Apologies for yesterday’s skipped post, but it’s going to get worse. Today I come at you at 6:45 AM from an aged, a/c-less hotel room in Portree, Skye Island, accompanied by a lone Sandra Bullock and the Most Useless Fan in the Universe.
Have I mentioned that it’s warm? Only in this room. Outside it’s 62 (16 C). Tonight I might just sleep on a bench.
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| Skye Island insane beauty #1 |
My reporting today is shoddy because this update will not actually include today’s adventures, seeing as it’s 6:45 and they have yet to occur. Also, as I am not a chipper morning person and am typing with my thumbs besides, this recap of yesterday may be less than stellar. But if you’ve read this far you may already know this.
Also, there is no WiFi at the Royal Portree Hotel so it doesn’t really matter when I do this, you won’t be seeing it until tonight when we return to the (also a/c-free but at least with functional fans) Pentahotel Inverness (UPDATE: There are no fans at the Pentahotel Inverness). But I wanted at least to jot down a few things about DAY ONE of our two-day Isle of Skye (Skye Isle? Not sure about the nomenclature) trip, with our guide, former British Naval Intelligence Officer George.
SYesterday, after a refreshing morning meal of warm carbonated water, a muffin and sweat, George picked us up in front of the Pentahotel and loaded us into an eight-passenger VW Van, which seemed a bit ambitious for our party of two, as did George’s outfit, which included a tartan tie. We were in shorts.
Off we went, six empty seats, broken a/c (that one earned my wife a withering “of course” look from her on the brink of blurting“I’m sick of Europe and it’s fetish with making sure everyone is uncomfortable and sweaty!” husband) and a guide full to the brim with naturalist and historic knowledge (and corny jokes, though the one about Angus the dog, I’ll admit, was pretty funny).
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| Skye Island insane beauty #2 |
Early knowledge: Inverness is the fastest-growing city in Europe. It has an old cathedral, a place where anyone can workout for a small fee, an arts center where we’d unexpectedly stumbled across a really great and youthful trio playing music that sounded like Astral Weeks without the vocals under a tent the night before our Skye trip. Hats off to you, Ali Levak.
Scotland has achieved 42 percent renewable energy, but sometimes the costs (clear-cutting trees and building access roads) are high enough to make one wonder if it’s all worth it. Urquart Castle was once owned by a guy named “Sir Hugh Grant.” That one slipped past everyone without comment, a sad reminder that it is no longer 1994. Irresistible floppy hair and a charming stammer, it turns out, have a finite shelf life.
In 1995, or maybe it was 1992, George isn’t sure, though either date puts some context around that scene in Trainspotting where Tommy makes them all ride the train out to the middle of nowhere so they can enjoy the Great Outdoors, Scotland passed a law called the Responsible Access Act, which forced big landowners (much of the country is owned by a few, even parts that seem to be parks) to allow public access to their land, provided that those using it practice “responsible usage,” which means they shouldn’t leave a mess or act like fools. If you can manage this behavior, you’re free to walk all over the place, camp wherever and whenever the mood strikes you. Sort of tough to get your head around, right? And yet so logical. Even so, it doesn’t stop the “convoys of caravans coming from Italy” that make July and August simultaneously the most maddening and George’s most profitable months.
This is just the warm-up, this barrage of facts. So is Loch Ness, if you can believe it. Take away the possibility that an immortal faux dinosaur has been living there for at least 1,600 years and you get Scotland’s biggest lake (loch), 250 meters deep and 23 miles long, with mostly uninhabited shores and lots of photo-ops. So basically about 2/3 of Lake Tahoe, only
without permanent residents (besides a mythical monster, of course) and a completely different sort of seasonal hordes. Less skiing,more gawking So it’s a basically a big, beautiful lake, and that’s it, plus a myth, which makes it kind of funny to see everyone gathered at each vista spot staring at the water, hoping to see something that’s been (allegedly) spotted a handful of times in the past century. You’d have better luck staring down at the BART tracks and hoping to see a mouse.
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| Sheep enjoying Skye Island insane beauty. |
(REAL TIME UPDATE: George has allegedly spotted the Loch Ness Monster, on sonar, while skippering a tour boat on Loch Ness.)
From there it was onto the depths of the Highlands, a rugged and mysterious place once far more populated until the sniveling (or maybe brave; I’m very conflicted) Bonnie Prince Charlie screwed everything up and turned tail and ran, leaving all of the fierce, lawless, suddenly badly defeated Jacobites with three options: 1) get killed by the redcoats (fat and away the most popular option), become enslaved to the redcoats, 2) get kicked off their land in favor of sheep and move to Tennessee.
We liked the Highlands because they more closely resembled Oregon and Washington than any other part of the U.K., with towering strands of trees, rivers and steep mountains. We enjoyed George’s tales of the Five Sisters and realized with horror that he planned to have us pose for pictures at every stop, an uneasy sense that increased when we looked at the results and found that when you spend three weeks eating cheese and French fries and not working out you end up looking different in pictures than you’re used to looking.
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| Portree, Skye Island insane beauty. |
We avoided most tourist sites. We were the only ones. The one time we did stop, at a castle whose name I did not write down because I figured I wasn’t going to post today, we were greeted with hordes, crawling around this hapless Castle like a modern version of the marauders who’d stormed its walls so many times in the past, only this time armed with phones and cameras instead of swords. The castle offered nothing in defense, save for a small cafe and a gift shop.
At this point George became convinced it was time for lunch and this was the place to have it. “The line’s not so long,” he offered. Now was the time to establish a tone. “Yeah, let’s keep driving,” I said. “Someplace less crowded.”
“You probably won’t find that,” he said sadly, but it took less than 15 minutes to prove him wrong. Sitting almost adjacent to the castle was an almost-empty small town whose one pub had almost shockingly good food (for a pub), picnic tables overlooking a lake/loch and best of all only a handful of other patrons.
Now relaxed and feeling so clever, we entered the Isle of Slye via parabolic bridge built in 2005 and initially requiring a toll until the locals rose up in rebellion. Now it’s free.
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| S. Bullock and George examining photos of Skye Island insane beauty. |
And there we were: Skye. Where “every other house is a B&B” and Scotland’s most stunning visuals (arguably) await, if you can sweet talk your way past the guy standing next to the “Road Closed” sign or the “Carpark Full” sign (which George could). One by one the sights piled up - stunning coastal views, dramatic rock formations, red and black mountains. Sheep. Go to Sandra Bullock’s Facebook page for 11 pictures. She had to exceed her daily limit, there was so much to see.
Even Cuith-Raing, which sure looks like a public area to me, is privately owned, this time by the eccentric Sir Ian Noble, who will do business with those who agree to speak to him only in Gaelic.
Thank you, iPhone, for not auto-correcting Gaelic to “garlic.”
Today we’ve got 10 more hours of this. Sandra Bullock is beside herself with joy. I’d like to go sit on the side of that mountain again, but I trust George to carry us through another memorable day, functioning a/c or not. You won’t hear about it until tomorrow, though, because upon our return to Inverness we’re meeting our friends the Crown Prince of Plate Glass and his family of Sun Devils, who we didn’t know were also going to be in Scotland, for dinner. This is our only overlap. After that we’re on to Ireland and they’re on to St. Andrews, where they’ll actually play golf instead of watching other people play golf.
Yesterday’s numbers:
2 - times George sweet-talked his way past guys trying to keep people out of places
1 - guy with a drone at Cuith-Raing. Not illegal, but annoying.
0.005 - amount, in miles per hour, that the fan in our room actually increases the speed of the air in the room.
22,000 - population of Skye Island. This increases to 1.7 million if you count temporary residents from Italy in July.
75 - photos of us taken by George. Approximately 4 of these are suitable for public viewing.
Next time you hear from me I’ll have hopefully navigated our way from Dublin to Galway via private vehicle. Shout out to Sandra Bullock, who continues to respond with a breezy “you’ll do fine” every time I express out loud a sliver of the anxiety I am feeling about driving on the wrong side of the road.
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