Barra and South Uist
going north
It's almost 10:00 when I awake and cruise down into Castlebay, where a café in the community hall-cum-school dishes me up a full cooked breakfast. After that, I pop into the library and use a commuter while waiting for the dark clouds to clear; it's clearly been drizzling and the roads are wet.
Once it turns brighter I opt to cycle around Barra's west coast, detouring while I do so to see the island's 9-hole golf course. There are a three players walking up the fairway and I can hear them speaking Gaelic, their voices carried on the wind.
My computer tells me I've ridden 25 km when I arrive at the ferry terminal, two hours before the 3:45 departure. The small café there is closed - due to the wedding, which the staff is attending - so I sit in the small waiting room for a while and then decide to ride to see the nearby beach airport, which is the only one in the world with scheduled flights.
It's a short ferry ride and as we are about to moor at the simple wharf at the bottom of South Uist, the sun comes out. Unbelievable really, as it'd looked like it was going to pour down just a short while ago.
I take some photos of the gorgeous beach and ride north, later enjoying a bag of chips for lunch at the dinky village of Daliburgh.
In the afternoon I find a ruined castle - looks more like a house - and venture down a sandy track to see some Stone Age remains of circular houses, ending up at the Youth Hostel at Howmore in the early evening.
This place is an uber-simple cottage with bunk beds for just 10 pounds each. There's an adjacent building with a shower room and kitchen-diner and being without any supplies, a Scottish woman touring on a BMW motorbike kindly shares her pasta with me. After a 70km day, the food is woofed down
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