Holiday Week 2: Monday: Dhanakosa (Trossachs)

Everyone went meditating at 8.30am, luckily for me I was fast asleep or I'd felt guilty. But, it's quiet time till 9.40am so I'm currently being ninja for the next half an hour.

Yup, you guessed it, I'm staying at a Buddist Retreat Centre (well in the staff quarters anyway). I woke up on the floor of a strange bedroom, but the pillow was comfy so I managed not to panic. From outside I can hear a waterfall, an have just been told it's not raining. Woop woop.

We checked the map, got in the car, and shot off. 10mins down the road (track) and we stop and leave the car at a hotel. By now I've realised what a beautiful place Loch Voil is. Stunning!

So, we'd been hiking in the Scottish Highlands for 5mjns when suddenly I was down to my boxers crossing the Loch with everything else on my back. Note to self: it's not even safe to wear the 'bottom of the drawer comedy boxers' out hiking where no-one else is around, cus the minute your crossing the Loch in them, your host will be there taking photos. Did i take photos of her in her pants? No, cus I'd probably have been slapped, in the nicest possible way :-)

And so we marched through endless bog (turns out we missed the path by about 5 yards) until we got to a never ending track that lead us into the mountains. I managed to use map, landmarks, compass, and timings to get us to our first peak (though it was pretty hard to miss). We had lunch and stormed up to the trig point at 715meters and made a short film (which I'll post when I get home).

8pm saw us setting up camp. This was the first time I'd used my new tent (Hilleburg Nallo 3GT) but am glad I bought a 3 man tent as anything smaller would have been a squish. Anyway, due to the shape of the ground etc, all the flat bits were waterlogged, so we picked a nice 45' slope in-between two ridges as our home for the night. Once it was all set up, sleeping bags readied, we discussed dinner. I wasn't to fussed about cooking everything, so we debated couscous with tomato and veg sauce, or noodles. We reached a unanimous decision when I realised I hadn't brought any gas. Oops.

We had a lovely cold dinner (remains of lunch) higher up the
mountain side, overlooking the loch as the sun went down. Unfortunately we missed the sun set itself due to a 7 headed dragon (3 tails) cloud bank that swallowed it right up. We partook of hot tea, and a dram'o'mead, and then scrambled straight up the side to the top where we collapsed and watched the last of the light fade.

I'd been smart enough to bring both my new head torch as well as my normal torch, but had failed to consider finding a dark green tent, in the dark, somewhere down the mountain side, and then a battery ran out leaving us just the headtorch. Oops number 2.

While searching the darkness, we frequently regretted not moving the tent to a perfect spot we had discovered after dinner - flat, dry, sheltered on 3 sides. Ah well, never mind. Too late now.

We finally found it after half an hour searching, and crawled into bed. This is where we discovered that shiny sleeping bags do not grip the sleeping mats, which do not grip the tent floor. So we spent all night crawling back up the tent so that our feet didn't stretch and break the door which we kept sliding down to. Highly annoying (we even pegged our rucksacks down in case they slid out and down the side in the night), but that's what you get when you camp on a 45' mountain side. Oops number 3.