Mull has almost no crime. This is handy, since we had to be out of the Youth Hostel (haven’t mentioned this yet, but there was a waterfall in the bike shed! A genuine waterfall) by 10 and didn’t really want to head back to the mainland until the 5 or 7 o’clock ferry.

We were actually out of the hostel by 9, because we’d booked a whale watching trip. Chained the bikes outside the quay, left our bags in the Sealife Survey visitor centre (not because they’d get nicked, but because they’d get wet in the inevitable rain!) and proceded to sit on a boat for six hours.

We saw no whales, alas. The Minke whales and the basking sharks started heading off about a week before we got there (having said that, the website announces that the day after we went they saw the minke 25 minutes out from Tobermory!). The Orcan pod could be anywhere along the Scottish coast, and of the three kinds of dolphins two (common and bottlenose) have already finished it’s season and the other (Risso) haven’t been seen at all this year, and only once last year. We also didn’t see any leatherback turtles or sunfish, which have started to turn up in the last few years as the dolphins leave. Global warming is pretty obvious in an ecosystem as carefully balanced as this.

The orcas make for a particularly sad story: there’s only nine of them, and they haven’t produced offspring in fifteen years. That’s sad in itself, but new research is suggesting that they might actually be a unique subspecies of orca; they’ve found certain populations don’t mix, even though their territories do, like the Norwegian orcas and the Finnish orcas, and there are some distinct physical differences in the position of the white patches near their eyes and the shape of their fins. So the Scottish pod might be the last nine of their subspecies, and they’re not breeding.

What we did see, and quite quickly too, were harbour porpoises. We saw several distinct individuals, at varying distances from the boat, including a juvenile. Brilliant! We found an area high in fish and plankton, so we hung around there a couple of hours, but nothing apart from more porpoises. The water was too rough to see much, so we could have been positively surrounded by sharks and whales, but there wasn’t a lot we could do about it. If the weather had been better we’d have gone further out, to Muck and Eigg, but we were pretty much trapped in the Sound of Mull.

We also missed seeing any otters, though there were a few shapes that might have been otters, might have been seals, but we did see several sea eagles. Huge! Beautiful. On the way back in we nipped into a cove to see common and grey seals. I’ve always loved seals, hence the Selkie story, and there were some with a little bit of grey-white still in their coats; juvenlies. Oh, and we saw lots of phytoplankton and zooplankton!

We pulled back into Tobermory, collected our bikes, and hopped on another bus (though at this point my knees had actually recovered – my friend’s hadn’t). Back on the ferry, and into Oban. Arrived at the hotel to find a discrete notice announcing they were under administration, but we had no problems with it. The staff were lovely, and even gave me a free upgrade from single to double for being cheeky enoughto ask for one! Well, to ask for a larger single – my friend had a bigger room with a bath, while I had a tiny one with a shower, but it turned out he had the largest single in the hotel. I got boosted to a double with a bath, but no shower.

I decided to eat in: the food was horrible. Don’t get me wrong, I got what I paid for: £15 for mor food than I could really stomach, but it had been microwaved, and the peas were shrivelled and the black pudding dry. But the waiter was lovely! I get the impression the cook had just stopped trying, which when your workplace in under administration isn’t entirely surprising.

Very early night, in the end, because I had nothing else to do! Except I remembered that I did, and after an hour’s doze woke up and wrote some postcards. Had to check out at 10 the next day (still no lie-ins!), after a breakfast left on the hotplates too long, and got to wander about Oban for a couple of hours. We had a tour of the whisky distillery, which was really interesting (plus free whisky tasting and free glasses to take home!), and walked up to the colloseum-esque structure on the hill (got to love those mad, wealthy Victorians), but we ran out of things to do about an hour before our train and ended up looking at the tourist tat.

It was a seven hour train journey back, Oban to Glasgow, Glasgow to Edinburgh, Edinburgh to York. Quite tight changes. We had a bottle of wine and some random food (including biscuits stolen from the hotel) so we ate lunch on the Oban-Glasgow. I was right: the mountains were improved by wine!

We got back to York about 8ish, at which point I cycled home, changed, and ran out again for Tom Scott’s leaving do, since he’s heading to London to seek fame and fortune there. And then the day after I went to London for the Child of the Hive book launch, which shall get its own post tomorrow.