July 30, 2010: Boat of Garten To Aviemore
Aboard the Strathspey Steam Railway, I get ready for our first day of walking.
On the afternoon of Thursday, July 29, I climbed into a minicab for a traffic-beset journey to King’s Cross Station. I remember that the cabbie had his radio tuned to a long interview with Tom Hollander, who was talking about his BBC 2 sitcom, Rev, and that, when this ride was over, I was deposited outside the wrong station, St. Pancras – walking the last stages of this journey into the correct one. Here I waited for a track number for the 4:00 train to Edinburgh, a service on which I had actually purchased a first class seat. Both my daypack and my large backpack were stored in the shelf above me and, right on time, we were off. After months of planning I was beginning the first stages of a complex walking enterprise as Gavan and I began our assault on Scotland’s Speyside Way.
The trip could not have come at a better time for me since, for the last week or so, I had been in the throes of my usual compulsive litany of self-imposed tasks – virtually all of which I had succeeded in completing in the final hours before departure. Ironically, since this is the first chapter in another walking journal, one of my tasks had been to mail to its publisher the completed manuscript of A Walker’s Alphabet – a project on which I had been engaged for years.
I would rendezvous with my walking partner in Edinburgh and so, unusually, I was now travelling alone. They had given me a backward facing seat (though I had asked for the opposite) but this was less annoying than all those work-obsessed businessmen who could not keep off the cell phone. One chap seemed to spend hours advising others on how to shift from their present position into the next. One Scottish woman spent a good deal of time trying to work out the musical selections on the tape to be played on the next day at the funeral of her best friend’s father. A mother allowed a bored four year-old to use the central aisle as the repository for all her toys, with every loo-bound passenger having to step through a minefield in order to make it to the end of the car. My stomach was in a bit of a protest, and I disdained all offers of food as we sped north. The scenery began to improve as we reached the Tyne and its many bridges at Newcastle, and I recall that the Tweed scene at Berwick was also lovely. The sun was making a late appearance as I worked on a puzzle and finished reading several articles from my vast collection. The train was on time and so at 8:30 I found myself in Waverly Station. I had not been in Edinburgh since the grand tour that Dorothy and I had taken in 1967 – 43 years earlier!
There were a number of tasks that I proposed to accomplish before leaving the station. The first of these sent me into a Marks & Spencers food store, where I bought an egg salad sandwich, some prawn crackers, a Diet Coke, and some chocolates. Then I found the right spot to buy tickets for our onward journey on the morrow, and from the friendly clerk I got instructions on how to leave the station by the Calton Road exit. After climbing some stairs I found myself on a descending ramp into the street below. In my hand I had the printed instructions on how to reach the Apex Waterloo Place Hotel, where (after a good deal of research on the net) I had booked us a twin room for the night. I couldn’t have gotten us closer to the station for all I had to do was cross the street, walk a few feet uphill, and press a button at street level. A voice now asked my business and when I said I wanted to check in I was admitted to a hallway in which I could summon a lift to reception, a few floors above me. Here I completed the formalities, my big pack still on my back, and received a card key to a room on the seventh floor. No sooner had I turned my mobile phone on than it jangled its Tchaikovsky melody and I was speaking to Gavan, about to board a plane for Edinburgh in Krakow.
Very much relieved that he seemed to be on schedule (and that all sorts of additional contingency plans could now be abandoned) I began to relax, eating my food and watching a program on the attempts of an undercover boss in reviving the fortunes of the Harry Ramsden fish and chips empire. Ours was a very modern and well-appointed room but I wasn’t able to enjoy it properly. I nodded off a bit but about 12:30 I suddenly found Gavan in the room and then we could both relax and get some sleep.
We were up very early and Gavan (who could barely understand the accent of the clerk downstairs) made an early errand to get some cash from a Barclay’s machine. We checked out of the hotel (where our twin had cost us £98.00) and, disdaining the additional £20 breakfast charge, we made our way out to Princes Street and into a McDonalds. I had a bacon and cheese bagel and some juice while Gavan ate an egg McMuffin and we watched Edinburgh scurry along to work. I had a strong memory of this street from 1967, but things had seemed far more dour and staid back then. We took some pictures (with the famous castle in the background), each of us using cameras new to the walking enterprise; in my case I had bought a Canon Sure Shot S 90 only ten days earlier and there was much I had to learn about its workings.
We entered Waverly Station from Princes Street where an army of Asians was just emerging. We now had a little time to spare and this was used to return to the ticket counter in order to purchase passage for a short ride we intended to take the next day. There was some ambiguity about which platform to use for the Inverness train and we moved about several times before finally getting it right. Our train left at 8:33, almost immediately crossing the famous Forth Bridge – with Gavan taking pictures through the window. Our journey took about three hours and we passed through a number of famous Scottish locales never visited before – like Perth and Pitlochry.
The day had been bright enough at the outset but the more lovely the countryside the greyer it was becoming overhead. We passed through Kingussie and then slowed to a halt, arriving in Aviemore, therefore, about fifteen minutes late. We were now ready for the next part of a complex plan for the initial stages of our walk and this required us to walk over to the platform of the adjacent Strathspey Steam Railway, where we soon ascertained that there would be a 12:30 train departing for Boat of Garten. I then used my mobile phone to call our b&b, Ravenscraig, learning that it would be just fine for us to deposit our backpacks in the room we would be using for the next two nights. Then we dodged the traffic on the busy highway, turning right for a ten-minute walk into b&b land and passing a church which had the Scottish flag instead of a stained glass window. We discovered Ravenscraig on our left and were soon checked in, our landlady asking us if we wanted packed lunches for the next two days. (Our travel company, Mickledore, had dubbed the next day a “rest” day and so no lunch had been ordered for us – and we had to do this ourselves now.) We were shown to a nice room in a strip of cottages behind the main building and here we deposited our gear.
As we neared the station on our return journey (this ten minute walk in less than edifying ski-trash surroundings soon became a bore) we spotted a line of taxis and I had the idea that now might be a good time to book a ride for the next day, when I wanted us to use a cab to get started on our day’s undertaking. A nice lady from J.G.A’s taxis took down our details and we walked over to the steam railway platform, took some photos of the antique set-up and took out seats in a third class carriage. A volunteer ticket taker punched our pasteboards. The fifteen-minute journey to Boat of Garten was a lot of fun – I don’t believe I had ever travelled by steam before. After a farewell toot the train continued on to its next and final station while we stomped around in the waiting room where, for a pound, Gavan bought a hardback copy of two Sherlock Holmes tales.
The bad news was that it was beginning to rain; the good news was that we had only a short distance to cross before reaching the door of The Boat, hotel and pub, where we soon sat down in the dining room for some lunch. We each had a smoked salmon sandwich, a bowl of carrot and lentil soup and Diet Cokes. Poor Gavan had arrived still suffering from amoebic dysentery, which he had picked up in Poland, and he was on a medication that would not permit him to drink alcohol until the medicine had run its course. I joined him in this ban. Lunch was very good, though the service was slow and the Frenchman who served as the maitre d’ (there were a lot of his countrymen about) was hard to flag down. During a lull in the moisture I went outside to take a picture of the hotel, managing to get myself locked out – with Gavan having to get up to let me back in.
At about 1:30 we were ready to leave, stopping first in an outdoor outfitters, where Gavan was searching for an additional memory card for his camera, and I paused to put on full rain gear. Then we began our walk on a suburban street full of nice second homes, heading north under trees. The Speyside Way is walked by most people from Buckie, on the coast, to Aviemore, in the Cairngorms, and we would be using this northeast to southwest direction ourselves today – but with plans to reverse directions and walk toward to sea starting on Saturday. It meant that, for once, we were also using the text by Jacquetta Megarry and Jim Strachan the right way round, though there wasn’t much actual instruction in this Rucksack Reader, the well-waymarked route being followed usually with just the help of two maps I had purchased in Stanfords.
Across the heathery moorland between the railway line and Aviemore
Today’s walk to Aviemore was only six miles or so and it was very easy. After leaving Boat of Garten we crossed under the steam railway and began an undulating progress over heathland on reasonably dry surfaces. In the far distance we could see a patch of snow high on the mountain to our left and, at our level, a golf course. It had stopped raining and I was able to strip down to my t-shirt (whose front pocket provided a pouch for my camera case). There weren’t many other walkers about but we did pass a number of families on bicycles. I was surprised that the heather was only rarely in bloom; perhaps the long hard winter had delayed things up here too.
Outdoor sculpture north of Aviemore
We bounced along with considerable pace, Gavan usually out in front, with me, assisted by my walking stick, trailing along. The steam railway made several appearances on the embankment on our right and we passed through a sculpture garden (with each metal stanchion vainly trying to resist the attentions of vandals). At last we reached the A9 and turned left to head into Aviemore. There were several lovely front gardens hereabouts and I took some more pictures. Opposite Ravenscraig, which we reached at about 4:30, we entered a Spar grocery store and I bought some Éclair candies and a box of Ribena raspberry juice. I then took my shower, discovering an alarming patch of blood on my right arm – the result of losing a scab (which I had covered with a bandage) on the same spot that had also fallen foul to a thorn bush on the final stages of our Ireland walk the previous year. Gavan, meanwhile, began several days of fascinated rapport with the European athletic championships in Barcelona (also sponsored by Spar). Then we had to walk into town again, choosing the Ski-ing Doo, a “family restaurant” that favored an American style menu. I had a vanilla milkshake (actually made with ice cream) and a burger and we studied the many feeble attempts at humor in cartoons and captions on the wall. Local bimbos in short skirts camped out at the table behind us. I finished with an ice cream sundae and then, as dusk approached, we returned to Ravenscraig and more athletics on the TV. Chickens, who had the run of all the outdoor spaces, were sheltering on our front porch.
We rarely made it past 9:00 o’clock before falling asleep on this trip and tonight was no exception. Still, after all the complicated planning needed to get this trip launched we could be well content with our first day on the trail – though I did manage to point out one irony: we had spent a day on the Speyside Way without catching a single glimpse of the Spey!
Our next day is covered in:
Day 2: Dalraddy Holiday Park to Kingussie (The Badenoch Way)
If you want to continue with the Speyside Way itself (though now heading toward the sea) you can switch to: