Thursday, 18 February 2010
The British Isles, Day Ten: Loch Ness
This is an article in my ongoing series about our trip through the British Isles. Earlier articles include the Introduction,Stonehenge, Oxford, Driving to Wales, Anglesey, Crossing the Irish Sea, Dublin, Northern Ireland, Ferry to Scotland, Falkirk & Bo'ness, and Edinburgh.
Up to this point, we were having a fantastic trip. Everything we'd seen had been great, the driving on the left was going well, and despite having set up an extremely complex itinerary and travelling with a baby, things were going swimingly. Not only were the places we were visiting interesting, but nothing felt too 'touristy' (in the negative sense), considering.
I say all this, not because Loch Ness and Inverness were bad, but just to show that, in the context of following on so many highs, it was not as good a part of our trip as I had expected it to be.
I should point out right away though that the Highlands and the Loch itself did not disappoint. All Loch Ness really is, is a beautiful lake, but it is indeed very beautiful, especially on a nice day like the one we had. And the Highlands were a sight to see. I was explaining in the car to Emilie about how Scotland has the "Highlands" and "Lowlands"—pronouncing them slowly so she could hear the etymology—but my pedantic explanation was completely unnecessary, because the contrast between the two countrysides could not have been more obvious. When you reach the highlands, you know it: hill after steep hill covered with heather and thistle, too inhospitable to grow anything or even pasture animals, the highlands are a vast, empty land. (I'll have more to say on how empty in the next article.)
The downside was that the Loch Ness visitor centre was the first real "touristy" feeling place we had run into on our whole trip. Tons of buses with foreign visitors, and a cafeteria with sub-par food (made worse by the fact that the people in line didn't speak English and were making a mess of things trying to get their food), made this a place that we would have been better advised to skip. There are actually little restaurants in a nearby town that would've been much nicer to eat at, but we didn't know this at the time, as the large visitor centre is the first place you see. So better planning on our part would've helped. On the upside, though, it was fun to watch James charm a tour bus full of Korean schoolgirls :-)
Inverness, the capital of the highlands, is a small city of about 50,000, but managed to have the worst traffic we'd seen since Glasgow. This crowd, obviously mostly of tourists like us, also contributed to the touristy feel of the day that up until then we had managed to avoid. (Inverness has also been seeing a lot of population growth, 
so the city's infrastructure is already taxed even without the summer tourists.) I'm sure that with fewer tourists it must be a great place to visit, but as it is there are too many in August, which is the only month the weather gets warm enough for anyone to want to travel there, so that's a pretty theoretical concession.
Still, it would have been inconceivable to do a driving tour of Scotland and not venture into the Highlands or visit Loch Ness, so I am certainly glad we did it. The visit itself was fine, and only 'marred' by the fact that there were so many other people visiting too—if we had somehow visited Inverness first, I'm sure that my impressions would have been quite different. As it is though, we were being spoiled by our trip, which meant that things were going pretty well indeed.
