After months of greyness and rain, the Scottish raingods have finally shown pity and sent out the sun over Glasgow. Instantly, one could spot people of all ages stripping down to t-shirts and shorts (never mind the 8°C) and enjoying coffee on the street, facing the sun like lizards getting their blood to boil.
The trees are blossoming insecurely, after weeks of tango-ing with the frost, reminding me how green Glasgow actually is. It makes all the difference. Even the smallest things seem to fill me with pleasure now, like putting on my sunglasses – because I can!
Being driven by the fact that I have hardly seen anything of Scotland above the central belt, I took Lee and my backpack and off we went to Glen Coe.
Glen Coe, just a 2,5hr bus ride from the central station, is a beautiful skiing resort in winter, and a paradise for hiking-, canoeing-, biking-enthusiasts in summer. The long Loch Leven centers the long chain of mountains, which served as refugee for countless highlanders fleeing from the massacres initiated by the English – who else. The protestant King William had all those clan chiefs and their families killed, who wouldn’t take an oath of loyalty, one of them being Maclain, the elderly chief of the MacDonalds clan, who got his own wee cross for remembrance.
Hiking up the devil’s staircase, it is almost impossible not to imagine these revolutionaries in their kilts lope up the green fields with their pipes and harps. At least it was a nice picture that kept me from thinking about the burning pain in my thighs and legs – how on earth have I ever walked 800km’s before?
The view was magnificent! On the way up we prompted two young men, who looked like experts and eyed us with suspicion, to point us into the right direction, as we had no maps and definitely no idea where it exactly is we are going. A rookie mistake.
After 5 hours we finally returned to Glen Coe village and treated ourselves to a pint of Guinness and a large Highland Burger. The meat looked an awful lot like a goat turd paté we saw on the tracks – a local secret maybe?
