Nina, Elsa & Sophie.
After a restful first night in Oban we started our exciting day. Today’s plan: touring Mull, Staffa and Iona, three of the most famous islands in the area. The weather was beautiful, clear blue skies and sunshine. Yet it was still very cold and we scurried in the morning to get dressed as warmly as possible. Everyone ate their breakfast individually, some in the hostel, some on the ferry because of faulty time management (totally not speaking from experience).
At around 10 am we were ready to board our first ship: a ferry called the Caledonian McBrayne to Mull.
We were sitting on the deck and enjoyed watching the landscape change from Oban’s coastlines to the open sea. As we sat there looking out at the water we found that everything looked like straight out of a book. Especially the striped lighthouse and the cliffs rising from the waves seemed almost magical.
As soon as we arrived on Mull we got on a double-decker bus which would transport us all the way across the island. On the drive we saw the windswept mounds, different lochs and animals like red deer, sheep and highland cows. From time to time there would be facts and folktales told over a speaker, giving us live information to the things we were seeing.
After we arrived at Mull’s coast we took a much smaller boat to Staffa. We really enjoyed this ride, the sea was beautiful, the sun was glistening and saltwater was splashing in our faces as we sat at the railing. A highlight was seeing four seals 'bananaing' on the cliffs in the ocean, something we all were really excited to spot.
After about twenty minutes we saw the tiny island of Staffa get bigger and bigger on the horizon and after about thirty we were ready to first set foot on the island, famous for its basalt columns that look so tidy, they almost seem manufactured.
They form when lava cools quickly and forms into hexagons because of the rocks chemical composition. The columns are about fifty million years old which, in stone years, is considered really young. On Staffa we were free to roam for an hour, exploring caves, walking through the meadows and eating our lunch. We were amazed by the beauty of the landscape and really liked visiting this place.
Another boat brought us to our final stop, Iona, an idyllic island with a village at the coast surrounded by green hills and mounds. We spend two hours there, getting coffee, tea or hot chocolate, walking around and sitting at the beach with its clear turquoise water, white sand and an abundance of colourful shells waiting for us to come collect them. We would have liked to surround the whole island but we had to admit to ourselves that that was a little too ambitious.
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Sadly our time on Iona was over way to fast and if we ever wanted to get back into our cosy warm beds (is it obvious we're a little cold as we're writing this?), we had to catch our ferry again to get back to Mull, get on the same bus, have the same bus driver (we still didn't understand his strong accent) and do the whole journey from Iona over Mull back to Oban again. On the way we saw some more highland cows and red deer. We also learned that the schoolchildren on Mull have to get on their school bus at four am …! Thank god we live in Basel. We also figured out that Ms Hänggi was not kidding when she said it would be cold because the temperatures remarkably cooled down as the evening came and we were thankful for our thought through layering earlier.
After a wonderful but long day we arrived back at the hostel where we ate pasta together and soon got ready for happy and tired.
Good night and see you tomorrow?
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