Beautiful Edinburgh and the Wild Scottish Highlands

We’ve been in Edinburgh for the last month. We came here for the month long Fringe Festival which has comedians and  other acts perform all over the city.

We spent the first two weeks taking it easy and seeing a couple of shows each night or some sightseeing. I even joined the local pool and went swimming every second day. If that sounds busy it gives you an idea of just how much running around we’ve been doing for the last six months. So we were having a good rest.

Unfortunately, after a couple of weeks we both caught a chest/respiratory infection and have spent the majority of the next two weeks in bed or on the couch. Getting sick while you’re on holidays is a real bummer. But I guess one positive did come out of it; I no longer had any reason to put off doing my tax return. So that’s finally done now after avoiding it for a couple of months.

Before we got sick we did get to see some interesting things like Edinburgh Castle which sits on top of a steep cliff.

Even though it looks like it’s impossible to attack, armies have climbed up the cliff at night, surprised the defenders and taken the castle. The way they found this secret route was because one of the guys in the castle would sneak down this path at night to go to the pub. So the army followed him when he went back into the castle.

And if you’re a Harry Potter fan you can check out all the places J.K. Rowling used as inspiration for the books and visit the cafe where she used to sit and write. She used to wander around Greyfriar’s Kirkyard and borrowed a lot of names from the gravestones for her characters.

We also went on a (long) day trip through the Scottish Highlands all the way up to Loch Ness. There’s some really nice scenery in the Highlands, since there’s so few people living there it’s one big wild landscape with mountains and lochs (lakes) scattered all around. It’s not quite the same as Croatia which is full of forests and almost no sign of human development. Because there used to be a lot of people living here hundreds of years ago and in this time they cut down almost all the forests.

Even now there’s an empty bare section of land called Glen Etive (which was also used in the Bond movie Skyfall) where there’s not a tree in sight. It does make the craggy mountains look very dramatic, but a part of me was wondering what it would look like if more of the forests were still there along with the animals that are now extinct in the area. But there are efforts to reforest sections of the Highlands so hopefully they’ll bring back the original beauty and wildness of the area.

We eventually made it to Loch Ness after nearly 6 hours on the bus and finally got the chance to go hunting for the Loch Ness Monster. Well, when I say hunting I really mean sitting out on the boat deck and enjoying the nice boat ride around the Loch and checking out the scenery.

But they do have sonar on board the boat with a nice big screen for everyone to watch and look for the monster. On the boat they did tell us that a few years ago some people found a monster shaped object on their sonar and spent a bit of money pulling it out of the Loch, only to find out that it was a movie prop from a film about the Loch Ness Monster.

Next up we’ll be heading south towards London again, and hopefully we’ll get rid of the last of this infection before we get there.