Scotland Part 2

DAY FOUR
Monday 12th June 3:30PM
Ullapool – The Return – Sat outside Youth Hostel.

Andy
Firstly, mention must be made of a lady we have just encountered. She was the first cycle tourist we have chatted to (except actually for the grumpy Belgians here the other night – but they don’t count). First impression was her bike – REALLY laden up – and we both thought “How is that little old lady managing to get round here on that thing?” Well, in conversation it turns out that she’s cycled here from fucking Carlisle and is “on her way round”, as in right round the bloody coast! AND she’s camping. Christ. Then she’s off to Norway on the ferry (from Newcastle) and plans to “do a bit” over there before heading down through Scandanavia. All on her bike. Fair play – that is THE thing to do on your retirement, but fucking hell lady we now feel a bit inadequate on our mere ten day tour.

Rich
Not ‘arf mate. We feel dead wimpy. But we told her of our 40 mph downhills, which she was a bit scared of, so perhaps she wasn’t that hard after all.

Up this morning and made what we hoped would be a monster protein – calorific breakfast: fried corned beef. Unfortunately it really wasn’t too pleasant (and Andy couldn’t quite stomach all of his) [it was foul] but it did the job as fuel.

Said goodbye to Dave and Caroline, and the students (who, given that they were up until 2am with their fire on the beach, were up promptly) and headed for the more main route, easterly, past Loch Assynt, to pick up the A road going south (A837). Good progress, fantsatic views of Suilven and the other not-quite-Munros and a couple of stops for a castle (Andy just LOVES castles) and a tea-shop where we camped out until the hail had gone past.

Andy
(The castle was pants.)
We are now being buzzed by the RAF and their pesky jet fighters. This somehow spoils the seaside ambience if you ask me.

Considering how ‘cold’ the weather is, once again I am being burned by the sun here. Just had a text from Jo saying that the weather is cack in Leeds. Good. It’s top up here.

Yep – the cycle today was pretty hard one again. The return down the main road to Ullapool made us realise just how much graft we put in yesterday before we set off on the single track road to nowhere down the loch side. It was 10 miles and on it today we had at least three 40 mph descents, long ones, up which we’d toiled yesterday on the way north. No wonder we were knackered after a mere 30 miles to Achmelvic.

We toyed briefly with the idea of moving our YH booking over to Stornoway tonight and getting the 5:30 ferry across. But our boy here tells us that there’s no SYHA place in Stornoway (we’d have to find an independent one) so we have opted to stop and chill in Ullapool. After all this is a holiday!

Rich
And it’s sunny, so I am gonna need an ice cream.

6:10 PM
Thoroughly cleaned and showered in the Youth Hostel the intrepid duo march off to the touristy shops and indulge in a postcard buying frenzy. Oh, yes. We are so hard. We had a rescheduling meeting and have reduced our last stop at Torridon down to a single night (Sunday) as this will give us another day on the outer islands – we were a bit oushed for time otherwise. Also we are now booked into Uig and Broadford on Skye, so we are pretty much fully planned. The Gatliff ‘simple’ hostels on Lewis, Harris and Uist don’t take bookings.

The weather forecast it has to be said is lousy, but it has been thus all the way so far, and (touch wood) we seem to have been OK. At least the wind is Westerly which is fine for us as we will be blown back across Skye!

Rich has just been on the t’internet at 50p for 10 minutes which is a tad costly. I’ve written a few postcards.

The plan is to go for some more award winning fish and chips tonight. Yum. And a beer. Or two. In the meantime we will retire once again to the comfy chairs.

Rich has just informed me that our gorgeous Scandanavia girls have arrived. About time too.

DAY FIVE
Monday 10:25 AM
Ferry Ullapool to Stornaway

Andy
On board SS… ferry, which is just about to disembark from Ullapool. Now, this DOES feel like a proper advanture all of a sudden.
Yesterday evening we hit the chippy once again. It is actually properly award winning. Oh yes. Radio 4 voted it ‘Britains Best Take Away’ in 2005. And to be fair the (cooked to order) fish and chips are very, very good.

Having taken said fish and chips back to the hostel we dined with two German girls to whom we’d been chatting earlier. Rich picked a fine Merlot from CostCutter to go with the food. Deserts were Muller Fruit Corners – we eat in style!

[A note here on the German girls. Two youngsters, one 19 and one 25, just off on a jolly on buses around Scotland staying at hostels. We met a lot of folk doing this – just out for an adventure in a ‘far way’ place. Pairs of girls in particular, having a great, easy, safe holiday. This goes to show the excellence of the SYHA system.]

After dinner we roamed round all the pubs looking for one which served proper beer. After rejecting three (The Arch - dead), The Seaforth and The Ceilidh Pub (full of old people) we arrived back at the FBI next to the hostel and had one there. [This pub it should be noted had a bunch of Yorkshire men and women serving behind the bar.] Again, the smoking ban in pubs should be loudly applauded here. I cannot wait for this rule to be law in England.

OK, we are off. 2hrs 45 mins to Stornoway and the forecast is for a ‘comfortable’ crossing. The weather is, as ever for a morning, dull and drizzly, but hopefully will sort itself out in the afternoon like it’s been doing each day so far.

In Scotland you continuously feel as if you are exisiting inside a postcard view. For instance last night the sunset in the harbour produced some really beautiful light conditions, and there was also an amazingly bright little rainbow which appeared in the middle of the harbour at one point.

Back from our beer we DID end up chatting to a pair of blonde Swedish girls. See – I told you there would be some.

We both slept well once again.

This morning we have been to the aid of a fellow biker chap who was in our dorm and who was having a wheel/tyre type issue. Turns out he’d been sold an unsuitable rim and then on top of that a crap tyre (his original tyre was fine). No tyres would fit on the rim unless he managed to get about 80 psi into it, which he couldn’t with his rubbish pump. Rich’s excellent mini track pump did the job no problem. The guy is still stuck though as he needs a new pump or preferably another, more suitable, rim. Ho hum.

Omlette, bacon and toast for breakfast once again and the boat tickets were obtained (£30 for an island “Hopper” package thing which was a bargain for our 3 boats). Bags packed, and here we are on the ferry heading out of port and into The Minch [the channel between the mainland and the Outer Hebrides]. There’s lots of pretty islands dotted all around [the Summer Isles] and the weather ahead looks like it consists mostly of blue sky.

DAY SIX
Tuesday 7:05pm
Kershader Community Hostel, South Lochs, Lewis.

Rich
We are in a strange place – not what we thought it would be and this is not where we were meant to stop...

For some reason we were the absolute last to leave the ferry (priority not given to cycles, then) and I noticed only one foreign vehicle on the car deck. Straight after hitting the off ramp it absolutely pelted with rain – NOT a nice welcome!! Just as we were getting lost in Stornaway and Land Rover pulled up alongside us and it was Andy’s mate Kev, who’s wife is from Lewis and they have a house on the (rather remote) west coast.

We went for shelter and lunch in a café and when it didn’t look like the weather was going to break, decided to head off regardless. The plan was to do Callanish. Unfortunately, when we missed a turn just out of town (I thought I saw it but it wasn’t signposted anyway). As we were down the road and the weather was still dismal the thought of going west and then having an almighty headwind later on the return was a bit too much to take, so we pressed on south.

There were breaks in the weather but it ws slow going and the open moorland offered little relief. The oddest thing has to be the ‘villages’. Sometimes you’ll get an impressive array of build up: “40” speed limit signs; countdown markers; names in English and Gaelic and for what? One house if you are lucky. It sums up one of Andy’s favourite phrases about some of the places we have passed through: “Is that it?”.

Andy
This area is deslolate. Not in the impressive fashion though – more in the crap kind. Just endless featurless open moorland – a whole lot of fuck all. Why the hell anyone would choose to live here I really do not know. I guess in nice weather – some sunshine and a little less of the cross-winds and freezing rain – the cycle south may have been quite pleasant through this alien landscape, but as it was it was just grim. I found myself really wanting to be cycling through the familiarity of mountain scenery once again: big hills and everything. The exposure and unfamiliarity of it all was rather unsettling.

Anyhow we eventually found our turning off the main road (the only road!) south to find this odd little place about 5 miles down a single track road. We’d been thinking traditional Black house with a thatched roof… and we are in an old school building. Well, not that old – something from the 60’s with classic Scottish white rendering etc. No bloody heating either: we cannot get it to work. At least the tumble dryer seems to be going for free (Rich: Hu-fucking-rah).

Out two fellow guests (note: only two as no one else is daft enough to want to seek this place out) are Nicole: a German nurse who speaks really wonderful English and who is bussing it round the islands; and Mike, a felllow bike tourer from Darlington. He is the most loaded up biker we have yet met: 4 panniers, back pack and a bum bag. Tent, walking gear and everything on board, and he’s on his own. Crikey. Both these guys seem decent people to be sharing with.

Ooh look – it’s peeing down again outside and five minutes ago it was blazing sunshine. Welcome to Lewis indeed.

Tomorrow we will head further south and see how far we can get. Bernaray would be the target but we can bail out once again (to another YH) a bit further north if needs be.

The happening night life of this place consists of the four of us sitting round eating polo mints and Rich’s packet of dried fruit. Rock and roll.

Rich
Another “funny” moment on the road was when we were pounding along against the sideways rain and looked up to see two roofers hard at work on a chimney. We thought they were nutters .. but consider this: at least they weren’t on holiday.

We also had a minor (but nevertheless significant) mechanical: my horn broke. So at the moment I cannot scare the sheep whitless or signal the arrival at our destination in the traditional Eatough/Golborne tour fashion.

[The horn was fixed a little later that evening with the aid of Mike and his handy roll of electrical insulating tape. We were saved – thanks mate. But further on the DIY front we never did manage to get the heating going.]

Andy
Damn – I have just realised the we deliberately resheduled our YHs on Skye and Torridon so we could spend more time on these lovely islands. That means we have two more nights out here before we can head back to the ralative sanctuary (sanity?) of Skye.

Actually, I’m sure we’ll get to like these islands – at some point. The other two guys here have been singing the praises of Harris and Uist so we shall see.

9.00 PM
We’ve all been sat here for a couple of hours reading and stuff and ONE car has gone past. Ooh – the traffic!

DAY SEVEN
Weds, lunchtime.
Tarbet, Harris, Outer Hebrides. In the Fruit Tree tea house, early afternoon.

Andy
“Fuck the Stones.”
We have decided to bail off these bloody islands as it’s just too harsh to be biking out here.

This morning saw us head southwards from Kershader with our man Mike for the 5 mile return to the main road. He headed north...

2:45 PM
... at that point two blokes sat down with us at our table (the place was busy) and we chatted with them over a pleasant lunch (including gallons of tea). They were David and his dad Fred. Fred had cycle toured round Scotland in the early 60s. David lives on south Uist and is doing Christian charity work with alcoholic folk on the island. Most interesting to chat to a ‘local’. He and his wife also lived in Cardiff at the same time we did – in Cathays just around the corner from the Crwys Road Co-op!

Back to our bike day…
We are bailing as the biking is just… unpleasant. The wind is pretty ferocious and it’s just really hard work cycling. This may sound a tad wimpy but we have both decided that cycling for the sake of it is not what we are here for, especially in ridiculous conditions. We could have plodded on down to Bernaray but that’s on the exposed west and by all accounts things are even more grim down there. [It should be noted that the wind had changed from easterly the day before to an equally gale force westerly.] The forecast is better for tomorrow (Thursday) but David reckoned the weekend was not looking good at all. So, we will nip over to Uig this afternoon (the ferry from here is at 4pm) to the YH there, and then across Skye tomorrow, hopefully in decent conditions, with a tail wind. And, I should add, with “God’s speed” (cheers, David) - whatever that is in miles and hour.

Meanwhile we have ‘done’ Tarbet. Boy is it a happening place. I did buy a Harris tweed pouch thing as a souvernir in a craft/toy shop. (Note that Harris tweed is pound for pound more expensive than diamonds.) We also visited the one newsagents/grocer in town and the bustling tourist information center where Rich picked up a most interesting leaflet: “Cycle The Hebrides”. He is deeply engrossed in this right now so perhaps he can enlighten us as to exactly where it was we went wrong?

Rich
Yeah, well ‘Cycling the Hebrides’ is done carefully… there seem to be a few basic rules of thumb:
1. NEVER, EVER cycle from North to South (as we were doing).
2. NEVER cycle on the A859 (as we were doing).
3. Put your bike on a bus the instant the terrain looks lousy.
4. Take ‘picnics’ everywhere (or you will starve).
It’s quite telling that the “Cycle the Hebrides” leaflet only has one picture of anyone doing any actual cycling, and the people involved appear to be smiling somewhat ruefully though gritted teeth.

So, I’m with Andy – let’s get back towards the mainland which, for cycling, is much more pleasant as it is shielded from the North Atlantic by … The Outer Hebrides.

Andy
4:15
Over the sea to Skye. On the ferry HMS… whatever. Rich says that we now have the perfect view of the Outer Hebrides ie. from behind some double glazing. Of course now it all does look rather ruggedly inviting, but we know the truth so he has a point. Looking out in front of this tub there’s the very impressive view across the top of Skye with the Trotternish hills looming majestically, and also our first glimpse of the Cuillin way off in the distance. All look reasonably cloud-free from here, and let’s hope they stay that way.
Actually looking off the starboard side there does still seem to be some big black clouds over Harris.