2020 was set to be a year full of travels – I had Malta and France already planned out, other ideas in the pipeline, and was hoping to return to Australia towards the end of the year. And then this little pandemic happened. Emails started trickling in cancelling flights, accommodation bookings, and dreams. With a travel restriction of 5 miles in place, it started looking like this would be the first year where I didn’t go anywhere – quite a horrible thought. But thankfully around the beginning of July that was lifted, and while getting out of the country was still fairly difficult, we were at least allowed to travel around Scotland.
I’m a little ashamed to say that despite having lived here for most of my life, I haven’t really been to many places in Scotland. So when my boyfriend mentioned doing the North Coast 500 – a 500 mile road trip around the northern coastline of the country – I figured this was finally my chance to see some of my home turf.
We had a week (holiday for him, me living the eternal holiday life of furlough), but thought we would give ourselves five or six days of that and just play it by ear. We booked a couple of nights accommodation, packed a tent for the rest of the time, and made a rough plan of places we would like to see, but wanted to keep it pretty flexible.
The most solid part of our plan was that on the first day we would drive to Fort William and climb Ben Nevis. My logic was that if we were going to sit in a car for a few days I wanted to stretch my legs first. Ha. Having never climbed a Munro before, I clearly had no idea what to expect, and taking on the highest one (1,345 metres) with no training or the right gear was perhaps not entirely sensible.
The drive from Edinburgh was lovely – the sun was shining, we were both excited for the trip ahead, and with the slight easing of lockdown still very recent the roads were quiet. Driving through the Trossachs National Park and Glencoe, the scenery was already getting more and more beautiful and as we got closer to Fort William the impressive Nevis range came in to view.
By the time we got to Fort William, stopped at the supermarket and made our way to the foot of the mountain it was 1pm. The sun was shining as we set off and I started to regret having brought a jacket and spare trousers with me. We sped up the first hour or so, spurred on by overhearing someone we passed say that we were already about halfway. Because of the cloud, we couldn’t see the top and so never had any idea how far up we had to go; But what we could see didn’t look that high, and we definitely got cocky. At times I was practically running up, and Alex had to keep telling me to slow down and pace myself.
After another half hour or so, my excitement and energy levels began to fade. This coincided with us hitting the cloud. Gone were the beautiful views and nice man-made path, replaced with cold, rainy clouds and treacherous gravely slopes. The next hour was just focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and trying to quiet my thoughts of wanting to give up. Every time a bit of cloud cleared and we saw a peak higher up than what we had previously thought was the summit, my heart sank.
At one point we reached a huge, icy bank of snow. There was a small group of people gathered at the bottom trying to figure out how to get up it and at that point I realised how ill-prepared we were. We carried on though, managing not to fall. Some time past there I really considered giving up. I’m not a quitter, but this just seemed like it was never going to end. The rain was pelting in our faces, every part of my body was frozen and in pain, and for all we knew we still had another few hours to go; The average time to get to the top is four hours and we had been climbing for just over two.
With a bit of encouragement and a snack break I managed to keep going and shortly after we found ourselves climbing through what felt like a barren wasteland in the clouds. Cairns emerged out of the thick fog to mark our way and the ground started to level off – and just like that, we had made it. We were the only people on top of the highest mountain in the country, and it had only taken us two and a half hours to get there.
As we started heading down my spirits lifted – slightly. I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold but at least we were on the way down now. That’s not to say it was easy though, especially for me and my notoriously dodgy ankles. Once we were back below cloud level we had some (almost frozen) victory chocolate before continuing to almost run down as fast as we dared. Nearer the bottom we each had one pretty bad fall, as we got more tired and our coordination got worse. But by 6pm we were back in the car park, elated, exhausted, and soaked to the skin. It had somehow taken us exactly the same time to get down as up.
Knowing that we would be exhausted we had booked a hotel for the night. Fort William is a small place so the options were limited as it were, but Covid had made that even worse. We had booked the Berkeley House Hotel which had great reviews, but unknown to us had just been taken over by new owners who were definitely not keeping it up to previous standards. I think we were both so happy just to have a hot shower that we didn’t care at first, but it was pretty dire.
Warm, dry and suddenly ravenous, we walked over to the high street to find a place for dinner. Pubs and restaurants had only opened the week before but many were still closed, and the few that were open were already full. We found one though and the promise of a hot meal kept us going through the 45 minute wait for a table while we sat in the pub next door. When it came time for our sitting, we ordered, ate and were on to dessert within half an hour of being there – safe to say we were hungry!
Without a doubt it was one of the most physically challenging things I’ve ever done; but the feeling of achievement (and the week of pain to follow!) was worth it.
STARRY NIGHTS, CITY LIGHTS 