Yesterday did an 11 hour day tour involving 2 coach trips, 5 boat trips and a lot of walking. But it was amazing!
That’s a puffin, and I was only about a foot away when I took this. We had travelled to Staffa island which is a tiny rock west of the large Hebridean island of Mull. Staffa is home to many sea birds, but mostly people come to see the Puffins. It’s right in the middle of chick season now, and there were loads of them!
It was surprising how fearless they were. Be mindful that there were dozens of tourists on the island, and we were able to get extremely close without them flying away or even reacting much at all. They nest in burrows at the edge of cliffs so this naturally limited how close we wanted to get, but I think I had expected them to fly away almost when we were within sight!
Staffa itself is a remarkable place…
It’s one end of The Giant’s Causeway which stretches to Ireland and is mostly made from these usual rock pillars.
There’s a large cave that starts at sea level and continues under the island, and the above photo shows the walkway to view it. Legend has it that the cave was the ancestral home of one of the giants that created the causeway, and while it was once available for tourists to enter these days we can only go up to the entrance.
So rewinding a bit, the above shows two of the boats we rode. Thankfully I didn’t get sick (hooray!) but earlier in the day we were a little worried we had underdressed. Thankfully it got warmer so my shorts weren’t a problem 🙂
The trip took us from Oban to Mull, then all the way across via coach to the southwest post where we then visited Staffa and then were dropped off on the ‘sacred’ isle of Iona, which was home for over a thousand years to a famous abbey.
Iona is remote and windy and sparsely populated. This cat was just hanging out in the ruins of a nunnery from 1200, and was far less interested in us than we him.
Iona had its own tiny – tiny! – post office from which I mailed a couple of cards. Will they have a special cancellation?
Of course we visited the abbey as well, and it was well worth the visit. We had wanted to explore the island a bit more but time was limited and we’d spent a bit of it on a nice lunch.
That shows dinner as well (on the right) which was back in Oban after our 11 hour trip. We saw and traveled a lot yesterday, but to be honest the puffins were so cute and remarkable they almost eclipsed everything else. I also took loads of photos and it was unusually difficult to select only a few for this summary.
Basically it was a great day, and bound to be a highlight of this trip 🙂
