Return to civilization..? 17 9 30 (18) 25 1 21

...which is to say I arrived in the evening of the 17th and departed in the morning of the 28th traveling for the most part by hire car which i collected on the morning of the 18th by returning to Edinburgh Airport by bus and returning it 10 days later before the expiry time of 11 am.

This autumn break the fifth such trip around the autumn equinox began in 2013 and continued in successive autumns until the present day after I sold my yacht in 2012 but continued to have an autumn September sailing with a fellow yachtsman in his boat when we were fortunate to sail in the same waters as the Russian Federation training vessel, the world's biggest such boat the Sedov...
  
    
I recall with affection that first autumn visit following on from a spring visít in May /June time for the the people I met on the way and for the hills I climbed...
climbing my first remote hills in the Cairngorm mountain range which necessitated first walking into the hills with my 60 litre Jaguar Vll rucksack precariously perched on the wheels of a shopping trolley so I could carry all the equipment for overnight stays at Scotland's bothies: unmanned huts in her remote places where mainly fell walkers stay in order to climb her more isolated hills and walk her glens...

After 5 such trips one can see patterns emerging and it is these aspects which interest me most in these blogs I shall write to charter this journey not only among the hills of Scotland but among fellow travellers first on the flights and transport systems to get there in the first place and then among the Scottish people and fellow tourists along the routes one took as one increasingly becomes aware of being this older guy noticeably so with encroaching more senior years...    

One such fellow traveller was this young lady who shared the row of three seats on the portside flight from Stockholm to Edinburgh a journey of perhaps 2 hours which after a slow start got her showing me her Taiwanese hTc smart phone being herself Taiwanese and also employed in a jo to do with tele-communications: a most charming lady, Yi Ling by name, who when we arrived in Scotland accompanied me into the city as we parted company at my bus-stop for Aberdeen and an onward bus to take me to Braemar, my climbing centre for the rest of my trip. The deal was that if i had had to wait a day to catch a morning bus we should have spent the day together sight-seeing and probably have spent the night together in the same hostel though she did point out that her reservation was for shared accommodation boys and girls together in a larger hostel dormitory somewhere... 
One of the most memorable walks involved walking for perhaps an hour from the Linn of Dee carpark to Bob Scott's bothy and then the next morning just as the sun was rising around 7am BST continuing in the direction of the Lairig Ghru Pass through the Cairngorms for 3 peaks in the range including Braeriach, with this pic of the Lairig Ghru from my first peak of the day the Devil's Point at 10:15:




Thence onwards to climb Cairn Toul and the Angel's Peak before returning whence I came to return to my bothy just as night time was falling a round trip of around 11 hours.

A year later 14 9 23 I climbed the peak Carn a´Mhaim to the east of the Devil’s Point and got the following pic of the Devil's Point itself with the two hills behind it which together with a nephew-in-law Dave we climbed this year from our camp site near the White Bridge 17 9 26...


This last pic of the view of the Devil’s Point as we descended those hills and at last came out of mists for the previous 4 to 5 hours, evidently below the cloud base…






to be continued...

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