The Isles of Skye

I’m traveling back to London right now on a train from Edinburgh after the end of the last USC-funded expedition, a tour of the Scottish Highlands and the Isles of Skye.

The Isles of Skye, purported by me to be the blindingly beautiful bringers of eternal happiness, did not disappoint. For starters, in the last two days I have meditated at the broken ruins of a seven-hundred-year-old castle, looked over the edge of a thousand-foot drop, sipped the glacial runoff of one of the UK’s tallest peaks, fallen into a mountain stream after mistakenly thinking “I can make it,” visited the birth site of dynamite and James Bond (not the same location, although that would make sense) and touched the curvy horn of a friendly Highland steer.

The whole trip has begun to blur together into a mess of gory stories about Scottish clansmen, ancient castles and beautiful views, but I’ll do my best to describe what we’ve done.

PREVIOUSLY on Kevin’s blog: When we last saw Kevin, he was staying in a hostel in Fort Augustus on the banks of the Loch Ness. Foolishly, he had let his guard down to write his blog, unwittingly placing him at the mercy of Nessie for a few short minutes. But that’s all the time Nessie needed. Well, would have needed. If, of course, she had chosen to attack, that is. Luckily Kevin escaped Fort Augustus and continued on his way, propelled through the bog-ridden fields of Scotland on a yellow Haggis Tours bus emblazoned with their motto, WILD & SEXY.

NOW on Kevin’s blog: Our current story is one of castles and bovine herpes, Scotsmen and unintelligible accents. It takes us through quiet northern Scottish towns and up to the highest mountain in the land!

I’m sorry I have to interrupt this advertisement, but I better start writing about what we actually did. Yesterday morning, we toured an ancient, restored castle. It was in a gorgeous location on a lake, placed on a small island a short distance away from shore. It had been fully restored since the early 1900s. We left there to have lunch in a small town up the road, closer to the Isles of Skye, and I bought a bandana from these two old women in a fabric shop. They gave me some free tea, so I felt pretty compelled. So for the rest of the day, I wore my new bandana like Rambo. We finally made it across the bridge onto the Isles of Skye after lunch, passing the town we would stay in that night on our way into the wilderness. The hostel we were staying in was called Saucy Mary, because apparently, three hundred years ago, there was a woman in the town who would flash any sailors who went by to appease their anger at having to pay a toll to get past a certain point at that town.

It’s always impossible to capture a view with words, so I won’t try to describe some of the incredible natural beauty we saw. Some of it still reminded me of southern Oregon, but more barren. Compared to the rest of Scotland and England, it was very exciting, hilly, mountainous country. Compared to Oregon, it was a backyard. But sheep roamed over all the hills, and we rarely saw another car. There were some great stories which went along with some of the natural landscapes we saw. For instance, there was a story about a great pillar on a mountainside of a giant and fairies, two mythical species which are common to Scottish folklore. The giant used to go up on the mountain to visit the fairies and tell them his stories. As the giant got older, he told them he wouldn’t be able to come and visit them anymore because he couldn’t climb the hill. They convinced him to come one more time, and after he had told all his stories and started to leave, the fairies were distraught and they cursed him, turning him to stone so he would stay on the mountain forever. Fairies are bad news.

There was another cool story about a cliff face with long, vertical streaks of rock. The story says a huge Irish giant came over to Scotland on a bridge he built to find himself a wife. He found the wife he wanted, but she was married to a Scottish giant, who wasn’t half the size of this Irish beast. The husband wasn’t around the first day he came, so he told the woman that he would be coming back the next day to crush her husband’s bones and make her his wife. The wife didn’t think this was such a good idea, so when her husband came home, she told him to take off all his clothes, shave his head, and construct a giant baby cradle to lay in the next day when the Irishman came back. The next day, the Irishman came back, and the woman invited him inside to wait while her husband returned from work. While he was waiting, he found the baby cradle with the husband inside, and deduced that the giant who conceived this baby must be too big for even the Irishman to handle, and he hightailed it back to his homeland. The cliff face was the husband’s kilt.

And then I had a life-changing event! The tour guide took us to a stream which once healed a young maiden who had a gnarly face. She was all scraped up, missing an eyeball, you know, the works. A fairy appeared to her and told her to put her face in the river, and when she drew it out, she was beautiful! She was no longer a minger, which is the Scottish word for an ugly person. So, all of us mingers dipped our faces in the river when we stopped. And now, I’m one of those beautiful people. My life is changed forever. People buy me drinks, I have to carry a mirror in my purse so I can powder my nose from time to time, embarrassing photos of me will soon plaster tabloids. It’s a great life.

That evening we returned to the town of Saucy Mary. We had dinner, and some great new friends and I went exploring. We had seen the ruins of a castle on our way into town and were eager to find them. There was a path which led to the ruins, and it was about a fifteen-minute walk from our hostel. Seeing an un-restored castle made the history much more tangible. We stayed there for almost an hour, saying little, just taking in the view of the bay and thinking. When we returned to the hostel, things were beginning to heat up in the so-called “biggest party town in the Scottish Highlands.” On the impresso-meter, this bold title falls just short of “Biggest-squash-at-the-county-fair” level of impressiveness, and just barely passes the bar of “my-son-or-daughter-is-an-honor-student-at-Roosevelt-Elementary” impressiveness magnitude. There was live music, and I danced a little while before playing the most abysmal game of pool ever witnessed in Scotland, which, on the carefully-calculated impressiveness scale, scores about a magnitude of 654f, the ‘f’ being a bonus modifier, signifying local fame for at least the next two months. It is a significantly more impressive title than “the biggest party town in the Scottish Highlands.”

This morning we visited some places on the way out of the Scottish Highlands. Our tour guide was a character and kept us well-entertained on our journey. We stopped off at the most beautiful area of the Highlands, an area known as Glencoe. Apparently this is where the MacDonald clan lived back in the day. There was a mountain in the distance I wanted to climb, but I figured I could only climb about 4000 of its 5000 vertical feet in the half hour we were allowed there, so it wasn’t worth the effort. We also saw the peak of Ben Nevis today, the highest peak in the UK at just over 5000 feet. We saw where Ian Fleming is from, and the tour guide pointed out the location of the oldest living organism on Earth, a yew tree estimated to be between five and nine thousand years old! We also stopped to pet a hairy Scottish cow. I guess one of the other guides used to let the cow take carrots from his mouth. He got really sick with what turned out to be bovine herpes. Aha!

And now I’m on my way back to London, just in time to leave tomorrow evening for Italy! I must be crazy.

Some pictures….One of Loch Ness, one of myself jumping in the air at the top of a huge cliff, one of a castle on a lake, one of the mountain cow, and one of my life-changing event.