LEJOG Day 86: Culbokie to Alness

Weather: Cloudy and cool with fresh northerly

Distance covered today: 14.7km (9.1mi)

Last night's B&B: Netherton Farm (£30)

Cumulative distance: 1772.6km (1101.4mi)/ % Complete: 91.6%

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 86 (click!)

After yet another piece of eccentric planning, I discovered that in practice today’s leg was a mere 15km (9mi).  I remember very clearly the sensation at the beginning of this journey, especially when I was training for it, that such a distance would have seemed quite challenging, whereas now it is like having a half-day!  Good thing too, because when I arrived at tonight’s B&B, I was confronted by a very surprised land-lady who told me I didn’t have a booking!  I have no doubt at all that I did, but whatever the facts, she had already let the room, so there was no point in arguing.  In any case, it looked a rather down-beat sort of place, and I wasn’t too disappointed to try elsewhere, only to find that all the other B&Bs in town were fully booked. As usual in these circumstances, I turned to the only person I know who remains completely steady in a crisis, Veronica, and asked for help. She quickly found an alternative in a nearby town, while I tried the very last option, the colourfully named Commercial Hotel, and hey presto, they had just had a cancellation and they had one last room. Having thoroughly disturbed her day, I managed to sort myself out after all!

It is interesting though that this part of Scotland is so full of tourists at present. All the guests in my B&B last night were from the continent. I was the only English speaker at breakfast and the conversation was entirely in German, between a family from Austria and one from Switzerland. The dreaded A9 was today absolutely teeming with traffic. The towns and villages I passed through looked prosperous and clean.  On Scottish BBC TV this morning, I heard a report that the economy up here out-grew the UK economy substantially over the past decade, and as I have been reporting throughout this journey, there is every evidence that this is true. The report commented that the growth in exports of expensive malt whiskey has had something to do with economic growth in the Highlands, and certainly in many of the local pubs and hotels, the malt whiskey business is booming. Whiskey tastings are apparently popular among tourists, in the manner of wine-tastings elsewhere. I haven’t yet succumbed myself, for obvious reasons!

It is also clear that this part of the country is still benefiting from North Sea oil. I noticed a sizable collection of rigs out in the Firth of Cromarty, and a few of the B&B owners told me that when the drilling rigs are around, the local establishments are really busy.  There is also a different, frontier feel to the place. Although the décor is vulgar in the Commercial Hotel, the feel of the place reflects its name.  This is where travelling workers relax. I overheard a conversation amongst a couple of barmaids complaining that the fellows who propositioned them last night were unattractive and clumsy. It wasn’t the propositioning they were complaining about; it was the style!  This is a very different place from the National Trails, where such a conversation would have been outrageously shocking for us genteel walkers! As I write this, I am looking at a few guys at the bar. They have their company names emblazoned on the backs of their tee-shirts.  They might as well be packing six-guns!

In the B&B at breakfast, while I was trying hard to understand the German spoken by the Austrian guests, and not really succeeding, I was thinking about my own state of emotion as this journey draws inexorably to its conclusion.  Last night, with my hostess’s friends, I had listened to their immense pessimism about the European financial situation and about how we are all going to enter another major depression. These experiences reminded me of a journey to Austria that I had made on business about a decade ago.
 

At the time I was captivated by the beauty of Vienna and considered that it would be a privilege to live there.  At dinner that evening, I was really surprised by the attitudes I found. As the visitor at this gathering of company staff, I was being ushered from table to table, and I found the mood to be generally really down-beat. On enquiry, I was told that the whole of Austria was quite depressed at the time. The reason was that Hungary was soon to join the EU. The Austrians said they were really concerned about this. Over the border, there were hundreds of thousands of unemployed people who would flood into Austria and work for a pittance, taking jobs from Austrians and affecting wage rates and labour markets. Austria’s high living standards would be decimated and it would pay a huge price for the European dream.

The following day, I travelled to Hungary and had a similar dinner in Budapest that evening. To my immense surprise, there was a similar mood of depression in the room.  On enquiry I was told that people were now quite depressed about the imminence of their joining of the European Community.  I was told that they feared that the Austrians in particular would see Hungary as an obvious takeover target.  The Hungarians had finally escaped the Soviet yoke, but now the Austrians, in a capitalist guise, would come in and buy up all the simple, emerging Hungarian companies, using capital and skill to dominate the Hungarian economy and introduce a new era of economic penury for the masses of unskilled Hungarian workers. International companies would see Hungary as a market for their sophisticated products and unemployment would rocket.

In my view, both sides had a point. What they feared is actually what happened in Germany when the wall came down.  What all these people didn’t understand though was that the removal of the barrier to the free movement of workers and goods would be the single biggest boost to their mutual economies in hundreds of years. There would of course be losers, but the vast majority would profit hugely from the change. Yet these concerns are reflected across the borders of any number of countries across the world, even today.

It seems to me that this is just another example of the twin great fears that instinctively motivate human beings: fear of the future and fear of the other, in this case, unknown people just across the border.  As I have argued earlier in this blog, those instinctive reactions are probably the reason our primitive ancestors were so successful at surviving as physical underdogs in a viciously dangerous and competitive world. In a world in which we now dominate, those instinctive reactions are probably responsible for more harm than any other human attribute. It is amazing that the power of logic and rational thought simply can’t compete.

Last night's evocative B&B, Netherton Farm in the dying sunlight

The view over the Cromarty Firth in the evening sunset

An important moment! John O'Groats appears on a mileage board for the first time. I slightly readjusted my percentage completion statistics to reflect this information

A rather noisy reception committee for me on the Cromarty Firth. They seemed to think fence posts offered a better view

An exquisite tern suggesting I go elsewhere

?

Another shot of the fireweed!! Exquisite!

No lace is as intricate

A row of neat cottages in the village of Evanton

High summer and the berries are appearing

And the mushrooms

I managed to escape the A9 on this cycle track amid the Fireweed

The spirit of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite Rebellion lives on!

All purple, yellow, brown and green

My cycle track took me through plenty of woods

Oil drilling rigs on the horizon near Alness and Invergordon