Day 9: Inverness, Portree

A bit of a long day, with a bunch of driving, walking, and dealing with painful customer service. I’ve been getting around with Optus international roaming, at $5/day it’s a bit expensive but has convenience. They also recently changed it from the kind of clunky charging by the week or day, to now charging by the day with auto activation. So every day I’ve been getting a text message to tell me my roaming has been activated for another day. Except today, the messages all said they couldn’t process payment. I’m not full of cash, but know that my accounts can handle $5. Tried another account, no luck. A third, nothing. At this point I start talking with customer service, as it’s clearly not an account issue, something may be stuffed with their billing side of things. Then I proceeded to get a full runaround and piles of BS, something about an outage preventing connection. Compounding my frustration is that I’m relying on the phone as my primary means of payment, thanks to the fucker who ripped off my old card (I still haven’t had that transaction refunded, either), but at least have some cash on me.Eventually, after 12 hours of different suggestions to fix, a hundred restarts, and a sacrifice to the telecommunications deities, one wonderful rep suggested I send two SMSs and that should trigger the roaming to commence. I don’t know why, as every other suggestion to trigger this failed, but the messages worked. I now have a phone.

We took “the top road” from Inverness to Portree, not the top top road across the very top of Scotland, but via Dingwall, Contin, Grudie, Knockban, and all the other wonderful places the A832 and A890 have to offer, before ending up at Eilean Donan Castle, as seen in Highlander, The World is Not Enough, and many other films. I’m pretty sure that Eilean Donan is Gaelic for “can’t drive, can’t park, and I don’t fucking care” as that would certainly describe far too many of the arseholes we encountered in the carpark.

Eilean Donan also has the Clan MacRae WW1 Roll of Honour, listing all the MacRae’s known to have perished in that war, from all countries/regiments. As it turns out, the writer of “In Flanders Fields” was Lt Col John MacRae and is quoted on the memorial. It’s a pretty castle, we didn’t go inside, opting instead for the cheap tickets to wander around the castle grounds.

For lunch we headed to what seemed to be the nearest place open, right along the waterfront in Kyle of Lochalsh, a little bothy. Went with the BLT, and had the best chips so far in Scotland, this place does the double with a pre-cook first, and it shows, full of wonderful crunch. The BLT was pretty good too.

Then it was on to Skye, across the bridge that happily is no longer a toll bridge leased to the Bank of America. Skye is basically one big postcard after another, lots of striking hills and glens, rivers, waterfalls, cows and sheep. What isn’t on the postcard are the roads, many are narrow, single lane with almost as many potholes as passing places, and as it’s a long weekend in the UK, add to the equation almost as many drivers who don’t know how to use passing places or be courteous to other road users. In only a few driving hours, we’ve encounter all manner of dickhead, and sadly there isn’t a common country, gender, car-type, or age of driver that can group the worse offenders. Except possibly the motor-home crew, they seem to be particularly oblivious to other road users.

After a quick check-in and a long attempt to talk to Optus, we met for dinner at the Isles Inn, a decent small pub that does some local beer and substantial food portions. Like many pubs we’ve encountered in Scotland, they don’t do reservations, so it’s turn up and hope. There are also a lot of businesses not open this weekend, even though there are a lot of tourists about. At the Isles Inn I had the fish and chips, a decent chunk of well deepfried fish, along with some good (but not double cooked) chips.

From here we went out to the fairy pools, which is really just a long chain of waterfalls so it’s no surprise this was on the list of must see things for the waterfall couple. The pools/waterfalls are beautiful and the whole huge glen that has these is also stunning, decent sized peaks with interesting shapes. Having done a huge amount of walking since this holiday began, averaging over 11,000 thousand steps a day, I took a few moments to dip my tired feet in the rather cool water (hopefully this will also be good for my ankles, as these are a little swollen).

As a reward for all the walking, we popped into The Old Inn for a drink, I had the local black ale which was wonderfully malty. The malty flavours are prominent, while hops don’t dominate, it’s a good drink. The Inn is down the road from Tallisker distillery, so we stopped in the carpark for a few pics. We may try to pop in tomorrow if the visitor centre takes random visitors, Also for tomorrow is a bunch more walking up and down hills.