Scotch & Sailboats : 5th day in Scotland

Day 5

August 23rd

This was to be the day of the pilgrimage, the day we were all waiting for, the day we would go to visit the motherlode. A visit to the scotch whisky distillery. Every person's brain had just 2 words flashing in big neon lettering: FREE TASTING!

An hour's bus journey through grassy fields and small villages brought us to the Glenkinchie distillery at about 10am. The distillery itself seemed somewhat small to me. It was just a couple of buildings close to each other. Not much bigger than a couple of large barns stuck together. Not what you would expect of a multimillion, multinational business.

But then, midway through the factory tour, one realises that all that is needed for a whisky distillery is a couple of giant fermenting vats which can be housed in, you guessed it, a couple of big barns. That, and the right water, the right soil, the right climate etc.

How whisky is actually made is quite simple: Soak a lot of barley in water and let it germinate. Then dry it out with smoke. Mash the lot and dump it in huge vats (tuns) filled with warm water and let it all ferment & turn to warm smelly mush. Cool and then distil in copper vats. Keep distilling continuously till the whole liquid becomes highly concentrated. Fill in oak casks and then store it cool dry place for maturing. The maturing period determines the quality of the final whisky. Different aged whiskies are then mixed together to get blended scotch. Alternatively, a whisky from a single batch or a single distillery can be bottled straighaway & sold, as a Single Malt.

The fumes inside the tun chamber were so strong that one of the guys (the same person who was relieved at not having won the whsky bottle) was overcome by them, and had to retire outdoors to get some fresh air. As for the rest of us, we though we were in beer heaven! The smell was exactly like that.

After checking out the shiny copper stills, and me having asked a couple of intelligent (!) questions, we came out into the whisky tasting room! At long last! There was an entire wall of different whiskies which were there to be served and enjoyed. I tried out a couple of unusual ones, asking the master for advice. Don't really recall which ones I tasted. One of them was a rare Caol Ila, I remember.

Later, it was time to shop in Glenkinchie's dutyfree whisky shop. I picked up 4 bottles of various Single Malts, and only stopped at the thought of my overweight baggage which I would be having to carry to Leicester on a local flight before returning to Dubai.

Back to the hotel, we advised everyone for get a bit of rest after lunch so as to be fresh for the evening's gala dinner. It was to be the grand finale of the trip. And what a finale!

At 7pm sharp, a bus came to fetch our entire group and take us to the docks. As we got down from the bus, the group could see a red carpet laid out, leading towards the steps of the HMY Britannia. There was a huge mustachioed royal piper in full regalia playing by the side of the boat.

At the top of the steps, we were met by the blonde tour guide, Shelley Ryan. At the sight of her, suddenly every guy's tummy got sucked in and they got taller by at least 2 inches! Amazing scientific phenomenon, this.

A purser come across to greet us, since our group was being given a personalised tour of the boat. He led us to the Queen's drawing room which had a grand fireplace and an equally grand piano. We draped ourselves over various settees & sofas while drinks were served. As expected, every person had their cameras out and was busy clicking away.

After 15 minutes of posing every which way, we were led all along the boat to have a look at the living chambers of various royal personalities, including the Queen, the Duke, The Prince etc. Their quarters were sealed off and preserved in an everyday kind of scenario. The queen had a rather small single bed along one side of the room, and a desk at right angles to it. The quarters were rather small, but they would have had to be, on board a ship.

We slowly made out way through the captain's quarters, the officers' mess room and the huge dining room. There were pictures of the royal family on the corridor walls. It was funny to see all the princes as they were decades ago.

Four different Royal couples have had their honeymoons on board this yacht. Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones were the first to get the Britannia treatment when, in 1960, it took them on a 6,000 mile voyage to the Caribbean. Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips were next, cruising the West Indies in 1973. In 1981 Charles & Diana boarded in Gibraltar at the start of their 16-day honeymoon voyage in the Mediterranean. Finally, in 1986  Britannia hosted her final honeymoon for the Duke and Duchess of York who spent five days aboard the Yacht cruising around the Azores.

See the pattern? None of the marriages survived! :-)

Out on the deck, it was getting to be dark, and the lights of the city were coming on one by one. The guide expolained to us that the Queen used to sail to various countries on the yacht on official visits, and when they arrived at the destination, the yacht would drop anchor off the coast, the royal Rolls Royce that was also on the boat, would be carried to the shore, the Queen would then get onto a smaller motorboat to get ashore, and then with full pomp and show, the Rolls would carry her to the official ceremonies. 

The Rolls is now permanently stationed in a glass-sided garage on the deck, and is still always kept in full working condition.

We continued our deck tour, and checked out the badminton court as well as a huge bell with the yacht name and "1953" the year of its commissioning engraved on it.

I made a quick detour here to go to the gift shop and pick up a couple of mementoes, including a commemorative Wedgewood. The shop was doing brisk business and the queues at the counter were really long. The place seems to be very popular with tourists.

We proceeded to the stateroom where a massive table had been laid out for us, with placeholders indicating our seating places. Each placeholder had an embossed royal insignia along with our names, making it an instant collectible. It was the same with the menus, which were individually designed, with the same embossed insignia, the individual's name inside and their specific diets taken into account in the individually customised menus. The Royal treatment!

After dinner was over and the plates had been cleared, I got up to thank the group for their performance, and then handed out the certificates to the winners, accompanied with a lot of applause and popping flashbulbs. Finally we made our way out of the boat, happy and sated.

This was the final event in the tour itinerary, and we would be making our way home from the next morning onwards. I would not accompany the group which would be taking a direct flight home, but would take a short local flight from Edinburgh to Leicester.

The next 2 days, including the weekend were spent happily in the company of the "golden haired" Maami'ma, the English cousins, boisterous kids running amok, toy trains laid out in the guest room (with their precise running schedules scrawled in spidery writing & pasted on various doors), visits to the local botanical garden (where I saw a Venus flytrap for the 1st time!), icecreams in the back garden in nice cool sunny weather. Oh, and not to forget, kitchen table discussions with a Shakespearean drama critic named Janet Jackson! (DISCLAIMER: No wardrobe malfunctions occurred during the course of such discussions). A good time was had by all.

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Highland Games: 4th day in Scotland

Day 4

August 22th

Today was the day for the team-building activity at Mavis Hall park. We had arranged for some highland games to be played between teams comprising our group members, though I had no idea what these games were. After a 45 minute drive, we arrived at the farm. 

It was a grey morning, and it had been drizzling all through our journey. We squelched our way through muddy paths into a warm cozy barn where coffee was being served. I think a few of our guys wouldn't have minded a tot of something stronger, even that early in the morning! Fly, the terrier, was running around, darting between everyone's legs and then disappearing under the serving tables. On  our way in, we have seen a few hens clucking about, and then everyone had stopped to click away. It was really funny to see the mother hen pecking away at the ground, and her brood of tiny chicks following her, stopping every now and then to peck away on their own. I joked that catching the hen was one of the highland games we would be playing.

We ambled through leafy woods to the vast clearing which was to be the scene of the intense competition between the 4 "clans". There were to be 4 separate competitions:

Tossing the Caber: You have to lift a caber (a large pole) so that it is perpendicular to your body with one end pointing to the sky. The pole is then tossed forward in the air to rotate (at least once!) and fall over to lie in the 12 o’clock position, or as near that as possible.

Weight over Bar: This involves (obviously!) swinging a wooden block over a bar which somewhat resembles the rugby goalposts. The bar is behind you and you swing the block with the help of strong ropes tied around it, over your head , letting it go at the critical moment.

Highland Dancing: Teams watch a short demo of highland dancing by pretty girls in flouncy long skirts to the tune of bagpipes before they have to dance the very same intricate steps themselves.

Welly Boot Hurling: Team members have to throw a large wellie boot towards big tyre hoping to land it plumb inside, but it’s not as easy as it sounds, especially if you are under intense pressure to score points for your team!

As one can imagine, the teams were really charged up for the competitions, and the resulting antics were rather funny to watch! Especially when pot-bellied not-so-young guys huffed and puffed while trying to lift the oh-so-heavy cabers and balance them precariously over their shoulders. Funnier still was the spectacle of leadfooted guys in wellingtons trying to match the nimble-footed steps of the young girls doing the highland jig! As for me, I stuck to the only few steps I know, the bhangra steps made famous in all his movies by Dharmendra!

After the fun and games were over and the team totals added up, there was one more little game to be played: Haggis Malt Challenge. A bottle of malt whisky was placed on the uneven grassy field, and every person had to try throwing Scotland’s national dish (or a wooden skittle as a representation) as close to Scotland’s favourite drink as they could. The person who would get closest to the bottle would win the Challenge and the bottle! Our guide, Stuart, talked us through this game, and then proceeded to give us a quick demo with the wooden skittle which to everyone's amazement (and probably his own too!) went on to bounce a coule of times on the uneven ground and hit that bottle smack on target!

Of course, none of us proved to be that accurate (or lucky?). There was a bit of a tension at the very end, when the very last person to throw the skittle inched ahead to the bootle, and was declared the winner. Later. much later, I got to know that the person who ended up losing in the end was the most relieved person. It seems that he was not too keen to handle a whisky bottle, owing to the compulsions of his sectarian beliefs. Well, it's not too often that a contest ends up making not one but two people equally happy!

A happily tired, slightly wet & bedraggled lot finally made their way to the bus, to be taken directly to the lunch venue, The Living Room, that I have written about earlier. Afterwards, it was a quiet stroll along the streets back to the hotel, for some rest & recuperation.

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The Castle & the Fire: 3rd day in Scotland

Day 3

August 21st

Picture this: You are in the middle of the jungle in a forest lodge, the South African veldt is all around you, it is the middle of the night, you can hear the quiet noise of the wild outside, the whisper of the wind, the distant growl of the lion, you are preparing to retire for the night in your comfy cottage, as the rest of your group tiredly trudges to their respective ones. And then a female voice says to you, "I can't sleep alone at night!"

Banish all prurient thoughts from your head right now. This was serious. This grown up woman of ... well whatever age, had lived all her life in a big joint family, and would always be surrounded by lots of people, boisterous kids running underfoot, and generally be surrounded by a lot of noise. When she found herself in silent surroundings in a cottage all to herself in the middle of the African jungle, she obviously got the jitters very badly. Hmmmm.

We had to come up with a serious solution to this seemingly frivolous probem, since this woman was very much part of our group and we were responsible for their welfare.

The 2 other women in our group immediately whispered urgently into my unoccupied ear that they would *not* share their cottages with anyone. Mind you, one of these women was our event organiser and the other was a colleague from my company! But compulsions of privacy ranked way beyond the call of duty, and I couldn't really blame them for that.

Finally, after a lot of options had been examined and discarded, a solution was proposed by our little tale's protagonist herself. It was bizarre and yet it worked for her.

She spent the night on the sofa in the reception of our jungle lodge. All through the night, people kept coming on to rearrange the furniture, sweep the floor or to check out of the lodge. All that noise was enough for her to drift off into a peaceful sleep.

OK, apart from the fact that I had referred to this episode casually in my last blog entry, what does this have to do with our current Scotland trip, ? Well, nothing as yet. But will any member of our current group come up with some request like this? Keep reading.

Edinburgh is not a very large spreadout city. We could see the ramparts of the Edinburgh Castle  from our hotel. The bus journey took not more than 15 minutes, through narrow uphill streets. The bus parked on what I later discovered was the Esplanade. Unfortunately the Edinburgh Military Tattoo had finished just the previous day, so the entire area was rather desolate and forelorn. The sky was grey and overcast, which gave the castle a very Scottish look. 

The Esplanade area is surrounded on all sides by stadium-style seatings. I don't know whether this is a permanent arrangement or was rigged especially for the Tattoo. A quick explanation of what the Tattoo is. It is a kind of annual military parade given by British Armed Forces, Commonwealth and International military bands and display teams in Edinburgh every August as part of the Edinburgh Festival. So why is it called a tattoo, if there is no tattooing to be done? 

The word "tattoo" originally dates from the eighteenth century, when British Army units were stationed in Flanders. Drummers from the garrison were sent out into the towns each evening to Beat Retreat, summoning the soldiers to return to barracks for the night. The process was known as "tap toe" and encouraged the inn keepers to stop serving beer and send the soldiers back for the night. That devolved into the word tattoo. So now you know!

As we trooped over the drawbridge into the castle, we noticed a dry moat below us, and statues of Robert the Bruce and William "Braveheart" Wallace on either side of the main gate. By the time we had crossed inside, it had started to drizzle. Most of our own brave hearts had obviously come without any umbrella or cover. So we were scrambling over stoney cobbled paths to reach the nearest stone building. The castle itself is arranged more or less like the Tower of London; there is a large vacant square in the middle, surrounded by stone structures on all sides. These structures house various rooms or chambers, including the royalty's rooms, the throne room, the Crown Jewels collection etc. Then there are steps leading underground to dungeons, to chambers where World War 1 prisoners were kept etc.

The very first structure we entered had a tourist shop, which stocked blue colored ponchos. When I pointed this out to a few of my semi-soaked group members, there was a rush on them, and soon after I could see the entire group wearing them. As for me, I was prepared for the inclement weather with an all-purpose rainproof & windproof jacket. I always carry such a raiment whenever I travel abroad to colder climes. It has proven to be a great all-in-one jacket that has kept me warm and (mostly) dry in places like Jo'burg (in August), Switzerland (in December), St. Petersburg (in March) and numerous trips in Germany in the winters.

The tourist shop also gave me the opportunity to buy a few knick knacks for the family. That serious business conducted, I settled down to take in the rest of the tour. We ambled through the various structures that included these:

- The Royal Palace (apartments of the royalty dating from the 15th century, including Mary Queen of Scots. She gave birth here to King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England)

- The Crown Room: This houses the Scottish Crown Jewels and Regalia. They include the Crown of Scotland, sceptre and sword of state. The crown dates from 1540, is made of Scottish gold and is set with pearls,  diamonds and other gemstones. The Sceptre is also made of gold, and topped with a large quartz crystal. The most treasured possession of Scotland is the Stone of Destiny, upon which the monarchs of Scotland are traditionally crowned.

- St. Margaret's Chapel: It's the oldest surviving building in Edinburgh Castle and the oldest building in Edinburgh. Legend had it that St. Margaret worshipped in this small chapel, but research indicates that it was built at the beginning of the 12th century by her fourth son who became King David. This is a small irregular stone building. The rectangular structure with an internal width of about 10 ft has an entrance door at one side near the back of the nave which is about 16 ft long, then there's a round arch on columns leading into a sanctuary. A very quaint peaceful place despite the hordes of tourists pouring in through the narrow entrance. Since there was room for one person to either enter or exit through the only entrance, and since everyone stood aside in deference to the other tourists in typically polite British style, there was a gaggle of people inside and a long queue of people outside just dying to rush in.

By the time I came out of the chapel onto the upper ramparts of the castle where the cannons were kept, the sun had come out and there were large crowds of families with children enjoying the view of Edinburgh city spread out far below us. It was almost time to return to the bus.

Our lunch venue was The Dome on St. George's Street. This restaurant used to be a bank earlier, which is pretty apparent once you stand in front of its imposing facade of huge Roman-style pillars. The main doors lead to a plush lobby which wouldn't be out of place in any grand clubs or colonial buildings frequenting Bombay or Calcutta. This lobby in turn opens into a huge dining area completely overwhelmed by a huge glass-covered dome (what else?). There are ceiling-length pillars and potted plants scattered throughout the Grill Room. Overall impression? Elegant and cool.

During lunch, we had the same old problems about individual persons' dietary requirements. Some people didn't want to have meat because of halal issues, some wanted seafood, some had requested for just vegetarian cuisine and one person wanted raw fruits and vegetables, in other words, a Jain meal. To each his own.

Once lunch was finished, our group had free time to itself. People were told to make their own way on foot back to the hotel, if they so pleased. Else they could just wander about and discover the city, so to say. St. George's Street is not too far from the hotel, and the weather was pleasant too. So our group of 4-5 persons decided to stroll back to the hotel, taking in the sights.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival had taken over the city and High Street, right next to our hotel, was jammed with street performers as well as the crowds thronging around them. The pavements were packed tight, and it really was some effort to actually move through the crowd, since the street sloped gently uphill. In addition to the interesting performers, who apart from being skilled at their art were glib talkers as well, I was drawn to the couple of specialist whisky shops on the street. The more authentic looking one was Royal Mile Whiskeys, at the junction of High Street and St. Giles Street. I ventured in with my troop of curious onlookers. The entire shop was crammed with single malt whiskeys, not surprisingly. The bottles were neatly standing against wall cabinets, clearly labelled and marked with prices, ranging from 20 pounds to 300 pounds. On the shop floor were cane baskets filled with miniature whiskey bottles for a pound to 5 pounds each. There was a shelf in the middle of the shop that had confectionary made from malt whiskey. Something for everyone. More importantly, the sales persons were very knowledgeable and happy to help. I caught snatches of conversation between some of them and the customers who were animatedly discussed obscure varieties of whiskey. It was a lovely atmosphere to absorb in. I didn't buy anything right then, but returned later on another day and bought a bottle each of 16 yo Lagavulin, 10 yo Tamdhu and 12 yo Glendronach, and also an assortment of miniatures to gift friends. Oh, and I couldn't resist getting a small box of whiskey fudge for my family! It was back to the hotel after the long walk, and get some rest for the evening ahead.

In the evening, we all trooped back to High Street where we were met by a theatrical guy dressed all in black, either a clergyman or a judge. He led us through back alleys and pathways all the while talking about various dark episodes in the city's history that had happened there. I thought the entire walking tour could have been much better, but then maybe he didn't talk about the best bits. We ended up at an entrance to an underground tunnel, in a light drizzle. The tunnel smelt rather musty, and was the start of an entire mesh of interconnecting rooms and passages under the city, dated back to 1540, as we were told. These underground cellars had a bloodthirsty history which I won't go into details here, but all this can be read on their website.

Finally, we ended up in a large cavern where we were served dinner. It was a weird feeling, having dinner underground beneath a bridge.

When we came out of the cavern, it was in the foyer of a nice modern restaurant! The drizzle outside had turned into full fledged rain, and I was thankful I had on my trusted all-in-one wind- and rain-proof jacket. The hotel was within walking distance (of course!) and we proceeded towards it.

When we reached there and tried to get in, we were met by a couple of firemen who told us not to enter, and to stay out on the main street. A couple of hotel guests were being shepherded out as well. One elderly woman was clad in just a bathrobe and hotel slippers, having been hurriedly summoned out of her room, and was shivering at just the thought of going out in the rain. But the firemen were adamant, and had been joined by the hotel staff. The explanation for this was that there was a fire alarm and they were checking out the entire hotel.

So then our entire group members trudged out slowly on the street, where a fire brigade truck had arrived. Soon, two other trucks joined it and the entire hotel area was cordoned off. A long-legged blonde rushed out of the hotel and identifying herself as a hotel employee, asked us all to go off to the Carlton Hotel across the street rather than stand on the road. It took a lot of imploring the entire contingent to actually accomplish this, because by then the guests were feeling the effect of the late night and the tiredness of a full day. Shortly thereafter, the other hotel's lobby was completely taken over by tired sleepy guests sprawled all over every available seat in the vast lobby. The helpful staff of the Carlton even arranged for some refreshments for the hungry ones. It was past 1 am already with no further news from the firemen.

I kept going out into the street and standing across from the Scotsman to check out what was happening. It was almost fun to be out there in the rain. About 2am, we were finally told that there had been a fire alarm in one of the guest bathrooms due to some "malfunction", and now it was safe to again go in.

The bed was lovely, soft and deep, and I had just seconds to ponder before I slept.

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