Do you believe in God?
So…do you? Well, in that case, do you believe in the Loch Ness monster? I’ll agree they seem unrelated, but I listened to a tour guide make a fairly logical (if not convincing) case that if you believe in one you therefore ought to believe in the other. In the form of a long story about St Columba and a Pictish chieftain and the very first recorded sighting of Nessie back in 500-something.
After two nights in Newcastle we caught yet another Megabus to Inverness. Atypically, this one departed and arrived in the middle of town, at reasonable times. Nevertheless, it was a six and a half hour journey, and after traveling from Pembrokeshire to the Highlands -virtually one side of the UK to t’other- I’ve got a crick in my neck that ain’t ever coming out, and the posture of a veteran coal miner.
We arrived in Inverness at 11pm, and walked through the town to the hostel; town was all very pretty, fairy lights reflected on the river and all that. We walked past Inverness castle: it doesn’t look a decade old- what’s with that? Macbackpackers on Culduthel street was AWESOME. The manageress Lyn is the most capable hotelier I’ve met, making us feel right at home while we smelled scones baking in the oven for breakfast. She was making them the night before so she could have some wine and gin and a sleep in! The hostel felt small enough that we introduced ourselves to all the staff and met most of the guests, but we got a 10 person room to ourselves.
The photo at top is of Inverness in the snow just a few days before we arrived, taken by another guest, Leesa, from a hostel window.
I stayed up late (drinking way too much free coffee and hot chocolate) making travel plans with the wifi in the comfy lounge. It was cold enough outside that you could feel it seeping in by osmosis through the big glass windows, and I ended up crammed like a sultan into all these cushions with my back to the lovely radiator.
Next day we had our fresh scones for breakfast (Best scones ever! Granted, having been vegan for five years, i’m no sconnoisseur), and hopped on a bus to go and see the beautiful Loch Ness. No, we did not see the damn monster. I wasn’t even looking (maybe a bit). But the loch was beautiful; particularly the views we had from Urquhart Castle.
(photos forthcoming)
Back at the hostel, I started reading the Stephen Fry memoirs (wonderful so far) but was drawn into the conversation of the other guests. It started out funny and vaguely interesting, until it was just me and this French guy- I still don’t now his name- who talked with pitch-perfect understatement about cycling alone through -nay, across– Siberia. He talked about Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, about men in the North who drink 5 liters of vodka a day and die in their forties leaving the population of over-fifties almost entirely female, about dog-sledding and northern lights and incredible human warmth and hospitality. He said the most important thing you can have, traveling through Siberian winter in a tent, is a brush. To scrape off the layer of ice that condenses on your sleeping bag overnight.
Before, or maybe after, his trip to Siberia he lived for six months on Finland’s lake Inari, looking after 45 sledding huskies. The French owner of the settlement sounds like a bear; huge and solitary, and apparently talks less than a regular Finnish person. After six months he asked the younger guy, my fellow guest, to stay on, to which he replied politely “f**k off.” The setting, the landscape was incredible; the northern lights were common, and the midnight sun meant that for a month they ran the dogs from midnight to 9am instead of 9-5, but that didn’t make up for the eighty-hour working week and the week-long sled trips without re-supplying. This is a tourism business, but the only one that I’ve heard of that takes tourists out for more than a day, and without a snowmobile as backup. Tourists pay €2500 for this privilege *gasp!*. I know I couldn’t do this winter through to summer, nor afford that fee for just a week, but I’d love to volunteer if I can.
On our last morning in Inverness I went in search if Leakey’s bookstore- a beautiful big shop with a mezzanine cafe all inside a five hundred year old church, with the wooden altar still in place behind the cash register. The order of books on shelves is a study in chaos magic and fractal randomness. I’m sure the only existing order; clumps of books by one author found here and there, are either created by meddling customers or the books just migrate together by themselves. I think this is my innate system; i found four books off my 2012 reading list in four minutes, and had to make a hasty retreat to cut my losses. Iain M Banks, Ursula K LeGuin, Phillip K Dick, and Terry Brooks- take that, 24hour flight back to Melbourne!
That’s right; I’m coming home. It’s an unexpected journey, but as Gandalf would say, sometimes unexpected journeys are best.
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