South, south, south: John O' Groats to London, Part II.

So here I was, prepared with a sheet of cardboard which I had gathered in Thurso the day before and armed with a felt pen I got back in Inverness. In big capital letters I spelt out "SOUTH" on it and stood there by the side of the road next to the only junction around. I had all my hopes and expectations up: whoever was going to John O' Groats or back, or, in fact, anywhere up here, had to pass by me.

Duncansby Stacks near Duncansby Head

But as time went on the only thing passing by seemd to be, well, time. After an hour or so and only two cars, who gave me nothing but a short gaze, I decided I might as well just start walking back on my own. And so I collected my rucksack and any left over enthusiasm from the ground and started walking down the A99, maybe I would have more luck once I reached the next village. I should be disappointed, all the -wicks and -gills and -towns on my map were nothing but small hamlets, collections of a few houses by the road, and so traffic didn' increase much for the first hours of my walk. "What a great start for my days as a hitchhiker" I thought as I kept on letting my head drop only to effortfully push it up with every passing car in order to present my more or less painfully smiley face - it didn't even matter if these were travelling in my direction, I just hoped that, whoever had a reason to come up here, might as well have one to come back down again. About hitchhiking I had been advised by several people who were highly experienced with this, that the utmost importance in hitching a ride should be given to looking positive and well scented - though for the latter I neither did nor do now have any idea as to how one should "look" the part. Anyhow, I kept myself busy wondering about the difference it could make out here if I was to be accompanied by a fridge¹ - not much I suppose. Just as I was about to take a seat on the grass by the road and boost my energies with some bread it happened. A car, it stopped, right there next to me. I was being rescued from the uncertain seas of this black road²!

It is wonderous how much faster it is to travel by car, not just in actual time but in what you perceive. Still when it had taken me half a day to walk from Penzance to Land's End I felt this was quick, now on this lonely road and with this monotoneous landscape it was not even noon and already I felt I had taken twice as long to walk but short of half the distance. When it only took around fifteen minutes by car now I would easily have taken another two to three hours to get to Wick. The old chap who gave me a ride made the journey much shorter with a good, grandfatherly conversation and his tale of a short spell of hitchhikeing when he himself was a young man like myself - but well, for now this was enough shopping for memories as we arrived at the supermarket in Wick and he was only going to get some groceries and then head back to one of these anonymous little houses on the way back to John O' Groats. I positioned myself next to the cemetery, where the A99 was now appropriately named "South Road". It turned out that most traffic here would rather head for the dead than the Angles, but it was not all that long before a plain white articulated lorry stopped by the side of the road. Once seated in the over-engine cab I felt a little like sitting on top of the world - this whole lorry business reminded me much of these happy childhood days when my uncle, who was a lorry driver, once allowed me to come with him for a delivery he made to Luxembourg and the heroic feeling a young boy as I was it back then has when being aboard something big, loud and powerful like a lorry, especially when loaded with something mechanically complicated and overwhelmingly industrial such as a hydraulic press. With similarly child-like interest I began to examine the drivers seemingly true Scottish accent. After all the days I had spent here now this was the first time that I met a man who's accent, not voice, sounded as rough as one could imagine the wind scourge these lands in a storm. And I should not be disappointed with my interest in his Scottishness as half way to his home-town Inverness he abruptly stopped our slightly obscure conversation about women and free-of-charge internet pornography (what a true trucker, not a lorry driver!) to get on the radio and start speaking Scots with one of his colleagues who had just passed by us. Their chat was pretty much the same though, and I didn't mind. I just sat there smiling and admired their Doricness for a while, and so we got to Inverness late afternoon.

Since it had been a long day and I knew where to find a good hostel for the night and even some of its inhabitants, I flirted with the thought of getting some rest and well deserved meal. On the other hand, the hitchhiking was going well now, the last lift was for spirits as much as for way and there was still well over two hours of daylight left. I reckoned I could try my luck and wrote "Perth" on the backside of my cardboard sheet. Surely someone would pick me up on this busy dual carriageway down south. Not so.

¹For an account of comedian Tony Hawks travelling around Ireland with a small refridgerator as part of a bet, see Tony Hawks. 1999. Round Ireland with a Fridge. London: Ebury Press.
²The A99 alongside which I was walking was rated one of Britains most dangerous roads by count of accidents just before I left London.
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North, north, south: John O' Groats to London, Part I.

London-Land's End-John O' Groats-London: Done. I am home (home?), back in London after almost three months now. Still pretty worked up and not quite out of wonderland yet, the last days were dramatically slow progress and almost too fast to cope travel home at the same time. After leaving Inverness I made my way to Wick and from there took a bus to Thurso where I stayed in a actually very nice hostel - extremely quiet and peaceful, just as you would expect from a place so remote. Early in the morning then I set off for John O' Groats: final stop.

John O' Groats

I was just in time to witness the sunrise overlooking the harbour towards Orkney - what a spectacle. From the three or four houses around not a single soul was up, I was alone with the beauty of the moment and some nearby sheep. When I realised that it would probably stay this way until a bit later in the day I decided that now that I have come so far already I might actually make for the real north-eastern most point and head to nearby Duncansby Head. In doing so I thought I might after claim to have covered the longest cross-distance from two points in Britain and also hoped to get some nice impressions from the coastline, as I was walking on the shell covered beach.

For it only being around one and a half miles from John O' Groats to Duncansby Head, this walk on the beach was most packed with discovery. From the thousands and thousands of white shimmering broken shells lining the coast and the clinking sound they made when treading them to the hollow creaking of the sea working its way up even these shell lined beaches, the rabbits who build their holes in such manner that the whole shoreline looks like an Afghan hiding place for terror rabbits, the ever staring sheep who seem eternally fascinated with you and last but not least the colony of seals you encounter in this one hard-to-reach bay who all men out rush into the sea only to then turn around and be your theatre audience when passing by.

Carcass of the seal I found

Oh, and then there was this rather lucky moment when I almost got my foot stuck into the carcass of a dead seal a bit further along the way, I don't know how but my body subconciously must have realised that this was not a stone as I had thought and in a spooky way forced me to leap over it. How interesting it is that when I took to closer examine the carcass it was completely hollowed only with the skin and bones and whatever there was inside the head, but also without any smell of either rotten flesh or sea. I take it this was the work of seagulls, as someone once told me they were the police of the seas where vultures were their desert colleagues. Finally reaching the lighthouse by Duncansby Head I was offered the spectacular view of the two twin colums of rock split of the shore standing free like a temple to the sea just behind it and enjoying this for a while then made my way back to John O' Groats. It now being a more humane time of day there indeed I met some folks. Mainly people setting over to Orkney on the ferry (a joy that I was , for lack of money, barred from) but also one chap who happened to tingle up and down between Land's End and John O' Groats on his racing bike every now and then, or whenever he had a weekend off, as he said. Well, with their help I told the obligatory picture by the waymarker and then set for the postoffice to send a card to my parents, letting them know that my journey had (almost) come to an end and I was still alive. But now it was time to hitch a ride home!
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