Until next time...

I am sitting here, biding time to start the trip back to home, drinking the two Brit classics together because I am too late for afternoon and too early for evening—tea, and gin and tonic. Inversnaid, it turns out, is the final destination for this leg. Oh, well, that is what a detour into the Lake District will do. I am sad that I couldn't have done any more walking but as it was I nearly cried when I saw the chemist and the promise it carried for a possibly good nights sleep. To get to the chemist, and that sleep, was a kilometre walk down the hill to the ferry, a half hour ferry ride, a three hour train ride to Fort William, a half hour wait for the train back and a two hour train ride to Crianlarich. Mind you, it was a stunning train journey to watch while I reclined against the immanently useful Wesley. Coughing my lungs out, regardless of my hard won cough medicine, stumbling along Main Street and cursing the lack of numbers in street addresses because it means you never know whether you turned the right way when you got to the intersection,I saw a man come running out of his house calling my name. I had turned the right way and this was Charlie. Same-as-me Charlie. He was starting to think that he would have to call out mountain rescue for me, thinking the reason I was late was because I had been walking in the weather. Then he heard my cough. 'I had that cough', he said. 'It lasted three weeks.' It better bloody not. (I have since Dr Googled it and what I am going to do tonight is put Vicks Vaporub on the bottom of my feet, put socks over them and put them up—this, I am reliably(?) advised will stop the coughing.) The B&B was beautiful. Such a divine doona. Charlie went to a lot of trouble to show me how the television works and turn it on to the Riverdance of ball games for me (soccer). He brought me some mints which he swore by as part of his own recovery from the coughing fits and he left me to luxuriate in doona swathered junk TV (replaced the soccer with Lewis, which, I didn't know but you may, is a spin-off series staring Inspector Morse's left-hand man). I told the coughing that I had had enough and I somehow managed to get a few hours sleep—even managing to sleep through the alarm. 

Now I am in a little B&B in Banavie, a suburb of sorts of Fort William, home of the famous Neptune's Staircase (series of canal locks). My room is built into the roof so that if I want to do something upright I pretty much need to go to the door. Its decor is circa nineteen seventy and at first I thought, ergh, and, it's so small, but I have now reigned in the spoiled brat expectations and realised I am paying the same for bed and breakfast in a time-machine of my very own as I would at a youth hostel. There was no point trying to go back and try a couple more days walking. Everytime I exert myself my lungs bubble up in a disturbingly gurgling way and I can't breath. Think my body has decided for me what the mind refused to. I have two days to wait for my train back to Edinburgh so I will catch the train to Mallaig tomorrow—it follows the 'Road to the Isles', heading to the coast off which stand alluringly named islands such as Eigg, Rum and Muck. It is also the rail journey they film for the trip to Hogwarts. You can take a steam train, or you can take the regular train on the same tracks for less dosh. And on Sunday, weather permitting, I will try to climb Ben Nevis and bag the biggest Munro. The sun came out at one stage today and cleared all the clouds from the mountain—mountains like to hold onto weather like a stole around their shoulders, only reluctantly allowing it to be removed. There was snow up there!

 

And then, it will just be a matter of making my way down south for my flight. Can't believe it is all over. Thank you to everyone I met, everyone who indulged in conversations with me, made me laugh, told me interesting things about themselves and let me tell them about my journey. Thanks for all the kindnesses. And thanks to everyone who read my blog and to my special commenter who replied without fail to everything I posted. I'll be back to Inversnaid sometime in the future and then let us see if we can finally wrap this thing up! Ciao.

666.2 kms: Rowardennan-Inversnaid.

There really was nothing in between. It would have been cheating to put the names of the few houses in between because they were so remotely away from the track that I couldn't really have said I was there. Oh, maybe Cailness—I got close enough to see their coats hanging up and their windows and doors open. I have no idea how they get there though, because there was also no road. No road, but I was able to get a phone signal?  

The fact that there was no road was the only reason I was technically on the road. I had no other way to get to the bed I had booked at the bunkhouse here in Inversnaid. But if you thought I was a misery yesterday, you should have seen me today. The following was how the conversation with myself went for the first hour and a half stint—on a loop:

 

I feel like I am in a cone of cold-induced misery.

Sorry, to hear that.

And this hill has been going up for an hour. How can that be? There is no where to go up to.

I'm not really sure, sorry again.

And I can't even stop and have a break otherwise I will be eaten by the midges. Don't you know that once one of the female little suckers bite you, it makes a chemical deposit so all it's friends know where to find and eat you. I am a marked woman.

Yeah, I can see the marks there. Maybe you shouldn't scratch them so hard.

(Glare) And I only got three or four hours sleep again. Every time I coughed, I banged my head on the top bunk.

Mmm, poor you.

I know, I'd cry but all the fluids in my body have been redirected to my nose.

Excuse me, I am just going to step off this cliff.

 

The second hour and a half was mostly along the lines of 'oh, maybe the drugs have kicked in, this is okay'.

 

I was going downhill.

 

And then the track turned treacherous and back up the hill, and I started to feel sorry for myself. And moan. And some poor guy stopped and asked me if I was okay. I just said: 'I have the flu'. Sorry dude, I thought you were asking for an honest answer. Although the honest answer would probably have been 'I have a cold': flu sounds more dramatic. Then I had a coughing fit while two elderly people raced past me like I had the plague. When I finally got to Inversnaid there was a grand hotel sitting on the shores of the lake (I had thought there was only the bunkhouse), and a little sign that said 'Bunkhouse—one kilometer up the hill from the hotel'. I was almost prepared to forfeit my payment and ask for a room at the hotel. Then I saw a building that I thought was the bunkhouse and started up the stairs thinking 'must have been hundred meters up the hill'. I was half way up the stairs and realised that the building didn't really look like a refashioned church (see left). I started back down to the road with the realisation that unfortunately I had read the sign right. A woman stopped her car and asked me where I was going. I explained my idiocy and she drove me the kilometer (seemed like more) to the hostel. Her son freaked out when I came in and called him by name.

 

So what to do now? I am sharing the world's smallest four-bunk room with Lisa, from Switzerland, who will be subjected to a night of coughing in exchange for a six am start. She's getting up so early because tomorrow's first seven miles are on a rocky, scrambling path between a rock and a loch. And it is going to start raining at eleven, according to the weather forecast. After five bad sleeping nights, and predicting a sixth, I am not sure a six am start works for me (even though I will hear her rustling her plastic bags then). I am fairly sure a walk along a precipice in the rain doesn't work for me either. My accommodation for tomorrow night is fourteen miles away. I really want to get to seven hundred k's. All these considerations. But I am still tempted to catch the ferry across the loch at the civilised hour of midday, and access the facilities that come with the side of the loch that has a road—buses, trains. Access, not necessarily use. Who am I kidding?

 

Two more things that I have discovered deet can do: if applied to your red-raw-from-blowing nose, it can make you leap about seventeen feet in the air from pain; if applied to your ears in order to keep the midges out of them, it can then ensure that your i-pod earphones become stuck to the inside of your ears, requiring a rather painful bandaid like removal.

 

Let's see what a night can do for this green lurgy in my body.

 

Good night to Inversnaid, good night to you.

655.0 kms: Balmaha-Milarrochy-Sallochy-Rowardennan.

The news is on in the Clansman Bar in Rowardennan (view from hotel to Loch Lomond on right). I love British news. It doesn't matter how upper class it is, it is all just about sex and scandal. And football. And, in Scotland, the Independence Referendum. I think maybe Scotland should become independent for its future. (Not that it really has a choice I suppose, I mean, who is really going to make the decision regarding that one. Eh? Even if they have got the Stone of Scone back.) It is just that it has so much water about the place, that when the fuel runs out and water becomes the commodity of power, then Scotland can become a Superpower. They won't want England and it's hosepipe bans hanging on like midges on a stationary walker. 

This may be my shortest blog to date. Good night. Just kidding. But I feel dreadful and staring at whatever garbage is on the TV is much easier than thinking. Oooh, there's Julia. She is in Mexico. She seems unconcerned about the earthquake that has been reported to me via a reliable source— there is certainly nothing about the shaking colonies on the TV. My cold has decided on shifts as its best approach so the cough settles in for the times when I want to sleep, or be in public places (because people love someone coughing all over their public areas), and the congested head and sinuses move in for hills, climbing or times when breathing is helpful. Sorry about the self indulgent moaning.

 

What is the difference between a hen and a chicken? Is it to do with what bit we end up eating?

 

Saw my first Highland cattle today. That long fluffy fringe must impair their vision because the second one I saw was trying to mount another bull.

 

Today's walk summed up in one word: undulating.

 

I did meet the ranger. Apparently she doesn't just get to wander up and down the paths all the time—mostly she has to be in meetings. She asked me what day I was on. She meant for the West Highland Way. Technically, I answered, the fortieth. When I explained she shook my hand.

 

I've tried my people, but I am spent.

 

Good night to Rowardennan, good night to you.

 

643.4 kms: Easter Drumquhassle-Drymen-Garadhban Forest-Conic Hill-Balmaha.

So sad. There is an end to my tunnel and I can see where it is. The sign at the end does not say John O'Groats, it says Bridge of Orchy. I mean, who has even heard of Bridge of Orchy. It means I have four more walking days, one day to get from the middle of nowhere (Bridge of Orchy) to somwhere sort of somewhere (Fort William), one to bag a big munro (thirteen hundred meters) and one to get from the sort of somewhere to the central somewhereness of Edinburgh for a next day trip to The Big Somewhere (London). Four more days. It is breaking my heart. I want to carry that big lug of a backpack for longer, I want to unpack it fully every single night and pack it all back up again every single morning. What am I saying? (Possibly just that I don't want to go back to work.) The train trips from Fort William to Edinburgh, and from Edinburgh to London take about the same amount of time: the distance between the first two is about a hundred and eighty kilometers, between the second, six hundred. Methinks the first train will take a very indirect and stop-filled route. It does appear to go down the side of at least a couple of lochs, so it will probably be lovely. Ooh, I like the trains!! There is the silver lining. 

I don't know how they did it, but those midges managed to get to places doctors don't get to. Actually, for me, being the great lover of doctors that I am, that could mean anywhere. Okay, places where only lovers should go. If any family are reading this, that is a theoretical and artistic statement, not personal or subjective. I just read about it once in a book. I was so glad to see the sun shining through the perspex window of my beehive this morning. Thought it may deter them. No, midges like sun too.

 

Short day. I spent a fair bit of time wandering around Drymen in a sort of stupor, trying to work through the above plan in my head. All the snot and irritation that have moved into my head seem to be having a detrimental affect on my thinking ability. Get this. Drymen is not a big place. It has no cafes or bars with wifi (that I could find or be referred to), it has a public phone that can only and exclusively be used to make emergency calls and no private pay phones in any bar or pub: it is a communication black spot. But it has a public library with computers? What? Actually I did use one in Kirkintillloch too, but prior to that, the only library I saw had four wheels and was being driven by an erratic geriatric who nearly collected me on the road—that would have been an ironic death, killed by the books I love. This library was amazing. It had two staff members. One was ringing locals to make sure they knew Jim had died and were they okay, and did they know the funeral was today. The other called Gwen to let her know a great coffee table book highlighting, in pictures, the reign of Queen Elizabeth II had come in, and that she thought it was something Gwen may like to pop in and have a look at. But no, no more Jill Andrews' had come in, don't think she has written anything for a while.

Balmaha's Bay on Loch Lomond

The walking was delightful in the sun. I even relished the chance to climb a rather steep hill—until I got to the downhill bit. I cursed at the kissing gate perched on a hill that wasn't big enough to get my pack through, meaning I had to take it off and then do the major swing to get it on my back while perched on a cliff face. I asked some Americans how my downhill would be. They answered: 'I don't know, I only went up it.' Um. Going up gives you some indication of what it would be like to go down, doesn't it? It is the same hill. Am I the only fool that accesses the upness of the hill for what it would be like to go downhill on. I am staying in a bunkhouse in Balmaha., There seem to be millions of people upstairs, but I have, at last look, a room to myself on the bottom floor. Maybe I coughed up some of the flem that has taken over my body when I booked over the phone this morning, and they have shoved everyone else out of my way for the interests of public health. They are very sweeet though. And I am hoping, forth night lucky, to maybe get a good nights sleep tonight. Cross fingers.

 

Good night to Balmaha, good night to you.

 

630.3 kms: Milngavie-Craigallian-Dumgoyne-Upper Gartness-Easter Drumquhassle.

I am staying in a beehive tonight—a very cool beehive with padded red walls and sleeping benches. (see left) Its camping, but not as you know it. It's the Scandinavian thing (unfortunately at the Scandinavian price too—bloody single occupancy). I took it because it was available and had a roof. I was standing under the large sign announcing the start of the West Highland Way and a boy asked if I would please go and sign in to the visitor's book if. He and his boss then managed to agitate my already nervous disposition about my 'winging it' accommodation philosophy—aided in most part by the pages of people who had already signed in for today, and, 'that's just the one book, there is another one over there'. But ultimately, I really just liked the look of my hut. It is like having your own treehouse. Hope I still feel that way when I am trying to sleep. Two bad nights down (one due to discos and mysterious morning thumpings, one due to panicking over a weird charge to my credit card that is useless to try and do something about on a weekend in the middle of the night), I should be due a good sleep regardless.. 

Found out today what the go is with all this talk of midges. I stopped at an honesty box (I would probably stop at a shoebox—actually, yes I would). This one had flasks of tea and coffee, bottles of water and scones with jam and cream! Cup of tea and scone in hand and seated on a chopped tree I suddenly realised I was in a cloud. I stopped the next person walking past, asking 'are these midges?' Yep, that's them. He did say that he thought today's weren't so viscious—'not the vampire ones'. Do the vampire ones have little cloaks? These still managed to get my ears and the bits in between my bangles where I didn't get the deet. Maybe on my head too—I don't think hair is a barrier. I got sucked into a salesman's pitch for a net at the tourist office, but didn't have to resort to it today. Apparently midges are slow fliers and so one good way to stop them is to not stop. I managed some revenge by killing several thousand brushing them off my thermal leggings and by eating three with my scone and five in my tea. Yummy, nutritious protein bombs. There were also a few stuck in the stickiness of my deet. And the half a dozen or so that I inhaled. I can only think that it was worse for them than it was for me—drowing in green cold snot. Suffer midges. This is war.

 

If you are ever in the Scottish highlands, fighting the midges and wearing a bad set of painted fingernails with no remover, don't worry, deet melts nail polish. Should we put this stuff on our skin!!!

 

Despite the milllions of people (which really, at my late starting time and snail-like pace I don't really encounter as they are travelling in the same direction—they are just all here in the first night's destination's pubs), it is nice to be back on a long distance path. It has a particularly good path so far, some new intriguingly different ways of getting through fences and increasingly beautiful scenery. Saw my first genuine bull today. He was making the most noise I have ever heard a bovine make. Don't think he was happy and I was very glad I was not in the same field as he. You always see images of sheep and cows but they don't show you the rams and the bulls as a whole. It is because they are really ugly. I am sorry to be so superficial, but when you think cute lambies, cute sheepies, cute cowies, these dudes are not what you imagine seeing. They're butch, big-boned and grumpy. Hanging out to see highland cattle though—just not the bulls. Saw this great herd the other day. They were all like neopolitan ice cream—perfectly divided in three, black, white, black, with the white stripe around their middles. Every single one of them. It was odd and beside one single such marked cow, I haven't seen it anywhere else

 

Listening to my i-pod today I came across Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road, here's a bit of 'kowture' for my blog:

 

Oh public road, I say back,

I am not afraid to leave you,

yet I love you


 

You express me better than I can express myself

You should be more to me than in my poem

 

I think heroic deeds were all concieved in the open air

And all great poems also

I think I could stop here myself and do miracles


My judgments as thoughts I henceforth try by the open air,

the road

 

I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like

and whoever beholds me shall like me

I think whoever I see must be happy

 

From this our freedom.

From this hour I ordain myself

Loos'd of limits and imaginary lines

Going where I list

My own master, total and absolute.

 

Listening to others

and considering well what they say

Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,

gently, but with undeniable will,


divesting myself of the holds that would hold me

 

I inhale great drafts of space.

The east and west are mine,


and the north and south are mine.

I am larger, better than I thought

 

I did not know I held so much goodness

all seems beautiful to me.

 

 

Me again—there is something magical about the open road. I will miss this.

 

Good night to Easter Drumquhassle, good night to you.

 

 

612.6 kms: Kilsyth-Kirkintilloch-(Milngavie).

I knew I had seen a vision of my fat arse on a bus seat for a reason: I just got the day wrong. 

I am not sure I have even done anything today to regale you with. I may just go with some random thoughts and things seen.

 

For the boy: thirteen more volvos and four more deer.

 

When I was walking on the Round the Forth path a few days ago—just before I got lost in the maze of Hopetoun House—a man warned me that I was about to see what he didn't know was my fifth deer for that day. This one, unfortunately, had been hit by a vehicle. I was tense. I have been doing this little side project on these three trips which I don't think I have really told many people about—usually I just freak B—— out with it when she looks through my photos and comes across it accidentally. It is a little macabre, but I have been taking photos of roadkill. Okay, you all think I am odd now. Not just any roadkill—just the beautiful, sleeping animals whose essence seems still to be around them. Maybe it is because it shows there is so little difference between life and death. I'm not trying to be profound. Walking like this, on the road parts at least, takes you somewhere where life isn't usually this slow. It is normally the cars that whizz past in these places between 'lives' and people don't see the effects cars can have. But I was really not ready for something as large as a deer. (The largest to date was a badger, all its stubbly feet in the air and stiff as straight whisky, but somehow, sorry to say, not beautiful.) I could smell something wrong first. But when I got to where the spot was someone had already been there and removed the poor thing—after all, this was the route the torch was going to be taking, couldn't possibly have a dead deer there to spoil the event! All that was there to show for the life of that poor deer was a large pool of blood and the flattening of the grass on the side of the road. And somehow its essence too. Don't worry, I didn't take a photo. I am not even sure why I am writing this—maybe I took the second lot of cold and flu tablets too quickly after the first. Do the things you want to do. Don't wait. Tell people that you love them. Even that you like them. Like is absolutely underrated.

 

Flittering over the canal was a bird, unimaginably blue.

 

In the cold wind blowing on the canal, a swan floated with her wings full of signets, keeping them warm.

 

How do you say this: Hawick. That's right, leave out all the middle letters, it is Hoyk. And this: Milngavie. Same again, Mill-guy. I can tell I am on the Glasgow coast of Scotland now rather than the refined Edinburgh side. Two men in the bar where I just ate a whole slice of Banofee Pie (as if I wasn't feeling ill before, it is banana and toffee pie drowned in caramel sauce—there probably would have been fewer calories if I had just drunk two cans of condensed milk) have used the f-word more times in the time it took me to eat my cake than I have heard in all the years before that. It was phenomenal. I wonder what they use when they are cross. As I was coming out of Edinburgh a man walked past having a conversation with himself about the unsuitability of the Scottish political environment and the weather, how it would all change for him as soon as he got to Hawaii. It was like being in the Trainspotting narrative.

 

I can hear the flesh of the person in the room next to me squeaking against the porcelain of the bath. It is disconcerting. The hotel has given me a 'Good Nights Sleep Guarantee'. Maybe I need to go to reception and say the squeaking is stopping me sleeping. Maybe it is too early at seven pm.

 

I am stopping there. God knows what will come out next. Start another long distance walk tomorrow—the West Highland Way. I'll be walking past lochs and bens. This will be real Scottish countryside. I am even going to try and bag myself a Munro. (Climb a mountain over three thousand feet. There are 283 or so of them in Scotland and you can, or I do, often question Scots about the number of Munros they have. The highest I have met so far is sixty-nine.)

 

Sorry, no photo. I am feeling ick and have just had the worst restaurant experience. I know, that is a white whine (see the Age from a Saturday ages ago in the section where they have new words for the twenty-first century—its basically the complaining of the privileged). Instead of me walking and getting you a photo I have chosen to get in bed with a scandalous book (Fifty Shades of Grey) that I just had to have for the torment of a twenty-five minute bus ride. I worry myself. Where are those night-time cold and flu pills?

 

Good night to Milngavie, good night to you.

 

 

602.8 kms: (Beancross)-Falkirk Wheel-Bonnybridge-Underwood/Lock 17-Auchinstarry-Kilsyth.

I did not expect to do those sorts of kilometers today (not that it is record breaking in any sense). I would not have been surprised to actually see my fat arse on a bus seat all the way to Kilsyth. I hit the snooze button for an hour and a half before dragging myself up and out into the fine Scottish summer. Today, in summer, it got to a high of eleven degrees. And it spat rain all day. In Melbourne, I noticed, it was sunny and seventeen—in winter!!!!!! What is strange though is I am not sure that if this weather was transposed, very legitimately into the Melbourne winter and I was walking around in it, whether I would not think it was too cold for this sort of a malarky. As it is, in this summer environment, it seems bearable. 

After an inordinate amount of faffing in the centre of Falkirk (breakfast, internet searches for accommodation, phoning said accommodation, post-officing), I caught the bus back to the Wheel. Then I faffed a bit more by having lunch and my first Irn-Bru, the Scottish national soft-drink. And finally, I hit the towpath at about two in the afternooon. I wasn't convinced I still wouldn't have to resort to a bus somewhere, but two feet took me all the way to my scary-exterior-modern-interior hotel in Kilsyth, The Coachman. I stopped at Lock 17 for what I have discovered belatedly is the answer to my toilet issues—a drink that allows less fluid in than it buys the right to use the toilet to let out: espresso. The establishment in the middle of nowhere that is the restaurant at Lock 17 is, very bizarrely, an Indian Restaurant and Pub. It is an eighteenth century stables and Inn for the horses that, at the time, pulled the barges along the canal. Now it is ultra modern and serves that quintessential Indian-Scottish dish, the Haggis Pakora. What the ... ? If I wasn't already so full of spicy Falkirk Wheel meatballs, I would have tried it just because it sounds so odd. But if haggis is so calorie rich already, what on earth does deep frying it in batter do to it?

 

Despite the espresso I had to find a bush to dive into again. If the country was run by women, this would not happen and we would not get to our final destinations only to find weeds tucked in our underpants. There would be PC's all over my maps (Public Conveniences). The towpath was high on a bank with no hiddey spots. It did, however, at one stage stretch straight for quite a while and I was tempted to just go for it. Luckily I didn't because even though it seemed I could see people if they were there, a cyclist turned up shortly out of nowhere and they would have definitely caught me. There was no-one on the canal either. No-one until I came stumbling out of the bushes when I eventually found a spot that didn't look like I would sink into four meters of mud. I sincerely think there is a conspiracy to catch me with my pants down.

Thanks to Doug and Agnes at Lilliesleaf, Easter Cottages, for sending this through to me.

Oh great, Friday night disco at The Coachman is just starting downstairs. If the waitresses were freaking out about someone having dinner by themselves this evening (and coping by pretending I didn't exist), then they will have a canupture if I go and get stonkered and dance a bit by myself won't they. I'll stay in my room and dance with Wes instead.

Good night to Kilsyth, good night to you.

P.s: I am being made a mockery of, ignore everything I saidabout coping with the weather—after a night of disco and bangings at five am, I think I now have a cold. I think it is either from that room or from bearing my bot to the elements. Pooey.