Digestives by Midnight: 2012

Today was our second day proper in Fort William, and rather than lounge around and do nothing to the best of our ability as we did yesterday, today I wanted to go climb some mountains. So I chivvied Jen out of bed and then lay around playing Pokemon for a while before we collectively got our act together and managed to exit the hotel. Doing so is hard work when you know that you're at least a mile of loch and B&B scenery away from what scant facade of civilisation Fort William offers, but we made it. Walking through the pitch blackness with all our luggage and no true idea where we were going was much less fun than taking a pleasant stroll into town, though I can't quite place why that would be.

Our hotel is an old, rambling building that seems to only have three members of staff, two of which are almost disarmingly eager to please their guests. I don't know if they're just a bit too intense for my liking or if they just don't have much to do since the tourist season is pretty much dust, but for whatever reason it can be kind of unnerving. They're also remarkably ill-informed about bus and walking routes involving the huge mountain that is pretty much the only reason that people would come to this place, but they're trying their best. Alistair, the dude who runs reception most of the time, did clue us in as to the gondola ride at Nevis Range, which sounded like a feasible alternative to my 'lets walk up Ben Nevis' plan that Jen enthusiastically vetoed, and so we set out today with intent to make our way there.

Fort William has a high street, which came as quite a remarkable sight after three months on Harris. That is pretty much all that it has, though, aside from a small standing army of hotels and B&Bs, so we didn't spend much time in town itself, stopping only by the travel centre to find out where and when to catch the bus to the Range, and at Morrisons to buy some tasty snacks for our miniature adventure. The bus itself was cheap in comparison to the Hebridean bus services, which were pretty pricey but admittedly had to cover a much greater distance. Instead of an hour of mountains and lakes, we were treated to ten minutes of trees before being dropped off at the visitor centre. Here it was quick and easy to buy tickets and leap aboard a gondola.

On the way up I was irresistibly reminded of what Dad would say in such a situation, something like 'we'll be fine, only nine people died on this gondola last month'. The elder couple we were sharing our ride up with took this all pretty well and even joined in with my increasingly dark predictions for what we'd find at the top. This all took on a rather ominous tone as we ascended into the clouds, and the gondola station at the top was but an indistinct looming shape ahead of us, but in the end we neither found ourselves attacked by mountaineering zombies nor accidentally ascended up to Heaven.

At the summit, the views were nonexistent, as the thick cloud cover engulfed everything, leaving a space of only about twenty metres in every direction where we could see. Though this meant we couldn't get any pictures, as someone who's climbed mountains and oohed and aahed over the view plenty of times, I actually found the change quite refreshing, the feeling of being amongst the clouds pleasingly alien. Looking out from the viewpoint into the thick bank of fog, which offered occasional glimpses of the world beyond, I was reminded of the various city in the sky myths, as well as the Northern Lights - you know, strange things in the sky that can only be glimpsed at certain times, shrouded from sight of the common man.

That was about it as far as mountaineering went for the day, so we took a more sedate gondola ride back down and hung out in the cafe, waiting for our bus. In due course we discovered that the nasty lady at the travel centre had in fact lied about the time when the last bus came by, and we'd missed it. Luckily, we were able to entreat the kindness of a couple of holidaying Londoners for a ride back into town.

Since Fort William had failed to metamorphose into an interesting place with lots of stuff to do whilst we'd been away, we stopped off for some food before heading home. At the bar place thingy that we stopped at, we finally took the opportunity to try out this haggis stuff, which was alright. I think in having unconsciously avoided eating it for so long I'd pedestalised it to some extent, and it didn't live it to whatever preconceptions I'd build up around it, but still, it was nice enough. I'd eat it again. Unless there was something more interesting on the menu.

So, that brings us back to the hotel, where I decided that I was going to finish writing my post about Harris and then start that blog I'd been thinking about for a while. Hi!

Here be dragons.

This post finds me in sad spirits. Though as I speak our ferry is pulling up to Skye, and we embark on the first leg of a whole new adventure, it’s an adventure that will ultimately be the opposite of the one we return from. Three months ago we left behind everything we knew and the passive disdain for it of which we were so well acquainted, and went on a brand new adventure to a brand new place to meet brand new people. Now, though we embark upon distractions en route, we are returning to what we already know of. This time, there’s no aura of mystery.

So anyway, I thought it was about time I got myself a personal travel blog, rather than just guest-editing on Jen's from time to time, because we do have different interests and different ways of looking at things, and expression requires room to breathe. Hence we are here, myself poised to write of the Outer Hebrides, y'all hopefully poised to read of them.

Tarbert from on high, looking towards South Harris and Skye.

The problem with goodbyes, for me at least, is that often the true impact of the departure does not hit until you've already gone, and so it’s only now that Harris is a lumpy sprawl on the horizon that I appreciate how much I enjoyed my time there. For someone who arrived sick of city life, it was a highly refreshing breath of fresh air. No longer are houses stacked up against each other like the unholy brickwork of a patchwork city; construction makes the most of the space, with towns of any size being a remarkable rarity. I am reminded somewhat of Edmonton’s natural urban sprawl, unconstrained by such things as green belts that confine and contribute to the claustrophobic nature of many English cities, but to a lesser extent. Ironically, both Alberta and Harris, for all their quite notable size differences, share the same trait of having more than enough land in comparison to the total population.

The Hebrides, and to an extent the Highlands as well, are very sparsely populated. The most notable result of this is that in a place where a (comparatively) large amount of people gather, everybody knows everybody, and a lot of the people are related as well. For good or ill this means that there’s little that goes on without everybody finding out about it, thus breeding a very small-town feel that is, well, it’s pretty understandable really given that Tarbert is indeed a small town.

Quickly moving on from that rather tragically formed sentence, I’d have to say that I much preferred this particular small-town feel to the one I got living and working in Sandiacre for many years. Maybe it’s because I was the perennial outsider, or maybe I just liked the people more. Who can tell. That’s not to say that island fever doesn’t set in from time to time, because it does and it’s driven us all mad. Island fever is what I came to call the strange, listless pressure that comes from having very little personal distance, both from the workplace (which was one of the few nearby places to hang out in our off time) and from other people, and puts everyone a bit on edge and is a terribly effective means of deftly conjuring drama from the air and throwing it about inconsequentially.

Another fuel source for this listlessness is that, as implied above, there’s not a lot to do in one’s off-time in Harris. There’s plenty of scenery to gorge oneself on, but since neither Jen nor I are currently drivers we were slaves to the rather lackadaisical island bus service, which is faulted only in its doing as every other bus service in the world does, and running only as needed. On Harris, buses aren't need that much, except for school runs, and so they run infrequently and not very late. It makes sense but it still kinda sucks. Without that we’re limited to what’s available in Tarbert, which is for the most part either a) drink at the Mote or b) drink at the Inn. Even Stornoway, the closest thing to a city that you’ll find on the islands, has very little going on when the latest you can stick around is 5:30pm.

This is probably unfair. Jen and I arrived quite late into the tourist season and only really had a solid month of summer in Tarbert. During that time there was quite a bit going on, such as bi-weekly craft fairs, frequent live music and various summer festival events. Sunday was the only exception; the people of the islands are very strict in their observance of the Sabbath, especially on Scalpay, where washing your car or leaving your laundry on the line would be met with the modern social equivalent of fire and brimstone. I'm not sure exactly who these ‘people’ are, as for the most part I only met a bunch of old dudes who escaped Scalpay every morning for a few whiskeys at the bar, or the younger generation who didn't seem to give much of a damn anyway, but well, I guess the folks who are real serious about it aren't the type to pop down the Mote and wag their fingers at everyone present.

After August, and the passing of the season, every day came to seem a lot like Sundays, as Harris folded up and went into hibernation and we all started going crazy with lost listlessness. Ironically I even had trouble focusing on one of the things I could spend my time on, my coursework, as a result of this, although alternatively that could just be me being a lazy fuck. But, well, wasn't the point of escaping to the Hebrides to avoid doing all that rushing around? Whilst occasionally frustrating, it was always pleasant to be free of responsibilities beyond ‘go to work’. The management put us up for free in their staff housing, which was pleasingly vintage, and even supplied us with free bags of money for the remarkably steampunk coin-operated electric meter in the closet. We also got free food of various qualities that ran all the way from deep-fried beef burger to home-cooked curry depending on a variety of factors from how exhausted the chefs were and how many mouths they had to feed. I mean no disrespect for those guys, who battled their way through some of the most demoralizingly overbearing working conditions I've ever seen in pursuit of that much-vaunted 4 star standard, after having done that for fourteen straight hours it’s tough to feel inventive.

So yes we lived free of the consequence and endless monthly cycle of bills and pain that modern life brings, and that was pretty neat, but after a while I came to miss civilisation, if only for the many distractions it offers. We didn't even get reliable internet at home, which made internet procrastination so much effort that it was often easier to get on with what we were supposed to be doing instead. Surely something’s up there.

Oh yes geography. So here’s the interesting thing about Harris, and Lewis. These two islands are actually one island, separated by mountains rather than water. Their geography differs, though; Harris is treacherously mountainous, whereas in Lewis crags give way to rolling hills. Presumably that’s why Lewis is the more settled, and contains the vast bulk of the population; better land for farming. It’s not without its dramatic wildernesses, though, as we discovered when we took a ride with Vanessa and Murdo to a secret beach, where massive pounding waves and a boisterous, take-no-shit sea wind were hard at work making the Hebrides that little bit smaller. Staring out over the Atlantic storm with desolation all around, it’s hard to escape the feeling that these islands really are the end of the world.

You should go.