Thursday, Feb. 24 ---
--- After a frantic day at work trying to make plans for the weekend, I finally settle on going back to Scotland, this time to do a bus tour of the Northern Highlands. I get off work, rustle up some grub, and around 10:30 PM I head to Tube station to catch the midnight train to Edinburgh (I tried to catch the same train to Georgia, but the guy said it’s in a completely different country. Damn that song...)
After minimal delays, I get to Euston and drag myself to the train station. It’s an overnight train, and for one pound more I get a berth (or a bed, for those not hip to the train slang). I hop on the train to find quite an interesting scene -- it’s a long hallway, but it looks like someone has blocked of half of its intended width for the entire length of the car, thus forcing even the slightest of people to turn sideways when shuffling down the hall (seriously, Jack Sprat would have a tough time getting through this chasm...) And what lies behind this barricade that has chopped the comfortable moving space in half? Why your beds, of course. You find your room, open the door, and are immediately greeted by the far wall in the back and on the side, and your beds are immediately to the left. Looks just like my flat in London (and my room last year at school, for that matter.)
I plop my stuff on the bottom bunk (and in doing so band my ass on the opposite wall and my head on the bed. Such are the spacious confines of a Scotrail sleeper) and enjoy my free shaving kit (if it wasn’t free before, it is now) until my roommate comes. He finally gets there and when I ask him how he is, visions of staying up all night talking like teenaged girls at a slumber party dancing in my head, he replies, “...” Nothing. Just a blank stare, stupid grin on his face - he looks just like a stroked out vegetable standing before my eyes. Figuring out he doesn’t speak English, I run off to my bed (which is over and done with in the literal blink of an eye), jump on it in a huff, and cry myself to sleep...
Friday, Feb. 25 ---
--- I wake up at 6:30 to the sight of a strange man standing by my bed trying to balance a tray on my face. Apparently breakfast is served. Despite my resentment at the rude awakening, it turns out to be worth it. It’s just a cup of tea (and trying to drink this on a moving train is more difficult than performing brain surgery on a chipmunk) and a croissant, but the croissant is the best one I’ve ever had, and I’m not that big a fan of them. This one, though, is cool to the tongue, fluffy, flaky -- in short, completely delicious. I finish my feast, use the WC (again, as difficult as the chipmunk thing) and head off into town. I’m an hour early, so I wander around town revisiting some of my favorite spots that I encountered on my previous stay in Scotland. (Best stop is the inside of St. Giles, something I didn’t get into last time, and it’s a typical Gothic church on the inside -- lots of stained glass windows, pointed arches, and whatnot, but this church is extremely dark. The glass just doesn’t let much of it in, and this creates a rather somber and spooky mood.) This is grand, and at 8:30 I check in at Haggis HQ and prepare to begin my trip.
Our chariot is a bright yellow minibus (just like the one I used to ride to school, but this one’s a Mercedes. Only the best for the college kids...) and our tour guide is Dave, a scrawny Scottish lad with a big grin and equally ample glasses. He promptly begins the trip with a quick jaunt around Edinburgh on the minibus. Since I’d seen most of the stuff he was going to talk about, I begin to tune him out a little. That is, until he explains how the town inherited its topography. The volcano the big castle sits on used to be active and would spew out lava, eventually creating a uniform city, height-wise. Then the glaciers came and gouged out the middle, or as Dave says, “These huge, fuck off ice cubes cut the hell out of the land.” Ah, Dave and I are going to get along just fine...
We leave Edinburgh rather quickly and head off towards the Highlands. It’s about an hour before we stop, but along the way we pass the time by introducing ourselves to the twenty other bus mates. We do this by getting up in front of the bus and telling our most embarrassing story. Not having one (what’s there to be embarrassed about half the time anyway? Everyone knows I’m an idiot, so what’s one more example to solidify their notions?) I cook up a whopper, swagger to the front, announce my name and city of origin, and then let fly with this one. Here it goes: “I’m on a little pub crawl in London a couple of weeks ago with a few of my mates. We’re on our fifth or sixth pub -- the evening’s going well, so no one is quite sure at this point -- and while I’m at the bar, this guy asks me if I want to ‘puff on a fag.’ Now having been in London for over a month, I realize this guy to be offering me a smoke. Not usually a smoker, but not wanting to come off as rude, I graciously accept with the intentions of giving it to one of my pallies. Problem is, this guy starts to pull something other than a cigarette out of his pants. Seems my mates and I had wandered into a gay bar on our little exercise in excess, a fact we quickly remedied by becoming a dust trail.”
The bus seemed to get quite a kick out of this one and everyone was still having a hearty laugh while I returned to my seat. Finally subsiding, we continue north to the Highlands, so called due to their cornucopia of craggy mountains and generally increased elevation. Dave passes the time by telling us what “sexy scenery” we’re in for, and pointing out the favorite haunts of “the blue rinse brigade” or “the coffin dodgers,” otherwise known as the elderly tourist community. (“Avoid places like these like the plague, mates,” he admonishes. “You’ll never be able to get anything done because you’ll be tripping over the endless sea of canes and walkers.”)
Our first stop is Loch Lubnaig, a pretty lake (that’s what ‘loch’ means) nestled next to a gorgeous span of mountains. It’s quite a vista and I take the first in what will be a long line of pictures with mountains, cliffs, or just really tall things in them (like the seven foot tall Chinaman named Domino who worked in one of the souvenir stores we stopped at. Quite photogenic, that lad.) Nature calls me, both to pay attention to her beauty and to relieve myself of all the liquids I’ve been drinking, so I sidle over to the woods to find a good spot to kill those two blooming birds. I find one just across the road -- it’s under a skying canopy of tress, so the rain can’t get in, it’s greener than Kermit’s backside, and it even has a gorgeous canal running right through it. So naturally, I take a picture of it, and then I take a piss on it.
Feeling relieved, I hop back on the coach and Dave dishes about Rob Roy, that storied Scotsman. Roy was a thief in this area, making a living stealing hairy coos (Scottish for cows -- more on them later) from the people. He would steal the shaggy beast from the people in the Trossachs (the area we’re in) and then get them to pay him to find the delinquent cows because, miraculously, he always had an idea where they were at (I tell ya, those peasants sure were quick). This went on for a while, him stealing and magically finding the coos, and eventually people started to pay him ahead of time to fend off the thefts. This essentially started the Scottish mafia because if people didn’t pay him, he stole their coos and didn’t return them, endlessly harassing them for money.
Besides being a rather clever extortionist, years before anyone had heard of Bill Gates, he was quite skilled with the sword. Nobody could beat him, both because he was quick and strong, but also because, as Dave put it, ‘he had fucking monkey arms, too. He could hit people days before they got there they were so long.” After this lesson in anatomy, we stop at his grave, a rather nondescript thing for all he did in the area (so much so that I pass it twice without even noticing it), and then learn a little more about Scottish history.
Scotland and England were at each other’s throats a lot way back when (it hasn’t changed all that much now, though, as the two are constantly carping over Scotland’s proposed independence. Scotland says, “Let us be free.” England says, “No.” Scotland comes back with a quick, “Yes.” England: “No.” Scotland: “Yes.” England: “No.” And back and forth for months with no progress coming along. Name calling and girlie-slapping coming soon to an island near you...) Well eventually Scotland took over England, sort of.
When Elizabeth I died (because as Dave says, “She was butt-fucking ugly. Really terrible.”) a Scotsman took over and thus Scotland kind of ruled England. The Jacobites, Scottish Catholics, really backed this man, James VII, and peace reigned. Until, that is, England decided to remove James just because he was Catholic (see, the English are a mostly Protestant bunch). The Jacobites were really pissed -- not only because they believed in the divine right of the King to rule unimpeded, but also because they were Catholic and were being persecuted because of it. So they organized their troops, a meager resistance of 2500 pissed off Scots, and got ready to square off against the English army in the battle of Killiecarnie.
On this rainy day in 1689, this band on unhappy Highlanders came to face a British squad of over 4000. The Scots had turges (circular shields with one central spike jutting out from them), two-handed swords, and daggers. The British had muskets. Outnumbered and out-armed, the Scots were unperturbed. They proceeded to mess with the Brits’ heads, hiding in the woods, bagpipes screaming, all the men banging on their shields with their swords. So the racket tumbling down from this hill is tremendous -- both from the pipes and the pounding -- and to make things worse, it was a hot, muggy day, so all the men took off their kilts.
The racket reaching a fever pitch, the half naked men erupt from their spots in the woods in what will be known as the Highland charge, screaming at the top of their lungs, their swords swirling in chaotic circles of death. They swarmed the English who were firing their muskets once, tamping more powder into the barrel, adding another bullet, and then getting ready to fire, but in the meantime were getting their heads chopped off by the pantless people. It was a massacre, but not in the direction you’d expect looking at it on paper. In the first 15 minutes, the Jacobites killed 1500 Brits and sent the rest quickly scurrying back to Queenie.
Next stop is the valley of Glencoe, also known as the weeping valley -- both because of history and the fact that when it rains here, hundreds of waterfalls appear and make it look like it’s crying. The valley itself is a breathtaking pass between a slew of skying mountains and is truly amazing -- both the sight and the accompanying story. A lot of people used to live in the valley, all belonging to the MacDonald clan. The new King that replaced James was William of Orange, a Catholic much more to the liking of the British. Now William knew the Jacobites hated him, and he began to harbor a keen dislike for all Scots because of this.
To exert his power, he forced all the chiefs of the Scottish clans to sign a treaty pledging allegiance to him. He assumed the dislike he felt towards the Scots would be returned, thus resulting in a refusal to sign the treaty by at least one chief. Problem is, as I told you earlier, the Scots really believed in the monarchy, regardless of religious denomination, and so every one of the chiefs signed. Well this really pissed him off and so he chose a scapegoat to punish. This turned out to be the chief of the MacDonalds because he had, thanks to a communication breakdown and bad directions, signed the decree three days later than everyone else.
So William hired another clan, the rival Campbells, to kill the chief and all of his clansmen. So the Campbells made their way to the MacDonald camp and thanks to a clan tradition mandating hospitality to all visitors, they were invited in to the MacDonald camp and treated to the finest feasts and beds. The Campbells stayed for two weeks (how’s that for eagerness to complete a job?), knowing full well what they planned to do to their generous hosts, but soaking up the hospitality anyway. A dilemma presented itself, though: the two clans started getting along really well over this time -- they went out drinking together, eating together, etc. Should they kill their newfound friends or follow the orders of their new king? When the signal came on a freezing cold, snowy day -- a single gunshot atop one of the mountains, which thanks to the acoustics of the valley must have sounded like a cannon -- they opted for the latter and started killing the MacDonalds.
The chief was shot in his sleep and dozens of others were shot in a frenzied panic to escape. These people, roused from slumber by the startling shots and still in their pajamas, took off on foot into the snowy conditions trying to flee the valley by either of its two exits. Upon reaching the mouths of the valley, though, these scared people were greeted not by the sweet visage of freedom, but rather by the members of the English army sent there by Billy of Orange himself to fence them in. Rather than be shot by the soldiers, the MacDonalds ran back into the valley and tried to scale the faces of the mountains -- no easy feat even on the nicest of days, and this was a bitterly cold and snowy one. Because of this, over 400 froze to death on their way up the mountains. All told, the massacre of Glencoe claimed close to 450 people, including the 30 or so that were stabbed by the Campbells upon returning to the valley.
Resentment still remains all these years later: a pub down at the base of the valley has a sign posted over the door reading thusly -- “Absolutely no hiking boots allowed inside, and no Campbells either.”
Before boarding the bus, I spot a sheep eating grass a little ways up on a cliff. I climb up, not making any attempt to mask my approach. Eventually I reach the top and the sheep still has its back to me, mindlessly gnoshing on the grass. I call to it -- “Hey, sheepie, I’m here. Whatcha doin’?” No response. A little pissed at its sheer oblivion (when I talk, people (and animals) should listen, right?), I run up to is and smack it on the ass. This gets its attention and the thing goes running off giving me a dirty look. I call out, “Hey, ewe, I just you a favor, you ungrateful bastard. If I was a Scotsman, you’d be haggis right now.”)
After a short hike down to the bus again, we leave the valley and pass the Isle of the Dead, a tiny island covered with the graves of the MacDonalds. Dave tells us this is also the site of untold buried treasure. You see, it was the tradition of the Scots, just like the Egyptians, to bury their loved ones with gold and other valuables to they’d be well prepared for the afterlife. That said, no one has disturbed the graves here out of respect to the fallen, and Dave says they don’t take kindly to those who break this tradition and start digging around the Isle with dollar signs (actually pound signs, but whatever) in their eyes. I put my spade back in my backpack...
Right after this we pass the Isle of Peace, another place involving that unlucky clan. This island is completely flat and so was used to hold meetings with members of other clans because any ambush could be spotted from miles away (I see- it’s a distance thing. Maybe if Campbells hadn’t been living in their houses and there were a few hundred yards of spacing, the MacDs could have seen that one coming, too, right?)
Up next is Glen Nevis (‘glen,’ by the way, is Scottish for ‘valley,’ ‘Nevis’ for ‘high point’ or ‘venomous one’ -- appropriate both due to its height and its death toll: more people die here than anywhere else in Scotland (apparently there are a lot of stupid hikers here, a point Dave confirms.) (A quick aside before we get there. Dave tells us of a mountain whose name means ‘tit’ (sorry, Gram) and criticizes the namers -- “If that’s their idea of what an ideal tit looks like, I don’t want any fucking part of it. I’ve seen bigger tits on my brother’s little boy.” He then proceeds to tell us of a girl on a previous trip whose name was Bonnie Paps. “I saw her name on the sheet and just busted out laughing. She had no idea why, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘Bonnie,’ in Scottish, means ‘nice,’ and ‘paps,’ as I’ve just told you, means ‘tits.’ So this chick’s name meant ‘nice tits,’ and boy, her parents sure did her right with that one -- hers were spectacular.”)
Now back to Glen Nevis -- this was the valley where they shot a lot of Braveheart. It’s a wonderfully serene setting that must look tremendous in its full green splendor. Dave then tells us a little bit about Braveheart himself, Mr. William Wallace. Lots of the stuff in the movie was right, so watch that if you want more details (and it’s on my list of things to revisit when I get home), as it is a great flick, but the movie makers did make a few mistakes. For one, William Wallace wasn’t a short Australian like Mel, he was a giant of a man. He wasn’t a Highlander, so he wouldn’t have worn the kilt Mel was sporting in the flick. The fight scenes weren’t filmed in Scotland with Scottish soldiers, but in Ireland (at which point Dave audibly feigns vomiting) with Irish soldiers (at which point he actually does.) (And if you happened to be a bird on a branch that day, you could have seen a brilliant reenactment of the final battle scene with a more proper setting and cast than that of the movie, one staged by us. Dave made the people who haven’t seen the movie (sin!) go down the road a bit while the rest of us stayed at the top. Dave played William, hopping around on his imaginary horse, a goofy red wig and blue and white plaid hat on his head, a Scottish flag draped around his shoulders as a cape, spitting out the memorable lines of that scene. When it comes to, “they’ll never take... our freedom!” We all ran down the hill, screaming at the top of our lungs, charging on the infidels who hadn’t seen the movie. We scared the hell out of them and had a great time doing it.)
The big mistake the moviemakers made was regarding his death at the end. The method was correct -- he was hung, drawn, and quartered. The magnitude was not (and this is a little surprising, because the ending is rather unpleasant, but read on...) -- First, he would have been stripped naked (and wouldn’t the women have loved it if this made it into the movie?) and dragged by his bound feet behind a horse to the sight of his execution. Next, the hanging -- he wouldn’t have been dropped from a gallows -- this would have broken his neck and ruined everyone fun. Instead, the slowly raised him off the ground by a noose, suffocating him until he passed out, and then they would drop him to the ground so he could get some air, regain consciousness, and then start the whole process again. Suffocate, pass out, start over again. The whole time this is going on, the slow suffocation would cause the poor man to experience irregular muscle control, so he would piss and shit himself (he’s still naked, remember) and also would sport an erection that would culminate in involuntary ejaculation (is there any other kind?) This humiliation would continue until his tormentors tired of it, at which time they would move on to Act II: Drawing.
Now this sounds flowery enough -- maybe his captors would take this break to draw the man some pictures to cheer him up -- “There, there, William. Cheer up. Look! It’s a sunflower! And, ooh! Lookie here -- a butterfly!”) So sorry, my misguided friends. When someone’s getting drawn, it means they’re slowly being drawn out to unnatural lengths (sounds like Reagan’s presidency, huh?) They tie four separate ropes to him, one for each major appendage (and unless you’re a stripper from a blaxpoitation film in the 70s, we’re not talking about that one) -- your wrists and your ankles -- and then have their horses start pulling in opposite directions. The game is over when your shoulders and hips are torn from their sockets, but before the appendages are actually ripped from the body because if this happens, the play is over before the big finale.
Speaking of which, Act III: Quartering. This is where the shit really hits the fan for the poor victim (and thanks to Act I, they needn’t look very far for it. Just look down...) First, he is eviscerated, gutted from left hip to right hip (or the other way around, if you’re feeling saucy) and his intestines are then pulled out and burned before his eyes. The stench (and the pain, more importantly) now probably being intolerable, the process quickens. His arms and legs are cut from the body, his “wedding tackle,” as Dave says, “is cut off and stuffed in his mouth (if you need help decoding this, just wait until next year. They explain all this stuff in 5th grade...) and then, the final stroke, his head is cut off what remains of his body.
Finally dead, the disgrace isn’t finished yet. The dismembered parts are sent all over the kingdom -- one place for an arm, another for the other arm, one for the leg, etc. These were sent off as warnings to others in the kingdom of what happens to the sinful / criminal / hateful -- pick your punishable negative characteristic of choice -- if they aren’t careful. And the head, that most telling of warning signs, got shipped down to London to be stuck on a spike on the London Bridge where everyone entering the city would see it (this became an increasingly more unbearable reminder as the weeks wore on, thanks both to the effects of rotting and the birds pecking at the flesh.) (William Wallace’s head went here, too, by the way, his wedding tackle still in his mouth. Ech...)
After this lovely story, Dave smiles at the pale faces and takes us to lunch. After this, we drive around some more, the high points being: Fort William -- this town has a geothermally heated water supply and you can see the pipes running down from the mountain to the houses and buildings below. There’s one for hot, one for cold, and one for... porridge? That’s right, the townsfolk add oats into one of the hot water pipes coming from the mountain and thus have instant porridge which comes out of their three-knobbed faucets.
Another interesting note is the dividing line of Scotland, the Great Glen -- this is a string of water that cuts the country almost in half diagonally, from southwest to northeast. The two sides of this line are the Highlands and the Lowlands, and the water is made of a series of four Lochs: Loch Lochy, Loch Lennie, Loch Oich, and the infamous Loch Ness.
Point III: Haggis. The last haggis, which was an actual animal that lent its name to the subsequent dish, was shot in 1804. There is a cairn to memorialize this final fallen animal -- which looked like a giant guinea pit, according to Dave -- a cairn simply being a big pile of rocks. We, having each taken a rock from the shores of Loch Lochy (or Lake Lake-y, if you’re translating) place them in the pile so there will always be a piece of us in Scotland -- a cool gesture, to be sure.
Eating haggis used to be strictly for the rich folk, so the peasants devised a poor man’s version of it and this is what is still eaten today (though when I tell you what’s in it, you’ll wonder why). They take the sheep’s stomach, scrape out all the grass and dirt it had eaten, clean it, and then stuff it with oatmeal and all the off cuts of the sheep -- heart, lungs, kidneys, etc. -- mash it all together, boil it in the stomach, and then pull out the paste inside and serve it with potatoes. Mmm. Sign me up...
So overcome with emotion, we decide to ease our sorrows with a hearty snowball fight in the fallen haggis’ honor. This is great fun -- I didn’t think I was going to get to have one of these this year -- and we spend a good ten minutes belting the crap out of each other before heading back to the hostel.
Our hostel is on the small island of Skye on the western coast of Scotland. We’re staying in the town of Kyleakin, a wee fishing village that, with a well thrown boomerang, you could hit every important building in town. After changing into some dry socks -- I stepped in Loch Sock Soak back at the cairn -- I head off for some grub at Saucy Mary’s, a pub next to the hostel. The name Saucy Mary’s has some historical significance (lucky you) -- Mary was a Viking princess who was rather rambunctious. She would block off Loch Alsh, the only waterway the boats could navigate in the area to get to the sea, with a string of boats chained together to prevent passage. She would charge the boats a toll to get by, then unchain the boats to let them through, and to show her gratitude at the payment she would stand in the tower over the water and flash her breasts to the men as they went by. Thus, she got the nickname “Saucy Mary” and it’s now a catchphrase the men use to goad the women into showing them their paps. “Give us a little Saucy Mary, lassie!” (It didn’t’ get me anything but a slap in the face (by the woman) and a black eye and loose tooth (by her Neanderthalian boyfriend whom was hiding in his cave and thus previously undetected by yours truly.))
I order fish and chips -- since this is a fishing village I figure the haddock will be unbelievably fresh -- and it’s the best I’ve had since arriving here. The fish is like butter and ten times as tasty. After this (and the requisite couple of pints) we head across town (which is across the street) to King Haaken, another pub, for karaoke with the locals. We close the place down singing song after song (at least a half dozen before the night is over) treating (subjecting) the locals to stirring renditions of “O Bla Di, O Bla Da,” “Roxanne,” “Addicted to Love,” and “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling.” It was hilarious and probably atrocious to hear in person (for once consider yourself lucky not to be here), but I swear we were getting better as the night wore on. I turn in for the night with my throat raw and scratchy from the “singing” and a buzz tickling at my brain.