free to be able to rate and comment on reports (as well as access 1:25000 mapping).
- Loch Meavaig from the car park
A couple of weeks ago my partner and I finally got the chance to spend time in the Western Isles - on the list for a while but we'd never got round to it until now. We based ourselves in Harris (Scalpay) for the first five nights, before moving to Lewis (Stornoway) for a couple more. There's not much to do indoors on Harris, so we prayed for good weather... and after two or three days of heavy rain (it was still pouring as we waited for the ferry from Uig on Skye), the clouds parted just as our ferry sailed into Tarbert on Monday afternoon, with consecutive days of sunshine predicted for as far ahead as our weather apps would forecast!
One major snag though - I'd been suffering from a painful foot injury for the last few days, which made it very painful to take shoes on and off, and difficult to walk (or even to stand at times). I'd made my first ever trip to A&E the night before driving up to Harris and was now on a week's course of double strength antibiotics, but I wasn't going to be able to do anything too strenuous for a couple of days at least.
So on Monday late afternoon / evening I was housebound, watching the sun go down out of the window, feeling sorry for myself and imagining all the beaches we could be catching the sunset from. Fortunately by the next morning the antibiotics had started to kick in, my foot looked more like a body part rather than an inflated balloon, and more importantly, it wasn't too painful to walk (carefully).
We decided to venture out to Huisinis, North Harris, with a scenic road leading to a sandy beach. On the drive we stopped numerous times to admire the beautiful scenery...
- Waterfall at Amhuinnsuidhe
...before marvelling at our first (of many) Harris beaches:
- Huisinis
On the way back towards Tarbert, we decided to try the walk to the North Harris Eagle Observatory - a 3-mile return walk, fairly flat and on a good track. Ironically this was pretty much the only day of the week where we didn't spot any eagles, but it's still an interesting walk with some dramatic scenery. Binoculars recommended for scanning the crags from the hide.
I returned to the car with my foot still intact, and we had another leisurely drive back to Tarbert, where a distillery tour awaited (a waste of a sunny day, but it didn't involve much walking). Then... disaster! Our barely-a-year-old camera developed a fault, rendering it totally unusable
We have cameras on our phones, but it was the worst possible time for the camera to break: the start of our holiday, and a trip to St Kilda booked for the day after next...
We tried not to let this latest development spoil a delicious lunch, an excellent distillery tour, or a tranquil sunset on Luskentyre Bay. But (at the risk of sounding like a spoilt brat) it was very frustrating that a much-anticipated holiday, bucket-list trip to St Kilda and a miraculously perfect weather forecast was threatening to be marred by my injury and lack of a decent camera. And we reckoned Harris was just about the worst place to be based if you need a camera to be fixed quickly!
First-world problems of course, and of course we were lucky to be here at all. I'll post about the rest of the week in the coming days, and you can read all about my injury and the camera crisis in the next installment
>> next day: Lewis whistlestop tour