TGO Challenge 2012: Day 5 - Drumnadrochit to Loch Ceo Glais

...to where?  You might well ask.  Today was the day when things began to fall apart.

Over breakfast I shared my knee anxieties with PeterfromHolland and he suggested that instead of ploughing through the middle of those hills that shall not be named I detour round to the north, which would avoid a lot of bogs and height.  Brilliant!  I'd been fixated on either sticking to the original plan or throwing in the towel.  There was a third alternative (although I distinctly remember  my Latin master saying you could only have two of those things).  I needed to catch Gordon's 9.30 ferry but I also needed to get to the chemist to stock up on ibuprofen and a knee support thingy.  By the time I arrived at Temple Pier there was no boat to be seen.  I did waste 5 minutes at the other pier asking some Germans if there had been viele mensche mit grosser rucksacken bei hier heute morgan, a question which was met with some blank looks.  They probably didn't understand me because under pressure and an interval of 40+ years since I did the O level,  I'd forgotten that the proper sentance construction is time before place.

I rang Gordon and ascertained that the next ferry would be at 4pm or 3.30, if I could find Harry from Newcastle (who I'd met on the train up) and Jean Turner (who I knew only by name) to pass on the message.  This meant I had half a day to kill.  Back to Drum to sit in a tea shop.  It wasn't a great tea shop and I wasn't feeling great.  Everyone who was in town the previous day, we now across Loch Ness and heading east and I was stuck here with a swollen knee and losing time.  I spent a couple of hours designing a new route on the GPS, which isn't easy if you want to cover more than 2km x 3km on a MemoryMap 2800 screen.  It was going to add a bit of distance but I could still be in Aviemore on the day I'd originally planned - just rather later.  I phoned the route into John Manning and went to explore Drum some more.  I bumped into Harry and then I bumped into Jean and we all met up in Fiddlers cafe, which is much to be preferred to the other place by the green.  More coffee and comfort food and eventually the time came to walk back to Temple Pier.  Not a boat or a Gordon was to be seen.  Harry called him on the phone and he said he was on his way.  Phew.

Jean, Harry and me (looking slighly demented)

The boat ride was fun and Gordon was a goldmine of local knowledge.  Inverfarigaig can't really be said to have a pier.  Getting ashore is really quite sporting.

Gordon's boat leaving Inverfarigaig Pier

We walked up the hill with Harry and then Jean and I headed north along the road which roughly follows the line of the R Farigaig.  This was already a deviation from the route I'd phoned into TGO Control - oops.

We were following the Trail of the Seven Lochs, which Jean had picked up a leaflet for in her researches for what became her award TGO Challenge winning route.  It is a new trail, which seems to have been devised by someone sitting in an office in Inverness who'd probably never set foot on a hill in his or her life but I'm getting ahead of myself- we didn't find that out until the following day.  At this point all was splendid, walking in the warm, late afternoon sun, watching the curlew and chewing the fat about all sorts of stuff without making any attempt to set the world to right (Leave that to those that feel the urge, I say.  The world has a habit of doing what it wants over a long enough time span anyway).

We walked till about 7pm and found a half decent place to pitch a couple of tents, with a stream for fresh water, just at the southern end of Loch Ceo Glais .

Camp by the side of the B872

Jean lent me her Sony wind up, long wave radio and I caught an episode of The Archers (things weren't good with Ruth and David).  We were camped under a hill with a mast on it and I was able to exchange a few texts with the kids and friends.  The knee was bearable but I had a bit of a problem with a big toe nail, which had started to lift a little and was looking a bit of a menacing shade of blue/black.

Rainbow over Loch Ceo Glais

We'd walked about 5 miles from Inverfarigaig but with the new route, I was now probably 10 miles further from Jonshaven than I'd been at the start of the day. 

TGO Challenge 2012 - Day 4: Bearnock to Drumnadrochit

I slept the sleep of a tired person in the steaming and slightly fettid atmosphere of a room with the central heating on full.  When I walked into the dining room at about 8 the next morning, I found Peter from Holland deep into a heavy counselling session with two Italians.  It seemed there had been some sort of falling out between them and their Scottish partner the previous night in the pub in Cannich. 

I only had 7 miles to walk on this day, with the promise of another comfy bed in a hotel, so it was a leisurely start and by the time I set off it had stopped raining.  I stupidly asked some workmen at the roadside for directions into the forest, instead of believing the map, and ended up doing another 2 miles along the road but if I had gone the other way I would probably have missed the sign on a gate which read, 'Highland Cattle - Cows with Horns'.  It made me think of this...

 It started to rain again as I picked up the forest track but it was a brief shower and the sun came out and all was well with the world.  That is all was well apart from the nagging pain in my right knee. Loch Ness came into view. Woohoo.

Loch Ness from the forest above Drumnadrochit

As I descended down through the woods looking for the shortcut past the fort I'd been told about, I realised I was being followed by a couple I recognised as fellow bloggers.  It was Mick and Gayle - going for a walk.  So we continued together to locate the illusive path and with my GPS loaded with OS maps and Gayle's superior tracking skills we managed to find a barbed wirte fence to climb over onto a very muddy track heading in the general direction of Drum.  It wasn't actually the right track, as we realised when we got to the bottom and saw a far less muddy one running parallel to it.

I parted company with M&G as they turned in the direction of the Co-op and I headed into 'town' to the hotel, my right knee now hurting quite a bit more from the descent.  I didn't make it to the hotel in one go.  I bumped into PeterFromHolland who despite leaving Bearnock after me had arrived first.  He had just booked himself into the same hotel, having blagged some cheap deal on a room because their bunkhouse had closed three years earleir (or something like that).  Next, I spotted the three Scotsman sitting in a pub and since it was lunchtime and I was in no rush, it seemed unfriendly not to go and join them.  And it was a good call as the barman was handing out free whisky to Challengers so it seemed uncharitable not to stay and sample the steak and ale pie they served (purely by way of a market analysis).  I can report that it was a fine pie but perhaps not quite as good as the one in Cannich.

The rest of the day was spent lying on the bed in the hotel, popping ibuprofen and blathering my knee in biofreeze gel to reduce the swelling.  This didn't seem like a good state to be in before heading off onto the next section of the walk (into the mountains that shall not be named) and 118 miles still to be walked.

TGO Challenge 2012 - Day 3: Glen Cannich to Bearnock

Apologies for long intermission.  I've been back to Scotland in the meantime.  So, where was I? 

Oh yes, I'd just been woken up by something cold and hard in my ear and the sound of a Whooper Swan.  How did a swan get in the tent and why was it sticking its beak in my ear?  OK, so it was the toggle on my sleeping bag.

Having now abandoned the delicious and largely nutrition free meal of soup and noodles to start the day, getting up and going was a somewhat quicker affair.  The outside world was rather grey and drizzley and the first thing I needed to do was get across the River Cannich.  I was under the impression that the 1:50k showed a bridge just upstream from where I was camped.  Actually looking at it now on the computer screen, blown up to something that an old bloke with increasingly crap eyesight can focus on, it is bloody obvious that it's a ford and not a bridge. 

River Cannich - to be crossed

So the day got off to a start with an unplanned paddle.  Then I  had to do battle with another gate fastener but after that the track though the forest was nothing short of really quite pleasant.  There were views of mist clung hills and birds of many varieties flitting around and about.  I crossed back over the river by a road bridge and took a track which should have avoided 2 km of road walking but after 1km I reached a gate supporting a fairly uncompromising, 'keep out' message.  Some rude words were uttered.  Then I spotted what looked like a fairly wide and braided bit of river just beyond and decided another paddle was the better part of discretion.  So back on the road and a brief photo stop above the falls of Eas an Fhithich and I was walking into Cannich before midday, half a day ahead of schedule. 

Eas An Fhithach

I wandered up and down the main street, checking out the facilities, which took about three minutes and went into a throughly run down looking cafe/bar/hotelly sort of place and had a thoroughly splendid steak and ale pie and a cup of hot coffee.  Peter from Holland came in as I was doing my Desperate Dan impersonation and we held a broken conversation between mouthfuls of cow and chips.  Peter mentioned that he was booked into a bunkhouse at Bearknock that night - or was it a bear house at bunk knock - I was only half listening. 

After settling the bill I set out into the rain and went in a generally westerly direction to turn onto the track into Kerrow Wood.  This turned out to look like a stage set for a re-enactment of the Battle of the Somme, made all the more convincing by the sheeting rain predicted by Mr Gloom and Doom 24 hours earlier (damn the man).  What I had expected to be a pleasant forest trail was in fact a new access road, bordered by large drainage ditches and fences, for use by both logging and pylon construction traffic.

Logging Road in Kerrow Wood

What a pleasant scene!

Cut down trees, put up a pylon

I completely missed the track to Loch Rhiabhachain and as I sat on a log scoffing some comfort food and pondering the map, a red squirrel ran past my feet.  The last time I'd seen one of these I was about three years old.  I was so excited I tweeted.  And then a bloke in a huge logging wagon stopped to ask if I was ok, which was nice of him, the more so because I'd half expected he was going to tell me I shouldn't be there.  Anyway, it was too far to go back to the junction, even assuming I could find it amongst the ditches and bomb holes, so I carried on down the logging road to the Cannich - Drum road.  I'd succeeded in covering just over two road miles in just under four and half.  If I carried on like this, it was going to take consideranly longer than planned to reach the coast.  My earlier euphoria was starting to ebb.

I plodded along the grass verge for a couple of miles, getting sprayed by every passing vehicle and musing on how much wetter, very wet feet could get.  I came across some road kill in the form of a small deer, which led me to consider if was possible to prepare venison stew with a very small swiss army penknife and a pocket rocket.  Well how hard could it be, for goodness sake?  And then Peter from Holland popped out of a side road muttering stuff about chambered cairns and bear pits in bunkers, so I followed him and ended up at a knocking shop with Bear Grylls.  One of us must have been hallucinating.  It had been a funny old day but I had a room to myself, large enough to accommodate a wet tent and wet clothes and a radiator to dry wet boots (oh there's nothing quite like the smell of incipient mildew) and a shower.  And that was when I discovered that instead of packing a small bottle of liquid soap from Rose at Backpackinglight, I had in fact packed a small bottle of Avon Skin So Soft cut with lavendar oil, which someone told me was just the thing for midgies when we did Knoydart two years ago.  As indeed it was - they'd loved it.

And that left just 125 miles to go.