Author Archives: The Chronicler

A Triptych of Islands

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In ’22 we cycled a less-than-obvious line to call on the four Celtic capitals on the way to an extended clutch of pet and house sittings.  Which I thought of as the ‘CelticCapitals Circuit’, which in the current parlance would probably be branded, at great expense, the ‘CeltCap Way’.  In ’23 we finished the ‘Cycle home from the Mediterranean Sea’, that had been curtailed by an interregnum of Covid.  Marketable as yet another C2C route; possibly ‘TheMedNord Way’.  So when it comes to ’24 we need a new theme, one that carries on a developing ethos that is gaining currency in the ongoing climate debate.  A ‘no-fly’ route that will take us to a destination that has been an aspirational ‘thought’ for some considerable time.

Iceland.

Once, back in the last century, the ‘land-sea’ route to the Norse island would have involved a three day cycle ride or a three hour train journey to Aberdeen for the ferry to Shetland.  Today it’s a bit more convoluted.  The sea journey now starts out of Hirtshals on the northern tip of Denmark, and no longer calls into Shetland.

So whilst map-gazing for possible routes, a potential line suggests itself.  At a certain magnification using the on-line mapping site, a blue dotted line materialises, with the script ‘Kintyre Express P. Summer Only’, crossing the Irish Sea to connect Port Ellen with Ballycastle.  A quick search determines that it does exist, and that it is still running. It even takes bicycles and has spaces.  It’s meant to be. 

A triptych of isles on the letter ‘I’.  An alliteration that comes with a nice phonetical scan: Islay – Ireland – Iceland.  

All I need now is a clever branding title. 

It is such stuff as dreams are made on…

It really does exist!

Just over an hour, port to port.

Boat Taxi?

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The Rio Miño forms the international border between Portugal and Spain, not that such a concept in a modern Europe has a great relevance to the average cycle traveller.  Its interest lies in the fact that it offers us up an interesting decision.  We have a choice for crossing this river… bridge or ferry?

Experience in Portugal over the last four weeks has left us with the conviction that any and every bridge of any consequence has come with some form of problem.  Anyone who has negotiated the old US Army Corps of Engineers’ double-humpbacked girder bridge over the Charleston River will sympathise with The Navigator’s near phobic fear of bridges.  An experience that still taints and permeates the thought of bridge crossings.  But today armed with app-maps and street-views you would have expected we would be able to plot a route over a bridge that might mitigate some of that angst.  However what all this clever tech can’t do is account for the ogres and bogles and trolls that live under that bridge.  

All’s going well; The Navigator has carried out her due diligence, plotted the route, we’ve rounded the corner ridden up the slip onto the ascending ramp to find the nice, safe pavement coned off, then to notice that the anticipated two lanes will soon become just one.  One narrow one.  They’re repairing the piers.  Then there was the long single lane bridge on a quiet Sunday morning when suddenly a plug of traffic and an ambulance’s wailing siren comes rushing ominously from behind.   Now we’re pedalling like the furies.  

So when the city of Porto arises on our horizon it seems like a sensible option to source an hotel room on the southern side of the Rio Douro. We can then have the leisure of walking and inspecting the multiple options for crossings and for negotiation with the denizens that live under the six different bridges.  As it transpires there really is only one obvious choice.  A cast-iron structure from the Eiffel school of ironwork that carries the Metro and pedestrians on the upper deck and a lower deck for cycles and other ambulantes.  Still, it’s a bridge in Portugal, ergo it’s under major refurbishment.  Hundreds of people are crossing in any one hour, wandering between the painters, around the tarring squad, tripping over cones as they take selfies, whilst the inevitable, oblivious, instagramming influencer clogs the narrow pavement.  

We leave town by riding the lower deck, leaving dusty tyre tracks on the pristine tar, in glorious isolation, early on a Sunday morning.  I suspect the gremlins will be sending an invoice to the next river bridge crossing.

If you ride a coastal route it’s going to be inevitable that there will be wide rivers or even estuaries to cross.  This coast has plenty of them.  So as we approach the border that’s delineated by the Rio Miño we have a suggestion of a ferry that may or may not exist.  One on-line report says the car ferry ceased at the turn of the century when the bridge opened, but that there was still a passenger service somewhere nearby.  So it came as bit of surprise, as we pedalled away from an overnight campsite to be accosted by a man offering “going to Spain… boat taxi?”  It’s nowhere near where our map suggests it to be.  Now it has to be understood, I’m very sensitive to people offering services in the vicinity of an international border; be they taxi transfers, money changers or assistance enablers.  My default setting is to ride past pretending ignorance even if they have official looking laminated documents strung around their necks.  In my defence I couldn’t see any boats, let alone taxi-boats from where I was; The Navigator however was behind and a bit more curious, stops to engage and looks over the riverbank.  At the bottom of a seaweed encrusted stone jetty is a ridged inflatable boat that has already loaded on two cyclists.  The craft’s master seems very keen to add our two steeds and their panniers to the manifest.  I was rather hoping that no more bikes turned up as I’m convinced they would have been wedged on board too.

Seven exhilarating minutes later he has rammed his craft onto the deserted Spanish shore and we are leaping from the bow onto soft sand, and I’m dodging waves to offload four cycles. He’s in a hurry to get back across as a taxi has pulled up, presumably with some more potential pilgrim passengers.  Maybe they were creaming off potential fares from the supposed ferry further up the estuary, the ferry they claimed no longer operated. What I do know is that their rates were half of those advertised by that supposed defunct service.  

It feels somewhat subversive, but It’s nice to be positively conned at an international border.  That, and we’ve avoided another part Portugués bridge and its itinerant attendants.

Caminhos, plural.

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“Bom Caminho!”, offers the barista as I weave my way through the tables and chairs that flow out of the café and across the pavement.  “Bom Caminho!”, from the peloton of road racing cyclists (male; always male) as I round the next bend.  “Bom Caminho!”, from the council’s man emptying the street bins. 

There would appear to be an assumption being made.  It could be the direction that we’re heading – north; the paraphernalia – five bags; or the date, Easter week.  Ergo, we must be ‘pilgrims’. 

‘Bom Caminho’, ‘Good Path’, might be the literal translation, but of course it relates to at least one of the many routes that lead to Santiago de Compostela. 

We’re riding out of Porto in a thickening mist, a murk of drizzle that concentrates into persistent penetrating damp.  Out of that flat soft light the next apparitions materialise, two hunchbacks with walking poles tap-tapping out their strides.  Two peregrinos carrying rucksacks shrouded by all-enveloping pochos that still show their creases, recently bought and now newly extracted from their packaging.  Looking further along the path I can make out several more ghostly outlines; yet more pilgrims.  For most this will be their first, if less than auspicious, day on this ‘caminó’.  

We’d already been asked “are you going to Santiago?”, to which we’d offered the possibly sacrilegious reply: “only if it’s on the way”.  Possibly an excommunicable reply, but we did explain that we were actually heading home to Scotland.  So with our accoutrements of baggage, our direction of north, the presumption would appear that we must be on ‘pilgrimage’.  But are we?

One dictionary’s definition suggests that pilgrimage is a journey to a religious place, or a person regarded as travelling through life, and that the term’s derivation runs through Provençal and back to the Latin for ‘foreigners’.  So by those definitions we are ‘pilgrims’, even if we’re not on an overtly religious journey.  

For many, when mention is made of the ‘Camino de Compostela’, the image will be of the route that runs east to west through the north of Spain.  The mistake lies in the singular usage, when it should be “Caminos”, plural. There are many routes just as there are many starting points.  Canterbury, Kent, being at a northerly end of one, whilst Cabo São Vicente is a southern one.  

We had ridden to the Cabo; it’s the km 0 of the Algarve cycle route.  A lighthouse perched at the extremis of mainland Europe, at the sou’western corner of Portugal and one start point of another Camino.  At this southern end the walkers tend to be Northern Europeans on packaged walking holidays with little supportive infrastructure beyond accommodation and vans ferrying luggage ahead.  However when the Camino reaches Porto everything changes.  Blue and yellow signs at every turn, granite distance posts, three metre wide cycle lanes, a vast array of accommodations.  The impression is of a visitor industry shifting from ‘sand + sunning’ to ‘pilgriming’.  It makes for relaxing touring, a journey where you don’t always feel that you’re ‘in the way’.

Although I do wonder, for the walking pilgrim, shrouded in an all-enveloping restriction of nylon, if that first granite post, the one that indicates ‘265 km’ is an encouragement.  Still, we exchange “Bom Caminho” as we stride or pedal on our way.

MacAdam’s Diet

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A critical mass of bicycles on the road makes for a safer environment for the cyclist. Statistics and research bear this out; accident figures drop disproportionately, counterintuitively, with increased bike numbers. Segregated lanes, dedicated off-highway routes help further, but only counter the increased auto-populations.  Just check some home driveways to see the two-, three- and four-car households, where one or none would have been the norm three decades ago.  But what is less obvious to the car-bound traveler is the increased girth of vehicles and the decreased width of track.  

We’re riding the Hebridean Way, or at least our version of it.  Ours is a full navigation of Barra, a deviation down any available or enticing dead end Uist track and a long stop to wait for the daily passenger flight to land on the sand.  Much of the route has the largest concentration of single track with passing places left in Scotland.  So we’ve become very aware of the enforced proximity that modern cycle traveller encounters.

The VW Golf is 21% wider than its ’74 ancestor; it’s just a pity that the rural A class Scots road hasn’t expanded in sympathy. Actually, in many instances they’ve shrunk. The second photo is an extreme example of an all too familiar scenario.  The local authority needs to carry out some major pothole patching.  Presumably they considered it more economical to apply a generous topcoat; however, it’s not possible to cover the full existing width. Were they to do so, the new edge would be broken off within weeks.  Send along a three tonne tractor pulling a two tonne trailer loaded with ten tonnes of boxed potatoes and it wouldn’t last a day. (Agricultural tyres are 50% wider than of yore).  The net result of this nice new black coat is a road that can be 150mm(6”) narrower at each side.  Do that with a West Highland single track and the loss is considerable.  

I’ve become quite animated about gordo-cars, roadside gutters, verge precipices, crumbling passing places simply because we’ve visited so many of them.  From Barra to Harris it feels like we’ve stopped in over half of them, to let either the oncoming or overtaking local pass; it is their road, and they obviously believe they have exclusive ownership. Or the terrified camper-vanner who’s just collected their new hire and are encountering their first passing place on a less than corpulent road.  


It might have been comical. 

We’re at the bottom of a hill, I can see four white diamonds denoting four passing places all the way up to the top.  A camper van crests the rise and immediately pulls in, as do we at the bottom. 

They wait.  

We wait.  

Harris Chicken.

We’ve already dumped a dose of momentum, all that kinetic energy, so we might as well wait, we’re going to have to rebuild all that potential again. I’d like to do it slowly.

Still they wait.  

They’ve read their Highway Code, uphill traffic has priority.  

We blink first.

We set off.

Far too fast, and ego won’t let us get off and push, as it’s only going to complicate matters further.  Puce faced, pulse thumping we reach the top and dutifully acknowledge their oh so kind consideration.  We’ve passed so they won’t have been able to lip read The Navigator’s comment.  Inevitably, behind said camper is a beat-up Ford van full of lobster creels who’s in a hurry.  I can see the thought-bubble pop as it scatters grit and rushes off… ‘bloody toorists’.  

Therein lies the grand conundrum.  The narrow road, the passing place, the flower specked verge, the wandering ewe are all part of the Hebridean essence.  A product that is heavily sold to the local economy-generating visitor.  It’s a contrast that suddenly becomes all too obvious when the main road north enters North Harris and Lewis and returns to a two-lane highway. Suddenly, everybody seems to be in a hurry.  No longer do we have to drive for the other road user, so there’s the chance to drift into that Zen moment on that long slow climb, to plod my way to the top, unmolested.  No longer the need for polite consideration, making driving decisions for the other.  It’s a relief, but something has been lost.  That quintessence of island cycling.  Like rounding of a bend to find a tide-graded boulder shore or the cresting of a granite outcrop to discover a primrose-speckled machair.  Spotting a white-throat diver on a lily-dotted lochan whilst watching a rain squall cruise across the Minch.  Or simply speculating on who will reach the next passing place first.

That was the Outer Hebrides, Eilean Siar; we then sailed over the sea to Skye, the island with a bridge and the ‘No Vacancies’ signs. ‘Isle Full’ would be a better title, and with it comes a consequent traffic level and a clutch of ‘honey pots’ that makes the outer isles seem empty and myself ever regretting whinging about camper vans, their occupants and passing places.

Still in catch-up mode.

Went to Jura and all I got was a Dozen Lousy Ticks

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The Isle of Jura, famous for George Orwell and a date, a whirlpool, and red deer.  The gentleman author dispensed alliterative similes and metaphorical allegories to the bemusement of Higher literary comprehension Glasgow schoolboys, the red deer dispenses ticks.  I know about ticks, for I am the tick magnet.  And knowing this I can’t explain why I took to the waist-high brittle dry bracken, in shorts, to find an interesting, imaginative angle for a photo of a fallen birch tree. It would appear that I was the first succulent to pass their way and twenty of them decided to hitch a lift.  Or just a long slow suck. A gross of opportunistic suckers.  Euphemism intended.

In an eco-world we’re encouraged to appreciate the interconnectivity of all life forms, where every life form has a part to play. However it is hard to see how a tick has any function.  But that’s an Anthropocentric view, from the perspective of a Lyme Disease microbe, the tick must be the perfect vehicle for replication and migration.  Get the timing right and the female tick could be birthing ticklets six Hebridean islands away.  Bio-transfer.  From the unmentionables somewhere up around The Butt of Chris to the exposure of The Butt of Lewis.

Addendum….I was trying to get an angle that would align the prone tree trunk just above the hillside horizon, a silhouette against the blue of the sky.  However the topography did not comply with the photography.  

Expletive geography.  Expletive biology.  Expletive tick.

This was a little while ago. Technology and its operators have been somewhat challenged by the availablility of electricity and/or mobile ’phone signal, by the ambient temperature and/or weather, and by the time and/or will to sit down and get the act together.

Post Interregnum

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C19 isn’t over but the interregnum is.  Or at least our interregnum is.  We’ve hit the the road once again.  Stepped from the front door, turned west with no defined plan, other than to keep moving, see where our bicycles can take us.

Interregnum: defined by the OED as a period of suspension between reigns or successive governmental periods; whilst not strictly accurate, is a useful metaphor for our current predicaments.  

Twenty five months ago we, like many others, made a hasty and expensive retreat from a European journey.  Our kit was duly cleaned, sorted and stored with an anticipation that we would be able to pack it back up again that autumn.

And we all know how that panned out.

So one interregnum later we start to pack, only to slowly realise that we have slithered down the learning curve.  What should have been a relatively simple pack – we’ve done it several times – second nature – took all day.  For sure some items had mysteriously migrated to another place, a sealed tube of seam-sealer had magically evaporated, a decision was needed on stove type and do we always carry a corkscrew, bottle opener and a sieve?   But these weren’t the real causes, just mere procrastinations.  

It was the cerebral existential questions. Can we thole the angst of negotiating for road space?  Will the knees survive the gymnastics of tent life?  Do we still have the instinct to find a safe, legal, wild-camping?

Can I still do this?  Do I really want to do this?  

Set against these imponderables was a weather forecast of easterlies, that in the Scots vernacular and this time of year, translates as ‘manky east’ – ‘stunning west’.  It would appear that two years of pandemic stasis has produced a couple of dithering ‘fair-weather’ tourers.  Time to climb back on the learning-curve, time to go west.

A quarter hour away from that initial step away from our front door and all the foreboding angst has evaporated.  Tail winds, bright sunshine and a bicycle that has acquired its own momentum, gliding along an old railway line.  The same line we’ve ridden innumerable times in the interregnum, but now it’s as if that pandemic interlude has been warped in a bubble, an interruption that will exist as a memory, held in suspended animation, but is now consigned for storage to a shelf labelled: ‘Time out of Time’.

CalMac – Caledonian MacBrayne – that loved and hated institution that runs most of the ferry services in the west of Scotland.
Jura
Kilnave Chapel, Islay
Barra

The Navigator – editor and tech in chief – apologises that WordPress is getting the better of her right now. The content is here, but the layout is not the best. Another thing that has to be relearned.

Some Things Change, Some Things Don’t

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It’s been ten years since we last cycled this way, so it’s going to be interesting to see what might have changed.

Ten minutes away from the airport, and we’re pushing against the rush hour on a motorway shoulder… seen this movie before. Add two minutes and we’re stuck in the back of a warehouse peering through linknet fencing to where we think we should be…. played this game before. Correct this aberration only to find that we’re now bumping along a dry river bed… I’ve got the t-shirt already. We can see the hotel, it’s got ten stories, it stands like a beacon…. on the other side of a multi-lane highway that has an impediment of crash barriers in the way…. sorry, read the book already. It’s good to know that some things don’t change when it comes to Biking Spain.

For the ‘Osborne’ bulls still grace the hilltops and artists still paint on blind corners, Tio Pepe still lounges by the road’s verge and people still take their parrots for walks.

And yet, and yet…. all that angst between airport and town will soon be solved when they place the final span of that wooden bridge, another obstacle solution on the Cadiz-Athens EuroVelo route. But the biggest change in these ten years has to be App mapping. Once it was a paper Michelin map that had its fair share of wishful thinking, where the simplest solutions were to cycle the main thoroughfares and hope not to receive too many ‘waggy-fingers’ from the Gardas Civil. Now, with Google and its variants we’ve found deserted tracks through knurled olive groves, navigated around vast stretches of farmland and crossed rivers on exposed ferries, only occasionally ending up in flooded culverts or down narrow alleys looking down a flight of steps and into the Mediterranean Sea.

A ‘deja-vu’ that I’m happy to repeat.

In Another Place

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Search engine ‘Shetland Islands, then scroll down to ‘what people ask’ and click on ‘do the Shetland Islands exist?’  It’s a fair question, for too often they are plagued by a necessity for economy, the assertion that blue sea space is wasted space.  Like lands abandoned, a prisoner in a cell, locked in a box, up in the top right hand corner of every UK national map.  That, or it’s wedged into the cleft created by the Aberdeenshire and Easter Ross coasts.  Most will know that the Shetland Islands are to the north of the Orkneys, which in turn are somewhere off the coast from John o’Groats. fullsizeoutput_3e0b

But How Much Farther North?

Stand on Stromness’ pier and travel the equivalent distance of Edinburgh to Inverness and you will find the puffin burrows at the southern end of the archipelago high up on Sumburgh Head.  Now travel the virtual return trip to Perth and that will take you to the final lighthouse and a clutch of geo-superlatives, to Muckle Flugga and Britain’s ‘most northerly’ pub, bus stop, check-out, post office, petrol pump, chip shop… etcetera, etcetera. fullsizeoutput_3de2

The Other Land’s End.  Another Ultimate Thule. 

The adage that when in Lerwick: “you’re closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh” only emphasises the innate feeling that you’re in another country.  Of course it’s erroneous, yet when I’m chatting with another cycle-travelling French family and they ask as to where we’ve come from, I instinctively say “Scotland”.  So confirming my socio-typical assertion that mère, père, et trois enfants on a bike trip will invariably be French, but also that my subconscious is drifting in a foreign place.

In Another Place.

fullsizeoutput_3e43And yet that feeling of ‘new place-other world’ is only emphasised at every turn.  A place where puffins are ‘tammie norries’ and ‘curlie doddies’ are clovers.  Where the anti-littering campaigns have slogans like “dunna chuck bruck” fullsizeoutput_3dedand the chip shop doesn’t offer deep-fried pizza but serves mussels from the voe right outside and not from the pickle jar on the counter.  Where a craft IPA beer is black and the Victorian homes still have wrought iron palings.  Where honesty-boxes abound and traffic offers excessive respect.  Where trolls cross the road and there’s more wood in telegraph poles than living trees.  Where the ratio of Nordic Cross to Scot’s Saltire flags is infinite to one and the ferry’s car deck smells of fish and not diesel.

That same overnight ferry has deposited us in rush hour Lerwick, with a weather window of opportunity.  The promise of at least three days without rain, and given our locality and the capriciousness of this Scottish summer, we should be grateful.  More importantly, that ‘window’ would appear to be wind-free, or at least what passes for ‘windless’ on a group of islands that’s never more than a short walk from any shoreline and the Atlantic Ocean.  A place that’s near treeless and where the plants, ponies and panoramas all cling close to the ground. 

fullsizeoutput_3ddfTrue, it is near wind-free, a climo-phenomenon that simply allows the cloud to settle down and clamp to the sea, that flushes out all colour leaving a pastel of greys to be the dominate colour wash, graduated shades that merge sea through shore to sky.  So it’s as well that the old croftlands and the road verges are such a dash of contrasts. IMG_1295fullsizeoutput_3e23 Virulent splotches of magenta thyme interspersed with yellow streaks in clogged ditches of Monkey Flower and Flag Iris.  Eyebrights creep through the sheep-nibbled sward, leaving solitary sentinel Orchids, and Angelicas that are exploding like umbrellas from tissue pokes.  All are a reminder as to how a genuine wildflower meadow would once have naturally looked, pre- a drench of selective herbicides.

We’ve been south to wander through the 3500 years of habitation that is Jarlshof, not that any Norwegian Jarl ever lived in a house there.  That name comes from the ever-effervescent imagination and creator of Scots-myth, Sir Wattie Scott.  Then to traipse the sea cliffs in the company of the long-lensed twitteratzzi photographing the ever-gregarious ‘Tammie Norries’ and a wren that’s endemic to the isles.  It’s trinomial name somewhat more bulky than its minimal stature…’Troglodytes troglodytes zetlandicus’ or in the local parlance, ‘Rindill the Runt’.

In Another Place.

Now to head north on the final stretch of the National Cycle Route 1.  fullsizeoutput_3de0It, not we, started in Dover and will complete it’s travel up North Mainland; across Yell; then north through Unst to Muckle Flugga.  Where it will accumulate that collection of ‘most northerly’ superlatives, of which the most intriguing could be ‘the most northerly flowering cactus in a bus shelter’.

Bobby’s Bus Stop.

 

fullsizeoutput_3e00At the age of six he wrote to the Shetland Times bemoaning the demise of the old wooden shelter that had been deemed unsafe and demolished.  The council reacted and replaced it with a shiny new one.  A short time later a wicker table and sofa materialised, then a microwave, followed closely by a carpet, the telephone and curtains.  fullsizeoutput_3e09All anonymously.  Today the montage creations are the work of a group of volunteers, who curate a rotating celebration of themes.  Moon landings; sheep; Queen’s Jubilees; Fake (g)nus and that real, living, flowering cactus. fullsizeoutput_3dfb

In Another Place.

fullsizeoutput_3e17And from gnus, fake or otherwise, it’s not an overly obvious jump to golfing.  It’s UnstFest and the organisers have created a golf course; an 18-hole peripatetic course.  You peregrinate, the holes don’t; although in this isle of low mists and wandering trolls, you wonder.  The holes might be short, but travelling between them is long, for the course encompasses the whole island.

In Another Place.

fullsizeoutput_3ed5Turn a corner and the road sign warns of ‘crossing trowies’…. malevolent spectres, or a resurrection, a manifestation of a 70’s icon?

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In Another Place.

Stop for a beer.  It’s IPA… India Pale Ale, a beverage that once was the lubricant for the lower orders of the British Raj; a bitter brew that traditionally couldn’t score much above an ABV 3%; hence the ‘pally-ally’ or ‘peely-wally’ appellation.  That’s all changed; now it comes with a kick, but a ‘black’ pale-ale does still seem like a contradiction, whereas the logo of a Shetland pony and the name ‘Blindside’ seems almost appropriate.  IMG_7354It wasn’t just the cartoonist Thelwell who considered the Shetland pony to be a self-opinionated devil incarnate.  I fully concurred with this beer bottle’s subliminal message which I took to be… “never approach a Shetland pony on its blindside: you’ll only get a hoof in a delicate place”.  That, and they don’t come with handlebars or brakes.

The actuality is somewhat more prosaic. This beer’s story refers to the visit of the NZ All-Blacks in ’17.

fullsizeoutput_3df5We’re on a tent camping trip, and whilst the Scottish countryside access code allows for wild camping, it seems churlish to avoid the established sites.  In part because they come not only with a hot shower, but with an ethos that’s been lost in much of the rest of Scotland.  Local community-run campsites operating an honesty box system.  One even has a note stating that the warden won’t be back until a week on Tuesday and that the bantam eggs are £1.40.

In Another Place.

fullsizeoutput_3effHaving taken the obligatory ‘most northerly person in Great Britain…(possibly)… photograph, visibility was somewhat reduced.  Maybe there was someone clinging to the skerries that house the Muckle Fluga light and so potentially negating our momentary claim to fame.  We turn south. 

fullsizeoutput_3e01Back along twisting roads that roll between moor and shore… repeatedly.  Hill lochs with ‘rain goose’, treacle-black waters, fishers’ bothies and respectful drivers.  The latter that are becoming a very noticeable occurrence.  A long curve lies to front, a car approaches from behind, it remains some considerable distance back…. the sight lines elongate…. still it won’t pass.  Maybe they’ve spotted one of the ultra rare red-necked phalaropes or they assume that they’re still driving a ‘single track with passing places’ road and therefore still spooked by the incongruity of such a diminished width of macadam.  Still they don’t approach, so to the gravel verge we head, still no reaction.  Finally a frantic convulsion of arm waving seems to elicit the required response.  Trouble is we are now tyre deep in peaty glaur, and more importantly, stopped…. on an up-hill.  Still, I’m not complaining for these courtesies will soon evaporate if the next ferry is due to leave in five minutes.

In Another Place.

fullsizeoutput_3d99And finally down to the metropolis that is Lerwick.  Capital of the Shetland Isles, with it’s 7000 inhabitants, cruise ship hordes, and wrought-iron railings.  It took a few moments to realise what was different, unusual, not-missing….  all the stone-built late-Victorian mansions along King Harald’s Street still retain their original garden wall railings.  By contrast, look at any comparable building’s wall head in any other British city and you’ll notice the oxy-cut rusted tooth set in a leaded hole; all that is left from the war effort to convert fence palings into aeroplanes.  Unfortunately, Spitfires were made from aluminium and not pig iron.fullsizeoutput_3da5

In Another Place. 

Stuck high up in a box or wedged into the Cromarty Firth, transferred to a different sea; and yet the islands can unashamedly call it’s diminutive town a ‘capital’ and I find it unquestionably accurate.

Is it the fact that you arrive out of the bowels of a boat or the plethora of Nordic Cross flags in places where a Scot’s Saltire Cross might fly?  Or ‘da’ dialect that’s so tantalisingly similar but so evidently different?  Or that island status, one that all islands share; with their watery perimeters, that makes them feel like places apart?  No passport control, and still it still feels like a place Not-Scotland, and yet it’s all so British, albeit with a light patina of Scandi-Norsk washed over it. 

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Which leaves one unanswerable question: why has it taken me several decades to find my way to this ‘Another Place’?

Footnote: Late last year the island’s MSP Tavish Scott raised an amendment to rectify the location depiction aberration.  Now all official government publications have to be geographically correct.  The islands will sit where they’ve always sat, but now freed from that virtual prison, officially and visibly at the hub of a circle that encompasses all Scandinavia, The Faroes, Iceland and Scotland.

Travelling in the Present Tense

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Most times we travel in the present tense. Moving down a street, through a village, across a country in the here and now; all the meaningful interludes in the plaza, at the market stall, by the side of the road, are but present moments in time. For both ‘us’ and ‘other’ there is no past and little future; no yesterday and little tomorrow. All is two dimensional. Little depth. Which can be liberating, for I come with no form, nobody can know my history; there’s a freedom from responsibility, an escape from reputation. But when you make a return visit, depth, and the third dimension floats into place. The photo’ archive, that recording eye, is a potent reminder of what was. Now to find what is.

Such is the case and our return to Uruguay. 

Some things change; some things do not.

We first visited thirteen years ago. Then, it was possible to agree with the adage that on your first day you would see your father’s first car, that an Uruguayan has a Thermos surgically attached to their elbow at birth and that they will take umbrage when the Porteño resident of the Argentine capital refers to Uruguay as their 49th barrio.

Much has changed since we first visited. The heavy goods trucks still haul eucalyptus logs, but they no longer grumble slowly past in a cloud of particulates; nor do you get your groceries individually bagged in a voluminous eco-waste of single-use plastic bags. Nor did I see Dad’s Hillman Hunter; however I did find my first set of wheels.  I’m just not sure roseate pink was ever an Austin production colour. Finding the stretch Fiat 500 was an absurd bonus, and I have little use for a grounded plane. As for Yerba Mate and the attached paraphernalia, it still predominates, and you know when the ferry has docked by the pulse of Argentine cars that race past, heading for their designated beach along the coast. 

Julio is still the caretaker of the house we’re visiting, his hand-shake is still a vice-grip, he still arrives with an armful of hibiscus blooms for la señora; only now, he’s eighty-six.

That much is still a constant.  What is different is a significant increase in cycle travellers. For the geek in the know, if you saw a loaded bike with the panniers with those tell-tale reflective patches, you would assume they would be European, almost certainly Swiss, whereas if they were a family then they would invariably be French. 

Not any more. 

It’s been one of the joys on this trip to see the breadth of nationalities, and in particular, southern Americans, out on the road. Once the guidebook’s advice to cycling visitors was to bring all your spares with you, as the opportunity for purchasing parts would be non-existent. Frankly I felt that was a trifle condescending; we’ve had some very imaginative and durable repairs over the years.  However, now with this increased presence has come a vast change in the quality of componentry. There’s some rather nice kit out there. The bent-wood basket probably doesn’t go with the ethos of macho mountain bike, but I did like the design sentiment.

Forbye the more usual combinations of solo males and millennial couples, there was the Argentine father with his four year old daughter on a recumbent ‘tagalong’, followed by her older sister with a pet poodle in a basket and her mother bringing up the rear. Or there was Carlos and Cristián from Circo Trayecto with their clown’s collection of juggling clubs and a unicycle, away to perform in the middle of another crossroads somewhere between The Caribbean and Cape Horn. Or Juan who is hauling a wooden shed around the world, and this chap with a surfboard, riding south from Brazil. And then there is the Kumtrú touring club whose motto is: ‘eat a lot: cycle a little’, and who asked: “have you ever met so many fat cyclists?”. Who then they feed us vast plates of spaghetti.

So we can say with absolute authority, we have never in all our previous tours met so many other cycle travellers as we have this year. 

On occasions we are the “rule to the exception”.

*Note from The Navigator: you may have gathered, we are back in Scotland for a while; the blog may catch up – eventually.

Vignette Viajero #2/2019

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Early May, mellow May, and a southern hemispheric autumn.  A stiff breeze blows from the river and through the elegant dapple-trunked street trees. An early, long light stretches down cobbled lanes, echoing to the soft swish of wind, rasping rattle of wire-tined rakes and the reverberating roar of several two-stroke engines.

A squad of Colonia’s council workers are trying to herd the drifting, falling leaves.  Leaves that are in league with Wind.

Wind the contrarian.

Wind the schizophrenian.

Wind the tactician.

Wind which divides its forces and advances down the same street from both ends.  A pincer move worthy of any storm twister.

I’m wandering up and down the narrow cobblestoned calles, hoping that the parked modern car that was interfering with a possible photograph, or the Instagrammer who had insistently monopolised that pink wall yesterday, have all moved on.  I’m on the hunt for further pictures to add to several ongoing projects.

Wind: that most challenging of the elements to capture.  Given its near-ubiquitous presence on this trip, there’s been notable opportunities.  I’ve had the chances, the ingredients for an elemental drama have been plentiful, only to be found unprepared.  That inverting umbrella, or the dog who’s chasing a surf-kiter (instead of a cyclist) through the water.  Or it might have been the Navigator’s cycling 30° cant and her sudden slew across the carriageway in Tierra del Fuego.  Only had I suggested a re-play there might have been a major difference of opinion; safer to photograph road signage, wall-paintings or ghost-trails.

And then I find myself being pursued by a swirling cloud of herded leaves.

I’ve found today’s project.

Wind awake, turn the next corner to find that the national flag is ripping taut on a high banner pole with an interesting picture possibility.

Uruguay’s flag; in the idioma of vexillologists is: ‘a fly of nine equal bars horizant; alternate white, blue; a hoist canton carrying the charge ‘Sun of May’ resplendent on a field of white.

Pictures, like maps save a thousand words.

Now the challenge: can I align the Sol of Cosmos with the Sun of May?  But the banner’s shadow is creeping across wet rocks, rocks that are being washed by the rising tide and travelling out on to the River Plate.

It was a close call, but I’m still dry-shod and unembarrassed, as only the scavenger dogs got to watch the teetering, crouching crazy gringo.

*Note from The Navigator:

Those of you paying attention will have noticed that we are actually back home now, for a little while.  The blog may catch up with us, eventually.