I´ve already told you about the first part of my magical Easter trip to Scotland, but now we will get to my absolute favourite part of the whole trip and honestly one of my absolute travel highlights in the past years: our Highland tour.
If you remember my Wishes for 2015 you might recall that I really wanted to go to the Scottish Highlands and when that wish came true it was so much better than I ever expected. We spent three days in and around the Isly of Skye, stopping at all sorts of magical places, like faerie pools, Kelpie rivers and castles. If you ever get the chance please, please visit the Highlands, they are honestly so beyond beautiful and seeing so much nature after mainly doing city trips over the past years was truly good for my soul. A little warning beforehand: get ready for a huge picture spam, that might make you want to pack your bags immediately.
Getting there & Acommodation
Going up to the Highlands from Edinburgh is quite a journey and when I was trying to find buses and trains it was such a hassle. When I go back (that´s not an if my friends) I would like to rent a car and explore the Highlands myself, but for our first visit we booked the three day Isle of Skye tour with MacBackpackers and I can recommend it so so so full heartedly! If you stay at the Castle Rock Hostel in Edinburgh you get a 25 percent discount on the tours, but you should definitely also look at coupons or other discounts online. We payed 90 pounds for the three day tour plus 36 pounds for our hostel. I honestly was afraid this tour was not going to be worth it, but I enjoyed every single second and for the experience I had I would have happily payed tripple what I payed.
We stayed at the Skye Backpackers through out tour and always ate in one of the pubs in Kyleakin, right at the coast of the island. If you like seafood this is the perfect place to try it, as it is freshly caught and a lot cheaper than anywhere else around the UK, if you like me despise it, we still have burgers.
Day 1
We got picked up right at our hostel in Edinburgh and it took us almost the entire day to get up to the Isle of Skye. Usually I am not the biggest fan of bus journeys, but this one was honestly so much fun, mainly because our guide Greame, who was great at story telling and an incredibly chatty guy in general. We generally stopped every 1,5 hours and in that day alone we visited a Whiskey distillery (and obviously drank Whiskey), a very cute little Scottish town, stopped in the middle of nowhere to take pictures in the snow and so on and so forth. I really liked being able to concentrate on the countryside outside my window and not having to drive and I also loved hearing such detailed insights into the history of the Highlands and the way of living up there. We also made a stop at Loch Ness, which is obviously crucial for a Scotland trip (even though I skipped on the dip into it, but some of my friends were brave enough for that) and a castle, so it was honestly the full Scottish adventure package.
Day 2
Our entire second day was spent on the Isle of Skye, which honestly is such a breathtaking beautiful place, that I am still not really over it. Being the actual 9 year old that I am, my highlights were a visit to a Kelpie (basically a somewhat evil water fairy) river, where we splashed some magic water on our faces for eternal beauty. Please let me know how young and gorgeous I now look in the comments. We also took a little hike up to Faerie pools, incredible little pools of actual turquoise water in the wild mountains and stopped in a little coastal town along the way for lunch. There was everything a nature lover´s heart desires from waterfalls, over mountains, to deer and baby lambs. It was such a mind blowing experience and even now looking at this pictures, I can not believe I actually got to soak all this up.
Day 3
On our last day, we already had to go back to Edinburgh and I actually would recommend you to do the 5 day tour if you can. However we still made a lot of stops along the way. We were so incredibly lucky with the weather and got to have an actual picknick lunch in the sun at Glencoe, not only the location of a famous clan battle, but also the background of many Hogwarts scenes in the Harry Potter movies. We also made our way up to the National Wallace Monument, apparently a very important clan man in the fight against the English, but mainly interesting because there is ice cream on sale. We were safely back in Edinburgh around six, just in time to soak up some more sun in this gorgeous town before we moved onto Glasgow, which will be the next travel post! Hope I could convince you to make your way up to the Scottish north, as it is honestly a lifetime experience. If you are still not convinced, don´t they say a picture says more than a thousand words?
