driving through the hebridies

most flights to continental europe out of delhi originates at night and everyone is trying to grab some sleep....for the first time, i flew out early in the morning...post breakfast, with nothing else to do (the aircraft's entertainment system was down!!) and seeing our flight path had taken us over afghanistan, i opened the window to peer out into the early morning setting and wow... a mad scramble to get my camera out and i was busy for the next half hour shooting the landscape outside. ladakh has been my most favourite location for a shoot but despite taliban, i will need to get to afghanistan soon.

having deposited son in his univ, drove through the outer hebridies islands. the three hour ferry from the picturesque ullappol in the mainland to stornoway was rough but manageable...the rain dampened my spirits a bit but i was told by my host that it is par for the course around the year...these islands are a dream come true for the landscape photographer. i always thought that arunachal was the land of a million lakes, from the very tiny to the fairly large...but these islands beat arunachal hollow. while i don't have the stats, i can bet that there are more waterbodies than land in these islands. moreover some of the beaches are so so pretty and the water so clean that if it was a tropical island it would have been a beach bum's paradise. more important for me was that the gaelic people are very nice and extra polite and i didn't get screamed at or even get dirty looks when i pulled up completely illegally many times to take a few photographs!!!

My driving maps and tourist guides all mentioned about "end of the road sculptures" as a must see.while my wife liked the sculpture bit, i liked the end of the road bit and we tried our hand at getting to one. as the name suggests it is at the end of a road and a few feet short of the sea. the road that leads to these are off the map and my sat nav had no clue what i was upto. but since they were signposted well, we managed to finally reach one of these. these are sculptures commissioned by the local councils and created by local sculptors to get the tourist to get off the main highway and wander into these tiny villages. while the sculpture itself held no interest to me, the drive and the quaint village we went through made up for the bad drive which i guess was really why the sculpture was created!!!