Underground, overground, wombling free...

My next stop on Mull was Tobermory, for a day and a night. As well as being known for its whisky (which I confess to finding a bit rough round the edges) Tobermory is now quite famous for a current children’s programme filmed there, call Balamory. It is an exquisite wee seaside village, where any fool with a camera can take their own postcard-perfect pics, as it is sooo photogenic.


But I went there for one reason and one reason only; Elizabeth Beresford and the Wombles.

“… And last, but very important indeed, there is Great Uncle Bulgaria’s atlas. It is very large and very old and the pages have gone brown round the edges and some of them have come loose as well, although Tobermory has done his best to keep them in place with strips of sticky paper. It’s a job which he dislikes because the sticky paper gets stuck to his fur, and the more he tries to get it off the more it sticks, so many of the maps have pieces of fur down the sides. The atlas is important because all the Wombles choose their own names out of it. Some of them spend a long, long time looking at all the different parts of the world to find just what will suit them, and some of them merely shut their eyes tight and point and hope for the best.
Which is how Bungo got his name….”

(The Wombles by Elisabeth Beresford.)

(I am now tempted to start a series of travel adventures, visiting place-names of wombles. There’s Great Uncle Bulgaria, Wellington, Orinoco, Tomsk, Cousin Yellowstone (from America)....)

Having come for a fairly random reason I had absolutely no idea what to do when I got there. Fortunately the staff at the hostel were able to recommend a walk or two, so once fortified by a bacon roll and coffee I set out. I was impressed that in the space of a 4 hour round walk I was able to experience coastal and mountain views;





thundering waterfalls;





streams cascading through mossy hollows;


a pine forest straight from Middle Earth;


another of Scotland's mirror-like lochs;




early autumn colours;





and nature's own masterpieces of time and tenacity;

(I also squeezed in a slightly out-of-town craft gallery and afternoon coffee in an exquisite chocolate shop, where I was treated to another of nature's extravagant displays to accompany my latte and coffee truffle;)

I rounded off my Tobermory visit with a good meal out that night. I had intended a solitary fish’n’chips from the van on the pier, but happened to run into an acquaintance made on Iona, and ended up having dinner together at the pub. A cheerful end to my unexpectedly relational time away.

That night there was only one other girl in my hostel room (a relief as there were 6 beds in the room, which would have been a squeeze!). She turned out to be another Aussie, so we had a nice wee chat. It had been quite a while since I'd met a fellow antipodean. She was doing the classic working/travelling thing for a couple of years, with her husband (who was in the boys dorm down the hall; very school camp-esque!). She described to me how they'd 'done' this city, then that area, this country, that continent, and how they were planning to 'do' the rest before heading home to settle down.

It bothered me a bit. Was I thinking that I too should have worked out a plan to 'do' what bits of the world I wanted to 'do', and then move on? Or did it make me wonder what we were doing it all for; were they travelling purely for the sake of being able to say 'been there, done that' as the girl made it sound? Was I also, without allowing the time to be moved by what I was seeing, and changed by what I learnt of the world and people's ways in it? Food for thought anyway.