The Isle of Skye

It's a beautiful day here in London so naturally I am indoors, in bed, recovering from a rather late night out and waiting for the internet man to fix our system.

Thus, I blog.

I've got Summer 2009 highlights coming up: a week in Scotland with Dawn, a week in Turkey with Jen followed by another week with Jen, this time traipsing around Croatia and Italy. Going from sublimely beautiful place to amazingly architectured place meant I I took roughly 700 photos over the course of the summer. sifting through all of them is proving rather difficult.

So here's Isle of Skye in July 2009. I always meant to make it there when I was studying abroad, but time and weather permitted me not. I finally got there in the end with my friend/coworker, Dawn. We took a twelve hour train journey, from London to Edinburgh to Inverness to the ends of the earth at Kyle of Lochalsh and got picked up by Dawn's parents who retired on the island. We then got in a car, went over a bridge and, for an hour, drove past various hills, mountains, sheep, chickens and nearly inhabited 'villages'.

welcome to the isle of skye: population 500,000 sheep, 40,000 mountains and 2,500 winter residents. ish.

it's safe to say that i've never felt so far away from civilisation. And in a series of mega understatements Skye was one of the most beautiful, desolate, lonely, stunning, mountainous places i've ever seen. Our week involved a lot of not too much including: hiking, being a geeky geology nerd, getting slightly turned around in a dense fog, swimming at the community rec centre, beer drinking, eating scones with jam and cream, whipping around roads in a camper van, and, AND my debut of driving on the wrong side of the road. It only took me three years to work up the courage. and even then, i refused to drive down single track roads. and i almost hit a sheep crossing the road.

We got really lucky with the weather. No rain until the last day, mediumish winds, and temperatures around the 15c mark.

so here's a start of the photos from places dotted across the isle. days 1-3


The Woodcock family camper van whips around hairpin bends on single track roads at high speeds


Walk Number 1: The Old Man of Storr


View from the top of something


old mill by the waterfall. good luck finding it, based on my ace description



geeky anglophile thing i would miss if i one day leave this land--phone boxes in the middle of nowhere


Dunvegan Castle, which looks a lot like an old block of really ugly council flats


Coral Beach


supposedly the water is geothermally heated and delightfully warm for swimming. and maybe it is, if you're crazy, scottish or suicidal


Walk Number 2: Sligachan


really in the middle of nowhere


no marked paths, just a lovely stream that turns into a roaring river in the winter


see the fog creeping its way towards me?

final verdict: 1000/1000 on the beautiful scale, but i was ready to go back to the world as the week waned on. lovely to visit, just not to live.