Since I reached Durness, I had many sleepless nights here in the very north coast of Scotland. It started while I was camping by the sea in Durness. When the sun went away giving its light to other parts of the world, the darkness came in. I was very lucky because the clouds suddenly decided not to show up that night, giving way to the countless of stars and the unearthly milky way to appear. I was speechless, the pain all over my body caused by the cold wind suddenly disappeared, I felt that my mind left my body for a while when I saw these super massive open space starscape. This is the first time I saw such things in my entire life, it was very clear, the night sky I saw here definitely beats the night sky I saw in the Lower Himalayas years ago. I was standing outside my tent in a very low altitude, just at the sea level unlike when I was in the Tibetan mountains where I sat at nearly 5000m altitude that time. But here, Im sitting at the very north of Scotland, in very high latitude. And the latitude beats the altitude here.

At first the night sky seems dark to me since my eyes are not used to the very low light condition yet but after a few minutes looking at this darkness, automatically my eyes got adjusted by it and the sky looks really bright! This time, there are even more shooting stars and it really feels like there were many spaceships in the sky firing laser at each other. Maybe because it is so massive and so beautiful and it feels so divine, the clouds refused to cover this night sky. It lasted for almost the whole night, the clouds came in once in a while and disappear again, allowing me to see this marvel for hours and hours, I ended up sleeping only when the sun about to come again.

It is dark here in the north of Scotland, very few lights coming from the small village, the ground was so dark making the sky looked really bright showing strange colors coming from the Milky Way. For a while, I thought I finally saw the mysterious word called the “Infinity”, I thought I finally saw heaven from afar. And for a moment I could feel the greatness of the divine power when I see this magic. I could feel the greatness of the master of the universe, the one who is the most merciful, the master of the judgement day, the same master that I always pray to and seek help in my entire life to show me the true straight path. I felt weird, because the cold doesn’t seem to bother me anymore, I don’t feel the pain like thousands of needles penetrating my skin getting to my bones when the super cold wind blowing hard to me. I felt calm, I felt like the pain signal inside my body system stop functioning at that moment.

All campers here in the campsite were sleeping. I was the only who was awake to witness this magic. Everybody was sleeping inside their tent, covering themselves inside their sleeping bags from the cold. Perhaps they don’t know about this divine starscape, perhaps they don’t want to struggle under this very cold condition to watch this marvel of the universe. I realized I was the only one here who had the sleepless night watching this magic. Since then, I saw this magical starscape almost every night in this very northern part of Scotland, in Tongue, Durness and Thurso, making me feel like I don’t want to ride back south towards Glasgow. I felt like staying here, but I knew that it is impossible…