Edinburgh to Inverness - 24-hour friends...

9:37AM, sitting on another train. this one stops a few times on its way to Stirling, where i get off and change for the one to Inverness. i only left the backpacker's 20 minutes ago - an incredible luxury in my book. sitting in the bar sipping a coffee and looking relaxed, chatting to a couple of the folks i'd been hanging out with last night:

"What are you doing still sitting here? Shouldn't you be at the station?"
nah - i've got 20 minutes to get from here to there (pointing across the road to the sign 10 metres away that reads "Edinburgh Waverley"). you know what, i think i'm gonna be ok.
"HA! Well, we'll see you back here in half an hour when you miss it! We'll be waiting!"

sorry guys. it's been real, but i'm off.

true to prediction, i was not a happy lad when i awoke yesterday morning. the warm room and doona had saved me from the worst of it, but my legs were still stiff and aching and my shoulders whined in protest at the abuse. i lay there while my companions were getting up and got ready to face the day. the room had nearly emptied the day before - all that was left was Sam - a girl from Sydney who'd been there the night before, and a pretty Romanian girl who's name i hadn't caught who was there because she'd missed the train out to the farm she was headed to the night before. she'd asked a taxi driver about somewhere to stay and he'd pointed her towards the nearest hostel to the train station. she explained that she was a something between a horticulturist and a botanist and had been employed on a 6 month contract to work with rare flowers. never been out of home, and now she was in Scotland on what sounded like a pretty awesome adventure. she heard me grumbling about being stiff and achy (i explained that it was self-imposed misery, but she was sympathetic regardless) and the next thing i know she's kneeling on the floor and demanding that i give her a foot which she proceeded to massage. this sort of kindness from strangers was a bit of a shock, but i wasn't going to rock the boat.

when she was done i thanked her profusely and took her downstairs so that she could get a quick feed before she was picked up by someone from the farm. i asked the usual questions - the answers don't necessarily mean much to me, but it's comforting to talk about home, and it gets people's lips moving. she was from Transylvania, which got an instant grin out of me, and she made an obvious joke about vampires and werewolves. of course, it's somewhere i'd like to get to at some point and she insisted that i contact her before going so that her family could show me around. i'd known her for about 45 minutes at this point, and i nearly fell over by her earnest friendliness. i managed to dodge exchanging numbers to make sure the temptation didn't arrise, but as she headed out the door with a slightly confused looking scotsman carrying her bag i couldn't help but hope that she got by ok. some people are just too fucking nice for their own good, but she put a smile on my face and 24 hours later i can't help but wonder how she's getting on.

the Romanian girl now a memory, i finished shovelling cereal into my mouth and got myself ready to face the day. it wasn't until 10AM that my boots hit the pavement, sunglasses on my face to ward off the bright, sunny day which none-the-less felt like ice, and headed north. i'd taken 15 minutes out, sitting on the veneer floor of the dorm, stretching to get my unhappy muscles moving before getting kitted up and getting out. i could have headed down to Holyrood Castle, but after the day before's adventures the idea of another castle and more touristy shit did not sit well with me, so instead i took a bearing on the water i could see in the distance and headed for it, meandering otherwise aimlessly through the New Town.

the Georgian New Town was built with geometric precision after 300 years of Edinbrugh being confined to a mile-by-half-mile area behind the Flodden Wall, built to keep the English out but instead served to just keep the Scots in. for 300 years they built higher and higher inside the wall, expanding way past maximum capacity, creating a population and hygenic nightmare until it was finally decreed that the wall would no longer be maintained. the people took it into their own hands at that point and, so the story goes, they quietly demolished it inside of 5 months and sprawled with reckless abandon. the New Town is a victory of urban planning - the roads for the most part are grid-like, each block another series of uniform terrace houses. from up high it looks very impressive, especially seing as it was built in 3 stages over the course of a century. after 20 or so minutes of wandering generally northwards i was well and truly off any of the maps that i had so i just kept making educated guesses, letting my instincts, and then the bus stops be my guide. it took a little over an hour to get to the water, by which time i was staggering. most of the kinks had been worked out, but i was far from recovered, so after a little while of standing on the edge of the redevelopment i asked around and found a bus to take me back to Princes St (the edge of New Town closest to the train station). i was fortunate in that the number 10 took me through the suburb of Leith, somewhere i'd wanted to at least pass through so that i could drop an email to an old friend of mine of the same name and tell him i'd been there.

it was past midday by the point the bus let me off in front of the Sir Walter Scott Memorial, and i needed to sit down somewhere and sort myself out for an hour or two. in my travels i'd been pointed towards Rose St - a not-quite-street, not-quite-lane one block up from Princes St - which was reputed to be pretty much wall-to-wall bars and taverns. 40-odd of them. finding a place to sit down, have a quiet beer and some food was pretty easy - all i needed to do then was walk up one direction or another until i saw the familiar "Free WiFi" sticker in a window. walked, found, entered, connected, i had a pint (so that i'd be a customer) and started working out What The Fuck i Was Doing. having an extra day up my sleeve in the hostel was a bonus, but by this point i was starting to get a little sick of Edinburgh. don't get me wrong - nice town, but the time to move on was rapidly approaching. Inverness was the next place on the cards, but with Perth (Scotland) an hour or so north it was a temptation and i had a look at options, but in the end Perth went in the Too Hard Basket - i could have done it as a day-trip, but the timing was looking a bit harsh and i've had to hump my backpack around for the day, and hostels in the town were looking thin on the ground so without having to pay at lesat 3 times as much for a B&B an overnighter wasn't going to happen. 20 minutes later a £10 train ticket to Inverness was booked, as well as a couple of nights at a hostel near to the station and that was that.

plans made and sorted, i had something to eat and and a pint of water while i checked the news and investigated tours and things to do in Inverness and the surrounds. when my battery started to wind down i packed up and headed west along Princes St and up Carlton Hill where Eve and i had gone back on Sunday, enjoying the view for a little while before i headed back to the hostel.

i just got distracted in an amusing way: after changing trains at Stirling and now Inverness-bound, i wound up sitting across from a Swedish couple playing guitar and singing old James Taylor songs. we wound up getting chatting for something like half an hour about music, and since i have my music collection on my Eee i gave them an introduction to some reasonably obscure Australian music. i'm now SO glad i made up the Oz Mix - it made things a whole lot easier...

when i got in Sam had just got back from checking out the castle and we got chatting. i wanted more scotch, and managed to convince her to come up to High Street and try some, so 10 minutes were were swapping stories in the Albernach while sipping 21 year old Glenfarclas. having someone to hang out with was really very pleasant - we've next to nothing in common, apart from being a ridiculously long way from home, but a friendly face and company over pints seemed to be enough. back in the hostel bar we met up with Blondie (from Melbourne, with a penchant for giving people nicknames, which is probably why i can't remember hers) and Random (Steve from Winnipeg, Canada). for the rest of the evening i managed to gain the title of PC (for Perth/Canberra) and after playing cards and demolishing burgers the four of us headed off for a pub crawl which wound up lasting just one pub (the Bannerman where i'd been the day before) before fetching back up at the hostel again. i wasn't overly upset - i felt that i'd seen my share of pubs by this point and finishing the evening within staggering distance of my bed was entirely For The Win. Sam and i had the dorm to ourselves... although when we'd passed through after getting back from the Albernach the windows had been open and there was a strong smell of weed in the room. the Sneaky Stoner didn't resurface and by midnight i was showered and sleeping the sleep of the dead, and the rather tipsy.

meanwhile, the Swedes are back to singing and playing and making pleasant noise to my left and the view out the windor is of hills and trees and old stone buildings all dusted in snow. is it happened, the train wound up stopping at Perth, so i grabbed my camera, dumped out and took a bunch of hurried photos to prove i'd been there. from what i could see while passing through there's not really a lot going on, but at least i got there, if only for a minute or two. between the 24-Hour Friends back in Edinburgh, the jovial Swedes and my minor wish-fulfilment of getting to Perth, i'm in really quite high spirits. 24 hours ago i was starting to lose interest... now i'm back in the swing and curious as to what the world will look like when i get to my destination...