Scotland Day 2 - Blue Mountain and Ospreys

At about 10:00am, after a lovely breakfast at the Eagle View, we left towards Aviemore. The scenery en route was beautiful. Since the day before we had glimpse of snowcapped mountains. It felt as though we were in Switzerland or France, but we did not have to fly to another country. We must have been pretty high up from sea level as the mountains did not look so high but were covered with snow.

We wanted to go up to the mountains. On the way, we passed by Loch Morlich and stopped to take some picture. It was very beautiful, with the Cairngorm mountain range in the background.

Cairngorm (which means Blue Mountain) is a ski resort near Aviemore. There was a funicular which took us up there (we wouldn't have made the journey on foot!). It was so cold and we had to buy a hat for me, and a scarf for Sook before going up. At the top, there was the Ptarmigan restaurant (more like a canteen), a shop and an exhibition. We visited the shop and exhibition, and also popped outside on to the snow to see people skiing. It was quite foggy but the snow conditions were good for skiing.

As we were about to leave, the we saw a postbox which claimed to be the highest postbox in the UK. So we went back to the exhibition to write our postcards and bought stamps so that we can post the cards from the highest postbox in UK!

At the bottom of the Cairngorm, lies Rothiemurchus where you can do a lot of outdoor activities. We stopped at a fishery loch to try to spot ospreys coming down to fish. There were fishermen there catching rainbow trouts. Some of them were very successful. The ospreys did not come down to the waters when we were there but we could see them flying high.

At last we got to Aviemore, which was just a little skiing town. We stopped for a little while to visit the shops just before they shut and then headed off to Inverness for the night. The hotel in Inverness was by the river, but it was quite old inside. It had a nice restaurant next door, and Sook tried their award winning haggis for starters. However, that night, in the middle of my shower they ran out of hot water and I had to finish with cold water... brrr! Sook then had to wait 1/2 hour but in the end showered with lukewarm water.