Three Weeks In Scotland (Scotland in general)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Scotland in general
Date:	26/02/03 (260 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: the landscape

Disadvantages: the weather

Clearing a bookshelf I found the diary my friend and I had written when hitch-hiking through Scotland. I thought at once I could use it for an op, so I contacted the travel guide and asked him what he thought of it.

What ? Have we now to ask for permission when we want to write an op? No, rest assured, nobody has thought of that, but, erhmm, the date on the cover of the diary says '1964'! He replied that certainly not only our auld friends up north would enjoy a tale of days gone by and I should go ahead. Let me warn you, this op is a bit on the longish side, if you're in a hurry, you'd better pass on...

My friend from uni and I had come to London at the beginning of August to take part in a language course, but something went wrong and we could only begin in September. We had our youth hostel cards with us and a small rucksack each (backpacking hadn't been invented yet), so we decided to go on a hitch-hiking tour. Where to? Why not to Scotland? We didn't know anything about the country besides its position north of England and the usual clichés, we bought a road map and off we went.

Crossing the border was disappointing! We, continental Europeans, had distinct ideas about what a border should be like: bounds and barriers and a policeman who'd put a stamp into our passport watched by an Alsatian with a muzzle. But what did we find? A tea-shack and a simple sign 'Scotland', and that was it. Ah, well.

After looking down at the city from Edinburgh Folly and looking into the streets in the Camera Oscura, a kind of huge radar screen, we went to the youth hostel. Which was full; we could only get a private room somewhere in the city. How many guests can sleep on four mattresses? Eight, according to the greedy landlady!

This night was the main reason why we moved on the following day, but not before visiting the National Gallery of Scotland and paying our respects to Rev. Robert Walker wh
o so elegantly skates along on one leg lifting the other. My friend liked him especially because he wears knee breeches, just like she did. Btw, these and my self-sewn khaki trousers, wide from hip to ankle, made a Scotsman cross the street and ask us where in the world we came from, where people dressed like this?!

We were travelling on a shoestring, but when we came to The Tartan Gift Shop on Princes St., I decided to indulge in luxury at least once and buy cloth for a skirt. I liked the announcement: 'If your name is So-and-so, then your tartan is...' showing an endless list of all possible tartan colour combinations. Not surprisingly my German name was not in the list, I decided on MacLeodRed. When I told the shop assistant how much cloth I needed, she looked at me as if I were an extraterrestrial. Metres and centimetres, what was that? She called her colleagues, but they couldn't figure out, either, how much I wanted, I couldn't respond with yards and inches, and so I was re-measured 'correctly'.

We then left the city and crossed the Forth, we wanted to see the Scottish countryside at last, and countryside we saw during our trip, more and often longer than we had intended. I don't know what the traffic in rural Scotland is like today, in those days there was hardly any in some areas. The problem was not that the drivers didn't want to give us a lift (sometimes they didn't, especially when we were dripping wet, with the result that we were getting wetter and wetter!), no, the problem was that sometimes there were no cars for hours, and the Sundays were seemingly dead. My diary reminds me that once we 'kidnapped' a young man, we hopped into his car, flirted with him until he didn't remember where he had wanted to go to in the first place and made him do 100 miles extra!

Where did we go from Edinburgh? Looking back I wonder why we didn't go to St. Andrews, Perth or Dundee. We only ha
d a road map of Scotland, but no guide book, so I assume we just didn't know about any attractions there and obviously nobody told us about any. Our general destination was the north coast, but when someone told us about an interesting place and there was a youth hostel in the vicinity, we more than once changed our course.

This happened when we were in the Highlands. After admiring the hill slopes covered with heather from Devil's Elbow (on one of the few sunny days) we hitched to Balmoral, had a look at the Royal Castle and intended to continue our journey to the north when a driver stopped, opened the door, grinned at us and said, 'Hop in, I know where you want to go!' We were very surprised as we didn't know ourselves, but then he told us about the Queen's arrival at Ballater train station. I've elaborated on this event in my op 'The Queen and I'.

What else belongs to Scotland besides the holidaying Queen? Lochs! Whisky! We passed Loch Lochy (what a name!) and Loch Ness without being too impressed, the weather was horrid. Our drivers liked our perfect pronunciation of 'loch', no problem for a German tongue.

Near Strathpeffer the co-owner of the Invergordon Whiskey Distillery picked us up and gave us an extra tour through the whole establishment although it was closed for the weekend. He was so proud and repeatedly told us that *his* distillery was the largest in Europe and that there was only one a wee bit larger in the USA: What about it now? Can you fill me in on the destiny of this distillery?

Carbisdale Castle was on our want-do list, but a Scottish Sunday was looming and when luck would have it and we could get a lift to Tongue on the north coast, we took it. A baker had placed/posted/banned (?) his wife in a caravan up there and visited her together with his son over the weekend. Contrary to what people had told us about the bleak and utterly boring landscape there we liked
it. Studying Russian at uni we knew what tundra looked like, but hadn'?t expected to find this landscape in the north of Scotland. And we saw Highland cattle and black cows with *black* udders, oh yes! If you don't believe me, go and have a look yourself.

Suddenly our baker shouted out that the driver of the Landrover that had just overtaken us was Mr Profumo! Mr Profumo indeed! We knew everything about him, his story had been in the German yellow press as well. He had gone into hiding in Tongue together with his wife Valerie. Our baker told us that he would go to church on Sunday and we could see him there if we liked, but he made us swear not to tell a living soul about it, Profumo's privacy was to be kept at all costs.

The first thing we did, of course, when we came to the youth hostel was tell two German boys the news, they accompanied us to the Episcopal Church of Scotland the following day where we provoked raised eyebrows from the baker. My friend was convinced that Mr Profumo was ogling at us all the time, I couldn't say, all I remember is Mrs Valerie wearing a crocheted cap and singing her heart out.

We went to the coast after service and looked at the Atlantic Ocean a seal looking at us all the while, smiling as it seemed. We were impressed, it was exactly as we had imagined it. Where next? We had time enough, we could have gone to the Orkney Islands, north, north, that would have pleased us, but it was sooooo cold, it was the coldest August we'd ever experienced. Everything is relative, though, two hitch-hikers who had been to Iceland for two weeks, found the temperature in Scotland rather pleasant.

During the whole trip we weren't much into hygiene, more often than not we slept with our clothes on lying in youth hostels made of cardboard with the wind blowing in one corner and out the other. Once we had a hostel with two outhouses, 'ladies' and 'gents', we had to take a para
ffin lamp and stumble along a path to get there. We waited until it was dark, of course, we wanted the whole 'romantic' programme for our money!

The youth hostels didn?t offer food, the guests had to cater for their own needs, that meant a lot of carrying, especially on Fridays. I remember what Mother's Pride looked like when we fished it out from the bottom of the rucksacks after a long day on the road! We would have liked to iron it to bring it back into shape. 'Flatten tins, please!' ah, we learnt a lot in those hostels. Porridge! We had never seen any before and couldn't believe that something looking like this was edible.

As there weren't too many hostels then we often met the same people again after some time and, sharing our meals, told each other about the routes we had taken and the adventures we had experienced. The boys were very content with the Scottish car drivers, they said they either took hitch-hikers or they didn't, they couldn't detect any unfair preferential treatment of girls. So there.

A German teacher of PE had angered the participants of the Highland Games when he won the race easily and elegantly, but boy, did they laugh their heads off when it came to 'tossing 'the caber' and he didn't even know what to do, to say nothing about his poor performance!

The Cape of Wrath was a name we would have liked to add to our collection of exotic place names, but no car went into that direction. 'What do you want there?' We couldn't answer. 'Isle of Skye' didn't sound bad, either, improved by the addition 'Inner Hebrides', so we decided to go there. It was ages before the bridge was built, it was ferry service then and you?d rather not miss the last one before the Scottish weekend would hit again with everybody indoors and nobody thinking of cold, wet, hungry, desperate hitch-hikers out on the kerb of the road.

The warden o
f the first youth hostel behind the ferry on the Isle of Skye was an American Professor who had read about a vacancy when strolling through the streets of Edinburgh. As he could answer convincingly that he was literate, he got the job for the summer. He was so nice, he couldn't say 'No', he accepted everybody! When we arrived, all the beds and blankets were taken, we got three newspapers each for the floor, later not even newspapers were left. In the middle of the night some girls got up and lit a fire with their newspapers, we joined in and at least had a very special night in the kitchen. Nevertheless my memories of the Isle of Skye are very positive, a wild and edge-of-the world feeling floats back into my memory.

Ullapool and palm trees on the coast because of the gulf stream that was another thing we were interested in, but it was sooooo wet! We were willing to see as much as possible, but had the distinct impression that Scotland didn't want us.

Someone had told us that Glasgow had the friendliest people of the world! Well, the ones we met didn't behave in a way that made us doubt this statement. I hope that it's still true today! But then we only met very friendly people wherever we went, once we were even invited by an old couple to stay overnight. We had already been invited to do so by a young family in Newcastle upon Tyne, though, i.e., friendly people on both sides of the border.

When we talked to the warden in the first English youth hostel we came to and told him that we had shortened our trip because of the weather he went and fetched a photo album showing us his sunburnt family swearing that the photos were taken during summer holidays up north. Well, well. We have to believe him, I for one won't go back, not in this life at least. After this trip I got to know my husband, an Italian, and now my compass shows more south than north.

What had impressed us most in Scotland? The landscap
e! What had we missed during the three weeks? Culture! The following year my friend and I hitch-hiked to Rome where we indulged in culture for two weeks so excessively that I didn't enter a museum for five years afterwards.

Modus in rebus, as the Romans used to say, 'measure in the things', heehee.

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