In 2010 I decided to continue my trip. My circumstances were different this year, as I'd spent a happy half-year working for a great new company where I liked everyone, they paid me lots and it was interesting and enjoyable. I was lucky to have a job, I realize that, and grateful too. If my unemployment had lasted another year, I don't know where I'd now be. I'd be extremely depressed about my life, I expect: I'd be running my own business and making no profit I expect. I was never one to take my career seriously and, unlike others, I never ever in my life thought "I want to be a blah". Somehow it never fitted into my world view that I should work or have a career. Since I had a job I only had a short fortnight of holiday to spend.
My first mistake was to go too late in the year. I had this strange idea that August was going to be warm, but actually it's noticeably colder than July. I set off on 8/8/10, which was almost the same date I'd left on the year before. I should have gone a month earlier because I was going further north. I'm such a fool! I think the reason for going in August was to catch the Fringe again, which I enjoy. However since I wrote about it last year, I'm not going to cover it again this year.
I crossed the border on 8/8/2010 and I was using the spare wheel as a replacement for one of the back tyres. Last year I didn't bother to take the spare wheel on the grounds that I'd never needed one. This year I was extremely glad to have it. On arrival in Edinburgh I had a complete flop and discovered that I wasn't interested in doing anything, which was caused by the fact that I'd spent the first half of the year working hard. Anyway, the first thing I needed to do was to fix the tyre, and this was more work than I expected. I should write a horror story about a huge chase going from one set of lazy incompetent disinterested mechanics to another. It is generally complete hell trying to get a car mechanic to do something for you, and do it right. I phoned a mobile van service a few times, and eventually he tells me he's not going to go to where my car is, at a convenient location on the outskirts of Edinburgh near the ring-road. What a lazy twit!
I phone a garage and they tell me they can help so I drive there and then they tell me they are fully booked for the day and can't help! So I return in the morning and they tell me it's going to take two hours to fix a puncture. So I give them my tyre, but because I'm smart (and a lot smarter than they are) I draw their attention to the fact that the hole is near the edge of the tyre. That's not something they thought to ask about is it? no. Well Oh dear they can't fix it now because it's in a difficult place. So I ask if they've got a new tyre. Oh yes they have one in stock, but oh no when they go to look for it they can't find it and oh dear they don't know where it is. None of their suppliers can deliver a new one unfortunately. Are they A BUNCH OF FLIPPING IDIOTS? So I go looking for another garage. Another garage helpfully tell me that I won't find a 12" tyre like mine for fifty miles around, as no-one uses them much any longer. Great!
In my searches I find a tiny little garage hidden behind a sign about exhausts. It's a one-woman small-business, and she is that rare thing: a mechanic who has a clue what she is talking about. She says yes, I can fix your puncture, and I can do it now, so I leave it with her.
Unfortunately the puncture has damaged the wires of the tyre, so I need a new one. I don't know what on earth I drove over that was capable of cutting through a steel wire. Amanda can get one for tomorrow, however, so I leave her with a bonus and get on the bus back to Edinburgh. That little runaround took me half a day, and I'm back to Edinburgh by 1500. You think it would be simple to get a spare tyre, but OH NO, they don't want to make it easy do they? I am so glad I had my space-saver spare tyre, as without it I would have found it difficult to find a replacement tyre. I discovered that if I need more space in the boot, I can actually put the spare tyre in the footroom of the passenger, as it's unlikely to get stolen.
Anyway, after getting the tyre situation under control, I walked down the Royal Mile chatting to whoever wants to chat with me. I found a young girl standing on a concrete bollard advertising her musical called "Fresher" (Paulden Productions and the Blue Penguin). I asked her why she got involved in drama (as I usually do) - she said that she's always wanted to dance, and she's being doing it since she was three. Clearly, it's in her being, just as it is not in mine. A little further up I meet a Theatre and Drama student who has a play written by one of her friends as a module for the Drama course, and they thought they'd take it to the fringe. They are showing at The Space which is Arts-Council subsidised and thus costs a third of what it should normally cost. Normally, you're looking at £3k for three weeks. That's an awful lot when you're a student, but to a middle-aged worker like me it's not much really. Further on still, I meet a sweet young girl in her second year at Oxford who decided to go to the local drama group / school in her village when she was eight, and kept with it. Now she's leading a play called "Wait until Dark" and you can only be impressed at someone so young making good with her life. She studies theology at Oxford, and, like me, clearly enjoys academic analysis. Further on I meet a few guys who are running a play called "Art". Most are students, but one is an unemployed actor whose agent put him into it because there was nothing much else to do. This reminds me how pleased I am to have a job. If I was unemployed, I'd so feel like I was wasting my life.
However I've written on the Fringe already. After a few days of it I was on the road again. Leaving Edinburgh was a maze of motorways which I luckily managed to negotiate successfully, and I crossed the Forth Road bridge, which is surprisingly free. Heading north I stopped at a small town called Blairgowrie. It's comparable to Birnam & Dunkeld: it's also at the foot of the highlands, on the Highland Boundary Fault. The guide said it had a nice walk down by the river, and there were signs of that although it was all fenced off when I visited.
The A93 road north is is really a B-road. It's a narrow windy road with little bridges, and is too small to carry the large lorries and campervans that charge down it in a remarkably arrogant fashion. It's a fun drive for my little car, which is the right size to use it. It's a road through the highland landscape, and on the way it reaches 670m before meandering into Braemar. You can put the car in neutral and coast down some stages at 35mph. Although the Cairngorms are, essentially, a big granite mound, the erosion of water has cut some channels into the granite and the roads normally follow these low areas.
Braemar is a remarkable little find. It's a small village lying at a low-point in the mountains, at the meeting of three glens at 350m. There was only a couple of cottages here in 1848 when Prince Albert decided that the nearby castle of Balmoral would make a fine summer getaway for their family. Royal attention made the area fashionable, and more holiday-makers came this way.
Apparently there is this thing called the Highland Games which is sited here ever since approx 1000. Originally, it was to select the strongest for the king's army, but the tradition continues even though no-one really lives in the highlands any longer.
These days Braemar is a small village with two hotels based on tourism and a golf-course, and is a miniature version of Aviemore. The royal influence has probably retarded its development to a great extent and this is why it is a fiftieth the size of Aviemore. There are a lot of B&B signs, and a shop that rents bikes. However it really is much smaller than the holiday centres on the other road, the A9 to Inverness. During the winter I expect it spends its time under 2m of snow.
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I drove a mile up the road from Braemar to find a nice spot by a river to place my tent, and although it was windy and rainy overnight, the temperature in mid-August was sufficient. There is a campsite in the village, which there should be, but it costs ~£10 a night to stay there. Like, why should I pay that kind of money when I can find my own patch of grass in a nicer location for nothing?
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My first morning in Braemar I didn't feel like doing anything, so I arose late and made a cup of tea with my new butane gas stove. This is a new addition to my camping kit, and is proving quite popular with me. I bought it in a sale in my home town for like £25 which was half-price, and it is a well-made piece of kit. It's quite precarious in that when you've got boiling a pan of water on it, it's top-heavy, and can easily tip over and spill on your legs etc. so you do need to be careful with it. It consumes little room in the car and lets me have baked-beans with my bread in the evening, whereas I used to have only bread.
I had some newspapers I bought at Kinloss services on the way here, and I elected to stay in my tent reading them until I was tired of so doing. I had much more energy the last time I came this way: clearly a half-year of working for my company had drained my energies more than I'd expected.
By lunchtime however I was feeling restless, so I went into Braemar and hired a mountain-bike for the afternoon for £10. It comes with a helmet, repair kit, lock and a map. I had a fun ride up to a place called Derry Lodge, at roughly 450m where there is a mountain-rescue hut, and is a base for climbing the big peaks nearby: Ben Macdui at 1250m is within reach, as are several others. I met a man called Brian Stuart who works for the Scottish National Trust Estate management. He was there with his tent collecting moths. He has a special trap which has a 120w lamp in it and he runs it from a little generator at night. The moths come over and are caught in the trap. In the morning, they are pretty docile and are easy to handle and catalogue. Brian seems to have been walking around these hills all his life: he told me how, when he was younger, he'd catch the last bus passing this way on a Friday, spend the weekend walking and camping and return on the last bus on Sunday, along with a lot of other walkers, to Aberdeen.
I asked him about the forest, and it's the same old story as at Dundreggan: if you keep the deer out the forest regenerates very quickly. He pointed out an eyot of shale in the river which had lots of small scot's pines growing on it because the seeds get left there by the floods, and obviously the deer aren't eating them. He said that you could get something of a similar effect on the land if you removed the top layer of soil to uproot all the heather, because there are lots of seeds in the soil as well.
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Brian had an amazing brass paraffin stove that you have to pump by hand, dating from the 1930's. They are much cheaper to run than my butane stove which costs a lot. He said they are still made in India, and there are people in the UK who import them and the parts. It's exactly the kind of low-tech industry that would flourish in India.
At Derry Lodge I saw a lot of walkers pass, with their rucksacks. It's a clear route into the hills. There is also a path called Lairig Ghru which will take you through the passes to Aviemore on the other side of the massif, peaking at 830m which is still pretty high. It would be possible to cross the mountain pass to the other side on a mountain-bike in a day if the paths were good, unfortunately the Lairig Ghru is pretty rocky and so you have to walk it. I think you could get over in a few days in fact.
I discovered there are these things called "bothies" which are little huts in the wilderness where anyone can spend the night. There are fireplaces and stuff, and if you're a walker it's advantageous because you won't need to carry a tent. There is one near Derry Lodge that sleeps approx ten, and is so well insulated that if you light the fire it gets unpleasantly hot in summer.
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On Friday evening the weekenders began to arrive. I discovered I had put my tent in a popular place. At 1800 a young couple arrived and started the fire. At 1900, a convoy of three large cars containing families arrived and I went to talk to them. They said "you beat us to it!" in an affable way, indicating the patch of ground they had in mind. They disappeared off up-stream where there is lots more space. I can't blame them for coming out this way: it's a brilliant thing to do if you have a family, and you can drive here from Aberdeen in an hour or so.
This is the highland experience: walking around the mountains and along the rivers. That's the basic theme. You can play with that a little, and do it on a bike or in a canoe, and you can choose whether to camp or stay in a hotel or a bothy. You are not going to enjoy it unless you appreciate the scenery: the mountains, the views, the beauty of the cascading rivers and the challenges you can make for yourself here. On Saturday 14/8/2010 I went and paid £13 quid for a walker's map of the area (it was expensive because it was on waterproof paper) and it was a gateway to the mountains.
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There are lots of paths around the mountains here, and apparently you're allowed to wander whereever you like. I chose to drive a few miles out of Braemar to a hamlet called Inverey where there is a car park at 344m. I spent four hours walking, climbing to the summit of Carn Liath at 818m, from whence you get an amazing view of lots of other peaks nestling under the blanket of clouds. It was pretty tiring I must admit, and clearly I'm not ready to tackle the big peaks which in this area reach to 1200m. However it was totally cool. The weather was warm and moderately sunny for my entire walk which surprised me: usually you find that as you climb the weather changes dramatically for the worse, ie that it is warm and sunny in the car park but on the peak it's cold, windy, foggy and it's raining. However today it was also decent on the peak and I stayed there a few minutes trying to name the other peaks which was a task that defeated me. The route I walked would make a very good mountain-bike ride, as much of it was a rough track or dubious pathway.
In four hours of walking I met no-one else which really did surprise me on a Saturday in August.
On Sunday morning I found the midge swarming around my tent at 0900. The wind had gone and the midge thus appeared. My inner tent was midge-proof, and the outer tent offered moderate resistance - until I opened the door. They disappeared however when the sun appeared. It seems they dislike the heat. Midge normally collect in forest gullies, where the trees provide shade and still air, so on big open floodplains where I was camping, there were small numbers of midge. During my week however my tolerance of midge fell rapidly and I was nearly a nervous midge-paranoid by the end of it.
Although the midge disappeared by Sunday lunchtime, another nuisance appeared: motorbikes. I discovered that the A93 south from Braemar is treated as a racetrack for high-powered motorbikes. The whole valley reverberates to the sound of their aggressive engines. By contrast, the cars that pass along it are almost unheard. Noisy motorbikes should be banned from this National Park.
Actually, I settled in Braemar and stayed here enjoying the Cairngorms instead of driving on. I hired a mountain-bike on a couple of days for £10, and crossed some high mountain paths. I discovered that you have to stay to what the map considers the more substantial paths when you have a bike. I tried biking over a narrow path between two mountains and discovered a new mountain sport: walking along a rocky path for five miles carrying an awkward heavy object and being bitten by midge. It was not a success.
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I gradually got fitter, and on my last day I walked for seven miles, from Lin of Dee to Derry Lodge, over Luibeg bridge, past Devil's Point and towards the bothy at Corrour in the mountain valley. From here it would be straight on through the Lairig Ghru pass and down to Rothiemurchas. If I'd stayed the night at the bothy, I could have reached Aviemore the following day. It could be done, then, to go from Lin of Dee to Aviemore in two days of walking. This is something I'll probably do some day. I turned back, but I saw the pass through to Aviemore which was quite exciting.
The landscape of the Cairngorms is clearly sculpted by glaciers: there are lots of broad u-shaped valleys which I think are pretty characteristic of glacier gouging.
I discovered the Lee Valley at around 460m-375m is thick with midge, so much so that even when walking you need a midge-net. The path from Lin of Dee to White Bridge is a nice flat track that mountain bikes can speed along, so you don't need to worry about the midge then until you stop. I saw some campers at White Bridge and if they didn't have midge-nets, they'd be insect food.
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Overall, I had a great time treating Braemar as a base to explore the mountains, and clearly lots of other walkers do similarly.
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