The Improvised Adventures of Rebel Without a Coat, 2013 - Episode 5: Ill-Prepared Smoker Climbs Munro

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Episode 5 – Ill-Prepared Smoker Climbs Munro

A mundane dream is abruptly dissolved by my friend Moe calling my name. It's probably about twenty to eight in the morning, and I've slept through the sounds of him getting up and making me porridge and preparing half a banana. I stumble over to the kitchen table and whack some golden syrup on the porridge, scran the banana and then the porridge, trying to register that I'm awake. It slowly begins to register upon the first fresh air reaching me as we step out of the flat building, Moe ready to go to college, me ready to go hitchhiking. We spark up and head down the broad street that slowly swaggers into suburban Perth. The sun is out, and just as we are discussing sun tans I spot a tanning shop over the road. Freaky, dude. After an uphill stint we reach the turn-off to the college and part ways. I carry on up the hill, enjoying views out over the houses and hills on my right, before stopping at a shop over the road to get a cornish pasty and snickers for the journey. After a couple of roundabouts I reach a layby next to a farm and dump the bags, standing in the necessary thumbs-up position.

Before long I get a lift from a guy going a few miles up the road and we discuss mountain-climbing. I've hardly done any proper hill-walking before, but I reckon after four months living on the Isle of Skye and not getting round to it, it's about time I climbed up a mountain. I'm not the biggest fan of excercise, but I always wondered when looking at pictures people had taken from glorious high peaks, what it would be like to have that in front of you. Surely everyone should experience that. So what better place than Scotland, home to a good three-hundred odd Munros, which I think basically means it's a thousand metres or more. I've had my eye on the closest one on the map to Crianlarich – Ben More – all one thousand one hundred and seventy-four metres of it. I've looked briefly at routes to get to the base, I already have a compass, and the guy driving me says he never goes up a mountain without a compass and an OS map.

With that noted he drops me off on the edge of one of those tiny villages that sits on the main road. Double yellow lines. I start walking, and by god it's a lovely day to wander along and look at the trees, the big houses and steeply sloping overgrown gardens to my right, and the view sloping down to my left, where a neatly kept park seems to flow into the green of the distant hills and fields.

I find a place on the corner just after the double yellows come to an end and whip out the snickers. Ah, snickers. You evil non-fairtrade sweet packet of sustainance. I stick out my thumb again. The flow of traffic is very slow here. This is why I set off early. People tend to be more willing to pick you up in the countryside, but sometimes you wait for ages on account of the sheer lack of vehicles. One time when hitching on a road of about the same size I didn't get a lift all day. I'm not too worried right now though as I've only got about thirty or forty miles to go and it's a lovely day for standing around. And I'm hardly waiting twenty minutes when a lorry pulls up. The driver's off to Oban, which means he's going through Crianlarich. Nailed.

The scenery is gorgeous, a greeny-yellow spring haze that slowly becomes more mountainous, soon giving way to a loch that sits right by the edge of the road, with banks so high up that we're seemingly skimming the serenely rippling surface, shining like melting glass in the morning sun. I remark that I wouldn't mind doing a job like this lorry driver's. I ask him about lorry-driving life for a while. Sounds pretty cool if you get the right job. And an HGV license of course. I can just imagine having my own company lorry and getting paid to drive around and live in it rent free. I file this idea away in the back of my mind. Would be at a disadvantage compared to living in a van as there would no space to make music...

Before I know it the Ben More Lodge zooms past me and I realize we're entering Crianlarich. I hop off the lorry and check the time on my iPod – it's about eleven in the morning. Made it with the whole day to spare! The hostel doesn't open til half three but luckily the receptionist is around to let me leave my bags, and I take my small rucksack and sit down on a bench opposite Londis, having a dark feeling that this almost certainly overpriced and limited grocery store is the only one in the village. I take off my shoes and socks, enjoy a surprisingly good cornish pasty and engage in a well-deserved smoke, watching a little spaniel playing and chilling out in a garden up the hill.

I wander down the road for a couple of hours, taking in the sunshine, mountains poking into the blue sky, and peace and quiet and birdsong disturbed by the odd car going about its business on the A road. About an hour down the road I hear the buzzing of sports car engines and I swear to god, about fifty Porsche Carreras go past in the space of two minutes, broken up by the odd boring van that's been caught in the middle of some kind of conquest. A very odd thing to witness indeed.

On my way back I am guided back into Crianlarich by the luring presence of a massive snow-scattered mountain, twinkling in the sun, which I suspect to be Ben More. I pop into Londis for some strategic low-budget shopping which focuses heavily on bread and beans, check into the SYHA and pick out a nice posh shower room. Feeling a lot less smelly, I go for what my Skye Backpackers buddies used to call a wee schlaff – a small lie down or sleep. I fall into a semi-coma for about three hours and stumble out of bed and into the kitchen. Judging by how wonderfully refreshed I feel, I've shot myself in the foot because it's gonna be a while now before I'm tired enough to sleep. In the middle of getting a pan of beans on, I'm asked to move rooms because of a mix up. No bother. I come back to the half-can of beans that I've carefully rationed and pop four or five slices of bread into the toaster. I get talking to an older woman who is here with some mountaineering friends, and I mention that I'm "planning" to climb Ben More tomorow. She says I need to be careful, she had an accident last time she climbed that. "Have you got crampons?" She asks. Feeling sure I've just been asked if I have a special brand of tampons for times of severe period pain, I ask, "Have I got what?" and she explains that these are the metal things you attach to your boots for walking on the snowy bits. I say no, I've got Cat boots, and she says they won't grip very well in the snow.

After burning my toast and enjoying it all the same, I mention my boot predicament to the receptionist and he says he doesn't reckon the snow will be too bad this time of year. I ask him if they have wi-fi, and he tells me it's a pound for twenty minutes. On your bike. I go to the bar of the hotel just down the road instead. As I walk through the village in the dark, I'm struck by a blanket of blackness and quiet, feeling as I walk by the two little black benches inside the porch of the hotel that it wouldn't be a bad place to live, you could chill with your friends on these benches with a quiet beer and a roll-up. If it weren't for the nanny state thinking we can't be trusted to carry a glass outdoors. But that's the beautiful thing about little villages in the sticks, often the bars here don't give a shit anyway. At least that seems like that sort of thing they wouldn't give a shit about.

I sit down with half a pint of Tennents and get distracted by Facebook and Couchsurfing. I have to be back at the hostel for the 11pm curfew, and by the time I get round to looking into a route up the mountain I've run out of time to get into it properly. I haven't seen any maps being sold anywhere, so I'm gonna have to hope there's a decent map on the wall of the hostel somewhere. I'll look into it in the morning.

I get back and scrounge some green tea from a box of freebies in the kitchen, and sit in the lounge reading mountaineering magazines until I get suitably tired around midnight. I figure I'll get up about seven and get out for eight-ish to give myself plenty of time to get up and down, so I head to bed to try and get some good mountain-climbing sleep. But there's a woman in the dorm next door with the most unholy cough I have had the misfortune to be aquainted with. At regular intervals the walls are torn with a sound akin to someone trying to regurgitate their lungs. I almost wonder at one point if I should go check everything's OK. I become increasingly restless and it seems other people are being kept awake too as I hear someone's mp3 player tinkering away on the other side of the room. Needless to say when I awake to the scuffling sounds of healthy energetic people getting up at the fresh hour of the morning when healthy energetic people get up, I'm feeling pretty wrong. I pull out my iPod from under my pillow and observe vaguely that it's about six thirty in the morning. Aaaargh. Aaaaaargh...

I drag myself out of the sheets around nine, throw on the same orange T-shirt and holey-pocketed blue jeans I've been living in all the time, and prepare the ultimate nutritious energy breakfast of bacon on toast. I slip on my waterproof trousers and jacket and assemble extra layers of clothing and whatnot in my day bag, and remember I was supposed to cook more bacon to make a sandwhich for lunch. I need to be out of the hostel by ten because it closes up during the day, and one of the staff is already beginning to clean the kitchen as I straggle in there and start clattering around. At roughly ten to ten I go and look at the big map on the wall to work out what the fuck I'm doing. Looks simple enough. Turn right at a farm down the road and follow the burn 'til it stops, and then, erm, head east. I scribble an impression of this route on a pad of paper and stuff it in my bag, roll a preparatory moutain-climbing cigarette and I'm out the door at about five to ten, popping into Londis to grab a granola bar for the ascent, then lighting my cigarette and pacing forward down the peaceful, quiet A85, gazing at the mountain I guessed was Ben More, shrouded in a beautiful wispy haze of cloud. The air is fresh, the sky is mostly cloudy.

It takes about an hour to get to Benmore Farm, and as luck would have it, just beyond the farmhouse is a small wooden sign pointing to a path on the other side of the fence and saying, "to Ben More". Follow the burn my arse. The path leads clearly in an upward winding fashion to the base of the mountain, it pretty much is the mountain. And the mountain is a big motherfucker. I can't tell at this point if it's the same one I was looking at before, but it looks like jolly good fun. I step over the fence. Not one minute into my ascent up the path, one of the many rams dotted about the mountainside stands looking at me as I come within a couple of metres, makes a very worrying noise and stamps on the ground, piercing me with its black eyes. Oh shit. I've never been scared of a ram before. But now, as I attempt to calmly walk past the ram without looking at it, painfully aware that it has horns, and as it terrorises me by walking behind me so I can't see it, making distressed grunting noises, the great whoose within me is well and truly awakened. I try to breathe away the knot of dread and continue plodding on like so many other hikers this ram must have seen in its days on Ben More Farm, attempting to assert a peaceful non-threatening energy so that the ram will not feel inclined to attack me, and I try not to feel threatened by the other rams who either stare vacantly at me or trot away. After a while I am able to concentrate on the walking uphill and not bother about the rams too much. Eventually the path is blocked by a big pile of mud and it's time to start walking directly up the mountain.

I begin following a stream, clambering through increasingly boggy grass. Almost immediately it becomes crazy steep, and I'm having to involve my hands. As the grass gets slippier and squelchier, I begin to appreciate that perhaps I'm undertaking a genuinely dangerous task. As my breathing steadily gets heavier, it's becoming apparent that Ben More Ain't Nothin To Fuck With. Before long I'm stopping every ten minutes for a brief sit down on a rock. I wend my way along the paths of various tranquilly trickling tributaries until I reach dryer, yellower grass and spot my first fellow hikers in the distance. These crazy bastards are already on their way down. I scramble upwards, my calf muscles becoming heavy, suddenly wondering why I didn't do some kind of warm-up. I'm sitting crunching my granola bar as the hikers pass me on their way down, I tell them this is a job and a half and ask them how far to the top, they reckon a couple of hours. Bloody nora.

As I ascend higher and higher, the view as I sit down becomes more and more insane. The loch on the other side of the A85 becomes more and more distant, wending its way into a valley off to the left, and a web of brown, white and green mountains slowly reveals itself, countless peaks merging together and fading into the mist. A couple of big close mountains to the left loom over the land with a silent majestic presence. By the time I've eaten all my food over several wee breaks and drunk most of my water, I can see the top section of the mountain coming closer, steep and rocky and exciting. Suddenly the wind picks up and sweeps across the mountain-side, biting my face and throwing me to the left on the occasional whim. As I keep sitting down to rest, I ground myself on the rock and allow my torso to sway like a tree with the power of the elements. Each time I get up I clamber on relentlessly with a new burst of energy. I see the top of the mountain coming closer, closer...and then I see more mountain, and realise that's not the top of the mountain. I meet a rocky path winding its way up and start to climb over stones that rattle and scrape and threaten to fall away under my feet, but this is a bit more straightforward than grabbing onto wet grass. Feels mostly pretty sound, I just watch my step. All the while the wind grows stronger. I see a couple of hikers here and there working their way up below or above me. I see more and more snow dotted about until finally I can see a blanket of snow wrapped around the rocks overhead, and just visible in the distance is what can only be the peak, with someone wandering around up there. By this point I've slowly veered left around the mountainside and new mountains have popped into view around the corner. Grey clouds are swirling and drifting like a low ceiling and a tiny crack of sunshine is blazing down onto one radiant white peak in the distance.

As I meet a man on his way down he mentions that someone took a slide and gave up getting to the top. When I reach snow blocking my path, surely less than a hundred metres from the top, I can see what he means. I gingerly test the snow and find it impossible to gain a foothold, my shoe automatically slips downwards. There's no way I'm getting up that, it's barely possible to stand on it. I wander sideways for a while to see if I can find a way up, but it's obvious there's no way of getting to the top without taking on the snow. It's a shame I can't get all the way to the peak, but I still have about 200 odd degrees of panoramic insanity surrounding me, it feels like I'm higher than any of the peaks within view. I sit down on a rock and stare at it for a while, trying to take it all in. I was hoping to reward my valiant efforts with a cigarette, but as I suspected, ain't no fool gonna light any cigarette in this wind. It's probably around three or four in the afternoon at this point and I'm pretty concerned about getting down to the bottom and into streetlamp country before dark, so I don't get to sit around digesting the magnificence for very long. I let the wind batter me for a few minutes and then begin the precarious descent.

And precarious it is. If anything, getting down is harder than getting up. It takes a lot of care and a slow pace to pick my way through the sloping grass and rocks. After a while the gradient becomes such that the easiest way to get down is to carefully slide forwards down the grass on my arse, pulling myself gently down with my hands. This is massively enjoyable, and I am just about able to concentrate on sliding without falling to my death whilst looking down into the valley, watching it come very slowly closer. After a while I find myself on insanely steep ground again and have to go very carefully. I can see what looks like the burn I was following on the way up, and as it gets steeper I hoist myself down towards the stream bit by bit. Getting down becomes more difficult. There's rocks and heather and grassy mini-ridges overlooking almost immediate drops. This is definitely not the way I came up. I'm having difficulty getting around this, so I start edging along one of these mini ridges trying to find a decent path. I reach the end of the ridge and it drops off so that there's no way forward, and the only way to keep going down is to lower myself onto the steeply sloping ground a metre or two below, with only heather to hold onto as I do so. That does not look like fun. I edge my way back, only to find that somehow getting up the bit I just got down is even more dangerous than jumping off the ridge. How the fuck did I do that. I've genuinely managed to get myself stuck, pretty much literally between a rock and a hard place. Admittedly the drop can't be much more than a metre, but there's always a chance I'll fuck it up and start tumbling down the mountainside. I have a vision of a rock that I accidentally kicked down the mountain on the way up, I see it rolling down and then bouncing with incredible momentum and a frisbee-like spin, falling about five or ten metres at a time before bouncing off the next landing spot, rolling and then bouning, rolling and then bouning, and finally trickling into the distance.

I hesitate for a good few moments and then anxiously start dropping my legs down, holding onto the heather. The heather starts to rip away and I nearly fall, recoil back to where I was standing, and absolutely shit myself. Not literally of course, The great whoose reawakens and I teeter on the edge of panic mode, my legs literally shaking. Looking back, it's probably not nearly as dangerous as it feels, but I'm already having visions of calling moutain rescue. With no phone. I try to breathe calmly. I just have to go for it. In one awkward move I lower myself down and gain a shaky footing on the ground below. I keep moving in a mostly sideways direction until I find the refuge of a safe route downwards. My legs are weak from the climb up and are feeling pretty tender with each heavy step downwards. The ground gets slippier and boggier as I finally meet the stream, but by this point I'm squelching over the bog with a fuck-this-I'm-getting-to-the-bottom-of-this-mountain attitude.

I clear the mud at the bottom and step onto the farm path with weary relief. But the rams are not letting me get away that easily. As I carry my tired legs down towards the farm house, I hear the scuffling sound of a ram trotting along behind me. The way they walk, I can't tell if it's walking or running. I take a tentative glance behind me. It's walking at a decent pace a metre or two behind me. What the fuck is it doing? It keeps following me, freaking me out with its horns that could come and ram me up the arse any moment. I keep calm and pretend nothing is happening. But I can hear the crunch of more pairs of hooves slowly joining in. What the fuck...I don't dare look behind me. The noise continues to build, and one or two sheep pop up beside me, contentedly walking along like I'm the fucking Pied Piper of Ben More or something. This is incredibly bizarre. I obviously have half a heard of sheep following me down the hill. Surely they don't think I'm the farmer...I allow them to walk with me in a state of utter bemusement, and they follow me right to within the last few metres of the fence where a couple of rams are chilling, and these ones edge away from me. I turn back just before climbing over the fence and they're all standing about, a little way up the hill, some of them have dispered by this point, some of them vaguely looking in my direction. I wave them goodbye and get over the fence, get back to beautiful tarmac and roll the most well-deserved cig of my life.

I enjoy the sound of the birds for a while and decide to whack some tunes on the iPod, settling for a compilation of tunes from around the world. As I get back into Crianlarich I'm being pulled into a dream world by an amazing banjo player called Chris Thile, who courteously finishes his tune just as I'm about to go into Londis. I grab some food for tomorrow's journey and return to the hostel. I relax my bones in the shower for a while, and then cook the other half of my tin of beans with a good helping of toast. Some silly moo has put the toaster on a setting where it only toasts the bread on one side, so some of my toast ends up a bit weird. I enjoy a green tea and a smoke outside as the sky is becoming inky blue, and the big question-marked shaped constellation stares down at me. When I go inside the dorm is nice and quiet so I work away on my travel blog for an hour or so, and around half nine it's about bloody time to go to bed. Mountains climbed. Nearly one. Sheep allured. About twenty. Sheep angered. One. Adventures to come. Many more.

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