The train from Birmingham to Edinburgh caught fire and for two hours I stood on Preston station with hundreds of fellow passengers, while a smouldering carriage was towed away and the train recoupled. My bicycle and panniers remained in the rear engine car, so I was a little worried to see the back half of the train depart!
When it rejoined, the same number of passengers had to cram into the shorter train and I stood in a doorway with some other young people, drinking free orange juice and telling travel tales.
After a few days visiting cousins and buying my uncle a bicycle (which he fell off), I left Edinburgh on a Wednesday and spent a night on a roadside where tinkers were camping, who set fire to the trees behind my tent while burning off their rubbish, meaning I awoke to disco lights (fire engines) at 1 a.m.
Cycling across the Forth Bridge into Fife was amazing, due to vivid childhood memories of the area. I reached Freuchie via Kinross and visited my father's cousin David Gordon and family, who gave me a huge box of sandwiches (which I had to eat for dinner and breakfast, because I couldn't carry them), a lift to the local campsite and directions to my great-aunt Margaret Gordon's retirement home nearby. She was amazed to see me and gave me a tour of her garden. She is the most active person in the place and probably the only one who can go wandering off into the garden without causing the staff to worry.
I stayed at Pilmuir, the Russell family farm near Lundin Links, for the weekend and was invited to use the place as my Scottish base-camp. Unfortunately my parents lost the Russells' telephone number and never found out about my weekly "I'm still alive!" calls to Pilmuir until weeks later.
On the Monday I cycled through Dundee to Carnoustie and visited Johnnie and Joan Henderson, who were very nice to me and I wished I could have accepted their invitation to stay longer, but I wanted to go north in a hurry because it was almost October. That day I also received my bank transfer from Australia, so was able to relax about my diminishing finances!
It took two days to reach Deeside via Stonehaven and Aberdeen (where glass on the road gave me a bad puncture). At the campsite in Inverbervie I was invited to wait for the caretaker by sitting in a warm caravan with a man and his deaf daughter and elderly father. They told me about an Australian nurse who had cycled through there a week before, and started asking me whether I carried as little money as she did... then the caretaker arrived, so I didn't have to continue wondering why they wanted to know about the contents of my wallet!
Rain hit me hard along Deeside and I wore plastic bags around my shoes, but the scenery was spectacular and I passed my first really big Scottish mountain, called Morven, which was shrouded in mist. I dried out and psyched myself up for two days in Ballater, where the campsite owner kept telling me about the virtues of the porridge I was eating ("cures everything from chilblains to cancer", said his mother).
I bought an expensive fleece top except it was XXL size and I was only L. And a thermal hat. I needed something warm because I was climbing the Grampian mountains to Thomintoul. I bought a small bottle of Royal Lochnagar Single Malt Whisky from the distillery at Balmoral, drank it on the way up the first hill, and met an extremely fit local mountain-biker who reassured me about the sanity of what I was doing and described how to tackle the steepest places.
In freezing wind and spitting rain I climbed to 2,100 feet across spectacular mountains and hit several incredible gradients on the Lecht Road. I tried to "shoo" a rabbit from the road but I think it had myxomatosis or was frozen like me. After a visit to the Thomintoul museum and a pint of Guinness, I spent the night at Grantown-on-Spey where the campsite was about to close for the season.
I soon found out that almost EVERYTHING to do with tourism was closing at the end of September. I reached Cullodden via Nairn the next day, stayed at a spotless campground and walked around the battlefield in miserable weather, but when I reached Inverness the campsites were all closed.
It was almost dark when I eventually made it to a camping ground west of Inverness which still had one day to go before closing (it was September 30). The sunset over Moray Firth was incredible, along with a huge cloud of luminescent mist over the inland water.
At Inverness I bought a new pump (I had two but my good one had broken in Aberdeen) and some cold-weather cycling gloves. I didn't make it very far up the road but found a campsite which was still open. And the next day I only made it to Dornoch because I was feeling a bit tired or lazy or something... oh yeah, and it was raining. I saw the infamous giant statue of the Duke of Sutherland who cleared the highland Scots from their crofts, and decided I wanted to reach Wick the next day (65 miles on the map, whereas I had only been doing 30-50). I made it, despite stopping in Helmsdale to see the "Timespan Heritage Centre" because my Uncle Alistair said his family had originated from there. I also had to tackle the unbelievably steep and winding "Berriedale Braes", where the road suddenly decides to dive down to sea-level then immediately up again, higher than before. Later I met a truck driver who had run off the road there, onto an emergency ramp... which wasn't unusual.
After my 70 mile day, I liked Wick because it was bathed in sunlight (nobody will believe me) with all the rainstorms whizzing around it, never hitting it. But the campsite was closed and I camped on a nearby dog-walk track next to a quarry, which smelled bad. There was no water supply anywhere, except the polluted-looking river... the campsite owners had even removed all the tap handles, so I couldn't cook or drink. When I went looking for water in the morning, I met a man carrying a rifle who swore under his breath when he saw me.
I reached John O'Groats in the morning, where it was unbelievably cold and wet and WINDY WINDY WINDY. I had a pint of beer in the pub and ate four potato scones for energy, then took some dodgy photos of myself standing beside my bike.
Turning into the wind and riding towards Thurso was like towing a parachute and I could hardly keep the bike upright. The roaring of the rushing air hurt my ears and I couldn't hear cars coming. That night I met an Australian surfer and his non-surfing girlfriend (they had been seeing me battling the elements all day as they drove between beaches) in Thurso, where we stayed at the closed-down campsite in a biting wind (I put up my tent behind a huge building... otherwise I would have been blown to Scandinavia).
I asked someone for directions to "a good fish 'n' chip shop" but it turned out there was only one, which specialised in fish with tiny unremoved bones and prepackaged microwaved burgers.
Next day after some shopping I tried to catch the ferry to the Orkneys, but had just missed one - the next one was 4 hours away. The booking office and waiting room only opened when there was a ferry around, so there was nowhere to escape the cold. I found a pub and wrote some postcards, but it closed within two hours. Lots of other people, even less warmly clothed, arrived and we all found out the ferry staff were at a colleague's funeral, meaning a wait in the cold for a few more hours.
The ferry ride was very rough and I met a couple of female backpackers who treated me like I was mentally unsound when they found out how I was travelling (and that I was using a tent). Their idea of adventure was a youth hostel and a bus. Unfortunately I ended up in the same youth hostel as them in Stromness that night, where my drunken roommate almost accused me of stealing his (lost) wallet. My other roommate was a Glaswegian visiting on business, and taking the opportunity to go walking on the islands while he was there. He kept insisting that I was completely insane to have brought a bicycle to windy Orkney and said "that's mad" when he saw that I was on a mountain bike, not a touring bike, and that my luggage included a tent and bulky walking boots.
Orkney WAS windy, but not too bad, and I enjoyed my two-and-a-half days there. I saw most of the historic/archeological sites and kept accidentally meeting a bus of backpacker tourists from the hostel who all laughed at me behind my back. But I really enjoyed the ride to Kirkwall, where the campground was closed but still had water (and small trees for windbreaks).
The ferry back was rough again and I ended up sleeping at the windy Thurso campsite again. The next day I spent too much time shopping for food, and only started west at 2:30pm. I stopped for a banana opposite the Dounreay nuclear testing plant and imagined the guards all had their gunsights trained on me because being a cyclist I probably looked like a spy from an environmental organisation. I heard on the radio at night that Dounreay is the subject of extreme concern because of the major incidence of cancer in the local population, which the government is not keen to investigate.
The wind became extreme in the late afternoon, the worst it had ever been, and I was blown off my bike twice. I was in the middle of nowhere and had to get to a safe place for the night, so after dodging sheep on my first single-track road (from this point until Fort William, much of the road was this narrow), I arrived at Bettyhill after 7pm in the near-dark, pitching my tent in the shelter of a hill while two German cyclists camped out in the main field, copping the full force of the gale... "Ve are just testink our new tent".
Turned out that he was a doctor working in Liverpool and she was his wife, working in the same hospital. They had driven a camper van to Lairg and cycled north, intending to go a long way west and then back to Lairg. I had been feeling quite alien and ridiculous since everybody's comments on Orkney and was relieved to see them, especially as they were on modified mountain bikes like mine.
Then the wind became EVEN WORSE. The following day was a nightmare. The three of us only made it 10 miles across the hill to Tongue, where we camped in a farmer's makeshift campground/field which was being battered by ferocious gusts. On the way over the hill I was spotted by a couple in a big rusty van who stopped in a lay-by and offered me a cup of tea. I was very grateful until I got into the van and they pulled the door shut, whereupon I discovered they hadn't even boiled any water... I was looking into the wild eyes of two complete lunatics who started blethering about the road quality and Dounreay and the wind speed and not listening to anything I said. They made me a rotten cup of tea which I could only hope was safe... then the man opened the door to check the wind speed and I excused myself ("my friends are waiting for me in the next town and they will worry if I don't arrive soon").
My tent looked very exposed and the Germans had the most sheltered spot, but eventually we all made jokes about the "force field" around my tent which seemed to protect it while nearby trees were almost being ripped out of the earth. I took them to the Tongue pub, then discovered they were the only Germans in the world who didn't drink. We amazed the other people in the bar with our tales of crossing the hill on bicycles.
Next day the Germans headed south because the wind was killing them, but I had to keep going west, which involved a massive detour around the south side of stunning Loch Eriboll. The wind had become more southerly than westerly, so I had a terrible struggle down the lake but absolutely flew back up to the coast.
I pitched my tent at Durness where I met Paul, an unemployed Edinburgh chemist who had just walked for two weeks through the mountains with only 13kg of equipment. This was just a sidelight to his travels of the USA, Nepal, India, etc, and his bicycle ride of northwest Scotland the previous year (being chased by rabid dogs, on a bike which constantly fell apart). He invited me for a few pints of 80 Shilling beer with Liz, a surveyor from Yorkshire, who had just walked back from a bothy on Cape Wrath. We all exchanged travel tales and had a lot of laughs, a really great night after so much struggling against the elements.
Liz left in her car the next day and Paul decided he was going to the Orkneys to experience the gale force winds which had just been forecast. I did my washing (thanks to the closure of campsites, I hadn't washed any clothes since Inverness!) and left at 2:30pm to travel the conservative (I thought) distance of 26 miles to Scourie.
But as I was packing up my tent the wind doubled AGAIN... this time it was really, really problematic to be doing anything but lying down... it got very cold, too. I was averaging first 7mph, then 5mph, then 3.5 mph on flat land, and crashing into the road shoulder every few hundred yards. I had to stumble through a flock of sheep who were practically being blown back to Durness with their shepherdess.
Then it got worse and worse, because the road went up a huge long hill with no shelter... stunning scenery but absolutely no place to be walking (I could no longer stay on my bike long enough to begin pedalling, and walking was now 1mph faster than riding). To make matters worse, the few cars which passed contained terrible drivers who made life very difficult for a cyclist.
I never stopped moving, to ensure I didn't get cold, but my clothes were soaked with sweat under my goretex jacket and I was getting quite frightened of the approaching dark, with very little confidence in my tent and sleeping bag. I had only done 14 miles out of the 26 planned and I was utterly exhausted, having to sing loudly and scream curses about the terrible drivers to keep myself alert.
I conquered the hill and was soon on the way down, telling myself that things wouldn't be so hard any more. Then, suddenly, I was in a tiny place called Rhiconich, with a loch, a couple of houses and a hotel! I headed up the next hill to see whether I was near my goal, but a very harsh rainstorm moved in and I turned back to the hotel.
Hotel Rhiconich turned out to be a luxurious place, but fortunately it was the off-season and I got dinner, bed and breakfast for £34. Not too bad when you consider the alternative.
I was mentally scarred and physically drained, but as I slept the wind changed direction completely... I woke to a gale-force north-easterly which meant the gusts were at my back and I could ride. I was propelled to Scourie, averaging 17mph, and headed for Ullapool... there's very little human settlement for 50 miles between the two but the mountain scenery is incredible.
Being so high up on a day where the wind was from the Arctic, I was cycling in just 4 degrees Celsius, wearing a hell of a lot of clothing and trying to keep moving. Cycling keeps you quite warm, but the wind chill was severe. I had a flat tyre 10 miles from Ullapool, but managed to make it there by 5:30pm, to discover that the campground was closed, with no water.
I was very tired and cold, and pitched my tent illegally on very hard ground in the most sheltered (not very) and hidden spot I could find, climbed into my sleeping bag and slept for 12 hours. I had a rest day in Ullapool, where everyone was complaining about the cold wind and wearing their winter woollens for the first time since last season. I just sat in my tent, reading, writing and resting.
I got water every so often from a tap at the local public toilets, and tried to find a bike shop because my left pedal had been making disturbing crunching noises. The local bike shop was actually a bike shed which opened for one random hour per day, with which I never managed to coincide.
So I headed over the mountains for Laide (near Mellon Udrigle, where I'd had memorable childhood holidays), in good calm weather, with a pedal that made ever-louder grinding noises until a plastic cap on its side popped off, revealing shattered plastic innards. In the most stunning scenery I'd seen, about 15 miles from Laide, I had a near-accident when a stupid speeding driver had to brake sharply to avoid a panicked sheep (which was more scared of me than the sports car). He skidded wildly past me, then accelerated into the distance.
I passed an elderly couple who were towing a trailer containing a dead stag, which the gentleman looked very proud to have shot. I camped at Laide, with a beautiful view over Gruinard Bay, and rode the short distance to Mellon Udrigle (cursing my wobbly pedal) the next day... where I found the campsite I remembered from childhood holidays still existed, so I returned to Laide, shifted my tent to Mellon Udrigle, and happily rediscovered childhood memories. There was a beautiful sunrise in the morning over the bay and the distant mountains, and I walked up into the nearby headlands from where I could see the Summer Isles and the Isle of Lewis.
I rode to Gairloch in the afternoon, which overlooks a stunningly panoramic sea loch, and met a friendly hippy-type couple in an old van who made me a cup of tea at the campsite... which was all-but-closed, but the owners allowed us to stay there. That night I was cooking my dinner, overlooking the water, and a young girl came up carrying a baby. She turned out to be the daughter of the hippy couple (the baby was her brother), and was the most intelligent kid I've ever met... she spoke with the wisdom of an 80-year-old about all the things she'd seen in their world travels, everywhere from Edinburgh to India. I got the impression her parents were also very bright... writers or scientists or something, I'm sure. They had decided to stay in Gairloch for a while and were offered an on-site caravan by the equally friendly campsite owners.
I would have liked to stay in Gairloch, but I hadn't come very far from Mellon Udrigle and wanted to push onwards. The wind was strong again so I decided to stay in Kinlochewe, but the campsite was closed and behind a high fence, so I rode an extra 11 miles through a narrow glen between massive grey mountains to Torridon. There was a tents-only campsite at Torridon next to the basic-looking youth hostel, and I was the only camper. I couldn't understand the washed-out instructions on the gate about how to find the caretaker's house for payment, so I didn't pay. I'm glad I didn't, because the facilities were awful... a dirty public toilet where the shower was blocked with toilet paper (I decided not to wash). A wild-eyed Scotsman in a kilt told me the caretaker hadn't been seen for weeks.
I wound over the mountains to Loch Carron, and on the final hill an aggressive young driver revved wildly when passing my bike. When I reached the top, I found him fixing a flat tyre by the roadside. It started to pour with rain and he got drenched. I did offer to help but he was too embarrassed to let anyone assist.
I stopped at a fish cafe and ordered soup and a crab roll. After a very long wait, the soup came in a polystyrene cup and there was crab shell in the tiny morsel of roll, which arrived on a paper towel instead of a plate. It all tasted like rubber and the nervous waitress kept asking me if it was all right. I didn't feel like complaining and I was still hungry so I bought some chocolate at a post office up the road.
Loch Carron is like Loch Eriboll in that you have to cycle around it... and on the final steep hill on the south bank the heavens opened. I was pelted with huge raindrops for about ten minutes, then dried out on the narrow, winding road to Plockton, where there was a sign saying "campsite now closed".
I couldn't find it anywhere - I almost camped on the local airfield by mistake - so I started knocking on the doors of B&Bs. Unfortunately it was a busy Friday night and on my way around the town I saw "Hamish MacBeth" being filmed at a lochside house. Several buildings had been modified to identify Plockton as "Lochdubh", the name of the town in the series.
Eventually I was offered a double room at a reduced rate in a B&B which had just opened for the season. It was the first B&B I'd ever stayed in, and it was also the nicest place I've ever stayed. The room and bathroom were beautifully kept, while the breakfast served in the morning was mouth-watering and kept me going until dinnertime. The owner gave me some helpful tips on cycling to Skye and was pleased I wasn't going to be paying the extortionate Skye Bridge car toll of £5.40 one-way. She also informed me I was staying two doors down from Robert Carlyle, the actor who plays Hamish MacBeth and who played Begbie in "Trainspotting".
Around this time I discovered I had lost the magnetic sensor for my cycle computer, the thing which records distance and speed on my bike. It had fallen off my front wheel somewhere just before Plockton. For the rest of the trip I had to guess how far I had travelled based on time taken and map readings.
Passing through Kyle of Lochalsh, I rode over the ridiculously steep Skye Bridge and along the eastern edge of the island, meeting the last ferry to Mallaig at 5:30pm. I wanted to buy a Guinness in the bar on the ferry, but I was the only customer and the bartender couldn't change a £20 note, so she bought me a Coke and listened to my travel tales.
Skye had been a bit cloudy and wet, and western Skye looked much more attractive... maybe I'll go there one day. Halfway along the Skye coast I was hailed by Ron Luse, a very tall cyclist from Ohio USA who had retreated to the weatherproof safety of a hire car. He turned out to be an Internet guru, so like true nerds we exchanged email addresses! Near Armadale I passed a sign which warned of a 24% gradient, the steepest I've ever heard of, but luckily it wasn't on my route.
At dusk I hot-footed it five miles from Mallaig to the nearest campsite, a farm run by horse-obsessive people, where there was no hot water. On the way I passed two women ambling along on mountain bikes, and shouted a cheery hello... unfortunately they hadn't heard me approaching and had the fright of their lives. One thought I was a ghost.
In the morning I headed for Fort William, over mountains and along the banks of Loch Eil. I stopped at a pub for lunch, pleased to see a touring bicycle parked outside. However, the rider turned out to be a grumpy old fat man who didn't acknowledge me. When I left I took a look at his bike and saw his panniers were ancient leather things like horse feed bags.
Fort William is a bland place, but I stayed in Glen Nevis campsite, where all the Ben Nevis climbers base themselves. The glen was really beautiful, but most of the mountains were constantly shrouded in thick mist... I saw a young child's poem on the Visitors' Centre wall, which said "... If you go to climb it / You're in for a real big shock / 'Cause it's summer at the bottom / And winter at the top!"
I finally managed to buy myself some new pedals at the local bike shop. I tried to buy William Gibson's new novel, "Idoru", at the bookshop, but they didn't have it in stock and the shop assistant rang her manager to ask him if he'd ever heard of "Idioru... Eyedearou... Idreoui..." He hadn't. So on my cousin Emma's recommendation I bought "Complicity" by Iain Banks, which captivated and disturbed me for the next two days while I rested, washed my clothes and fixed my bike.
Then I rode to Glen Coe, to a very basic campsite where the night wind blew through the nearby trees in gusts so hard and loud that I had to block my ears and pray.
I didn't pay enough attention to my map the next day, and eventually discovered I was climbing a SERIOUS though very scenic hill to Rannoch Moor, where the wind became intolerable yet again and I was reduced to a crawl. It was encouraging to reach a sign which said I was entering Argyll, because that meant I was actually progressing south after a long, winding road.
In a wild gale on a steep hillside I found a small diner run by an old man who was taking concerned glances at his ceiling, which was banging and rattling ferociously in the wind. He cooked me a Lorne Sausage because I didn't know what it was, and I hungrily followed the sandwich with two chocolate bars while being asked to take a snapshot of a Dutch couple standing in the full force of the gale.
I made it to Tyndrum at sunset, where the campsite was miraculously still open, though very wet, and the air was perfectly still. I left my tent at 9pm and wrote postcards in the local pub until 11, when I suddenly discovered there was a howling storm outside. I raced back to my tent to see if it had survived, and on the way I was drenched by horizontal rain.
Worse, my tent was listing badly because the metal pole had shattered at one of its joints, leaving two sharp ends threatening to rip through the fabric. I got completely soaked trying to administer repairs, to no avail, and tried to sleep in a sad, sagging piece of canvas held up by a pretence of a pole.
Then the whole thing caved in.
I packed two waterproof panniers and sat them on the flysheet to stop the tent blowing away, removed the pole parts and took them to the Gents toilet, where I patched them together with strong black tape and put them back into the tent. Although a great deal of water had to be mopped up from both inside and outside the tent before it would stand, the thing stayed up. I didn't get much sleep, caught a cold and the tent was now a really strange shape at one end, but I lived like this for the next few days until the end of my trip.
Only trouble was I couldn't pack the pole away properly thanks to the tape, so there was a long metal protrusion from the back of my luggage for the rest of my journey.
I cycled from Tyndrum along the south bank of Loch Tay and up a heart-attack-inducing four-mile hill to The Deer Park where I had more childhood holiday memories to relive. Unfortunately the place was now full of permanent vans and a bit run-down, so I just took one photograph of a scary hillside I'd climbed at the age of 7, and cycled back down to Aberfeldy (passing a place called Dull).
The Aberfeldy campground was quiet but very well kept, and the owner generously gave me an extra credit for the clothes dryer, because everything I owned was damp except for my shorts and one shirt... and it was a chilly evening. Fortunately, despite my newfound terror of the night wind, the air was perfectly still until morning.
Gales were forecast, but the air remained quiet as I climbed a huge hill out of Aberfeldy where it sank to 4 degrees Celsius again. But after the summit it was downhill all the way for nine miles and I stood at a busy road junction deciding whether to choose the campsite to the north or the more distant one to the south. A car pulled up and the young driver invited me to stay at his caravan park, which it turned out he had inherited from his grandfather. Reversing out of the junction he almost hit a van. He tried to charge me £6, an extortionate rate, and I got away with paying £5 on the excuse that I wasn't carrying any more. I pitched my tent on the bank of a river which seemed very close to bursting its banks.
The next day I was feeling very unwell due to my cold, but decided I could make it to Lundin Links, where my journey was to end. I headed southward to Perth and was pounded by rain, though fortunately the accompanying wind wasn't too fierce. I didn't have a map of Perth and it's quite a big town, so it took about an hour to find the correct southward exit. Meantime, I fell spectacularly off my bike in front of a bemused family when I stupidly tried to jump a kerb onto a high pavement. A pannier went flying and I landed on my rear, but everything was OK and I just rode off, assuring them I had been caught by a gust of wind.
Coming over the hill into Fife I watched an incredibly black, incredibly fast storm sweep low over the Lomonds and East Fife while the rest of Scotland seemed to remain in perfect sunshine.
I passed through Freuchie again, having come full circle, and it was a really strange feeling to ride up the path at Pilmuir farm again, where John Russell opened the door to let me in, as if I'd just ridden down to the shops and back.