Wayfarers' Scotland 2

Yay! The second part of my hiking trip! I left off where I was about to climb Beinn Dorain. The first half of the group dropped us off outside an Inn, and after a somewhat unpleasant encounter with a local guy in a van muttering angrily at us, we set off. We being myself and three of the guys from the group. Not a large party on this one!

Almost as soon as we started up the mountain base the weather took a turn for the worse. Plus there was snow on the ground from the beginning rather than us reaching it at a higher altitude. Snow is better than slush though, because slush just leaves your feet soaking wet.

Very quickly into the hike we realized that there were many dips and streams that could not be seen from the surface, which resulted in a few moments of a person falling through up to their waists. This only happened to me once thankfully. There was, of course, a lot of the more minor falling through the snow up to your thigh situations, and those happened quite a lot. Now, the thing about me is, whenever I am surprised I make this sort of weird, but brief, shrieking noise. It is almost like a yip, but a little more intense. Anyways whenever that happened the guys would think I had hurt myself or something and stopped to ask if I was okay. *The shame*. I tried to keep a control on that x.x.

So very quickly I realized that I might had made a mistake. My legs were already extremely worn out, and we had barely started! It was then I knew I was in for a rough ride.....

The weather really was on and off in terms of visibility, however what was always on was the wind. The wind was crazy! The above picture was us looking up the mountain...
and this is from the same spot looking back down. Luckily it never got nearly as bad as it had been on Monday. We could always see a fair distance around us, so we didn't get lost. The funny part of this experience was this hiker that followed us up the mountain. At first he had charged past us, but then realized we had a better grip on the path than he did, and he just followed us from a distance. However once we got to the point where things started to get pretty steep, we took a break for a few minutes. He then decided to go on past us and ended up going the completely wrong way, turning around and going back down the mountain. He didnt even make it very close to the top!

We stopped for lunch on a rather frozen rock, which thankfully was short, before heading on up. Now, my memories from this part of the hike are very few. The ones I do have are very white, and involve a lot of pain. My calves were on fire, which was to be expected, but for some reason my hip was also in agony, like someone had put a hot coal right in there and it burned me whenever we climbed. Extremely unpleasant.
 I mean, my God just look at that! It was absolutely incredible. I could not believe that I was in that spot at that moment to see this.
Even in the other direction, which was largely obstructed by clouds, there was a hidden treasure.

Now, there was a visible peak right in front of us that we assumed was the last one. As the boys headed on up to that peak, I was suddenly struck by the moment....haha no. I ran out of oxygen at the high altitude and started to hyperventilate. That was a scary few minutes. I eventually managed to stop doing that and catch up with the others, but it was definitely not something I enjoyed. Of course, after that moment of thinking I was going to pass out on top of this mountain, the peak we had been walking towards turned out to not be the real peak. I wasn't even surprised at that point, just disappointed.

THIS was the real peak.
I made this picture super big so you could see what was between us and that peak. It was a massive snow drift that looked like it was about to crumble into an avalanche at any moment. I was pretty vocal about the fact that I did not want to cross it. In fact, I had made up my mind that if they had insisted on trying to cross it, I would refuse and wait there for them to come back. They checked the way across out and discovered it was covered in a layer of ice which made it almost impossible to walk on, so luckily it was decided dying was not worth it!  I mean, we were practically at the same height as the peak, maybe only 10m lower, so I did not consider it that big of a deal.

Now the trip back down was dare I say it, almost fun! Why you ask? Well quite a bit of it involved us sliding for 50-70m on our butts down the mountain. We would actually go quite fast and it was a lot of fun, plus much easier on the legs, to do!
This is one of the sections we slid down. Obviously those are foot prints, but right before that we had slid all the way down that part of the mountain. And somehow my pants did not rip at all!

The rest of the way down was fairly uneventful. I was pretty cold and wet by the time we got back, and generally in pain. After we met up with the rest of the group back at the Inn, we headed back. I was determined to take the rest of the trip easy. I was happy that I accomplished what I did that day, and that I had pushed myself to do it, but I wasn't willing to do it again x.x.

The next day, of course, the whole of the group wanted to do a big mountain climb. Thanks to the vocal-ness of myself a few others, however, a low level hike was arranged. This easy hike once again had only four participants on it. It was completely different group than the one I had been up the mountain with the day previously, mind you, but I was happy for it because these particular people I had not had a lot of time to talk to, and that day turned out to be the perfect day for talking!

We decided to stay in the area around our base, and left walking straight from our trailers. It was gorgeous outside! It was so warm, the sun was shining! I could not believe how nice it was.
That mountain on the right of the photo? Well the taller peak is where we were supposed to go on Monday, and the shorter one next to it is where we had ended up....whoops! Our walk on Thursday involved a lot of tiny country roads that went through sheep and cattle fields. The sheep had their little lambs, and the cows had little calves!
After that we stuck to the roads, and eventually ended up in a tiny village where I sent the postcards I had been carrying around with me all week. We decided to walk out to the docks of the village on Loch Etive.
 There wasn't much left of the docks to be honest, but it was still pretty cool!
From where we were, we could actually see our trailers on the other side of the loch, so we just followed the shore back around. There was one perilous bit where we had to cross a rather large tributary. We all got our feet wet, but it didnt matter because we were right back at the trailers. We spent the evening relaxing in the heated apartment, where we discovered from the other group that their hike had taken a  horrible turn, and it took them 6 hours to get down the mountain! They did not return till nearly 8 at night! When they got back we had a rather wet BBQ in the rain, and went to bed a bit after.

The last day was not a hiking day at all! We went into the town of Oban to explore. Now, apparently there is a rather famous whiskey distillery in Oban that everyone wanted to check out. Everyone except me. I know, I am such a killjoy. So while everyone went to do that, I went shopping! Woooo! There was a bookstore I spent a lot of time in, and at another shop I got this really nice pair of gloves for only four pounds! Eventually I did wander my way up to this famous distillery and took a look inside. I ended up buying a postcard for myself and some whiskey fudge for my friends back in Birmingham. Later, while I was in a local information store, I got a phone call from my German crew for me to come meet up with them, which I did at a coffee shop where we hung out until it was time to meet up with everyone else for dinner. We had a really fun conversation about my German ancestry during that time, and they invited me to come to Germany to explore where my family came from! Very exciting :D

We ended up having dinner at this Italian restaurant right on the harbor. Don't know why we went with Italian, but my meal was really good, so I didn't mind. Plus the view was amazing. I was facing the wall of windows out over the ocean and got to watch the sun set. After dinner we headed back to the trailers to get some sleep before our trip back the next day.