars or people and it has been delightfully enjoyable, cruising along slowly and stopping from time to time to just enjoy the place. There are literally thousands of lochs here, from pond-sized freshwater lochs to 50km long sea lochs and we spent a wonderful half an hour or so at one waterlily covered one looking at many wonderful flower species. Not another car or person disturbed us and it was an idyllic short stop along a really wonderful day. I always imagined waterlilies to be tropical or semitropical plants, but we have seen many thousands of acres of them in Scotland. I suspect they may all be the same species because all the flowers are white and look the same.

The mountains are craggy, often rock faces, both smooth or broken, but others are smothered in heather or other plants, most of it not yet quite in flower. Having said that, there is plenty of colour around. There is very little blue, but heaps of yellow, white, pink and purple from a plethora of different flowers. Anywhere you stand, you are surrounded by at least 10 varieties of flower from pinhead sized to wild roses, thistles and waterlilies - but you wouldn’t stand in a frigid loch just to be surrounded by waterlilies.

There are thousand of kilometres of stone walls here, some mortared, others just drystone, but all picturesque. I have mentioned the old stone houses, but all the houses, old and new are very plain and symmetrical and either natural grey or whitewashed, with dark rooves, whether slate, tiled, shingle or occasionally thatched - and just an occasional rusty red iron shed roof full of holes.

During the last hour or so of the drive today, we were talking about having a pub meal, preferably fish and chips, when we stopped. When we set up at Drumbeg, it was a bit early to go to the pub so we sat and did things in the van, marvelling frequently and effusively about the view. Then we went down to the pub, only to be told there were no meals available that night. So it was baked beans and cocktail sausages, warmed up on the pathetic gas stove because there was no power available in the parking place. An early night of reading that night.

Thursday. Day 71

What can I say? We continued to cruise around the most stupendously awesome mountains, moors and lochs with every corner smacking us in the face with an unexpectedly beautiful valley, a quaint village, a rocky headland, a sandy beach, a picturesque estuary - or a combination of several such gob-smacking delights.

We called in to a few villages and stopped and started a few times, even stocked up on some more food and wine at a Tescos, but basically just moseyed along from one jaw-dropping view to the next. I think I have mentioned the narrow roads a few times and with 6 forward gears in our camper and so many hills and passing places where you have to stop or nearly stop every time another car, motorbike, cyclist or hiker confronts you, I reckon I have declutched and changed gears at least a million times or more in the last week. At least my left leg is getting some exercise - maybe that is why my knee is causing me a little pain! I think I am concentrating 80% on my driving and 20% on the drive a lot of the time so frequent stops and isolated roads give me the chance to see more detail in this beautiful place.

We saw a few deer at last, two on a hillside where we stopped to take in the view and Heather saw one near the road a bit later. We also had a really good look at a stag in a field less than 50 metres away. He was not at all bothered by us so we watched him for a while and took some pics.

We visited a lighthouse at the end of yet another finger of yet another scenic loop road and spent an hour walking around looking at the birds and flowers on the headland. I also had a walk around the ruins of a small castle along with 30or 40 other tourists, but never found out quite what it was. It was a listed historical monument, but with no information about what it had originally been.

We ended up at a van park near Ullapool, a bit bigger town where we did our shopping. The park was on the very edge of a long sea loch and it was interesting to watch 5he ebb and flow of the tide - and how the dunlins, plovers, oystercatchers, gulls, wagtails and sparrows used the tidal movements to refresh their larder. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the birds as the tide drew them closer to us as it came in and covered most of the rocks - and the dunlins were a first for us anyway.