Birthday in Scotland

You can’t win them all, I realize. My latest consultancy, for a consortium of UN branches and NGOs, wasn’t quite as stimulating as my previous job. Luckily, it lasted only half a month. And when it was completed I could look forward to a long-planned bicycle trip with some Thai friends to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.

While riding more than 250 km along the beaches, inlets, and seriously steep mountain tracks of these seven islands on the edge of Europe (closer to Iceland than London), we have enjoyed the distinct culture here a great deal. 

Road signs are written in Scottish Gaelic first, with English translations below. Each night we’ve sampled a different brand of peaty whisky, some so local that they’re not available on the next island to the north. At a community center supper on Scalpay, we ate seafood that was swimming only hours before.

And the aura doesn’t get much better anywhere than the one we took in around sunset tonight at the 5,000-year-old Callanish Standing Stones. Didn’t hurt that it was my birthday.

Let us just say that I haven’t given much thought here to the recommendations for Myanmar disaster risk reduction that I was crafting for the UN just two weeks ago. Perhaps I might have focused a bit more yesterday on my own risk, however. My bike hit a patch of gravel during a downhill and I came off, snapping a collarbone in the process. Ah, well. Can’t win them all.