Scotland

On the weekend of August 31st to September 2nd, I traveled to Scotland, to see the Highlands, and travel on the famous West Highland Line.

This trip started out bad even before I left home, as I had a lot of trouble ordering train tickets from the website of firstscotrail.co.uk. At first, they refused to sell me tickets for picking up at the railway station, as I did not have a valid UK address. After a bit of googling to find a valid UK zipcode to keep the webshop happy, they refused to accept my credit card. I found out that they tried to validate the card using my full name...and the dutch cards are usually made out to firstletter dot lastname. The problem was - there was no way to change my billing name, so I had to change the first name on my account to "F.". The problems were not over, though. Somehow, they had cached the failed order, and now they charged me for TWO trips. To make things even better...in order to cancel my first ticket, they would charge me half the ticket price. I sent them an angry letter, and they promised to refund me the whole amount. We'll see if they make good on their promise...freakin' webmonkeys!

As if this wasn't enough, I had a lot of trouble booking hotel rooms as well. They had no online booking, only "response forms" accessible from the web. I filled out a couple of these and never heard anything more from them...so eventually I had to start calling around. visitscotland.co.uk has some sort of booking agency that can arrange accommodation in most of Scotland. Trouble was that whenever they offered me something, when I accepted, the room would be no longer available. After three failed attempts to book a hotel room, I had to accept a room at a B&B in a private home. I was a bit skeptical at first, because there was very little information about the property. The good thing was that it was very cheap, just 22 pounds per night.

I landed in Edinburgh and took the Airlink shuttle to Waverley station, where I picked up my train tickets at the ticket machines. Since I had a couple of hours to kill before my train left for Glasgow, I walked up to "The Royal Mile" and walked to the castle. I had been to the castle once before, but I was 11 at the time, so I didn't remember all that much of my previous trip. The castle is on the smaller side, but you have great views over Edinburgh, as the castle is situated on a hill above the city itself.

The ticket inspection system on the train between Edinburgh and Glasgow would put the ticket inspectors on the dutch trams to shame. My ticket was checked on entry to the platform, by a guy on the train and on exit in Glasgow. Three times for a journey of 45 minutes!

From Glasgow I boarded the diesel train going up the West Highland Line. The diesel train was noisy and slow, and there was nothing interesting to look at until a couple of hours had passed, and we started going past lochs and steep hills. I was amazed, by the way, that they sold whisky from the trolleys on the train...so you could sip whisky while looking at the grand view of the Scottish mountains. What I could see of the Scottish mountains, anyway. The sides of the railway track were somewhat overgrown, so at times it felt like we were going through a green tunnel. After a couple of hours it turned dark as well, so I missed out on seeing the area around Glencoe on my way up to Fort William.

The B&B I was staying at had given me quite detailed location information, so it was easy to find the house. The room at the B&B was fairly OK, good size and comfortable bed. The landlord had a shower in the hall, so it wasn't as spartan as I had feared. In the morning the guy running the place cooked up an enormous breakfast for me: Bacon, eggs, sausages, bread, potato cakes and black and white pudding. Very good value for the price I was paying. I walked down to the train station and boarded the local train to Mallaig on the coast. This is supposed to be "The most scenic train ride of the British isles". Unfortunately, the weather was rainy and foggy, so I didn't see that much on my way to Mallaig. On the way back, though, most of the fog had lifted, so I got to see the beautiful landscape that they used as backdrops in the "Harry Potter"-movies, among others.




Coming back into Fort William, I discovered why it had been so hard to get a room. This weekend was the "Nevis-weekend", so they were hosting a race for people to run up to the top of Ben Nevis and back down again. There were a number of hiking stores in the town, and they had a lot of good equipment for hiking in wet and cold weather. I bought myself a pair of waterproof, windproof gloves.

They also had a number of whisky-shops, and I managed to find something I had been looking for for years: a bottle of Port Ellen whisky. I had looked for this before in specialist whisky shops in London, so it was funny that I found one in a touristy whisky shop in a small town up in the highlands.

Sunday I traveled back by train the same way I came. The good thing now was that it was daytime, so I was able to see Ben Nevis, Glencoe, Rannoch, and all the other stuff I missed on the way up there. After a few hours most of the interesting stuff had passed, and then it was just another boring train ride. I spent far too much time traveling on Sunday, so I was very tired when I finally came back to The Hague.

I think the west highlands could be very good for hiking. I saw a lot of nice mountains over there, although it would probably be good to have a car for going from place to place. Didn't seem like there were too many trains up there. The roads were narrow up there, with lots of single carriageway roads. They also drive on the wrong side of the road, so I think it could be stressful to drive up there.

Pictures are here.