Day 32 Wednesday 22 June 2016

Haggis for breakfast this morning with some fresh fruit & berries to start the day nicely. We depart at 8am from Wick, with all the hotel staff waving us goodbye, then passing by the shortest street in the world, Ebenezer Place, about 50 metres from our hotel. We have a pleasant drive back down the coast, backtracking the way we came up to Wick, although this time the sun is shining & the scenery is sparkling. The North Sea looks beautiful with hardly a breeze rippling the water, we can see all the way across the bight to the Scottish coast in the distance. We turn off the main road & drive towards the west coast of Scotland down a narrow single lane road. The road has small passing bays at regular intervals to allow vehicles to pass, fortunately everyone is considerate & we make good progress, although we are travelling fairly slowly. The scenery consists mainly of plantation pine forests with patches of cleared land where the pines have been harvested. Now & again we drive through some old growth areas where the trees close right in on the road & the trunks are covered in moss. In some places where there are houses there are masses of purple coloured rhododendrons lining the road on both sides & spreading along the roadside, they are very large & healthy plants, this climate must agree with them.

We stop for morning tea at a small town along the way for tea, coffee, scones with jam & shortbread biscuits. The hotel is very nicely set up inside with some very attentive young staff & the food is very nice. Half an hour & we are on the road again, relaxed & refreshed. We follow a nice river along for a while, crossing it now & again as we follow the valley. We slowly start climbing & in the distance some large mountains appear. As we get closer the trees are replaced by alpine meadows and we pass along old glaciated valleys with steep rock strewn hillsides & mountain lakes. We start seeing again the same white flower we saw a lot near Wick & on the Orkneys, it is called “Bog Cotton” as it grows in marshy soils. The white cotton like flower was used as a stuffing for jackets & pillows in the past.

Ullapool is our stop for lunch, a small fishing village, with a ferry service & tourism industry. We have fish & chips at a restaurant looking out over the harbour before going for a walk along the shops on the seafront. The sun appears again & the walk is very pleasant. The tide is out & the fishing boats are high & dry on the shore.

Continuing we pass more of similar beautiful country, climbing up to travel through passes before descending to the valley floors again. We stop at Loch Carron viewpoint for some special views over the loch in both directions before continuing to the bridge over to the Isle of Skye. We stop at our hotel in Broadford & drop off our baggage, where we also pick up our local guide for the afternoon, before heading west again on the Isle of Skye. We climb into the mountains again, Skye is an island that consists of many large mountains with small farms & settlements along the coastal fringes. The mountain ranges are the Red Cuillin & the Black Cuillin, the red being predominately red granite & the black predominately black magma. We can’t tell the difference, they all look like big mountain ranges to us with some interesting formations. The Black Cuillin have an interesting rockfall on the northern end where a very large fragment of cliff has split off & landed upright creating an interesting feature. There were a swarm of cars overflowing the carpark out onto the road edges & a swarm of people walking the paths up to the feature called the “Old Man of Storr”. It looked as though it may fall over at any moment.

We continued our travels westwards & stopped at a huge sea cliff. The interest here was a rock feature called the “Kilt Rock”, a huge cliff face with interesting large exposed columnar basalt formations. The view along the coastline from here is spectacular. On the clifftop some of the heather is flowering. Heather is an innocuous looking low brown plant that covers most exposed hillsides in mountainous Scotland, it has a small purplish bell-shaped flower. Apparently when the heather is in full flower the coloured hillsides is a magnificent sight. I think we are a few weeks early for it, there are lots of flower buds, but only a few purpled flowers starting to appear here & there.

On the way back to Broadport we stop at a small & very pretty port town that we drove through previously called Portreee. It has a row of brightly coloured buildings along the dockside & looks very pretty, rivalling some Italian towns. We had a nice walk around for half an hour, doing a bit of window shopping as well as admiring the scenery before we were on the bus again. We stopped again at a pub on the side of the road next to a fast running stream with great views of the Cuillin Mountains. A large cone shaped mountain across from the pub is the scene each year of a footrace up to the top of the mountain & down again to the pub. Amazingly the record is around 45 minutes, unbelievable.

Dinner at our hotel & the dining room has great waterfront views looking out over the loch to the mountains. We have a nice meal, Tereza taking on the haggis tonight & enjoying it, along with a nice chat with others on our tour. Another great day.

Today, once again a long drive but I think the scenery is beautiful, the best we have had since our English trip started. So far our journey takes us to so many interesting & historical places, we are really enjoying it all, but finding it that we would like more time in each place, but we are time poor & that is why we are on a tour.