John Linton ……..But Definitely The Wrong Side Of Mull
So HSPA doesn’t work on one of the Inner Hebridean islands (Mull) and neither does my mobile telephone.
However the whole purpose of coming here was to see a White Tailed Sea Eagle and the internet will have to wait.
I sort of cheated posting yesterday’s blog via emailing the written copy to Steve (and asking him to post it on Saturday (Sydney time) as our ferry left just before midnight on Friday night (Sydney time) and as I guessed there would be no internet where we were going to stay – in fact the whole island is effectively a communications free zone.
The weather remained atrocious with sheeting rain for much of our trip to the ferry terminal in Oban and it got even worse after we disembarked on Mull. Nice conditions to undertake a 45 minute drive on a single track road with progressively worse visibility and oncoming cars hurtling towards us at express pace. Despite the less than accurate directions we found our hotel on a remote part of the island (though I suppose that should be ‘remoter’ as with 3,500 people on a land mass of 350 square miles it isn’t exactly over populated).
The hotel was great and the welcome (large ‘wee dram’ of a single malt) followed by a wonderful meal soon consigned the weather and the travel difficulties to fading memory. The purpose of our trip was to see the Sea Eagle and if possible the Golden Eagle. The immediate bonus was that one of the 9 pairs of breeding Sea Eagles had nested less than 500 meters from the hotel and had one chick a few days away from leaving the nest. Our friendly host booked a local guide to show us the two eagles and the other Mull wild life so we did that yesterday for the whole day. We saw three golden eagles , the Sea Eagle chick and as we were on the last stage of driving back to the hotel (sea eagle sightless after 7 hours) there she was – this huge and magnificent bird flying along the loch parallel to our car- less that 200 meters away.
You have to see it to believe what a bird with an 8 foot x 2.5 foot wingspan looks like in full flight. As an added bonus two herring gulls (not like our gulls – but birds with 5 foot wing spans of their own) were ‘attacking ‘ the Sea Eagle making her twist and turn and half roll on to her back to expose her enormous talons to the attacking gulls. It was an awesome sight and as she twisted and turned and jigged and jagged she passed over head at less than 15 meters. Absolutely breath takingly beautiful.
So we returned to the hotel very happy and had the ideal meal (at least Annette’s idea of an ideal meal) of local smoked salmon followed by local oven baked salmon followed by Scottish just picked strawberries and local fresh cream.
Altogether a truly memorable day.
I have to admit that I haven’t thought about Exetel, HSPA, the internet generally or new plans or services for the past waking day so this blog mightn’t qualify as being ‘vaguely business related’ but then I would be lying if I tried to make out that any of my thoughts today ever strayed to any ‘vaguely business related’ subjects.
Back to the mainland tomorrow and back to more realistic thought processes.