April 23, 24 & 25: The last day at Loch Ness, the best camp spot & getting the ferry to Orkney
We’re currently at John O’Groats, about to
head to Scrabster for the Viking Ferry.
It’s not called the Viking Ferry.
I think it’s called something silly like Northlink, but the logo is a
Viking pointing north, so the Viking Ferry is a) more apt, b) a bit more
badass.
Yesterday we left Loch Ness and headed
north to where we are now, but the day before that was where I left you. We woke up pretty early after our long and
(actually pretty exhausting) Munro-bagging expedition, so that we could
organize the car. It was to be our last
night of accommodation for a while. That
was until I had another tear about my love for the Loch and my reluctance to
leave, coupled with the fact that the shower wouldn’t work and the dryer left
our clothes a wet and slightly dog-smelling mess. We called up the amazing place we had stayed
the first night (which had a bath and top-notch internet) so we could spend our
last night on the Loch there. As we pulled the last of our not-quite-dry
washing off the line, the cat, Bella, arrived for some pats. I let her sniff the rocks I had in my pockets
and this sent her into a kitten-like frenzy, attacking sticks and rolling
around in the sun.
We packed up the car, slightly more
organised than before, and head out to Nessieland. I’ve already mentioned a little bit about
Nessieland to you, but actually going there was a pretty bizarre experience. Rosalyn claimed she’d never been there, despite
being able to get free entry, so we needed to update her over dinner. When we did, we described the ‘museum’ as
follows:
If you gave somebody 200 pounds, told them
the only place they could shop was at Poundland (the equivalent of their $2
shop) and they had 45 minutes to make a museum, this is what they would
make. Oh, and the only help they can
enlist is that of their children, who are probably a 5-year-old girl who thinks
googly-eyes are the height of technology and an 8-year-old boy who quite likes
dinosaurs.
They started this sign for Nessieland, and forgot to finish it
We entered to be greeted with a
probably-lifesize fiberglass sea monster, but it looked like it was
papier-mache because the fiberglass was so poorly finished. It was a complete sensory overload, with
fishing nets and rubber fish just below head height. There were posters all over the walls, some
which repeated themselves multiple times, detailing various sightings. These were on adult headheight. At child headheight, there was a myriad of
poorly photoshopped images (used without Creative Commons approval, I’m sure)
of children riding the Loch Ness Monster in all kinds of environments,
including a sandcave. How a sea serpent
(or waterhorse, or plesiosaur) navigates a sandcave, I’m not sure.
One wall discussed the possibility of
Nessie’s origins as a dinosaur, actually.
First there was a poster on plesiosaurs, because most people think that
she could, in fact, be a plesiosaur.
Another mentioned the pliosaur, which is closely related but doesn’t
quite fit the description. Then the 8-year-old
son with a penchant for dinosaurs must have proclaimed “Why stop there?!”
because the following posters filled us in on the t-rex, pterodactyl and
velociraptor.
Another example of the ‘let’s just run with
this theme’ mentality was the Famous Loch Ness Monster Hunter wall. Adrian Shine, who constructed the exhibition
center down the road, featured. As did
Steve Feltham, the man who lives in the Dores Inn carpark, making Fimo
creatures to sell to tourists. Charlie
Sheen featured on there, because he came to Loch Ness once and might come back
one day. The link was tenuous at best.
Here I am making friends with the 'Nessie'
Probably my favourite example of tenuous
links, though, appeared in the New Exhibition that they proudly advertised at
the entrance. Nicholas and I figured
that they’d sent a relly down to Adrian Shine’s exhibition and asked for
notes. They then used all those notes to
make more posters, speaking more critically and scientifically of the monster’s
existence. They still had some wall
space leftover, though, so I think they borrowed a poster from the Bigfoot
Museum in North America and put it up.
It was bigger and more curated than any of theirs, so I don’t think they
were designed by the same team.
On the way out, they suggest that you watch
a ‘documentary’ – another term I use loosely – that talked about the loch. I think the blew the whole budget on a 15
second CGI clip of a plesiosaur swimming toward the viewer. A member of the Loch Ness Monster Fan Club
who, in most shots, stood in a room by himself, not looking at the camera and
appearing very much alone, narrated it.
The cinema was about the size of a standard arthouse theatre and with
the same number of seats, but we were the only ones in it.
This description of the exhibition makes it
seem like it was terrible and we didn’t enjoy it. It was terrible, but also amazing. I’d definitely recommend everybody visit it,
but don’t have too much water before you go or you might wee yourself from
laughing. Nicholas said the toilets
weren’t too bad though.
In the gift shop I bought a Loch Ness
Monster car air freshener with googly eyes and a certificate proclaiming I was a
monster hunter. We knew this already.
What is this suspicious movement in the water? A monster? A boat wake? We just don't know.
George Edwards is well-known for two
reasons. One is that in 2013 he claimed
he had a picture of the monster that had been verified by the military, so it
was definitely animate and legitimate. About
a year later, it was found to be a hoax to sell more tours (when he relayed the
story to us, he skipped over the fact he ever told people it was real). The other reason – and this was the one he
highlighted six or seven times – was the fact that the deepest part of the loch
was named after him.
In his tour, he said, “Now we’re going over
Edward’s Deep. It’s the deepest part of
the Loch. In 1989 this part of the Loch
was discovered by myself, and so it is named after me. My name is George Edwards, and this is
Edward’s Deep, named thus because George Edward’s discovered it and it is the
deepest part of the Loch.”
Is it a monster? Is it a swan?
Urquhart Castle from The Nessie Hunter
We finished up with our tour and head to
our B&B, where we sat in blistering sun that left me quite a bit pink. It feels extremely strange to be writing this
right now as we drive through hail and sleet on our way to Scrabster. Anyway, I pulled up a comfy tub chair in
front of the water and sat listening to music and making notes about our trip
(while keeping a close eye on the loch for anything strange) and eating Ryvetas
with paprika hummus.
Oh, I didn’t mention that we went via the
Dores Inn because we saw Steve Feltham sitting out front of his mobile
library. I went and said hello, but am
always shy when I meet my heroes. A
prime example is when I was a child and I met Dr Harry Cooper of Harry’s
Practice fame and I was too shy to get my book signed, so mum had to do it for
me. Something like 10 years later, I met
him again and said a total of two words.
This was a very similar scenario and it made me feel very grateful that
when I met the professor at St Andrews, he immediately started talking. I bought a Nessie model from him and took a
picture and then we left after exchanging a few words.
We met Rosalyn back at the Dores Inn for
dinner a few hours later, drinking gin and tonics and eating macaroni. We told her about Nessieland and she was
extremely jealous we had seen more stags, and then we ate doughnuts in the car
until it was very, very late and we drove her home.
On the way home, driving through Inverness,
we saw a cat crossing the road. “Silly
cat,” said Nick, “you’ll get run over.”
Fifty meters from there we saw a tiny,
spindly deer running across the road.
“Silly deer,” I said, “you’re lost.”
Then it ran into the carpark of a hotel in the middle of inverness.
So that was Thursday. To update you on our actual, current
whereabouts, we’re in the café at Scrabster, which is literally just a huge
ferry port about to head to Orkney on the Viking Ferry. I’m not quite up to date though, and
yesterday was quite lovely so I’ll tell you a little about yesterday first.
One of the main gripes – and I’m sure I’ll
get beat around the ears by other tourists for speaking about this as a gripe –
has been the weather. With the exception
of the three days of snow in Newtonmore, the weather has been glorious. It’s been pristine. It’s been cloudless and hot and relatively
dry, and there’s been hardly any fog except for that overcast morning that we
drove into St Andrews, and even that cleared by lunchtime. We feel like we’re missing out on a special
part of Scotland. While seeing Loch Ness
glittering under the sun and shining perfect blue every day was nice, it wasn’t
mysterious and dark and foreboding, which is what we came to Scotland for. Yesterday changed that.
We left our amazing B&B after having a
topnotch breakfast and a small pat of their cat, Dinky, who lept into our room
the minute we left and decided this was to be his spot. The other guests had all checked out, which is
why Dinky was let in, because usually he’s only an outdoor puss.
There were a few mundane things we had to
before we left Inverness, like filling up the car and picking up quite a lot of
groceries while we still had access to an Asda.
We started to drive north, assuming the weather was going to be
terrible, because every time we have intention to camp, the weather is
terrible. It wasn’t too terrible though,
in hindsight.
The field of yellow flowers
For the first hour, the sun continued to
beat down on us and we stopped a few times to wave to the tiny lambs sleeping
the fields and more often to pick flowers.
After we drove through Beauly, we came to a town that was almost
entirely covered in long stalks of fine yellow flowers. I told Nicholas to pull over, so that I could
grab some to put in my book of pressed flowers.
We think they might have been the flowers of some kind of herb or
vegetable, given they covered such long, rolling fields. They were quite
heavily scented, but not floral; they had a musky, earthy smell, not dissimilar
to wet mud and grassy paddocks.
We continued to drive north, not getting
out of the car until we came to another town called Badbea, or the remains of
it, anyway. I read to Nicholas from the
book of folktales I had picked up at Leakey’s and we listened to Ukrainian
music, which is perfect for driving to. Badbea advertised that they had a ruined
village you could visit. Figuring it was
time for a stop, we jumped out and walked down the path to a set of ruined
stone establishments on the side of the cliff.
It was quite windy and even more cold.
Apparently, some aristocrats who set up nearby allocated the area to
crofters and farmers, who eventually left because – to put it bluntly – the
conditions were pretty shit. I mean, if
it’s April and we’re thinking it’s unlivable, imagine January. We didn’t want to imagine January, so we head
back.
Dunrobin Castle, which we drove past but didn't go inside
If I worked for VisitScotland and was
wanting to attract people to visiting the little ruined village of Badbea, I
would be promoting the gorse. The one
thing that this relatively empty section of Scotland has going for it, is all
the gorse. Just rolling hills covered in
gorse. As we walked to Badbea I snagged
my tights on all the amazingly scented bushes of yellow plants. It was so sweet and so intense, and it
smelled like we should be on a Caribbean Island, downing Bacardis. Alas, we were in the wind and the Scotland,
but it smelled fantastic. We got back
into the car and kept driving, looking for the Whaligoe Steps.
Gorse!
Walking through the gorse to get to Badbea
Somebody put some giant chess pieces on top of this hill, probably
We actually drove past Whaligoe, which is -
on the map - a town, but is as much a town as a tomato is a fruit. We had to backtrack, and make the assumption
that the one unmarked street that went through Whaligoe would lead to the
steps. We walked down a road that felt
like we were walking into somebody’s backyard – and the barking dog didn’t
help.
“When I Googled the Whaligoe Steps, I got
lots of results about a café,” I said.
“It’s probably in Wick at the museum,”
Nicholas replied. There’s a museum for
the nearby ports in Wick, and I think you can get a boat from there to see the
steps. They also have an airport and a
Tesco. That’s probably it.
A small sign, featuring an illustration of
a whale proclaimed “The Whaligoe Steps Café”, tucked behind what we thought was
a house. We went in and were greeted by
a young girl, who seated us by a dirty window, in an otherwise pleasant
café. They offered coconut milk hot
chocolate and something called panfried gnocchi in chilli tomato sauce, so we
stayed and got it. If you’re ever in
Caithness area and looking for food, go to the Whaligoe Steps café. It was probably the best food and drink we’ve
had in Scotland. They even offered
Dukkah. It was like being back in
Melbourne.
Going down the Whaligoe Steps
At the base of the Whaligoe Steps
After we’d finished our food (we’d exceeded
our budget a bit and were eating quite modestly), I nipped off to the loo so we
could go and climb the steps. I came
back to find Nicholas in deep conversation with the pair of middle-aged ladies
sitting at the only other occupied table.
They were well travelled and we talked about Iceland, and about
Australia, because they had family there, and about global warming and the
Galapagos. We probably talked to them
for too long, and the fog was sitting heavily on the horizon, urging us to look
for a campsite.
The steps were wet and made of thin pieces
of rock. They led down to a wide inlet,
filled with nesting seabirds that flew overhead. The water was very clear, and beneath the
surface we could see the continuation of the huge rock formations. Nicholas rockhopped his way over to the edge
and could see into a narrow seacave, with birds that looked like black puffins
but we later found out where called something else (something I can’t
remember). We climbed back up the steps,
which was a more difficult feat than the journey down, and were almost back at
the car when a middle-aged man with faded forearm tattoos and a well-kept
handlebar moustache approached us. He
introduced himself as Davey and asked if we had managed to climb the steps.
Davey was the grandson of one of the last
men to fish down at Whaligoe, and he told us stories of the fisherman’s wives
who would carry the fish up the steps and into town to sell. He told us that Whaligoe meant Whale’s Inlet
(Whal = Whale, Igoe = Inlet) and was named this because they often had whale’s
get stuck in the inlet, and they would lift them out with a kind of makeshift
crane. He said that they had a pod of
orca swimming nearby just a few days ago.
I was so jealous.
The steps built into the cliff face
The Whaligoe Steps
He also told us stories about when Billy
Connolly did his World Tour of Scotland and came to visit (which I guess was
the most exciting thing to happen in the town).
Eventually, we shook his hand and got back into the car and started
looking for somewhere to sleep, the sky getting greyer and greyer.
A small sea cave near the steps
We thought this was a chimney, but it was actually a place for a mast to go, designed to hold up nets
Earlier that day, while we were at our
B&B, we had been speaking to the owner, who mentioned that he often had
people asking if they could camp on paddock that overlooked Loch Ness. He always said yes, but advised them to camp
with the sheep, not the horses, because the horses are a bit too nosey and they
might try to get in your tent. Equipped
with this knowledge, we were a bit ballsier in our attempt to find somewhere to
stay. We pushed open a rusty fence and
wandered down a series of inlets and pitched our tent as far out as we could
get a relatively flat surface.
We had an endless view of the North Sea in
front of us, rocky inlets on both sides, with all kinds of strange, flat cubes
of rock that looked like Lego bricks, and a field behind us. We set up camp and tried to take a picture of
two that might do the spot justice, but we soon found this was almost
impossible. The sky was clearing up, and
only just distinguishable above the sea on the horizon. There were flocks of starlings flying in
formation above us, and nesting pairs of sea gulls flitting in and out of the
little clefts in the cliff. Just as we’d
finished our cup noodles and zipped up the tent, it started to rain and we fell
asleep listening to the rain and the violent waves of the sea and the seabirds calling
out around us.
Our camp site
Can you see our tiny tent in the distance?
Living on the edge!
We woke up to more seabirds flying around
us this morning, maybe hoping we’d frozen overnight and they could feed us to
their nestlings. The sun was blinding
over the ocean but the air was cold so we had some tea, dried off the tent and
decided to have breakfast in the car elsewhere.
We drove out to Duncansby Stacks in John O’Groats, just by the
lighthouse there, and looked out to Orkney while we ate. The sun was still bright in the sky, but we
could feel the wind picking up and there were some ominously grey clouds in the
distance.
Camping on the very east made for an amazing sunrise
Our campsite in the morning
The Duncansby Stacks
Pristine weather for stack viewing
This little stack had three little Fulmar's nesting on it
And this stack had a seal swimming around its base!
In John O' Groats, about to head to Orkney
Orkney in the distance
The Stacks were pretty impressive, and
reminded us of the structures along the Great Ocean Road. The biggest difference was that when you go
to see the 12 Apostles, there are 400 other tourists, and the only ones to look
with us that morning were a dozen sheep.
We wondered whether we could camp there on the way back from Orkney, and
then made a beeline for Scrabster, where we boarded the ferry (which is super
schmick) and where we’re sitting now.
The water is turbulent, and I’m feeling a bit seasick for the first time
in my life.
Before we pulled out of the harbour, Nick
wanted to talk about the winches but I don’t know what a winch is. I told him to write it down because Barry
might be interested. This is what he
wrote.
“Because the ferry is so large, when it’s
tied up at the pier, the ropes that tie it down at controlled by automatic
winches – as the boat pitches side to side in its berth, the winches adjust to
prevent slack or over-tensioning. Amazing.”
The view out the back of the Hamnavoe!
We arrived on Orkney just before 2pm and
spent the afternoon driving around the mainland and over the Churchill Bridges
to visit the Italian Chapel that was erected and decorated by Italian prisoners
of war in the 1940’s. It was quite beautifully
done, painted to emulate the brick walls and 6ft windows found in cathedrals
and chapels. We drove to Waulkmill beach, which pretended
to be a beautiful sand beach but was freezing.
In Melbourne, I don’t often mind when the beach is cold and overcast but
I’m craving some warmth that isn’t coming from the heated seats in the car.
On our way to look for somewhere to camp, we stopped by some WW2 bunkers that were a little creepy in the cold and the wind. We decided against camping nearby for two reasons: 1. It was incredibly cold and windy, 2. It was a little creepy.
The wind was pretty atrocious, so we ended
up sleeping in the car. I feared that if
we were able to pitch a tent in the bitter wind, it might not last the night or
give us a lot of protection from the cold.
Waulkmill Beach
Orkney has a habit of pretending to be tropical, but not being very tropical at all
The Italian Chapel
This candle holder was made of tinned meat cans
Approaching the altar of the Italian Chapel
The ceiling painted to look like brick
The Italian Chapel
The Churchill Bridges
"Tropical" Orkney with its renowned sandy beaches
WW2 defensive spot
We didn't camp here because it was spooky
The sunset from the car (where we actually did sleep)
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