here, there, everywhere

Though anyone who knows me knows I'm not much of a hiker (or a _____ fill in the athletic pursuit of your choice here), but I was somewhat encouraged by the way the guidebook made it sound totally do-able (only an hour!); the sign at the entry to the mountain said the same thing. It turns out both lied - to climb the mountain, you have to sign in and out, and we checked on the way back out - no one did it in anything resembling an hour. Also what the guidebooks didn't mention is that the climb is @$*&!ing terrifying and dangerous, particularly if you're bad with heights: there are times when the path is just a scramble of steep rocks with a sheer drop into nothingness on the side, with an occasional metal rope to cling to. I developed a very unhealthy relationship with the many metal ropes - it was nice having something to hold on to, but seeing one inevitably meant the path was going to get much worse.

I kept flashing back to this sign the higher we got. 

This is the path while it was still humane. After that, I didn't take any photos because I am a big baby and was honestly too freaked out to do anything but climb, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it's scary (also steep and pretty hard work - we took a lot of breaks, and passed a lot of people taking breaks, my favorite being the woman who was muttering stupid Incas as we went by). 

This is the view down - that tiny pile of rocks to the left there is Machu Picchu! I love this view in photo form, but at the time all I wanted to do was get back onto solid ground. In retrospect - safely on the ground a week later - of course I'm glad we did the hike, but it definitely wasn't a fun experience while it was happening, and not something I might have chosen to do had I known what it would be like. Oh well. At least I'm not alone? 

Once at the top, you're free to climb around the ruins themselves as much as you want.

So for the first few days, the weather in the Orkneys looked like looked like the photos I posted below. The rest of the days looked like this:

The first day of un-pristine weather began innocently enough (see ridiculous sunrise above); I woke up early and took the bus to the Tingwall ferry so I could go to the small island of Rousay, which is home to a wide variety of ruins ("You're the first passenger to Tingwall I've had all week," said the busdriver, though I didn't take much warning from this since I was also the only passenger on the bus for most of the ride). The ferry itself was tiny, with about 80 lifejackets for the three of us onboard ("odd time of year to go to Rousay," said the ferryman), a copy of the New Testament and Psalms and a coffee machine; I had planned on renting a bike when I got to the island, though there weren't any signs of life anywhere (the Visitors Center next to the ferry was dark but unlocked). I walked a bit up the hill and found a sign that said BIKE RENTALS tacked to a trailer containing bikes, but when I followed the directions taped in the window, I found only an empty and apparently abandoned-for-the-season farm with ducks and chickens who scattered and hid behind rusted barn equipment, so I went back to the main road and decided just to hike for the day, since it was only about 4 miles to the furthest archeological site I wanted to see.

There is definitely something both sort of awesome and yet deeply unsettling about walking all alone down the only road in sight on a tiny island where you have yet to see another human. After a few minutes it started to rain lightly, and I found the first of the various neolithic funeral cairns (it is still weird to me that you can just open the gates to these things and walk inside; I kept feeling like I was trespassing but the sign merely said Please shut the gate behind you); inside it was cramped, with a tiny ladder descending into an even darker second level.

I wish I could say I was cool enough to have waited out a rainstorm in a cairn, but after a few minutes I started to get slightly creeped out at the thought of hanging out in what basically amounts to a grave (and where the map of the tomb included little marks where they had found bodies) and decided to just keep walking. By the time I got to the second cairn, it was raining much harder and I think I would have been able to get over my fear of graves if I had been able to open the door (which was metal and heavy and along the top of the mound). At this point I was soaking wet and getting cold, so - ignoring the pitying stares of the sheep - I turned back around, hiked down the road and hung out in the abandoned visitor's center till the Pier Restaurant opened (the woman looked utterly horrified when I crawled in and pathetically asked for coffee while a puddle of rainwater collected at my feet). Fortunately the next ferry came not long after that, and the guy who took my ticket was kind enough to get his friend to give me a ride back into town, since there weren't any buses for that particulary ferry.

Anyway, not a particularly exciting story but hey, look, I got to actually combine all the words in the blog-title that I hastily made up way back in my little cube at work. I do really, really wish I could have spent more than two hours on Rousay, but maybe this just means I'll have to come back someday. At any rate, it is late and I'm heading out early to Wales tomorrow, so goodnight :)