Independent overland travel through Africa in a Unimog called Moglet

With our bodies still in shock after the horribly early start yesterday, we were both still pretty tired this morning. How on earth did we used to manage these early starts every day??

We left our deserted beachfront location and drove on south towards the causeway that would take us from North to South Uist. On the way we stopped at a ruin called Trinity Temple, which is apparently a site of European importance and cultural learning - I have to say, we found it full of poorly tended memorial stones and an awful lot of sheep shit! And when I say 'lots', I mean it - the track to get there had us literally ankle deep in liquified slurry of crap/mud/rain/who knows what. Thank god for waterproof boots and gaiters! The phonebox next to where we parked up gives you an idea of exactly how wet and wild the weather here can get!

After stomping in lots of puddles on the way back to get a bit cleaner we carried on south, naturally via a little unclassified road or two - one of which had a little herd of Shetland ponies who were only too happy to share our supply of recently purchased vegetables!

Driving south from North to South Uist, you have to pass through an island called Benbecula, which is connected to both via a causeway. Looking on the OS map, the place looked littered with castles and duns (intact or remains of stone built buildings on islands in the middle of lochs). We drove to a place called Caisteal Bheagram - expecting to see a castle on an island, which is exactly what we got - apart from the fact it was not much bigger than your average garden shed!

Not really needing much time to look around, we moved on to our planned stopping point for the night. On the way there, Jason continued to be mildly irritated by the manners of the locals - not because they were rude, but because there's an almost manic requirement to win whatever kind of politeness competition most of them seem to be engaged in when it comes to giving way on the roads. The majority of main roads on the islands are single carriageways, and every few hundred yards or so there's a passing place. What we've been finding day after day is that as soon as someone even glimpses Moglet on the horizon, they're slamming on the anchors and yanking the wheel to put themselves into a passing place, often with their wheels spinning into the mud off the side of the tarmac. And with Moglet being built for comfort, this invariably means they sit there waiting for us for what must seem like forever as we slowly trundle our way up to them. And they really dont need to pull over so far, she looks a little large but she's small enough to fit inside a standard parking space (honest!). This happens almost every single time, whether we're going uphill or down, and regardless of whether Jason has already flashed his lights, indicated and practically come to stop himself in a passing place. Politeness indeed.

So, extreme manners aside, we made our way to a little site on the map which indicated a couple of roundhouses several thousand years old. Lovely location, no-one around for miles, open sandy beaches and a perfectly elements-protected dip behind the dunes for us to spend the night. And obviously free too :-)

After a slightly odd but very tasty tea of burgers and onions in fresh baked rolls served with sweet and sour rice (I'm clearing out the cupboards again!), we went to sleep and looked forward to tomorrows adventures.

In the morning, we woke to the pitter patter of sea spray coming over the dunes onto Moglet and a local farmer pulling up in his 4x4 asking us if we'd seen his cows?! How do you lose cows??? He seemed slightly distrustful of our reply in the negative, perhaps he drove by the night before and smelled the burgers cooking...

We decided to go for a stroll on the beach and have a look for the remains of a viking house and an Aisled house (basically built on the same premise as a cart wheel, ie circular with a central room and others coming off it in 'spokes') that were promised to us by a guide book. A couple of miles later down the beach, lots and lots of plastic and broken fishing nets plus the obligatory animal skulls later (as well as a bright orange plastic ring Jason immediately strapped to his new bag!), and we were none the wiser on the ancient sites front. Jason found a line of stones in the top edge of a dune which he thought might be the remains of a wall, but that was about it. We decided perhaps the guidebook was so many years out of date that the sand had since re-claimed its mysteries and headed back to Moglet to continue our journey. On the way we found a fair few discarded bit of machinery (haven't these islands ever had any rubbish dumps?) and an awful lot of poo, so we decided to call it quits and move on.

The plan for the rest of the day was to continue all the way down to the bottom of South Uist, take the causeway (another one!) over to Eriskay just for a little look, then start trundling back north again with a view to getting a ferry over to Harris in a day or so.