Scotland the Wet

It’s raining again. Inverness was good, I had a long night’s sleep from 7pm to 7.30am. However I’d had a few beers with Jimmy from Texas on the train to Inverness and a couple when I got there. Jimmy was a lad. A tall, athletic bloke but a lad. Likeable. His hobby is shooting wild pigs on a mate’s ranch using night vision lenses. He says you look through the lenses and sometimes see 40 hogs (as he calls them). Then the coyotes appear downwind of the hogs; they hear Jimmy coming and know that it’s party time. Jimmy and his mate have  M16 rifles, which were the US army’s answer to the Armalite. They look like this.

They’re not machine guns but they reload automatically and Jimmy typically shoots four hogs before the rest are gone. They weigh up to 200lb because somebody bred a cross with Russian hogs and they’re flipping huge. Jimmy then cuts a strip off the back and leaves the rest for the coyotes. He says the M16 is the rifle of choice in the US. He sometimes doesn’t take any meat as the hogs are rampant vermin and need to be culled. If I was him I’d pop a few coyotes at the same time to show them there’s no such thing as a free lunch. 

I got the 9.15 bus from Inverness to Skye and got off at the Claunie Inn, where I  quit the Trail in May. From there I was to cut south over the hills to Loch Garry and then dog-leg south again through the hills to Clunes on Loch Lochy. From there it’s a 12 mile dap down the Caledonian Canal to Fort William. Flat and boring but a terminal challenge for us Highlanders!

I alighted from the bus at 10.40 at the Claunie Inn, had a quick ginger beer (you heard) and set off down the trail over the hills. There was a lot of snow on the tops over 2000ft and it was peeing down, which it did for the next 36 hours. 

This shot looks back to the Claunie from the start of the hill track. 

I struggled to get down the first hill range as the Trail sends you in an epileptic zig zag routine. I spent far too long trying to find crossings for a river and several streams. However a stag furnished testimony on the foolishness of taking too little time.

It’s knackering, climbing uphill particularly, with a heavy rucksack. Downhill is ok and you can appreciate the waterfalls, which are all over these mountain ranges, running from melting snow or pouring rain, or both as in this case.

I finally got down to Loch Garry, with a laughable sign saying that I’d only come 9 miles from Claunie and that the route was potentially dangerous.  It did’nt do the stag much good.

In the end I got a few miles further and pitched my tent (you heard) by the side of the footpath. Wilson got a sick note from his mum that he couldn’t make it this time; signed “My Mum”. Good job. When I got up in the morning my body heat on the ground – no lilo – had brought a swarm of midges to life. Bar Stewards. If they’re too small to bite then they get in your eyes. 

By the way, on the train, before I got tiddly with my mate Jimmy, I did the Daily Mail Scrabble Grams and got 129. The Par Score was 85-95. Now I’m not a typical DM reader in any aspect apart from age but I nailed it.

See you Jimmy.