LEJOG Day 84: Drumnadrochit to Inverness

Weather: Sunny to start then thunder and rain

Distance covered today: 28.1km (17.5mi)

Last night's B&B: Morelea (£35)

Cumulative distance: 1733.4km (1077.1mi)/ % Complete: 90.6%

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 84 (click!)

It’s always the way, isn’t it?  Just when I had more or less written off today as a non-event, it turned out to be one of the better days on the Great Glen Way. Towards the beginning, having managed to escape the crass commercialism of Drumnadrochit, I was rewarded with a quite magnificent view of Loch Ness and the ruins of Urquhart Castle.  Then after a testing climb of 1,200ft (400m) in the inevitable forest, I emerged in lovely Scottish moorland, and was treated to a display of aerial pyrotechnics as the weather changed for the worse and a thunder-storm built a head of multi-coloured cumulus cloud in the still morning air.
 
The ensuing thundery deluge once more drenched me to the skin. I had recently bought myself a new rain-jacket, much lighter than the jacket that I have been lugging with me from Land’s End. The idea was that this new jacket would be much lighter to carry and cooler to wear. The shop assistant and the label assured me that it was highly waterproof, and today was the day to test it. If it worked, I would post the other jacket home. Well, it didn’t!!  It’s at best shower-proof, so it gets posted home instead!

Despite the drenching, I was happily tramping along an old drovers’ road, which had an excellent walking surface.  This enabled me to look at the very sensitive and interesting management of many varieties of trees along the way. The drovers’ road seemed much more people friendly in terms of gradients than the foresters’ roads, presumably because people had to walk along it!  I was also interested to learn that the drovers used to average about the same distance per day as I have on this journey, though of course they had to manage a herd of cattle and sleep rough at day’s end, which might have been a tad more demanding!   Eventually I could just glimpse the end of the Moray Firth through the trees and over a rise, Inverness came into view. I needed to see it!  I had just managed 80km (50mi) in three days, with lots of ups and downs, and just about all my muscles (and my little toes!) were protesting!

As I walked down to Inverness, thinking about the drovers and how they must have felt, I saw an information board that told me that after the Jacobite Uprising, all Highlanders were forbidden to carry arms, except the drovers, who needed weapons to guard their cattle against the predations of Reivers. I thought about what it must have been like to walk long distances carrying arms as well as all the usual necessities and it reminded me of an unforgettable experience I had many years ago during Namibia’s war of independence.

At the time, I was managing the company’s operations in the soon-to-be independent Namibia with a specific company remit to prepare the company for complete independence from its affiliate in South Africa.  I was, for my sins, a member of the board of the Private Sector Foundation, and in that capacity I met and befriended a local lawyer named Anton Lubowski. I learned that Lubowski was the first and only white member of SWAPO (South West Africa Peoples’ Organisation).

At the time, various South African businessmen were meeting representatives of the ANC in African capitals to try to find a solution to that country’s intractable problems, and when Anton offered me the opportunity to meet Sam Nujoma, the leader of SWAPO in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, I jumped at the chance.  I was at the time particularly concerned about SWAPO’s ideas for energy in an independent South West Africa, which included building a refinery amongst other naïve ideas. SWAPO was being advised in these things by the UN and its mainly Scandinavian officials whose motives were no doubt impeccable, but who were inexperienced and rather impractical. I had a vested interest in ensuring that my company would still be allowed to operate in an independent Namibia and I was keen to assure SWAPO that our position throughout any transition would remain essentially apolitical from a party political perspective, though committed to a peaceful transition to democracy within the rule of law.

With a small group of like-minded businessmen, I boarded a light aircraft with Lubowski to fly to Lusaka to meet Sam Nujoma and his advisers. Anton had warned us the trip was not without risk. Although the flight plan had been cleared, there was no guarantee that the South African Air Force wouldn’t shoot down the small plane.  I remember feeling really anxious as we flew over the border.

In Lusaka, our first meeting was with President Kaunda. At the time he had already been in power since Zambia had gained independence a quarter of a century earlier, and he seemed like a very kindly old man to me (he could only have been about 65, which doesn’t seem so old now!)  He warned us that we should not preach at Sam Nujoma, who was understandably sick and tired of hearing all manner of people tell him how to run his affairs from the comfort of their armchairs.  In the event, he needn’t have worried; Mr Nujoma did almost all of the talking, and to be honest, he didn’t say very much beyond the fairly obvious, but he did seem genuine in looking forward to the outcome of the substantive talks with his senior advisers and ministers-in-waiting.

The talks got going the following day. I was staying at a comfortable hotel and was picked up each morning by an uncommunicative and expressionless driver in a Landrover, and transported to the meeting room. There the talks proceeded with difficulty. I found attitudes entrenched, political and simplistic. I found myself trying to point out the simple practical issues of energy supply and distribution, but attitudes to these were contemptuous and much more was made of social issues such as race, gender and equity. I was also of course accused of practicing racial discrimination in our current operations and I found myself protesting too much in defence of our existing policies.

Every evening, we would try to lighten the atmosphere by having a few drinks and supper in an establishment, a sort of club, though I’m sure they would have been horrified at such a description, where the liberation movements often met to socialise. There I had many interesting discussions with ANC and SWAPO members, and I often thought those informal discussions were more useful than the daily meetings. I was though surprised at the amount of alcohol that was being consumed. I had somehow assumed that the liberation movements would have been more abstemious.

One group of participants didn’t drink at all, however, and this included my uncommunicative minder. He stood with his colleagues silently at the outskirts of the social interaction, just watching.  I noticed that they were armed, which I assumed was for our protection. After some time, I couldn’t restrain myself any more, and I asked him on the way back to the hotel one night, why there were two such distinct groups at the ‘club’. At first, he wouldn’t respond, but I wore him down, and in the end in some frustration, probably just to shut me up, he said that the men who didn’t drink were ‘terrorists’. This was the term used by the South African authorities for ‘freedom fighters’, and in the way of these things, the liberation movements had adopted the term as a badge of honour, and used it quite commonly in colloquial speech. I was quite taken aback by this information as I had naively believed that the people we were meeting were all political, but it certainly explained the obvious distinctions between the two groups. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be active members of the liberation forces amongst them.

I asked him whether he had seen active duty, and he told me he had been across the border into South West Africa three times. He added, to my surprise that he was going in again in the next few days. I knew that these cross-border raids had been quite successful. SWAPO had succeeded in politicising many of the otherwise apolitical and simple people who lived along the Kunene and Okavango Rivers, especially by targeting those businessmen who had profited from the status quo, including some of our service station operators.  This had demoralised many people in the area, and support for SWAPO was clearly growing.  I knew also that because of this relative success, the South African Defence Force had redoubled it efforts to intercept the liberation fighters.  The “kill rate” was widely estimated to be around 50%, i.e. about only 50% on average of the interlopers successfully made it back to safety.  Very few were wounded.  When I got back to my bedroom, I took a coin from my pocket and spun it four times. I did this repeatedly and not once did I manage to get a successful outcome four times in a row.  I hardly slept that night.  No wonder my minder wasn’t very talkative.

I soon learned that there was in fact bitter rivalry between the active military forces and the politicians. My minder, now a little more communicative, told me that his colleagues were bitter that the politicians were already identifying houses that they would occupy in Windhoek in an independent Namibia. The politicians frequently flew overseas, being hosted by the UN and other international bodies committed to change in Southern Africa. They were living the high life, while the soldiers were taking all the risks and paying the real price for independence. I have often thought about this when confronted with comments on the high standing of the ex-freedom fighters in African societies today. The hugely high esteem in which ordinary people hold the liberation fighters for their sacrifice is ironically of course now one of Southern Africa’s real problems. Their status has led to abuses of power on a continental scale, nowhere more so than in Zimbabwe. It is so sad that this would seem to be the inevitable sequel to a movement of incredible courage and selflessness for the highest ideals.

If he is still alive, which I really doubt, I wonder what my minder thinks about it all now?  Anton Lubowski certainly didn’t make it. He was gunned down by operatives of a clandestine security operation affiliated to the South African Defence Force, with the chilling Newspeak name of the “Civil Co-operation Bureau”.  He didn’t live to see Namibian Independence.

Drawing the punters in Drumnadrochit

The ruins of Castle Urquhart on a point on Loch Ness

More glorious heather on a glacier-polished granite surface

My last view of Loch Ness, looking up towards the upper end

Lovely moorland above the forests, with a welcome way-mark just ahead

The highest point of the Great Glen Way; not very high though - about 370m (1,200ft)

A thundery still-life; the weather was spectacularly changing

The problem wasn't the midges! My tormentors were very persistent and irritating flies, some of which seemed to bite.  This is a self-portrait of me in my full insect protection gear.  

A drovers' road through a sensitively managed forest. Birch trees?

Spruce trees?

For Richard O. This is a white clover and the three-petalled leaf can clearly be seen. You and I have learned something! Thank you Veronica and Fiona!

More drovers' road. Beech trees?

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The Victorian mental asylum of Creag Dunain, now an NHS hospital

Old Inverness across the River Ness, fast-flowing, dark and sullen in the rain-filled air

The end of the Great Glen Way

Inverness Castle, with a statue of Flora McDonald. She had helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape from an island in the Outer Hebrides after the Battle of Culloden near Inverness. She later argued with the victor, the Duke of Cumberland ("Butcher Cumberland"), that she had acted out of charity and that she would have done the same for him if he instead had been vanquished