highland adventure the second - hogwarts express

(inverness and loch ness were the first. one day i'll theoretically get around to posting about that)

firstly, alison, i went to piemakers. i got the spinach and cheese and the apple. the spinach and cheese was thoroughly and disappointingly average, but the apple was very good. next time i will have to try the currant-apple one.

right, spent six+ hours on twoandahalf (hang on) trains getting me and my massively heavy backpack (i took both cameras and my barrel lens) to fort william. was a good child and read "many thousands gone" (school book) for the vast majority of this trip, as it was too dark to see out the windows for most of it.

the 18.21 glasgow to oban-mallaig is more than one train. it's four cars which start out together, then it splits in crainlarich and the front two cars run away to the west to oban. the back two wait a couple more minutes and then head off north to fort william and mallaig. so, so confusing if you don't know this, as the whole four cars say they're headed to oban until you get to crainlarich. cheers to conductors who put up with those clueless tourists who get on and panic slightly after pulling out of the station.

anyway, by the time the back two cars make it to fort william, it's about ten o'clock at night and on thursdays at least this means the station is closing as quickly as ever it can get the passengers out the door. which means that my usual tactic of asking someone around the station for directions didn't so much of the work. so i spent a very pleasant if quite chilly half hour wandering quite lost around fort william until i despaired of finding someone on the street to ask who wasn't drunk or headed in that direction and gave up and called the hostel. the directions i received (from an aussie) were quite roundabout, but i did finally make it. if anyone's ever travelling around scotland, the macbackpackers hostel alliance is superb. love them and stay with them. right, got to the hostel, found my bed in the "scottish legends and heroes" room, titled "skiatch the warrior woman," brushed teeth, and went to sleep.

got up yesterday morning, ate my muffins (i packed very nearly all my food with me from edinburgh) and listened to a saffer (south african, for those not familiar with weird scotch denominations for common tourist varieties) and a guy from some germanic country talk about driving sharks and then the same saffer and two indonesian students of a german uni talk about professional diving in nigeria and surfing in bali and headed out to wander around town some more. i really like fort william. i'm now quite desirous of returning in warmer weather to properly enjoy the outdoor capital of britain. who's game?

oh, wandered up and down high street as things opened, looking for someplace to purchase a belt, as i'd forgotten one. consequently was a little late wandering down the footpath near the station which eventually leads to the world cup grounds (didn't make it that far), consequently got to see lots of pretty sunshine on the loch, consequently was only just on time for the jacobite. but the point is, i made it.

the jacobite steam train, for those of you not attune to all things harry potter, was the hogwarts express in one or possibly several of the films. whilst i did not actually ride on a day when the hogwarts express engine was working, i did spend some time wandering through the middle two cabins, which are from the hogwarts express. must say, cabin-style is definitely the way to go, train-travel wise.

the scenery is spectacular. the mountains are all carved up from the glacial retreat and the heather's in its pretty fall colours of red and yellow. and so many lovely views of the sea and of lochs. it reminded me a bit of austria, especially fort william, but also the lochs we passed heading north.

mallaig, the end of the line, is tiny. teeny tiny. it's a fishing village, complete with a fleet of heavily-rigged little boads and a pipeline for conveying the fish from the boats to the ice house. what's odd is that it's on the windward side of things. apparently people used to have more sense and lived in lee, but around the 1700s they moved predominantly to the present village.

caught the ferry over to armadale on skye. (not the other ferry which goes to the small islands; we'll come back to this) there were loads of dogs on the ferry. it was quite nice to get to pet them. and petting two of them got me introduced to a lovely older couple and their friend and these two older brothers. i ended up walking up to the castle with the dogs, the two older people, and their friend. turns out they were in the area staying with the friend, who had decided they needed to go on a outing, so they bought ferry tickets, and only realized after they'd bought them that they were going to skye. anyway, we walked up to the clan donald centre and armadale castle grounds (the castle's a relatively recent ruin) and i lost them at the castle when i got out the cameras.

the grounds are quite nice s'long as the weather holds, which it did for the first two hours or so that i was there. then it started to get cold, which as it turns out makes folks (read: me) rather less keen on taking long nature trails, so i stuck to the slightly sketchy back paths through the wooded bits towards the entrance and then wandered back towards the ferry depot looking into the various shops and artisans studios. there's a nature trail just up the hill from the ferry landing which looks like what would happen if you crossed the organic garden with weybridge and the tam. didn't get to take it - it's not well-advertised, so i didn't find it until just a bit before the ferry was due to depart, but it was very friendly and i've added it to my (staggeringly long) list of things to do when i make it back to the north west coast.

on the way back to the ferry i fell in with the two older brothers and we ended up sitting together and talking about edinburgh back to the mainland. they told me a great story about the medical school here. apparently these two guys back a couple of hundred years or so ago were hired by the (world class) medical school to obtain cadavers for the school. they started out by getting bodies from the hospital, but the school needed more. so then they started exhuming fresh bodies from the cemetaries, but the school needed more. so they started killing prostitutes and homeless people and the like until they were caught and executed. apparently a law was passed after that allowing the families of the deceased to sell bodies to the med school.

got back and "wandered" about two really short blocks until i found the hostel, where i met two lovely swiss-german kindergarten teachers who've been spending their fall break in scotland. they head back to glasgow and then to just outside bern today. the hostel (sheena's backpackers and tea room) is very cosy and homey and i got a bit more reading done before calling it a very early night.

doodaded around the hostel the next morning until time to catch the train and then tried to do more homework on the way home, but spent probably more time just enjoying the view.

next weekend i'm off to carbisdale castle, which is now a youth hostel in the middle of nowhere in the eastern highlands north of inverness. have to go on saturday, as the train signallers will be striking this week.

i think that's it for now