Scotland, the Highlands and Lochs tour - The 24th of January 2014

We walked out of the hotel at around a quarter to seven so as to gather in front of St. Giles Cathedral, more precisely at Nero Café forty five minutes later in order to join the multi-lingual group tour to the Highlands and Lochs.

The weather looked as bad it ended up being all the way through the twelve hour tour and had it not been for the audio guiding and the incredibly funny and humorous driver it could have easily been an absolute disappointment, once the scenery could be barely seen due to the ongoing pouring rain. 

The very few stops took us to Callender through to Loch Lomond, the Three sisters Mountains, Glencoe and Loch Ness along the western coast up to Inverness. The eastern coast return via  Pitlochry and Perth back into Edinburgh city can't be really accounted for as darkness fell down abruptly and  one could virtually see nothing.

Loch Lomond is the largest surface of fresh water in Scotland. Its beauty is said to have been praised in literature, song and legend, though I don't think any of the eleven tourists doing the tour with us was too impressed. The sky was greyish and that didn't highlight the landscape beauty at all, which was certainly a pity because I have no doubt that had the sky been brighter and it would have made a huge difference.

Glencoe was the next stop and that I must confess was impressive, mostly because of the image of the bloody massacre of 1692 associated with it, which according to Dickens turned out to be "the burial ground of a race of giants". 

As history goes having signed an oath of submission to William III  in 1692, albeit five days late, the MacDonald clan generously  entertained 130 government soldiers in their homes for ten days, having then been mercilessly slaughtered  by them. It doesn't seem to have been the brutality of the  attack that shocked the nation but the breach of trust.

The landscape was powerfully harsh and that added to the historical account.

I managed to photograph two of the Three Sisters Mountains (hopefully the third sibling won't be upset) but we were so frozen and the soil was so slippery that neither of us ventured any farther to where the three of them could be seen.

Another stop took us briefly into a brewery but despite having got warmer by sipping some of the free whisky provided to the visitors neither of us made the way to where it was being served and took pictures of the loch that could be seen behind a "veiled fence" of branches instead.

The one hour boat trip around Loch Ness didn't allow us to see much from the inside and we were only "let out" a few minutes onto the upper deck of the boat as it approached the Urquart Castle ruins, which were formerly one of Scotland's largest castles.

We had all been looking forward to an unexpected "surprise" ... as I believe had Nessie eventually showed up we might have said it had been worth having come all the way up here. I was nevertheless drawn to the rather exquisite colour of the water which was of a unique dark yellowish colour I didn't manage to capture in any of the taken pictures.

From that moment onwards the trip was most exclusively interesting because of the historical background provided by audio but most of us were too exhausted by then to even pay attention to the jokes of the driver, who was at his best all the way.

I am sure he must belong to a brave clan, or at least he showed to be a lot "braver" than any of us.