Tours in Scotland

The Highland Cow

As you may have figured out by now, my last trip was to Scotland. I have already mentioned that my next trip, starting from 13 January 2018, will be to Ecuador and Colombia and and I am planning to post regularly while I am on that trip, providing I have got wifi! However, the main reason I started this blog was to write down my past travel experiences, so I will be digging into the depths of my memories to share my past travels with you.

Loch Ness

So back to Scotland. The main reason I went to Scotland was to attend the World Veterinary Poultry Association congress which was held in Edinburgh. The other academic and seven of the senior students in the group also attended the congress. We all did a day tour to Loch Ness on the Nessbus (www.nessbus.com). After the congress, I did a whiskey tour with Rabbies tour group (www.rabbies.com) as well. Rabbies was the tour operator which was recommended by the congress organisers. I must say, both tours were really great! There was quite a bit in common between the two tour operators. Both had really nice, clean and comfortable buses. However, the main highlight of both tours was the driver/tour guide in each bus. As the wheels started rolling, they started talking! An absolute wealth of information! The Nessbus, as the name implies, headed into the highlands with the final destination being Loch Ness to look for the very famous Loch Ness monster. Needless to say, we did not spot Nessy on this trip. I always like to leave something to go back for, and I really would not mind having another look for Nessy at a later stage. On the way to Loch Ness we went past Sterling Castle. This area was very important in the history of Scotland with many of the great battles between the Scots and the English being fought around Stirling Castle. There is still not too much love between the Scots and the English and after listening to the history the Scots have good reason for not being too partial to the English! There is

Loch Lomond

also a monument to the great Scottish fighting man, William Wallace. This name brings up pictures of Mel Gibson with his face painted blue leading the charge of the Scots against the very arrogant English army. Much of the movie "Braveheart" was based on the truth, with a bit of poetic license. First stop was breakfast at the Deanston distillery. See the whiskey of Scotland post for more details. We then travelled through the highlands, with more stories of how clans were murdered and more accounts of battles which had been waged along the rout. We ended up at Loch Ness and had a few hours on our own in that area.

The Rabbies tour followed a similar patten, with a very informative and talkative guide. Both tour guides had a lot to say about Edinburgh's favourite son - Sean Connery and how he used to work as a

milk man in the area before he had cemented his role as
as James Bond, forcing Sir Ian Flemming to change the original characher of Jame Bond to fit in with the very strong Scottish accent of Sean!
The Rabbies tour went to two distilleries. The first was a small distillery called Glengoyne and the second stop was the Deanston distillery again. This tour also stopped at the very beautiful Loch Lomond.
While walking around in Edinburgh, you could not help but to notice many of the windows in building which had been bricked closed. The Rabbies tour guide explained that in the 18 hundred's the English imposed a tax on the wealthy Scots. This tax was based, believe it or not, on the number of windows you had in your house. With the Scots being Scots, they decided to rather brick closed the windows than pay tax to the English. This led to the saying "Daylight robbery". The English were robbing the Scots of daylight when the Scots bricked their windows closed. I guess that at the end of the day, it was pretty much the tight fistted nature and pure stubbornness of the Scots which resulted in the bricking up of the windows. Talking about the tight fistted nature of the Scots - it was actually the Scots who invented copper wire. This was as a result of two Scotsman fighting over a copper penny!
Both of these trips were great and I would highly recommend both of them .