Scotland!
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
Finally found some time (and mood) to blog about my Scotland trip. It was really beautiful! Scotland is the northern part of UK, and is actually a pretty long drive. We set off at around 9pm from Liverpool, heading to Inverness.
Inverness is at the northern tip of the famous Loch Ness lake. The lake itself is very long-ish and after sitting in the car for such a long, long time, we stopped to take some pictures by Loch Ness at around 6am.
The drive to Inverness? 377 miles. We didn’t get there until around 8am! Although the rules stated that only the person who rented the car (the credit card holder) can drive the car, there was no way a single person can drive 7+ hours!
There weren’t any shops open early in the morning at Inverness. Luckily we found this little truck selling burgers and hot dogs, just beside the Kessock bridge.
Kessock Bridge in the background:
So after a quick meal of burgers and coffee (by the way, everyone had sour faces the whole day, thanks to driving through the night) we crossed the bridge to a little brewery called Black Isle Brewery. Got a rough idea how they ferment erm, stuff with yeast to produce beer. Here’s a lousy picture attempting to show the guy who took us on our tour and the sign board.
I didn’t buy any beer to try as I wasn’t much of a drinker, but from the little sip I took from Eu Hua’s bottle, it was nice and smooth!
Our next stop, Fort George is definitely the “highlight” of our trip. It was thoroughly boring!! It’s a army barracks built ages ago, and is still being used today. As such, much of the place is already modernised. And we had to pay like 7 pounds to go in for a walk..
Being a Fort, there were 2 layers of walls that we had to go through. The picture above was taken from the first layer of wall, towards the second layer of walls…
And inside.. there’s nothing but buildings that look like this..
One of the many “guard towers’ around the fort..
and the guards on duty…
Not wanting to get caught with a sour face while vacationing, I forced myself to smile..
We walked until we were thoroughly bored with the place (and felt we got back 7 pounds worth), we left for Urquhart Castle. Unfortunately for us, it turned out to be a very beautiful place, but we were late.. it was closed!
Caught in the act:
We then headed down towards our hostel at South Laggan and checked in. Some were too tired and went to bed, while a few of us wanted to make use of daylight still available and headed to Fort Augustus to buy some food and do some sight-seeing.
The Caledonian canal heads towards Loch Ness.
Well, as you can see it’s definitely been a long.. long.. day. I’m a lousy photographer.. I need time to familiarize myself with places before I can come home with decent pictures. That’s why almost all of my Scotland pictures come out.. just “okay”.. Sigh, more “okay” pictures tomorrow..
