The whole group rises from the ocean, high and precipitous, surrounded by wall of lofty rocks, imposing on account of their wild aspect and the deep bays and gulfs which separate them from each other. The cliffs, in many cases, are so perpendicular, that the boats are let down by ropes, whilst the sailors clamber up the sides by holes cut in the rocks. From the top of these walls, which are as smooth as if artificially built, a stone may be dropped into the sea 800 or 1000 feet below.

An Historical And Descriptive Account Of Iceland, Greenland, And The Faroe Islands; With Illustrations Of Their Natural History (1840)

The Faeroes are a mountainous archipelago that rises from the Atlantic about halfway between Scotland and Iceland. They’re small, as a comparison with a map of Scotland shows, and home to only about 50,000 people.

They’re a Danish dependency, and the inhabitants tend to be trilingual in Faeroese, Danish and English. Faeroese (like Icelandic) is a descendant of Old Norse. It didn’t come to be written down until the 19th century, and it had the misfortune to have its alphabet created by an etymologist—its spelling honours the original sounds of Old Norse, rather than the spoken sounds of the language. The capital Tórshavn is pronounced something like TOE-ish-hown; the village of Gjógv is somewhere between dshegv and tshekf; and Viðareiði comes out as VEE-a-rai-yuh. (All those links take you to the Forvo site, where you can listen to Faeroese people pronouncing the names. From here on, I’ll just link each placename to its pronunciation at Forvo, for your education, amusement and/or bafflement.)

And, while we’re on spelling, I have to confess that I’m in something of a minority when I write Faeroes. A search of the Google Ngram corpus suggests that the spelling I was taught as a kid in the 1960s has never been particularly popular, and that nowadays Faroes dominates by a factor of about two:

But I just can’t bring myself to write Faroes, because it always looks like the first syllable should be pronounced far, which in my Scottish accent is a very long way from the first syllable of the archipelago’s name.

Anyway, we spent a week there with a hired car recently. The flight from Edinburgh takes about an hour, and the car-hire process at Vágar is almost alarming rapid. (The Faeroese have a pretty relaxed attitude to rules and regulations. The fence around the port area in Tórshavn carries a sign bearing the non-committal warning “Trespassers Can Be Prosecuted”.)

Our winding route around the northern islands is marked in red on the map above, with tunnels dotted and a ferry route dashed. The islands are essentially long narrow mountain ridges, separated by flooded valleys. Most of the landscape seems to slope at forty-five degrees, or more:

The roads either follow the coast, zig-zag furiously up and down the mountainsides, or dive into tunnels. Some tunnels pass under the sea to connect neighbouring islands; some penetrate through the mountains to take you from once coast to the other. Some of the older tunnels are exactly the width of one vehicle, and unlit—you avoid oncoming traffic by slipping into passing places scooped out of the rock wall at infrequent intervals, each of them marked by a small sign that’s extremely difficult to discern against the glare of oncoming headlights. You’ll appreciate that we were a little too distracted by the horror of our predicament to take photographs at the time, but I’ve clipped an example from Google Street View to give you the idea. Below is the entrance to a tunnel that’s two kilometres long, along which traffic flows continuously in both directions. And it doesn’t get any wider beyond the entrance.

There’s so little flat ground available that there’s very little farming beyond the raising of sheep, and the grass to feed the sheep.

Beyond the closely space islands connected by bridges or undersea tunnels, the Faeroes are linked by a network of ferries. Plying between small islands in a big ocean, the ferries brave North Atlantic swell, and then push through the breakers to enter tiny harbours. The Faeroese lounge around looking bored during all this, while the tourists clutch the furniture with white knuckles.

Here’s a little video of what it’s like aboard the Mykines ferry, on what was reported to be a pretty average day:

All that steep ground makes for dramatic waterfalls. For our first few days in the Faeroes, we’d keep pulling over to the side of the road and gawping. Pretty soon we wouldn’t even get out of the car for a drop less than a hundred metres.

And everywhere, tiny communities seem to be wedged between the mountains and the sea:

The traditional Faeroese architecture involved turf roofs and tarred wooden walls, and they still appear in many places:

They even turn up in the cosmopolitan capital Tórshavn. You can see a couple below at extreme left of frame, on the brightly painted waterfront:

Many of these old buildings nowadays host government offices:

And, like every Scandinavian country we’ve ever visited, the Faeroes have a dramatic line in public statuary:

What else can I tell you? The Faeroese like their meat well-aged, which produces a number of aromatic and strong-tasting dishes. They eat whale—from past experience in Greenland, the meat has an unimpressive generic mammalian taste, and the blubber is unchewable, let alone swallowable. But in contrast to many small and steadfastly carnivorous nations, their restaurants produce tasty vegetarian dishes that go well beyond the customary limp lettuce and two tomatoes. if you’re Scottish, you will appreciate the presence, in the smallest of grocer’s shops, on the remotest of islands, of Tunnock’s Tea Cakes, Caramel Wafers, and Barr’s Irn Bru. (If you’re not Scottish, you may prefer whale blubber, or to go hungry, or to die. It’s up to you.)

The weather? Well, we’re in the North Atlantic, just south of the Arctic Circle. Sometimes it’s cold. Sometimes it rains. Dress warmly. Take waterproofs.

Random linguistic anecdote: We ordered a couple of packed lunches one day, asking for one to be vegetarian. They were handed over marked vegetar and kylling. I assumed kylling was an admirably frank Faeroese word for the opposite of vegetarianism, something like the forthright manner in which Germans call veal Kalbfleisch (“calf meat”). But it turns out they’d been labelled in Danish: “vegetarian” and “chicken”.

I do this a lot—it’s a sort of hyper-alertness for tit-bits of linguistic interest. I once deduced that the Swahili word for “bank” was tuo, after I saw this printed in large capital letters on the glass door of a bank in Nairobi. It wasn’t until I passed the other glass door, labelled IN, that I realized I’d been looking at OUT printed on the opposite side of the glass.
And then there was my transient conviction that kioo was a word meaning “toilet” in one of Zambia’s several languages—I’d seen it on a notice pinned to the door of a public toilet in Kitwe. I hypothesized some link to Swahili choo, which really is a word for “toilet”. But the Zambians I spoke to were unable to identify the language for me. So I walked past the sign again, to check that I’d read it properly … and realized that it  actually read “K100”. Which meant the charge for admission was 100 Kwacha (at that time the equivalent of a few pence in British money).

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May’s always a good time to visit the west coast of Scotland. This time, we had a pleasantly sunny stay on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, north of Mull. The main road in Ardnamurchan is the B8007, a classification that pretty much says it all—it’s a winding single-track with passing places, which sticks largely to the shore of Loch Sunart to the south. Occasional unclassified ribbons of pot-holed tarmac branch off to serve communities on the north side of the peninsula. (The TripAdvisor posters who describe the North Coast 500 route as “demanding driving” would have a nervous breakdown if confronted by a few miles of “Ardnamurchan unclassified”.)

Ardnamurchan is supposedly good pine marten country, and the Boon Companion came equipped with pine marten bait—strawberry jam and raisins. She smeared this confection on one of the stones outside our cottage, and I set up a motion-detector camera trap to photograph whatever came by. No pine martens eventuated, but something came and ate the bait during the night, after I’d taken in the camera. There then ensued a three-way tussle between me, the camera software, and the phantom jam-eater. I’ll show you the final result (obtained on our last night) at the end of this piece.

Ardnamurchan is also good Sea Eagle territory, and we had a little more success with those than with the pine martens. The first sighting was at Castle Tioram, on Loch Moidart.

While others admired the castle, I noticed something that looked like an improbably airborne barn door circling overhead. The silhouette alone was convincing, but a quick look with the binoculars confirmed the white tail. Later, we spotted another during a boat trip near Mull, and the Boon Companion managed to capture a telephoto view after it had landed.

We also finally managed to make it to the Ardnamurchan lighthouse, which we’ve sailed past on several occasions, but never visited. It’s quite a striking granite object, supposedly built “in the Egyptian style”—certainly a change from the usual bland, white-painted column.

One day, we joined a small tour boat at Kilchoan, which took us around the west coast of Mull, to Staffa and the Treshnish Isles.

Staffa is famous for its basalt columns and Fingal’s Cave, the strange acoustics of which supposedly inspired Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overture.

The Boon Companion and I have distinct memories of landing on Staffa by clambering over the side of a small boat, stepping directly on to the basalt—so we were publicly disappointed (and secretly pleased) to discover that Staffa now boasts its own jetty.

The grassy plateau of Staffa was positively teeming with visitors who’d made the journey over from Fionnphort on Mull, so we were glad to find a bit of peace and quiet at our next landing place—the island of Lunga in the Treshnish Isles. No jetty there—our boat attached itself to a floating pontoon, which it then rammed firmly up the sloping rocky beach so that everyone could disembark.

The Boon Companion immediately settled down to photograph Lunga’s 3000 puffins, which were strolling around on the cliff edge, bill-tapping and excavating their burrows, apparently completely oblivious to their human visitors:

Puffins make a marvellous little self-satisfied musical croak once they’re safely settled into their burrows, and we found ourselves surrounded by these pleasant murmurings. Here’s a sample from xeno-canto. (The call is heard a few seconds from the start of the recording below. There’s no point in listening after that, because it isn’t repeated.)

After a while, I trotted off to stretch my legs by climbing to Lunga’s 103m highest point, Cruachan, which (despite its humble height) gives spectacular views along the length of the Treshnish archipelago. This view looks southwest towards Bac Mor, which is more commonly known as the Dutchman’s Cap, for reasons that will be evident if you enlarge the image:

Finally, the pesky jam-eater. On my first nocturnal attempt to photograph it, using an infra-red flash, I got nothing. On the second attempt, the flash also lit up a wall immediately behind the bait, and all I got was a completely overexposed white image. On the third (and final) night, I managed to get a bright silhouette against a darker background. One more night and I could have got the flash geometry a little better, and offered you a properly exposed image. But it’s still easy enough to see what’s going on:

And a couple of hours later (after the badger had moved the camera), the clean-up squad arrived:

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Back to France again. While we generally prefer to explore new places rather than to return to previous destinations, the Boon Companion and I make an exception for the Côte d’Azur, which we visit regularly for a blink of off-season sunshine. This time we avoided some late snow in Scotland, to bask under clear blue skies in temperatures of 15ºC, which had been unheard-of at home for about six months. And we also managed to avoid being affected by that ancient French Easter tradition, the Strike Of The Air Traffic Controllers.

This time we visited Cagnes-sur-Mer, which lies on the long curve of the Baie des Anges between Nice and Antibes. More specifically, we tucked ourselves away in the mediaeval hill town of Haut-de-Cagnes, which protrudes improbably out of the modern bustle of Cagnes-sur-Mer.

Haut-de-Cagnes is a maze of narrow streets, mostly impassable by car, dotted with friendly restaurants in which (if you arrive early in the evening) the chef may bring the fish of the day to your table so you can cast an eye over it and have a sniff. (The Boon Companion, who is resolutely non-piscivorous, bore this uninvited encounter with a defunct dorade and saint-pierre stoically, and then ordered the pasta.)

A free bus service runs between the Château Grimaldi, at the summit of the village, and the low ground of surrounding Cagnes-sur-Mer. Even with its short wheel-base, the little bus passes round some of the tighter corners in the mediaeval streets with centimetres to spare. From the bus station, a stroll through slightly dilapidated parkland alongside the canalized Cagne River takes you to the coast and one of the French Riviera’s trademark beach promenades.

After a few days in Cagnes, we translocated to one of our favourite hotels in the world, the Royal Riviera, which sits at the neck of Cap Ferrat. It’s quiet and friendly and efficient, and within easy walking distance of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Villefranche-sur-Mer and Beaulieu-sur-Mer, all of which offer a great choice of places to dine, as well as places to sit and watch the world go by.

We wandered up the quiet coastal path to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat most days. It has now been fully restored after the flood damage of a few years ago, and it also afforded a glimpse of a pair of improbable shore birds, scuttering around on the Plage des Fourmis. Black-winged stilts have to be among the most improbable-looking of European birds.

Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat featured prominently in ITV’s quintessentially early-70s TV series The Persuaders! Several episodes were set on the French Riviera, which seemed an impossibly exotic location at the time, and during filming Roger Moore and Tony Curtis stayed at La Voile d’Or, a hotel which still overlooks the little harbour of Saint-Jean.

Having fixated on The Persuaders! during my formative years, I confess I still can’t look at the Saint-Jean marina without John Barry’s classic theme music thundering into my head:

Saint-Jean has also sprouted some more public statuary since we were there last, though I’m not sure why Prince Charles seems to be peering out of a block of concrete overlooking the waterfront.

On our last morning we were up at dawn to catch the early flight home. I’m not much given to mornings, generally, but even I had to confess that it was a beautiful sunrise.

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In the evening, after supper, they entertained us with an Otaheitian dance, which consisted of various writhings and distortions of the body, by no means obscene, yet in no respect pleasant.

Edinburgh Philosophical Journal (1820) Vol.III No.VI Art.XXII.—Extract from the Journal of Captain HENRY KING of the Elizabeth

From the Pitcairns, which I’ve described in my last couple of posts, we sailed on into the unfashionable end of French Polynesia. The famous resort islands (Tahiti, Mo’orea, Bora Bora) are all in the Society Islands in the west—but we sneaked in from the east, into the outlying archipelagos of the Gambiers, the Tuamotus and the Marquesas. On the way, we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, finally getting into the tropics proper; and we changed time zone again, arriving in the Gambiers at GMT-9.

Our first stop was in Mangareva, which is the origin of Pitcairn’s quarterly supply boats, and the Pitcairners’ closest access to an airport ( a mere 500 kilometres away).

Mangareva is a large island surrounded by a broad lagoon, which is dotted with smaller peaked islands, and fringed by a reef and several long, narrow coral motu. The airport runway occupies pretty much the whole of one of these flat motu, Totegegie. We came ashore in our Zodiacs at a proper harbour (which was a first!) and strolled into what felt like the teeming metropolis of Rikitea, home to about a thousand people.  Rikitea sits tucked under the old volcanic summit of Mount Duff, and hosts (unexpectedly, it must be said) the largest church in the South Pacific, St Michael’s Cathedral.

Next stop was in the Tuamotus, involving another clock change to GMT-10, on which most of French Polynesia operates. Our landing was on the isolated atoll of Puka-Puka, with just 150 inhabitants. The local kids had been given the morning off school to come and welcome us ashore with a song and dance performance, so we were greeted with great enthusiasm. And with refrigerated coconuts, which was the single best drinking experience of the whole trip. Chilled coconut milk, directly from the coconut—if I could find the person who invented that, I’d shake them by the hand.

Having lightly clipped the eastern fringes of the flat coral Tuamotus, we were suddenly into the mad volcanic landscapes of the Marquesas. The Marquesas keep half an hour out of step with the generality of French Polynesian clocks, but that just seemed a time change too far, and we stuck with a shipboard time of GMT-10, which would keep us in synchrony with Tahiti, our ultimate destination.

First stop was at Fatu Hiva, where we dropped into the Bay of the Virgins, and found (gasp) some other visitors there already. We were really getting back into mainstream travel destinations, albeit in the form of a few yacht-folk waiting in the Marquesas for a good weather forecast, before committing to the long journey eastwards across the open Pacific. Bay of the Virgins is Baie des Vierges, which is a one-letter name change from the original colonial name of Baie des Verges. My French dictionary would have that as “Bay of Rods”, but in French slang it comes out “Bay of Penises”, supposedly a reference to the improbable basalt spires that flank the bay. Guess who made the name change? Yup, missionaries. In Marquesan the place is called Hana Vave, which seems like it should have been the solution to the problem in the first place.

As a young man, Thor Heyerdahl spent some time on Fatu Hiva with his new wife, attempting to get “back to nature” by living in a poorly constructed hut in the forest. His book describes their inevitable decline into hunger, tropical ulcers, insect infestations and paranoia. The whole idea pretty much put the “Fatu” in fatuous, but it did expose Heyerdahl to the large Marquesan stone carvings that would eventually lead to his interest in Easter Island, and ultimately his (rather misguided) Kon-Tiki expedition.

Hiva Oa next. This island was, at different times, home to the odious Paul Gauguin, and the probably quite nice Jacques Brel, both of whom are buried in the picturesque Calvary Cemetery above the town of Atuona. The town also houses a Gauguin gallery, which I was sure would provide a welcome blast of air-conditioning on a hot and humid day—but the paintings are all reproductions, so no such luck.

In the afternoon we slipped around to the north coast, to visit the archaeological site of Me’ae I’ipona, home of the Marquesan tiki statues that inspired Heyerdahl. They’re all housed under thick thatch roofs, to protect them from the elements, which makes for limited photo opportunities. But the light on Puamau Bay was gorgeous.

Our last Marquesan island  was Nuku Hiva. (You’ll have pieced together by now that hiva is Marquesan for “island”.) Last, but definitely my favourite, for the spectacular scenery and the lovely bay of Hatiheu. We wandered around another archaeological site, this one densely overgrown, where we found yet another endangered endemic bird, the Marquesan imperial pigeon, clattering around in the canopy without an apparent care in the world. Then the best display of dancing and drumming we’d seen, and a stroll back down to the bay.

Our penultimate landing was in the huge coral lagoon of Rangiroa, back in the Tuamotus, and back on a  flat coral motu, where we pottered along the beaches of Avatoru Island, admired the palm trees, and studiously ignored the fact that there was a resort hotel visible in the distance. (First one of those we’d seen—we were definitely moving back towards what passes for civilization.)

At the end of our visit, as we sailed out through a channel in the reef, a pod of spinner dolphins fell in step alongside, as if escorting us safely off the premises.

And so to the dock at Pape’ete, Tahiti. I’m afraid my ideas of Pape’ete had become frozen after reading James Michener’s Rascals in Paradise (1957), so I was ready for pleasure yachts pulled right up to the dock so that their sterns overhung a narrow, unpaved waterfront street, and braced for roistering poets and artists having fist-fights outside Quinn’s Bar. But you know it’s not going to be like that, don’t you? It was just a slightly damp tropical town on a quiet Sunday morning. Sigh.

So we transferred to one of those plastic resort hotels, where we sat around for a pleasant enough (but slightly surreal) day, drinking local beer in the humid 30ºC heat, staring bemusedly at plastic Christmas trees covered in plastic snow, and listening to Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas”.

And then a midnight taxi ride to Faaa airport. (Three a’s! How cool is that? *) Two overnight flights later, we were in Edinburgh airport again. It was dark. It was 1ºC. Sleet was falling. Bing Crosby was singing “White Christmas”.

* Also spelled Faa’a or Fa’a’ā. I’m cool with all of these.

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In [Bounty Bay], which is bounded by lofty cliffs almost inaccessible, it was proposed to land. Thickly branched evergreens skirt the base of these hills, and in summer afford a welcome retreat from the rays of an almost vertical sun. In the distance are seen several high pointed rocks which the pious highlanders have named after the most zealous of the Apostles, and outside of them is a square basaltic islet. Formidable breakers fringe the coast, and seem to present an insurmountable barrier to all access.

F.W. Beechey, Narrative Of A Voyage To The Pacific And Beering’s Strait, Volume I, Chapter IV (1831)

Pitcairn Island, a remote, rocky outcrop just three kilometres long and two wide, was famously settled in 1790 by mutineers from Captain Bligh’s Bounty, along with a number of Tahitian men and women who had joined them (to a large extent involuntarily). Twenty years later, when the settlers were discovered by the American sailing ship Topaz, only one Briton and no Tahitian men remained alive.

Trevor Lummis’s book, Life And Death In Eden: Pitcairn Island And The Bounty Mutineers, tells the story of the murderous events that had taken place in the intervening years.

The island is still inhabited by descendants of the mutineers, along with a few in-comers. Mutineer Fletcher Christian’s surname is still prevalent among its forty-odd inhabitants. It’s Britain’s last overseas territory in the Pacific, and one of the most remote inhabited places in the world.

I’ve already written about our visit to the other, uninhabited islands of the Pitcairn group. This time I’m going to tell you about Pitcairn itself.

We were still dogged by the northerly swell that had prevented a landing on Henderson Island. The landing point at Bounty Bay opens northeast, and is little more than a shingle beach and a boat ramp protected by a short jetty. Metre-high waves were rolling in past the end of the jetty and breaking on the shingle. Getting ashore involved surfing the Zodiac in on the crest of a wave, and then turning hard left to get into the choppy partial shelter of the jetty. (I’m told there’s a new landing area at Tedside, facing northwest, but we never got over to take a look at it).

From the landing point, there’s a steep pull up into Adamstown, Pitcairn’s only settlement—a scatter of houses amid the island’s lush vegetation. The road up is called the Hill of Difficulty. It used to be a red earth track, which became notoriously chewed up by the islanders quad bikes when it was wet, but it has now been paved.

The village square is flanked on three sides by the Seventh-Day Adventist church, the Post Office and the meeting hall. There, the islanders had set up their souvenir stalls—and it must be a very rare visitor who, conscious of the unusual and once-in-a-lifetime nature of their visit, nevertheless comes away without a single memento of their time here.

The Post Office did a brisk trade (Pitcairn’s stamps have a certain philatelic cachet), but postcards can take several months to arrive with their intended recipients.

According to a spreadsheet pinned up on the noticeboard outside the meeting hall, Pitcairn sees visits from only ten or twelve passenger ships a year. Maybe only two or three of the smaller vessels will try to put passengers ashore. But if you’re on a large cruise liner, the Pitcairners will come to you—bringing their goods out to the ship in the island’s longboats (of which, more later) and setting up their market on board.

Various energetic folk set off to climb Pitcairn’s 347m highest point (which is poetically named Highest Point). We wished them luck. Captain Frederick Beechey , a quote from whom is at the head of this post, also described his visit to the summit of the island:

By a circuitous and, to us, difficult path, we reached the ridge of the mountain, the height of which is 1109 feet above the sea; this is the highest part of the island. The ridge extends in a north and south direction, and unites two small peaks: it is so narrow as to be in parts scarcely three feet wide, and forms a dangerous pass between two fearful precipices.

The day was hot and humid, so the Boon Companion and I decided to lounge around the village and its nearby viewpoints instead. I remarked to a Pitcairn lady that the day was too hot for a Scottish boy; she answered that it was too hot for her, too, which I found simultaneously disappointing and heartening. After most of our fellow travellers had dispersed, we perched ourselves on one of the benches outside the Post Office (a sitting area I’m told is ironically referred to as the “bus shelter” by the locals). I listened to the Pitcairners chatting to each other, enjoying the rhythm and intonation of the local dialect, Pitkern, which is said to retain some eighteenth century features, as well as borrowings from maritime slang and Tahitian.

An elderly pair of Pitcairners sat next to us, gloomily surveying the souvenir stalls. “Oh well,” said one to the other, after a while. “Soon be back to normal.”

When we began to feel poached by the airless heat, we strolled down to Pitcairn’s lovely cemetery, with its fine view and riot of wild flowers. An undistinguished grey bird hopped unassumingly around the gravestones, blithely unaware of the effect it would have on any passing bird-watcher—it was an endemic and endangered Pitcairn reed-warbler.

From the graveyard, we ambled along to The Edge, a fine viewpoint overlooking Bounty Bay, with a bit of a breeze, a park bench, and a good position to watch frigate birds and tropic birds drifting and squabbling in the updrafts.

There are memorial plaques here, commemorating the Bounty landing (with a second plate commemorating the Tahitian contribution to the community, added later).

One of them is (bottom left) is written in Pitkern:

Bout ya 200 years ago, January 1790, dem Bounty mutineer en dems Tahitian gerl cum orf ar Bounty. Uwas descendency start ya!

After a while, it was time to drift down to the landing site for our return to the ship. Which was starting to look a little problematic, as the surf was getting more active, and the waves were higher. Here’s what it looked like inside the protection of the jetty:

One Pitcairner cheerfully suggested we might have to stay and help repopulate the island.

But it turned out there was nothing to worry about—they launched a longboat for us, sliding it out of the boat-house and down the ramp into the sea. We clambered aboard at the jetty, and then the heavy longboat punched out through the surf as if it wasn’t there. After that there was just the small matter  of dropping a metre or so over the side of the rolling longboat into a bouncing Zodiac (hint: timing is all), so that we could in turn embark from the Zodiac on to the low marina deck of our ship.

Knuckles were intermittently white, but a good time was had by all.

Well, I think.

My next post (and the final post in this series), tells you about our journey through French Polynesia.

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The essence was timing. You had to hover outside the reef until a roller approached, throw on the engine, and ride through the passage on the crest of the wave.

Dea Birkett, Serpent In Paradise (1997)
(Landing on Henderson Island)

From our starting point on Easter Island, which I described in my previous post,  our ship headed west towards the Pitcairn group of islands. There are four of these, of which only one, Pitcairn Island itself, is inhabited. I’ll leave that one for another post—here I’m going to write about Pitcairn’s less famous neighbours, Ducie, Henderson and Oeno.

“Neighbours” is perhaps too strong a word—they’re dotted over 600 kilometres of ocean, and none of them is more than a few kilometres across. I’ve plotted their positions on a map of Scotland, so you can get a feel for how spread out they are.

We sailed for two and a half days from Easter Island before we reached Ducie, and each night we turned our clocks back by an hour, so that we could shift from Rapa Nui time (GMT-5) to Pitcairn time (GMT-8). We saw no other ships, no planes, and no wildlife apart from sporadic flying fish. We were, actually, travelling across an oceanic desert. On a map of the chlorophyll distribution in the world’s oceans, the space between Easter Island and the Pitcairns has the lowest concentration on the planet. Very little phytoplankton means very little of everything else farther up the food chain, too.

So we were pretty well-rested by the time we got to Ducie, what with all the extra sleep and the fact that the rocking motion of the ship tended to render everyone unconscious between meal times. Ducie is a classic coral atoll—a ring-shaped reef a couple of kilometres across with a central lagoon surrounded by a few low-lying islands. (The technical term for these atoll islands is motu, from a Polynesian word meaning … well … “island”.)

We landed on the largest motu, Acadia Island. Ducie is so far from anywhere else, it hosts only one plant species—the octopus bush, Heliotropium foertherianum, which forms a dense forest running the whole length of the island, just beyond the high water mark of the broken coral beach.

In this forest, birds nest, including most of the world’s Murphy’s petrels, and the gorgeous little White terns, which lay their eggs precariously balanced on tree branches. And since they have hardly ever seen a human, they are ludicrously trusting, just sitting tight and gazing bemusedly at any passing visitor.

We moved gently through the bushes, watching our feet to avoid treading on petrel chicks, which tuck themselves under the shade of low branches, and went to dip a toe in the bathwater-warm lagoon.

On the way back to our Zodiac boats, we picked up plastic waste from the beach and took it away with us—the Pitcairns sit on the edge of the South Pacific Gyre, and intercept far more than their fair share of the world’s floating garbage.

Next came Henderson, very different in character from Ducie—it’s a raised coral platform, ten kilometres by five, surrounded by undercut, overhanging 10-metre cliffs. Just three narrow strips of coral sand offer potential landing places. The beaches are imaginatively named North Beach, East Beach, and Northwest Beach—so if you’re passing you’ll know where to look for them.

If you’ve heard of Henderson at all, it’s most likely because it was recently reported to have the world’s highest concentration of plastic waste on its beaches. (The South Pacific Gyre, again.) It also had a walk-on part in Ron Howard’s film In The Heart Of The Sea (2015), which told a dramatized version of the story of the wreck of the whaling ship Essex. The survivors spent some time on Henderson, which Howard depicted as an utterly barren, black volcanic island, very different from its real appearance.

Unfortunately for movie makers, the real Henderson looks like a tropical paradise, with its white beaches and dense forests—a cinema audience would be hard pressed to guess how inhospitable it actually is. The lush interior is a leg-breaking coral maze, so porous  that rainwater seeps away immediately. The trees grow well, but the only source of fresh water is a single spring which is accessible only at low tide.

Our problem with Henderson was that we couldn’t land—a northerly swell was washing on to the potential landing places, shooting plumes of spray up the cliffs and generating dangerous surf on the beaches. We hung around forlornly off-shore to see if conditions changed, and then had to move on. So we had no chance to see Henderson’s fine crop of four endemic land birds, but we did glimpse a rare Henderson petrel shooting across the bow of the ship, with which the birders had to grumpily content themselves.

Our last uninhabited Pitcairn island was Oeno (pronounce it in three syllables: oh-EE-no). It’s another different kind of island—while Ducie is a ring of islands around an empty lagoon, Henderson is a raised coral platform, and Pitcairn itself is a peak of volcanic rock, Oeno is a small central island surrounded by a reef about three kilometres in diameter.

Big waves were breaking along the reef edges, but we surfed in on a Zodiac and waded to the shore. Oeno is a place of astonishing colours—the pale green of the reef, the blue of the sky, the white of the sand, and the intense tropical green of the foliage; all feel like someone has taken the real world and adjusted its “colour saturation” slider to an almost unbelievable intensity.

The Pitcairners call this place “Holiday Island”, because they come here for a break when the pace of life on Pitcairn gets too hectic. But they obviously don’t disturb the birds, which showed the same tendency to sit tight and ignore visitors as we’d encountered on Oeno.

Everywhere on Oeno, if you stand quietly, you can hear a sound like a distant boiling kettle—the surf breaking on the reef. And while getting across the reef on the inward journey was a matter of placing the Zodiac just behind the crest of a wave and surfing it in (he says, as if he could do it himself), getting out again involved butting through the breaking waves. It was a spectacular journey, but no-one avoided a soaking, and a few folk ended up (briefly) in the water.

My next post tells the story of our visit to Pitcairn, the only inhabited island of the group.

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You won’t find “islomania” in a dictionary, but the phenomenon exists, just the same.

Thurston Clarke, Islomania (2002)

islomania
A passion or craze for islands.

Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition (1989)

It seems Thurston Clarke just needed a better dictionary, but at least he drew the word islomania to the attention of a wider audience, some of whom would no doubt recognize the symptoms in themselves. As long-standing and unashamed islomaniacs, The Boon Companion and I took a trip to some of the more out-of-the-way parts of the South Pacific at the end of last year.

We started our journey on Easter Island (known to its inhabitants as Rapa Nui), dropping on to the broad tarmac of Mataveri International Airport after a five-hour flight from Santiago, Chile. Mataveri is said to be the most isolated airport in the world. Its improbable runway, lengthened by NASA in the 1980s, was once designated as a potential abort landing site for the Space Shuttle. And it’s nice that it is so long, because any plane that falls off the east end of the runway will tend to come to rest amid the airport’s fuel storage tanks.

Rapa Nui’s not really a place for a beach holiday—it’s built from three ancient volcanoes, and the coast consists mainly of unforgiving black rock. Only at Anakena in the north is there any extent of white sand—and the “tropical island” appearance has been artificially enhanced with a plantation of imported palm trees.

When we were last on Rapa Nui, over a decade ago, the airport was served by thrice-weekly flights from mainland Chile, and an occasional flight from Tahiti. Nowadays, LATAM’s Boeing 787s put down there twice a day, every day, in the high season. The island’s only town, Hanga Roa, seems to have quadrupled in size from the sleepy place we once knew.

And the islands famous moai statues are now cordoned off with warning signs and designated paths, where people once wandered around at will. I was alarmed by one of the new warning signs, which seemed to prohibit climbing to the top of a moai and throwing yourself off. Surely that goes without saying?

But the next moai in line revealed that the sign-poster had just posted the first sign ninety degrees away from its correct orientation. That makes more sense.

So. The moai. They’re everywhere along the coast, from the waterfront at Hanga Roa to remote corners of the north. When the island was first seen by Europeans in 1722, these huge statues were still standing along the shore, staring inland, arranged on platforms in groups so that their gaze could supposedly exert a protective influence on the villages they watched over. Half a century later James Cook noted that some had been toppled, but his expedition artist, William Hodges, produced a famous painting of the island that indicates he saw many statues still standing, even though his depiction is unrealistic in its details.

But the moai continued to topple, and 1838 was the last year on which any Westerner glimpsed one in the upright position—contact with Europeans seems to have precipitated some sort of war on the island, with villagers mounting expeditions to push over their enemy’s protective moai.

The process of standing them back up again began in 1955, and is still ongoing. Many of the statues broke their necks when they fell, and the older repair work is clearly visible in the form of concrete necklaces; newer repair work is less intrusive. Many of the statues also originally bore red scoria top-knots (as Hodges’ painting shows), and a few of these have been put back in place (mainly on statues with unbroken necks, for obvious reasons). And one statue, in Hanga Roa, boasts a pair of slightly alarming, staring eyes—replicas of the original fragile coral eyes that have been found in fragments near the toppled moai.

The moai all came from a quarry at the volcanic crater of Rano Raraku, chiselled out of a tuff cliff. The vicinity of the quarry is dotted with an astonishing number of scattered moai, apparently ready for transport to the coast, but all abandoned for some reason, and now more than half buried by soil movement. If you look right in the middle of the picture below, on the green slope below the cliffs, you’ll see a cluster of tiny dots. Each dot is an abandoned moai, two or three metres tall.

Here’s the view from a little closer.

More moai line the inner wall of the flooded Rano Raraku crater, and it was here that we encountered a man with something on his head, striding around with a look of immense satisfaction, chatting into his mobile phone. I’m guessing it’s some kind of panoramic camera, and for all I know he might have been doing something good and useful to humanity. But I couldn’t help wondering aloud if this might be the origin of the well-known phrase “knob head”.

The other big attraction on Rapa Nui is the spectacular Rano Kau crater—more than a kilometre across, and two hundred metres deep. Its flooded bottom-land is the last refuge for many indigenous plants, so is off-limits for casual hikers. (From somewhere down there came the soil sample that yielded the surprisingly versatile drug rapamycin.) You can’t walk all the way around the crater rim, either, these days, because of concerns about erosion. But you can stroll along a fair section of its arc.

We finished our walk at the remains of the Orongo ceremonial village, which used to host the bonkers Birdman Race—an annual race in which men descended the outer crater wall, swam to the outlying island of Motu Nui, grabbed a sooty tern egg, swam back and then climbed back to Orongo. The man who brought back the first intact egg won privileges for his clan during the coming year. The Birdman cult seems to have started up around the time the  moai were being toppled, and the race was run for the better part of a century before it was (predictably enough) suppressed by Christian missionaries in the 1860s.

The next day, we went down to Hanga Roa’s tiny harbour, and joined a ship heading farther out into the Pacific. I’ll tell you more about that in my next post.

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We took a trip around the north coast recently. Although we know the mountainous north-west corner of Scotland well, the Flow Country of the north-east was unknown to us.

Our trip effectively began in Dornoch, where I had the single worst meal I’ve had in Europe this century—and I include meals that have actually poisoned me in that league table.

So we’ll move right along and head up the coast to Wick, our next port of call. Along the way we turned in for a look at the madness which is Dunrobin Castle, a bonkers chateau-styled stately home with its own railway station. We wandered round the gardens and took in a truly excellent falconry demonstration. Andy Hughes knows a great deal about birds of prey, and he communicates it clearly and entertainingly. And if you’re lucky, a gyrfalcon will fly so low over your head that you can feel the downdraught from its wings. That can’t be bad. Unless you’re a lemming, I suppose.

Not far north of Dunrobin, we entered the old county of Caithness, and suddenly there was an outbreak of road-signs pointing the way to places with names ending in -ster. We were in Viking country—the suffix -ster is a remnant of Old Norse bolstadr, meaning “farm”, and -ster place names stretch all the way to Orkney and Shetland. At Lybster (first syllable sounded as in  libel, not liberty), we dropped down to the pretty harbour, had a lunch that wiped away the trauma of the previous evening’s dinner, and encountered a surprisingly tame Common Shrew darting around in the rocks next to the car park.

More interesting names cropped up north of Lybster—a geo (ɡjoː) or goe (ɡəʊ) is a steep sided coastal inlet—Norse again, from gja, meaning “cleft”. Back in the day, along this cliff-bound coast each little slot of a geo contained its own tiny fishing harbour—perhaps most famously the one at Whaligoe (“whale geo”), reached by a switchback stone staircase built into the cliff side.

Whaligoe is a sort of stealth visitors’ attraction, unsignposted from the road, presumably because those responsible for herding tourists around Caithness worry that someone will take a header into the sea off Whaligoe’s marvellous staircase. I wouldn’t fancy running down it in wet weather, but it’s actually a fairly easy descent down 330 steps to an artificial platform  on which the boats were hauled out and the fish salted, before the womenfolk carried the baskets of fish back up the stairs. (They were generously provided with one shelf, halfway up the stairs, on which they could set their baskets and take a rest.)

From a base near Wick, we made the obligatory trip to John O’ Groats. I don’t really get John O’ Groats. Historically, it’s a little ferry port for Orkney (the ferry once operated by the eponymous Dutchman, Jan de Groot), with a fairly pretty hotel. Now it also has a big bus park, a skimpy distance indicator, and a collection of assorted souvenir shops that sell exactly the sort of stuff you might expect.

But despite its pretensions, it has no geographical significance—it’s neither the most northerly point on the British mainland (that’s at Dunnet Head), nor is it the farthest point on the mainland from Land’s End in Cornwall (that’s at Duncansby Head). I wonder how many of the good folk who pitch up next to the now-iconic signpost at John O’ Groats, having cycled from Land’s End, make the extra detour to Duncansby Head, which would take them a good half-kilometre farther from their starting point, as the crow flies. But then again, if they’d cycled from Lizard Point in Cornwall to Duncansby Head, their start and finish points would be six kilometres farther apart than the conventional Land’s End – John O’ Groats run. And then again, if they started from the Lizard, a trip to Dunnet Head would take them a half-kilometre farther still from their starting point.

So, like a said, I don’t really get John O’ Groats. I do like Duncansby Head and Dunnet Head, though—both set in wild country, and each of them featuring the windswept remains of wartime Royal Observer Corps posts. (The station at Duncansby head has decayed away until it’s just a couple of ventilation shafts and a welded hatch, surrounded by a fence-off patch of overgrown vegetation, but its decline has been well documented by the people at Subterranea Britannica.)

From Wick, we then motored round by Thurso and along the north coast to Durness. This is all part of the much-hyped North Coast 500 tourist route (which now seems to have the wince-generating alternative name “Route 500”). We’d worried that the roads might by busy, but we drove for long stretches without ever seeing another car. Once or twice a posse of motorcyclists would roar past, and occasionally we’d run into a little convoy of classic sports cars.

That’s another thing I don’t get. What makes someone sit down and say to themselves: “Right, I own a powerful convertible car with poor fuel economy. What shall I do? I know, I’ll drive it slowly through a rainy place in a queue behind some other vehicles! Perfect!” But there they were, and they never looked particularly cheerful, I have to say. I couldn’t help but wonder what happens when two of these convoys meet up on a winding single-track road with widely-spaced passing places. Carnage, I imagine.

From the cliffs and geos of the east coast, we were suddenly among long sandy beaches. And from the flat boggy land of the east, we drove steadily into the mountain scenery of the west.

From Durness, the road weaves south around the impressive summits of Foinaven and Quinag, and we found our way to our next stop, Lochinver. Lochinver’s an odd place—tucked away on a remote part of the west coast, not on the way to anywhere else, and yet mysteriously equipped with both a Michelin-starred restaurant and an outpost of Chez Roux. The Boon Companion and I have dined in both, and would recommend neither—instead, we respectfully direct your attention to the bohemian joys of the Lochinver Larder (and Pie Shop). On our first walk into town, we encountered a surprisingly tame otter, fishing close to shore near the harbour and apparently unconcerned about our gawping presence on the shore. An otter and a pie shop in one day!

From Lochinver we wound or way down the narrow coast road south of Inverkirkaig, in the hope of nipping up Stac Pollaidh for a bit of a view.  But we arrived in the small car-park at the foot of the hill to discover the Scottish Perfect Storm—it was raining fairly heavily, but the midgies were still out—so Stac Pollaidh was abandoned in favour of an early lunch in Ullapool.

From Ullapool there was more coastal driving along the scenic route via Poolewe, Gairloch and Loch Maree before our final stop in Torridon.

Torridon is not exactly a teeming metropolis on a Sunday, but then again, you don’t go there for the night-life, do you?

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I have lain down in the long grass while the raven honked and flicked above me and the skuas cruised in a milk-blue sky. I have felt at times, and perhaps this is a kind of delirium, no gap between me and the place. I have absorbed it and been absorbed by it, as if I have no existence apart from it. I have been shaped by those island times, and find it difficult now to achieve any kind of distance from them. The place has entered me. It has coloured my life like a stain.

Adam Nicolson, Sea Room (2001)

Having visited all the large islands of the Inner and Outer Hebrides, the Boon Companion and I recently set off to sample some of its smaller delights. We were travelling aboard the Proud Seahorse, a fairly small boat (seven passengers and four crew), and going ashore in an even smaller boat—a Rigid Inflatable Boat, to be exact, of the kind familiar to us from previous trips, like the one to Wrangel Island I wrote about previously.

Our trip took us to three of the Small Isles, to a couple of the eastern outliers of Skye, and to the Shiants between Skye and Lewis.

It also took us through seas rich in birdlife, dolphins and whales. One day, off Eigg, we found ourselves in the middle of a feeding frenzy of gannets and Manx shearwaters (the gannets folding themselves like paper darts and diving into the sea all around us), with a minke whale cruising calmly through the midst of it all.

And east of Skye we attracted a little pod of common dolphins, who sported in the bow-wave for five minutes, on occasion flinging themselves into the air to flop down sideways into the water—it was impossible to think anything other than that they were having fun. The Boon Companion hung precariously over the bow, trying to capture some of these chaotic high jinks on camera, but it was a near-impossible task.

On Eigg, we landed beside the spiffy new ferry terminal at Glamisdale, in the south, but without enough time to walk over to the main settlement of Cleadale, let alone to fulfil my ambition of nipping up Eigg’s improbable highest point, The Sgurr. (This proved to be a recurring theme of the trip—enough time for a pleasant shore walk, but my hillwalking ambitions thwarted at every turn.) Some of our party set of to look for the infamous Massacre Cave (where MacLeods from Skye killed close to 400 MacDonalds, in revenge for the MacDonalds castrating some MacLeods, in revenge for the MacLeods raping some MacDonalds—so it went, in sixteenth-century Scotland.) We chose instead to wander in the opposite direction, exploring the old harbour area near Poll nam Partan.

Canna was perhaps the biggest revelation of the trip—we had absolutely no idea what to expect there. We found an island of tilted basalt terraces, producing spectacular bird cliffs along the north coast and layered green farmland in the south. The beautiful harbour nestles between Canna and the smaller island of Sanday—the two islands are connected by a bridge, though you can walk (or drive!) across the beach between them at low tide. So we did what was in effect a “two churches” tour—walking from the Presbyterian church on Canna, with its odd bell tower, to the Catholic church on Sanday, with its odd bell tower. Halfway between the two, the Café Canna was doing a roaring trade from ferry passengers and yacht-folk, and behind it a golden eagle hovered on the rising air along the cliff line behind the village.

Rum afforded a stroll along the south shore of Loch Scresort. The Harvey’s map indicated an “otter hide” near the jetty, so we walked through the woods to take a look at it. A minute after walking in the door, what should we see messing about on the rocks outside but an otter. Blimey. That was unexpected, otters not being entirely cooperative with the aspirations of people who build otter hides. From the hide we walked up to the madness that is Kinloch Castle, passing signs that seemed to indicated “otters in all directions”, a selection of interesting visitor accommodation  (including a faux gypsy caravan), and a small herd of the world’s calmest deer.

Raasay seems like a nice place, but not in the hammering rain. We landed at the ferry slipway, and made a slow circuit through woodland and then back along the shoreline. The rain got heavier, and the camera never came out of its waterproof bag. Which is a shame, because we were treated to the spectacle of a swimming mink, which forged resolutely across the bay towards us, and then crossed the path about three metres in front of our small group. I’m not a big fan of the American mink in the abstract, being an invasive species that works slaughter on native small mammals and birds, but it’s nevertheless always nice to see a fierce little predator going about its business.

We made two landings on Rona, to the north of Raasay. The first was at the north end, at Loch a’ Bhraige, which promised an anchorage sheltered from the southerly wind. Here we found ourselves staging a landing at MoD Rona, which Hamish Haswell-Smith describes as a “deep-sea listening post” in his book The Scottish Islands. It’s actually part of the British Underwater Test and Evaluation Centre. We rather expected the worst when our little party was met at the jetty by two stern men in a Land Rover Defender—but they quickly assessed us as being no threat to national security, and let us amble up past their helicopter pad to the lighthouse that crowns the point.

In the afternoon we slipped into Acairseid Mhor (the Big Anchorage), which was also nicely sheltered. At the jetty we found a noticeboard, which announced that there was a landing fee, but which also featured a couple of dog-leads hanging from hooks, to be conveniently borrowed by anyone who had landed with a dog but without a lead. Disappointingly, Rona Lodge with its bunkhouse, shop and “Rona Island stamps” was closed, and appeared to be the focus of some major building works, with dumper trucks rumbling up and down the main track. So we explored the shoreline, and then walked far enough inland to find a view that didn’t have a piece of JCB machinery in it.

At the Shiants (pronounced shants), we anchored overnight in the Bay of Shiant, off Mol Mor, the “big shingle beach”, which is a narrow neck of shingle that connects two of the three main islands. In the afternoon, we made a landing on the beach next to the natural archway of Toll a’ Roimh, and climbed steeply over boulders and grass to sit next to the huge puffin colony among the rocks here. Higher up the slope, the ground is divided into curiously regular ridges, each a couple of metres wide—the remains of old lazy-bed cultivation, and a sign that these islands were once inhabited by people who had to use every square metre of flat land they could find, in a generally precipitous landscape. I walked farther, to sit at the highest point of the natural archway, which put my head just about right in the middle of a puffin flyway. They whirred past madly on either side of me, and every now and then one would drop panicky little orange feet like dive brakes, to decelerate and make a swerve around my head.

The topography of our landing site then presented an interesting problem, as well as an opportunity.

As a glance at the map shows, it’s protected by a drying reef at low tide—so our little RIB had become trapped by the receding tide in what was effectively a large tidal pool. Except that this pool is connected to the sea through the natural arch. So we motored out through arch into the bouncy swell of the Minch, around the point, and back into the bay to our anchored ship.

The following morning we went ashore on the shingle neck, and walked round to the islands’ only habitation—a bothy to which Compton Mackenzie would sometimes resort, when he owned these islands, to get a bit of peace and quiet for his writings. There, we found Adam Nicolson and his wife Sarah Raven in residence (they stay on the islands for a few days each year). Nicolson is the author of (among many other things), a memoir entitled Sea Room, in which he describes what it was like to find himself the owner of these islands, at the age of 21, when he inherited them from his father. (I quote an evocative passage from Sea Room at the head of this post.) He was kind enough, on a drizzly day, to give us a small archaeological tour of the old settlement remains above his house.

And that was our whirlwind tour of minor Hebrides. Not nearly enough time ashore on any of them, I’d say, but compensated by time spent at sea, spotting birds and mammals and watching the scenery go by.

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