We started our day relaxed and with a great breakfast, after which we drove a beautiful road along the sides of Loch Etive and Loch Awe. I tried not to miss the junction to the Old Military Road along River Orchy which I have missed two years ago. Despite all the attention I missed it again and had to drive back a little to get it ... but it was really worth it. The valley is really beautiful with the river cutting its way through rocks and stone-formations every now and then ... sadly the sky was overcast with clounds and hasn’t made for a great backdrop, so the photography-part wasn’t that good.

 

After that nice drive we reached the western end of Loch Tulla where we‘ve planned to stay for the night. As it was only noon we decided to go for a little walk to Loch Dochard (which, according to the map, was only about 4km away). It started on a little gravel-road which transformed into a swampy path pretty quick which followed every bend of the „Abhainn Shira“ and required some artistic skills and long jumps as well as getting rid of our shoes to cross the creek a couple of times. When we reached Loch Dochard, my GPS-watch recorded more than 7km (one-way) ... a little bit more than the 4km we thought it would be. But when we reached the Loch, it was really worth it, was we had a really great view of the Loch and the surrounding mountains ... because of the still dull sky, not really great for photography, but beautiful nonetheless. After a short pause we headed back for our campsite and decided never to go for a walk without water again ... no matter how short the walk looks on the map ... ;-)

 

During the evening we had to deal with large amounts of midges for the first time and cooking dinner wasn’t really fun because of that ... we even decided to go to bed early because of those little fuckers ... you just can’t get rid of them ...

The next morning we started early to drive (through the amazing Glencoe) to Fort William where we have planned to restock and look for a great place to use as a „base camp“ for climbing up Ben Nevis. As we arrived there, we dumped that plan real fast as tons of tourists prepared themselves to go up ... not really our cup of tea.

 

We decided to drive on and use the day to drive to the Isle of Skye ... as we really didn’t want to climb up between all the tourists.

 

Some impressions: