Independent overland travel through Africa in a Unimog called Moglet

Rather than just disappear into the mists first thing in the morning, we took a little stroll on the beach before we left. Jason was impressed with what he saw the previous day, and wanted to take a few more pictures as well as show me a 'fairy door'. The rock formations on one side of the beach were really quite striking, and it looked very much like the layers of sedimentary rock had been forced apart by molten rock bubbling up from below. Jason tells me this is called an igneous intrusion! One of these 'bubbles' looked kind of like a secret door that could only be opened with a magic password, very Lord of the Rings-esque. The beach itself was pure soft sand, not a shell in sight, with smashing craggy bits around the edges where I imagine the local kids play in the rock pools in summer. It was also tinged with pink in striped sections, no doubt due to the colourings of the rock surrounding the bay.

Once back at Moglet, we made the usual getting ready to leave preparations, still occassionally mentioning the fairies hiding on the beach. As Jason mooched about outside getting things sorted, something half buried behind Moglet caught his eye - he poked at it with his toe, only to find it was a T-bar key, exactly like the type we use on Moglet for the main door, and exactly like one we lost weeks and weeks ago! Now I know what you're thinking, it was probably just one of our remaining keys and we dropped it in the dark the night before. Not the case though - Jason still had his original T-Bar in the cab, and mine has a blob of red nail varnish on the top so we can distinguish who's is who's, and this one didnt have any red on it! We concluded it must be a gift from the fairies, and we should paint it pink immediately, in honour of their lovely beach :-)

Fairy gift discovered and cooed over, we then had to bite the bullet and have a go at starting up Moglet. And we really should have more faith in her - fired up first time and kept on running like nothing had ever happened! :-)

We drove on to Durness and parked up in a campsite called Sango Sands. Very basic facilities at this time of year but had everything we needed to empty the tanks and fill up the clean water. Its free to stay there this time of year if you dont need hook-up, which is a nice touch, otherwise its £6 a night. Still a bargain, I reckon. Plus there was the inevitable Spar a couple of hundred yards away so we could get a few more supplies in. We tend to go shopping so much more in Moglet that we ever did when we lived in a house - its amazing how much we relied on frozen foods without even realising it! Eating fresh is obviously better, but its a constant niggle in the back of your mind, remembering just how many potatoes you've got, have the veggies all turned to mush, how many more days meat can we buy and fit into the fridge (another concern!) etc. Plus we're finding the local shops sooooo much more expensive than a big Tesco - I paid nearly £2 for a little head of brocolli the other day! Still, transporting the food to these places cant be cheap, and on the upside, theres loads more 'proper' shops like butchers and bakers and their produce really is top notch. We're mostly getting what we pay for, its just there's no option but to pay lots on a regular basis!

As a location it was fab though, even if it was pretty much the most exposed place we've parked so far - if it wasnt for the fact the wind was actually coming off the sea and trying to blow us inland rather than off the cliff, I'd have got Jason to move us somewhere else! The photo below doesn't really do the wind justice - the only reason I have my hood up is the hail is being blown horizontally at me from behind, and without my hood it would probably have knocked me unconscious! It's a really cracking beach, and with sunshine in the summer I can imagine it'd be a perfect place to pitch for a week or so and chill out. Apparently the breeze is pretty constant too (although not usually so enthusiastic!) so the midges aren't as much of an issue here as in the rest of Scotland during the summer months.

As is so often the case with us, we planned on staying here a night and then moving on, but we ended up staying for two. While we were here, we investigated the nearby Smoo Cave. In the summer months there's tours running which take you further into the chambers, but unfortunately all you can do in the winter is have a peer from the outside. Still pretty impressive stuff though. Jason had a wander around back up on the surface and found the stream which feeds into the cave to keep it flooded, via a waterfall that cascades down through a blowhole (something else you get to see from inside as part of the summer tours, so we just had to use our imaginations!) - what was weird though was when we arrived at the stream it was barely a trickle flowing down, and within minutes it had increased in flow to a fairly respectable torrent. You could actually watch the level rising and the water finding new courses through the rock as the volume increased. Weird, like someone upstream had just opened a gate or something.

We also went for a walk along the cliff top on the other side of the bay - seemed like the sensible thing to do when there's a Force 9 gale blowing! It was still blowing in off the sea though so, as uncomfortable as it could be when the stinging rain found your face, we weren't in any danger of getting blown off anything. We did manage to stumble across the remains of someones dinner though - pretty much all the main bits were there, from the skull all the way down to a couple of little hoofs and some scraggly tufts of hair/fur. Not sure quite what to make of that one!

The next day, we woke up to snow on the ground :-) We had been chatting to the site owner the previous day about the likelihood of snow, and he was adamant it wasn't going to happen - he said he'd not seen snow here since he was a lad! We were very glad he was wrong, there's something quite odd and special about a sandy beach with snow on it, I think :-)