Scotland: Winter 2005

We travelled up over two days, getting cooked lasagne on the way from Becca's mum, amazing. Also amazing is that the mini-bus survived some severe ragging from Adam. Neil had kindly supplied us some of his cheesy music for the trip, though this soon got superseded by Becca's Power Ballad's CD, through a lot of singing we all thought we were rock stars by the end.

For the first two days we split up into two groups, one for walkers competent moving on snow and ice and the other for a winter skills course. The two instructors we had hired for the winter skills course first took us to the Caringorms, one big snow playground, to learn how to use crampons and ice axes, and make some really good snowballs.

The bit which was most fun was learning how to self-arrest, stopping yourself whilst falling down a snowy slope. But for this we had to launch ourselves to hurtle down the training slope on our backs and then pull a self-arrest, digging the pick of the axe into the snow.

The hut we stayed in was in Glen Coe, so for the rest of the week we went walking in the amazing hills there. Most of the walks went past the snow line around 900m, but there was a more blimbly walk each day, so if you wanted a rest from mountains you could do that.

It was Scotland, so the weather was not always the best. As you can see, we had some amazing views (of cloud). Short days meant we generally set off in the dark and came back for around 5pm at dusk. This meant there was a lot of time for evening entertainment. This generally consisted of card games, board games, drinking games, just drinking, making sandwiches, singing to power ballads very badly, going to the pub, and dancing with a strobe one, just like a club, no really.

Wednesday was Christmas day, well it wasn't really, but we had a fake one anyway, with turkey, veg, stuffing, crackers, pudding, hats, christmas songs and party poppers. In fact I was so convinced it was the real thing, I forgot all about the real Christmas day till my mum phoned at 3pm on Dec 25th whilst I was listening to some Moby in my Bristol flat.

The landscape was amazing, the hills just kept going up, the lower lands had beautiful streams and wild deer herds, they were proper Scottish Glens.

Around 15 UBESters went to experience the amazing landscape of Scotland, play in the snow and to have a great laugh. All of us thank Kate and Becca so much for organising this trip.