Back to Oban and then to Barra

three nights waiting

It's rainy, so I'm pleased not to be in my tent and feel quite smug that I took some photos soon after getting off the ferry last night.

The 11:00 ferry takes me back to Fionnphort - merely a few houses - on Mull, where I wait around 30 minutes for a bus to arrive: the bus schedules are all synced with the ferry's, so visitors don't have to linger too long. It's a nervous wait as it's unclear if my bike will be accepted, but when the driver hears my problem he puts the bike in the hold and drops me off at the ferry terminal about an hour later; again it's a short wait to catch a boat back to Oban, the only place which will - hopefully - have a bike shop.

Oban isn't a massive place and it doesn't take long to find a bike shop - EVO Bikes - that can fix the rear hub. Ben Cathro and his mate Shuan Conway do downhill racing for team MTBlue.E.V, a company that makes cycle shirts. As luck would have it, Hope is one of the team's sponsors!

Ben dissects the hub to find that the bearing casings have disintegrated and have subsequently carved up the axle and free-wheel bits. He knows who to contact and makes a phone call and leaves a message. Things are looking up.

Instead of hanging around, I get a bus along the promenade with my heavy panniers and pay 30 quid for a B&B and go back later to check with Ben. As I suspected, nobody at Hope has called him back, so I ask him to call them again. The guy answers this time and says he'll post the bits, but it's now too late for today's mail, so he'll do it Tuesday and say they should arrive on Wednesday.

I've time to kill and spend a lot of it in the Lorne, a cosy downtown pub that has free Wi-Fi and decent food. Tuesday is gray and Wednesday starts off overcast, but the sky clears and it becomes sunny in the afternoon. I get a taxi with my panniers back to the bike shop - I had tried to walk, but only made it a few hundred yards. They are heavy! The postman comes, but there isn't anything from Hope so I buy a cotton cycling cap to cheer myself up and have a pub lunch and use Skype to talk to my wife back in Taiwan. It's then back to the B&B for another night.

Thursday is sunny! In the late morning I venture back down to Evo Bikes, but no hub parts arrive with the early post, so I have lunch in the Lorne - again - and go back to Evo at 2:00. Nothing.

Sympathetic to my plight, Ben agrees to let me have an old wheel that's kicking around the workshop that'll get me going again. It's a 36-spoke, no-name rim with a cheap Shimano Parallax hub that costs me 10 quid.

After dashing back to the B&B for my baggage, I pedal to the ferry terminal to get 3:40 ferry to Uist and then on to Barra - my destination. It feels good to be liberated and back on the road.

There are already about 30 bikes on board. All the other cyclists and cars get off at South Uist (Do they know something I don't?) and the ferry eventually arrives at Barra's dinky port after 10:30pm. It's dark.

The island's Youth Hostel is full and the few B&Bs I call at are, too. The owner at one tells me there's a wedding tomorrow and relatives have traveled from around to attend, so after riding a kilometer or two west out of the village, I set up my tent on some high yet soggy land overlooking the street lights of Castlebay.

The ground is sloping and sheep are roaming around, but none bother me in my tent.

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