Sutherland, Northern Scotland — July 30th - August 1st, 2004

Written by Narelle

Day 1, Edinburgh to Kinlochbervie via Pitlochry and Ullapool (Part 1)

We took a long weekend break in the highlands and headed up to the most north-westerly place on mainland Scotland for the first time ever. We left Edinburgh on Friday morning at around 11.30am, but not before some hassle with our chosen car rental company, Arnold Clarke, who turned out to be a bit picky about our I.D.).

I had my Royal Bank of Scotland Visa card and my Aussie driver's license, which apparently wasn't enough to hire a car (though it's never been an issue with any other company). Half an hour later, we got them to settle for Yves' out-of-date residency permit for Germany, which he happened to have with him, and his French driver's license — there's nothing like giving two obscure documents (in foreign languages) to confuse desk clerks. That settled, we headed off over the Forth Road Bridge and left the city behind.

Along the way we passed a few fields with big golden rolls of freshly harvested hay. Summer is a pretty time of year for a drive through the country-side as everything is so lush and green and there are masses of pink wild flowers everywhere. I played around with snapping photos on the 'action' setting on my new digital camera while Yves was driving at around 60mph (which is why some of our happy snaps are a little on the blurry side).

An hour and a half later we made our first stop. We had lunch in Pitlochry at an hotel called McKays. That was quite nice and we'd gone there intentionally because the last time we passed through there we'd been so impressed with the quality of their food and coffee. Really great coffee actually. (It's getting better now, but it was hard to find good coffee in Scotland a couple of years ago — some places still served instant coffee... eek!)

Pitlochry is an oddly busy little town in the middle of nowhere. We stayed there for an hour and watched the world go by over a relaxing lunch in the sunshine. Most of the people there seemed to be tourists and the town (which is not much more than a single street, about 1km long) is bustling with cars and people everywhere. Even so, Pitlochry somehow manages to retain a certain charm and avoids the temptation to sell out and become tacky, like so many other tourism-driven places do. Undiscovered Scotland lends some insight into the most likely reason for this.