Day 11 - Edinburgh and the Highlands

A very early start today to make it to our Loch Ness tour bus. The 16-seater took us north through the Highlands to the southern-most tip of the 25-mile long loch. As is always the way, today was one of the coldest air temp days we've felt, although it was very still, and heading north and higher in altitude didn't help. On the upside we did see frost so thick you can only imagine – frozen spider webs, frozen plants, frozen puddles, everything. All of this in the middle of the day! We were a little pleased; it wasn't snow but it looked very close to it, and we had an ice fight. The bus, led by driver and tour guide Tony, learnt about all sorts of cool anecdotes about the history of Scotland, its formation and the many wars that have been fought on its soil (mainly against the English). He was suspiciously patriotic and took great joy in recounting all of the things that Scotsmen had apparently discovered, invented, witnessed, been part of, written and generally claimed in his many entertaining stories. Along the way to the famous loch we passed through many quaint villages (not surprising really considering the capital, Edinburgh, is only about 450,000 people), got free whisky tasting and met characters such as Hamish the mountain ox and a semi-tame red deer that is due to be terminated because it has had too much contact with humans and consequently is being persecuted by its deer friends. Additionally, we passed a number of castles (including where Monarch of the Glen was filmed) and heard the histories of their various inhabitants. We also saw some amazing things like the Three Sisters (big mountain buttresses) among the lumpy, stumpy mountains that make up the Highlands. Interestingly, many people up there still speak Gaelic – it is taught in primary schools alongside English as a first language and all the street signs have both English and Gaelic on them. Also, there is no trespass law Scotland - if you own land in the countryside it is illegal to prevent people from hiking across it or camping on it.

Loch Ness itself was pretty underwhelming, perhaps because we went to the less touristy Fort Augusta and not all the way to Inverness. It was very foggy, and we passed on the £10 per person boat ride on the loch, which was from all reports bloody cold. It's a pity, but at least we can say we've been here. There was a cool little system of locks up the hill though.

Our return to Edinburgh at 7:30 tonight meant we missed almost all of the torchlight procession, a walk up Princes St that marks the start of Hogmanay. We had planned to do it, but had forgotten about it and only caught up for the last few hundred metres. There were people (theatre students?) dressed up as demons etc and a lot of people. A very impressive fireworks show followed, which only whets our appetites more for the new years fireworks in a few days time.

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Days 9 and 10 - Glasgow and Edinburgh

DAY 9 – EDINBURGH/GLASGOW

An unusually early start this morning got us on a bus to Glasgow. We decided to go and check out the 'other' Scottish city since we had time to spare. It has a completely different feel to Edinburgh. Everything in Edinburgh feels comfortably spread out, small, human-scale, and it feels much older than Glasgow. Glasgow seems more like a 'normal' city, with more modern architecture, taller buildings, and generally more hustle and bustle. It was enjoyable for its difference, but I'm glad we're in Edinburgh. Anyways, on a very cold and frosty day we headed east to Glasgow Cathedral, the oldest surviving Cathedral in Scotland (and/or UK?). It's stunning, 800 years of severe stone, incredible vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, smaller chapels underneath the main one, and surprisingly a lot of battle references and memorials to soldiers. Trekking back to the city centre, we noticed how well Glasgow handles visitors – every few hundred metres there is a big poster map of the CBD with attractions conveniently located, and they play on their architectural history in very overt fashion. It's kind of like they're trying to make up for the way their ancestors basically ignored Charles Rennie Mackintosh during his lifetime. I'm glad the public transport is so good here though – the city is almost exclusively made up of one-way streets, and would be terrible to try and navigate in a car unless you knew what you were doing.

 

We then jumped on a bus to the west end of Glasgow to see the transport museum. It was incredible how many artefacts they had on display, and across such a broad range. There were steam locomotives, the evolution of the car, dozens of bicycles, boats, metal detectors (re: aviation, following the destruction of a 747 over a small Scottish town due to a timed explosive in a suitcase), trams, motorcycles, fire engines, you name it. Each exhibit was well presented, but it felt a little incoherent and will benefit greatly from the imminent move to a much larger, Zaha Hadid-designed building. We grabbed some overpriced lunch (a necessity as our cheese and ham to make sandwiches was stolen and presumably eaten by drunk residents last night… grr) and headed across the road to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. That was truly a fantastic setup – very informative, easy to understand, a huge variety of stuff (including some very cool medieval swords and other weapons) and most impressively a section dedicated to explaining art to novices like us. It was really good.

 

I really liked Glasgow, although it doesn't have Edinburgh's character it does what it does very well.

DAY 10 – EDINBURGH

Our plans to see the Writers Museum were foiled for the second time today (it was closed on Boxing Day, and also apparently on Sundays), so we did a few housekeeping things like food shopping and booking our Loch Ness tour for tomorrow. Following a tip from a notice in the kitchen of the hostel we wandered to a nice little bar called the Brass Monkey. Before you judge us for going to the bar at 2:30 in the afternoon, this one is different. Every day they show a DVD on a projector in the back room, which is basically one giant mattress with cushions everywhere and cool little tables with holes in them to support your drinks while people walk past rocking the mattress. The best part is that the cost of the movie is only a drink from the bar. The drinks are good too – our coffees were among the best we have ever tasted and were huge for the price. We saw Leon – an excellent film that, surprisingly, we both enjoyed. It's a cool idea and perfect in a uni town like this, a good way to attract people to your bar and a nice way of escaping the cold. Keeley has already announced plans to open one in Melbourne. It would work really well in the CBD I think. Edinburgh and Melbourne are similar in that regard.

 

There are things you notice when travelling that aren't so similar though – cultural differences that stand out. For example, this morning a guy was shaving in the bathroom with both the hot and cold taps turned on full bore the whole time. I can't imagine anyone in Australia wasting water like that. Also, here people blatantly ignore pedestrian signals at traffic lights. Seriously, most people don't even look for the little man – they just check for traffic and run across. And everyone here smokes. It must be a way of escaping the cold (although you have to go outside to do it, so I'm not sure if that theory is dodgy). It's much more socially accepted, although illegal indoors.

 

The streets of the city are getting busier every day in preparation for Hogmanay. The carnival has doubled in size, and there seemed to be more people roaming around. We met more Aussies today too. Hopefully there will be fewer of them on the continent.

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Day 8 - Edinburgh

Another slow start following the shenanigans of last night led us to Boxing Day sales on the main street, where Keeley bought a new belt, and the National Museum of Scotland, where a rather eccentric old lady gave us a tour about Mary Queen of Scots. It was very informative and interesting, although the tour guide made for some pretty funny moments. Keeley became the star of the group when asking a reasonably innocuous question about the infant Queen Mary being sent to France for her own protection, and the guide was absolutely rapt that someone was not only listening to, but understanding what she was saying. The highlight of the day was, however, the drinking session with more randoms from the hostel. Our new friends – two Frenchmen, an Australian, a girl from Manchester and an American bloke studying in Dublin – took us out to a cool little pub in the Old Town. It was a really enjoyable night. Hopefully all the hostels will be as friendly as this.

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Days 6 & 7 - Edinburgh

Day 6 – Edinburgh

Today's main destination was the Edinburgh Castle. Despite the rather steep entry fee, it was a very enjoyable and interesting experience, including a genuine Scot tour guide and entry into the Scottish War Memorial (not quite as good as the Shrine in Melb but pretty impressive nonetheless) and Scottish War Museum, and of course the stunning Scottish Honours (Crown Jewels). Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos of the jewels or the memorial, but it was brilliant. More importantly though, we tried haggis (it was free!) and Keeley was very unimpressed. In fact, she was to the point of vomit. I personally thought it was okay, although I'm glad I didn't buy a whole plate of it. The highlights of the day were in fact Keeley's Christmas sponge cake (with solid chocolate 'icing'), baked potatoes with leftover chilli con carne filling (total cost: <£2 between us) and the drinking on Christmas eve with the other residents of the hostel.

DAY 7 – EDINBURGH

Christmas Day – not as lonely as I had thought it might be. We Skyped our families, and that was good, relieving the homesickness, and other than that it was a very cruisey day. Keeley and I were instrumental in the preparation of the dinner tonight, and along the way we met some brilliant people (most of them Aussies… again). For £2.50 each we got all you can eat and drink of some very good turkey and ham, salad, mountains of mashed potato, more carrots than you can imagine, trifle, apple crumble, some punch that was made of almost entirely alcohol, and various other bits and pieces. We were very pleased with our efforts. We have since been up drinking with the other residents of the hostel, but when the kitchen became the site of a food fight between 'us' and the cleaners, we decided it was bedtime. I was pretty worried about the homesickness aspect of Christmas, but it seems that we have been mercifully spared that problem, mainly by keeping busy and intermingling with the other residents.

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Day 5 - Edinburgh

Today we explored Edinburgh a bit more closely than yesterday, including a free walking tour by the same people as the one in London. Unfortunately, the guide this time around (another bloody Aussie!) wasn't quite as good as the bloke in London, but that could have also been a function of the weather. Today was the first day that we really felt the cold we were concerned about prior to leaving Melbourne. Fortunately, our jackets and various under-layers kept us pretty cosy – it was mainly our faces (and our bums whenever we sat down on a stone fence) that seemed to feel the cold, and even then only in the wind.

Anyway, our tour concentrated around the Old Town of Edinburgh, south of Princes Park (which used to be a Loch where all the town's sewerage was flushed to). We walked up the Royal Mile, a pretty cobblestone street that links Hollyrood Palace to Edinburgh Castle, stopping along the way to hear interesting stories concerning the unpopularity of King Charles II and the English methods of endearing him to the Scots, various characters like the minister of St Giles' Cathedral who remains the only person to be buried in the (now) carpark outside the church, witch burnings, the 'bodysnatchers' Burke and Hare, the graveyard prison of the Covenanter rebels who opposed the English church which is apparently haunted by the ghost of the prison guard MacKenzie, the only legal place to spit on the ground in Edinburgh, the cafe where Harry Potter was written, the story of the Skye terrier that returned to the grave of its master every day for fourteen years after he died, and numerous tales of executions (including one woman, Maggie Dickson, who survived) in the Grassmarket district. It was very informative, and although it sometimes felt overly rehearsed and directed at children, it was worth it. One thing I did notice is how dark all the buildings are here. Compared to London, the stone here is practically black, although the medieval beauty of it is enchanting.

Other than that, didn't really get up to much. The tour took up most of the day (at least 3 hours, most of the daylight hours here haha). We came back, did a little shopping and just tried to stay out of the wind.

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Day 4 - Edinburgh

It was a very slow start today. The flights and non-stop nature of the last few days has taken its toll. We rose late (although you wouldn’t know it by the light… it’s gloomy most of the time here, even at 1pm) and walked through the city to get our bearings and see what was going on. Cute little Christmas market at the foot of Castle hill, busy shops and a nice medieval-feeling set of streets winding up to the castle where we got brunch. We did find a brilliant souvenir shop, which was also a tartan-making factory, and with some difficulty a supermarket. It seems the supermarket we found is the budget one, as we managed to eat a very large meal each tonight for around £5. This is a good sign for the weeks ahead, and means we should be able to stay within budget most of the time. The backpackers we’re in has a very well set up kitchen (except there were no forks!) and our room is about three times the size of the one in HK. Not sure what the plan is for tomorrow, so I guess we’ll just wing it.

Day 3 - London

We arrived in London after a long flight in the wee hours of the morning, being one of the first planes to land at Heathrow for the day. We immediately sampled the Tube, catching it into the city and finding a locker to stow our bags for the day. Public transport in London isn't up to the same standard as HK, but the sheer size and overlapping nature of the system means there's always a train not far away. In contrast to the culture shock we got when we arrived in HK, this almost felt like we were back home on one of the suburban lines, with open air train stations, brick suburban houses and semi-industrial areas. We went for a wander to the museum precinct at South Kensington, but alas, although we had been up for hours the museums weren't yet open. A quick look around found us Baden Powell House, named after the founder of the Scouting movement, which interestingly had a very cheap hostel inside it. In said hostel we came across a brochure advertising a free walking tour of the city, which sounded like a good way to kill time during the day. We dropped in to the Science museum for an hour, playing with the many hands-on physics demos before meeting our walking tour in Hyde Park.

 

Now is probably a good time to mention how many bloody Aussies there are here – we heard many familiar accents on the plane from HK, and our carriage on the Tube from the airport was shared with half a dozen blokes backpacking, who had just arrived from the US and lost one of their bags. Our walking tour was no exception – a couple about our age from Sydney, a girl from Wagga who was finishing up her working holiday, and a bloke (Nathan) who had just arrived from Vietnam and Beijing. It was slightly disheartening; we didn't come thousands of kilometres to talk to Australians, but on the flip side it made the tour very enjoyable as our friendliness seemed to break the ice and start conversation a bit. Our 'New Europe Walking Tour' guide was Pip, a shaggy looking Brit from a tiny town outside London, who was informative, fun, knew his city and its landmarks well, and most importantly knew his audience. Being advertised as a free tour, it tended to attract many more people like us (ie cheapskates). Pip gave us helpful advice about what was good value, what was overpriced, and some ways to make the most of your time in London. The two-and-a-half hour tour took us to all the major attractions – Hyde Park and the Wellington Arch, Buckingham Palace (where we stood in the crowd while the changing of the guard happened, a very underwhelming experience), the National Gallery, Pall Mall, Trafalgar Square, St Martins, the Royal Cavalry Museum, Downing St, and Westminster. At the end all Pip asked for was a voluntary tip, which everyone seemed more than happy to provide. We will investigate more of these tours, as this one was incredible value.

 

After the tour finished we joined up with Nathan and went to the National Gallery. The collection there is very impressive and there are some genuinely brilliant works, but our dedication waned after an hour and a half so we went across the road to St Martin-in-the-Fields, a famous church. There is a café underground in the crypt, with incredible bricked vaults, and we looked upstairs for a few minutes while a service was on, but obviously couldn't explore the chapel further.

 

Tired, partially due to the fact that it was almost dark by 4:30, we returned to Victoria Station, got a coffee and an all-you-can-eat from a greasy, very unsatisfying pizza place, and hopped on our bus to the airport. Another plane ride, another check-in, another security check, finally we were in Edinburgh. Although it was late at night, it wasn't as cold as I had thought it might be, although it was very windy, and disappointingly not snowing. In fact, London itself was very bearable, much like a Melbourne autumn or winter, and we were too tired to really care about the cold in Edinburgh. Our respective jackets will make this a lot better though.

 

Tomorrow will hopefully be a recuperation day, so my entry may not be so long tomorrow.

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