Walking with Plato (4 page)

From Brora, we walked six or seven miles to the coastal village of
Golspie
.

We’d intended to walk eighteen miles to Dornoch that day. But Wendy’s blisters would have none of it. So at eleven o’clock we stopped at Golspie, rang around, and found a room at a B&B.

We were checked in by midday, and able to enjoy a picnic lunch and a long lazy afternoon at Golspie’s attractive little harbour and beach.

The next day, we managed a seventeen-mile hike to a campsite on the southern shore of
Dornoch Firth
.

Happily, we were able to detour off the A9 and onto small country roads for much of the day, including a delicious three-mile section along the shore of Loch Fleet. This beautiful sea loch with its mudflats, wading birds, wildfowl, and basking seals was a slice of heaven – and a harbinger of better things to come.

From Dornoch Firth, we hiked eighteen miles to the village of
Evanton
.

Once again, we were able to leave the A9 and walk along minor roads, through woodland and farmland, for much of the day. It would have been quite pleasant had the weather not been so energy-sappingly hot, and had my feet not, by then, become so tender.

By four o’clock, when we passed through the small town of Alness, our mental and physical reserves were sorely depleted. Yet we still had four miles to go.

We dragged our tired bodies into a café, flopped down at a table, and ordered coffee and shortbread. Thirty minutes later, we emerged – to my astonishment – with renewed vigour. I never dreamed that a brief sit down, a hot drink, and a couple of biscuits could work such magic.

Sadly, further trials awaited us.

Half a mile further on, the heavens opened. Within minutes, the dry and dusty road had turned into a shallow stream, and the gutters had become a torrent. Passing traffic sent waves five feet high crashing over us.

We battled through this deluge for a few hundred yards, and then stopped to hold crisis talks in the scanty shelter of a bus-stop. Clearly, this wasn’t camping weather. But what should we do? Should we stop and try to find a B&B? Or should we press on and hope there was room in the bunkhouse at the Evanton campsite?

We elected to press on.

We arrived to find a fully occupied bunkhouse and a sodden campsite. Everything – the grass, the trees, the caravans, the campervans, the bunkhouse, the laundry, and the children’s playground – was wet through and dripping, in the dreariest manner imaginable, with water.

Wettest of all was the field set aside for tents, which, for reasons I can’t fathom, was situated at the bottom of a small incline.

The tents already pitched there lay in puddles two inches deep. A group of children in waterproofs and wellies were using the field as a paddling pool. And all the while the rain continued to pour down.

The situation appeared hopeless. Luckily, however, the guy who ran the campsite came along and pointed to a small patch of ground at the top of the incline, upon which it might just be possible to squeeze our backpacker tent.

It was wet and muddy, and it was getting wetter and muddier by the minute, but it wasn’t actually submerged.

Grasping at this straw, Wendy and I set up a base of operations in the camp’s laundry room, and spent the next hour running to and fro with bits of tent and camping equipment. Eventually, we managed to set up a passably dry shelter, and, after strewing our wet clothes around the laundry room to dry, passed a not entirely uncomfortable night.

I recall listening to the
Philosophy Talk
radio show once, and one of the hosts, either John Perry or Ken Taylor, remarked that one of the most important things he had learned during the course of his life is that ‘good times never last and neither do bad times’.

This phrase became something of a mantra to me as I walked, often wearily and sometimes painfully, along the road to Inverness.

Whenever the going got tough – whenever my muscles ached, or my feet hurt, or my energy levels dropped, or my spirits flagged – I reminded myself that bad times don’t last.

I felt that this first, tough section of JoGLE – and, quite possibly, JoGLE as a whole – could be seen as a microcosm of human life in its constant switching back and forth between hardship and comfort, toil and repose, pain and pleasure.

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, in his masterwork
The World as Will and Representation
, gave a striking illustration of the human condition. He said that we can think of our journey through life as being like ‘a circle of hot coals having a few cool places, a path that we have to run over incessantly’.

His point, in keeping with his reputation as the most pessimistic of philosophers, was a negative one. Namely that lasting happiness is impossible, that the best that life has to offer is the occasional period of respite from the pain of unfulfilled desire.

But, as I limped along the final stages of our journey to Inverness, I thought of Schopenhauer’s circle in a more positive way. Whenever I got tired, or sore, or fed up, I would picture myself passing over the hot coals, and think,
there’s a cool patch just around the bend!

And, surprisingly enough, that thought was sufficient to make the hard times feel not merely bearable, but also – in a weird kind of a way – worthwhile.

When walking from Evanton to
Inverness
, it’s possible, with some straightforward rerouting, to avoid a big stretch of the A9 and take small roads and cycle routes instead. Wendy and I decided not to do that – though I can’t remember why.

Perhaps it was because my feet had, by this time, become agonizingly tender, making me want to complete the journey using the most direct route possible. Whatever the reason, it was an excruciatingly dull seventeen-mile walk, enlivened only by the crossing, early in the day, of the mile-long Cromarty Bridge, which spans Cromarty Firth.

The last few miles, along the A9 into Inverness, and then through the city centre to our campsite on the farther side of town, were the most dispiriting and painful of JoGLE so far.

The final section of A-road is a drab, multi-lane affair. Bearable enough, I suppose, if you’re hurtling along in an air-conditioned vehicle with your favourite tunes blasting out of the stereo. But depressing as hell if you’re crazy enough to be walking the damn thing: grunting under the weight of a fully laden rucksack as you make your way along a grass verge littered with cigarette butts, fag packets, crisp bags, plastic bags, empty beer cans, spat-out chewing gum, McDonald’s packaging, and soiled disposable nappies.

More depressing still when you realize that it’s a full hour since you first caught sight of the city, and yet you seem to be no closer to it now than you were back then.

More depressing still when you realize that you still have three miles to go, and your feet are already so sore that you can hardly bring yourself to take another step.

More depressing still when you finally get to the campsite where you are to spend the night and realize that it’s an ugly compound, surrounded by an enormous security fence, in a seedy part of town.

All of that aside, Inverness is a splendid city. A 2014 survey identified it as the happiest (and therefore, I suppose, in some sense, the nicest) place in Scotland.

It has a lot going for it. It’s picturesquely sited at the mouth of the River Ness, and it has a magnificent crenelated castle, a historic Old Town, a Victorian market, and oodles of riverside restaurants and pavement cafés.

More importantly, for cash-strapped backpackers like Wendy and me, who need somewhere to sit, cheap food, free Wi-Fi, and a socket to charge their electronic devices, it has a Wetherspoon’s.

We spent a much-needed rest day in Inverness: eating and drinking, buying gel-insoles for our hiking boots, and preparing ourselves physically and mentally to go off-road, onto the trail, and into the wild heart of the Scottish Highlands.

How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they are never present to a man at the same instant, and yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; their bodies are two, but they are joined by a single head.

—Plato,
Phaedo

Chapter Two

Simple Pleasures

Inverness – Drumnadrochit – Fort Augustus – South Laggan – Gairlochy – Fort William

The great thing about doing JoGLE, as opposed to LEJoG, is that you get the nasty bit out of the way at the very ­beginning.