Many years ago, when I was still in the early stages of this trip, every arrival in a new city came with a burst of renewed energy and enthusiasm. There were new things to see, new people to meet, new bearings to get, new routines to form and then discard after a few days. Sometimes there’d be a new language to not understand, too. Moving from place to place only gradually morphed from something exciting to something mundane, but in recent months it has become routine, bordering on tiresome depending on my mood.
I’m not sure why Edinburgh was different. As a destination it was an afterthought: I’d planned to go to Oxford and attempt a day trip into the Cotswolds instead, but trains from Oxford to Liverpool were hideously expensive, whereas I spotted cheap fares both to and from Edinburgh. And so it became the last place added to my itinerary, only a couple of weeks ahead of time. I got off the train, though, and felt that half-forgotten buzz of anticipation about a new place that I thought was lost for good. It was nearly midnight and the streets were deserted, but that only served to enhance the grandeur of the floodlit buildings on either side of the station. I was in Edinburgh! What was I going to do here? I didn’t know!
A bad hostel could have easily burst my bubble, but this place was the closest thing to perfection that £18 a night can buy. It’s all of ten seconds walk from the Royal Mile, the main road through the centre of the old town, and it’s inside a grand old stone mansion with a suit of armour propped up by the door, standing guard over reception. I’d been slightly concerned that they wouldn’t accept cash, given I no longer have a card, but it was no problem. The staff member handed over my key and directed me to the fifth floor. “Oh, and your bed’s name is Butterscotch.”
My bed’s name is… what?
“Butterscotch.”
I see. The bed has a name. That’s new.
Buttercup – sorry, Butterscotch, it’s a bed, not a cow - and I hadn’t met, and so going up and climbing straight in felt ever so slightly too forward. It was late, though, so I had little choice and Butterscotch didn’t seem to mind. They – I don’t think beds have genders – shared a room with three other beds named Chocolate Chip, Almond Fudge and Raspberry, and are very comfortable. They even had two pillows, a luxury that usually requires waiting until 1AM and stealing a pillow from another bed, with fingers crossed that nobody turns up later to demand their pillow back.
The staff member on duty the next morning asked how everything was. “Excellent”, I said, standing beside the suit of armour whose name, I now learned, was Arthur. “We’re getting along very well, considering we just met.” Then the bloke at the desk said he thought we were getting along too, and I had to clarify that I was referring to Butterscotch, not him. Awkward.
That morning I ventured out onto the Royal Mile and into a cafe that claimed to have vegetarian haggis. All I've ever known about haggis is that it incorporates the internal organs of cows, or maybe sheep? Haggis has never been on the menu for me before, so I tried to order it, but at the last moment I mispronounced 'haggis' as 'veggie burger'. Offal-themed local delicacies are really something you need to build up towards.
One of the relatively few things I knew about Edinburgh is that Arthur's Seat - the original, not the Mornington Peninsula rip-off - is there somewhere, and I thought I might climb it. My dorm mate George - a nanny from Perth (via London) who was sleeping in Almond Fudge until she found somewhere to live - seemed to think that was a very bad idea.
Having chickened out on eating haggis, I set off down the Royal Mile towards Arthur's Seat. The Mile is one of the grandest streets in Europe, lined with stately buildings on each side and full of statues of great Scots throughout history, including one of Adam Smith, the iconic founder of free market economics, who was most unfortunately covered in bird shit. How terrible.
The Royal Mile runs from Holyrood Palace, where the Queen stays when she visits Edinburgh and is unlucky enough not to stay in a hostel bed named after a dessert, to Edinburgh Castle at the other end, and it was only when I got to the castle that I discovered I was going the wrong way. So I ended up having to walk a Royal Mile and a Half to Arthur's Seat, but I didn't mind. It was such a glorious walk that even the bagpipes being noisily strangled to death at regular intervals didn't bother me. It was only once I was at the castle that I first saw Arthur's Seat, a full Royal Mile away, whose 251 metres of really quite severely vertical cliff face suddenly looked rather intimidating. Perhaps George was right. What had I gotten myself into?
I was psychically committed to reaching the top, though, so I dropped back into the hostel on the way and asked some pointed questions. Is the path clearly marked? Could a slightly rotund Australian, worn down by six months of travelling, reliably climb it in an afternoon before dark? Is it safe for diabetics? Unlike George, they were bemused by my caution. Apparently most people climb it comfortably in half an hour.
Bag fully loaded with as much sugar as I could carry, then, I headed down past Holyrood and the Scottish Parliament, where a path began that circled the mountain: I could either turn left or right and, perhaps guided by the invisible hand of Adam Smith I turned right. This was, naturally, a terrible mistake.
The path up Arthur's Seat brought to mind the very first thing I did in Europe, all those months ago, when I radically misjudged the benefits of riding a funicular in Lisbon. The gradient was such that I'd climb about 20 metres, stop for a rest, climb another 15 and stop for another rest. I suspected the people at the hostel were taking revenge for all the drop bear stories they'd suffered on their own backpacking trips to Australia. Half an hour? Surely that's nonsense.
Imagine my disgust, then, when I finally reached the top of the hill and discovered that I hadn't climbed Arthur's Seat at all. It was still right there in front of me. At best I'd climbed Arthur's Footrest.
The climb up the real Arthur's Seat wasn't quite vertical, but it was pretty close. I continued to take regular breaks, and at one point a young Scot from Aberdeen sat down beside me. "I knew I'd regret this half-way', I told him, 'and we must be a quarter of the way there, so I guess that means I'm half-way to regretting it." My companion looked up at the mountain above our heads, judging the distance to the top and said gently "you know mate, I'm not sure you're even half-way to being half-way to regretting it." Very encouraging.
I finally made it to the top after about an hour and a half, and took my time enjoying the view over Edinburgh, before turning to face the other direction, over Leith and the tongue-twistingly named Firth of Forth -
No. This wasn't fair.
Right behind the summit, where Arthur's Chairback should have been, was a grassy field that gently sloped down towards sea level, with dozens of people making the comfortable half hour walk up or down what just about amounted to a paved road. At least 90% of the people on the mountain had taken this craven, cheat's way to the top. They hadn't earned that view like I did. It wasn't right. I took the easy path down, of course, but I grumbled about the injustice of being able to do so all the way.
The Arthur's Seat climb consumed the only day of nice weather I enjoyed in Edinburgh. After a slow start the next day, reluctant to leave Butterscotch, I headed out to the zoo via a pub for lunch, where I thought I'd ease into the haggis with something without the awful connotations of internal organs, but otherwise just as bad. And so I learned that trying to eat a brown onion gravy-immersed vegetable pastie and mushy peas whilst sheltering from the rain is the sort of thing that might prompt one to emigrate from Scotland.
I roamed restlessly on my last day in town, strolling across from the Old Town to the New Town, which was only a sprightly 300 or so years old. It turned out to be a stately take on a relatively boring shopping district, but I was at least treated to the sight of a busker playing bagpipes that belched fire at climactic moments in the song. The flames are really handy for when you’re trying not to notice that you’re listening to bagpipes.
After shuffling about in the rain and taking shelter in the (free) National Museum of Scotland, the dark sky brightened just long enough to check out the Camera Obscura, a contraption near the Castle that was rescued from being unacceptably tourist-gimmicky for this jaded backpacker by being a) open since 1835 and b) pretty cool in spite of itself. Don’t ask me to explain the physics of it, but it consists of a dark room at the top of the building, in which sits a big white sheet. A hose-like apparatus runs from just above the sheet to a hole in the roof, and when the light passes through you can see what’s going on outside, as if from a CCTV camera. The bloke in charge pointed the hose up and down the Royal Mile, using a sheet of paper held underneath to ‘pick up’ people as they walked, blissfully unaware, before dropping them back to the pavement. Such novelties were quite the rage in the Victorian era, before we all got too easily bored by space travel and microwave popcorn to appreciate technical marvels.
It was time to catch the train, but first I had to face my fears. A hole in the wall just off the Royal Mile offered ‘baked tatties’ in a dozen or so vegetarian formats, one of which was haggis. I fronted up and ordered, but my voice must have betrayed my anxiety because the bloke serving offered to let me have two smaller tatties instead of one big one – one with haggis, and the other with something edible. The haggis turned out to be an anti-climax. Take out the entrails and what I was left with amounted to oats, onions and spices. It was fine in a ‘I don’t need to do that again’ sort of way, and better than the mushy peas
I was heading to Liverpool, a pilgrimage to the home of The Beatles. I arrived late to a hostel that had all the depressive air of decay that my wonderful home in Edinburgh had lacked. The beds here didn’t have names: they barely had mattresses. The free breakfast amounted to a loaf of bread, left at irregular intervals in an abandoned kitchen. The wifi didn’t work, and so I was cut off from the world until mid-morning, when the only other guest in the place showed me how to hack into the network for the university campus next door.
It wasn’t a great deal better outside, where the weather was persistently British, but I headed out and straight for Matthew Street and the Cavern Club. I bought a ticket for that night’s Beatles tribute show and spent a happy couple of hours sprinting through the rain from one Beatles-merchandise store to the next, talking myself out of buying everything from guitar picks to a set of 13 coffee mugs, each printed with a different album cover. I don’t play the guitar, and I don’t drink coffee, but it was really only end-of-trip poverty that stopped me from going on a spending spree.
Staying on Matthew Street – the rain was really too heavy to consider going anywhere else – I had lunch in a pub that proudly identified the booth where the pre-Fab Four would hang about before gigs at the Cavern. They chose that spot, apparently, because it provided an ideal vantage point to peek into the women’s bathroom whenever the door opened, where their fans were dressing up for the show. I pulled out a book and like The Beatles before me, waited out the rain before the show. You’ll be pleased to know there’s now a wall that shields the women’s bathrooms from view.
The book was a Robert Harris thriller set during the Munich conference where Hitler played Neville Chamberlain for a fool, and I continued to read it as I lined up for the show. Standing next to me were a middle-aged couple from South Africa, by way of Brisbane. The husband was a doctor, whose name I’ve forgotten so I’ll call him Dr Robert, and he was already two sheets to the wind. He spotted the book, asked what it was about, and after I handed him the blurb to read he began to tell me of his admiration for Winston Churchill. The proudest moment of Doc Robert’s career was when he was volunteering at a steam train festival in South Africa and the guest of honour, Winston’s daughter, had needed treatment for angina.
He went on at length about Churchill and his brush with fame, but he was genially inebriated enough that I didn’t mind sharing a table inside, not least because it meant I could roam about a bit without losing my spot. He talked a lot before the show started and his wife, who I shall call Michelle, talked much less. I asked what she did – she was a nurse – and we talked about that for a bit before eventually moving on to talking about South Africa. At some point Doc Robert mentioned that Michelle was Nelson Mandela’s nurse when he was treated for cancer.
He said it casually, like nursing Nelson Mandela daily for several months was nothing compared to having once checked Winston Churchill’s daughter’s pulse. Michelle smiled the smile of somehow with an incredible story to tell and no need to bring it up, because Dr Robert would surely get around to it eventually. They must be used to being met with skepticism, because Robert pulled out his phone, where he had a family photo with the great man ready to show off. “This is me, and this is our daughter…” he was pointing to the photo, “and this is Nelson –“
I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have laughed. “Yes mate”, I laughed. “I know that’s Nelson.”
I steered the conversation away from Churchill and back towards Mandela – The Chief, as Michelle called him – every chance I could. I asked a lot of questions, but remember very few of the answers. What I do remember is that Michelle was adamant The Chief was every bit as humble, as magnanimous, as forgiving and as decent as he appeared to be. And for that I’m glad.
The show itself was much more fun than a tacky tribute show has any business being. John was bang on, and so was George. Paul’s vocals were a bit stringy, but just like at the Real Sir Paul’s concert I attended a couple of months later, the crowd carried him through the difficult bits by singing along. The usual Ringo missed the show due to a Ryanair cancellation that day in Dublin, and so the bar owner’s 16 year old son stepped in. It’s not the first time Ringo’s been replaced on drums without anybody noticing the difference, I suppose.
I did very little the next day, which I’d set aside as a do-very-little day to allow for the Swans to play in a preliminary final before Geelong rudely interrupted. Aside from finishing the book, I hopped on a bus down to Penny Lane for lunch, but got there to find a surprisingly short and less than bustling suburban street. There wasn’t a banker with a motorcar or fireman with an hourglass in sight, thought there was a barber – open Eight Days a Week, a sign on the door said, but closed on this Saturday – and a chip shop that I’m sure would have sold me four of fish if it hadn’t also been closed. I took the obligatory photo of a heavily graffiti’d Penny Lane street sign, and left.
It was time for the last destination on the trip, and an anti-climax. Dublin started well enough, with one of my favourite things – a ferry ride, complete with spotting a seal in Dublin harbour – but it didn’t capture me. I roamed around Temple Bar, only to find that there’s nothing to it apart from Irish pubs, but they were Irish pubs only in the sense that they were in Ireland, and they were pubs. Like Florence with its Renaissance and Amsterdam with its vice, Temple Bar is a parody of itself, a Sovereign Hill in-situ, offering up the same Irish pubs you’ll find in Australia, in the US, in London or wherever else Irish Eyes Are Smiling™.
I wandered in and out of Trinity College, struck by how it’s burdened with the same split personality as so many other ‘things to do’ in Europe: for me it was a ‘thing to do’, but for the students around me it was just uni, and I didn’t belong there during class time just as I didn’t belong in churches during services. I roamed to the post office, which was at the centre of the doomed Easter rising in 1916 – where museum exhibits put the romance into pointless slaughter. I sheltered from the rain in another new museum near the docks, which focused on the Irish diaspora. They featured Tadhg Kennelly and Jim Stynes, which is fair enough, and Ned Kelly, who they’re welcome to have. They claimed Barack Obama, which was a little more tenuous but all very well, and then Che Guevara, which came as something of a shock.
I was only here for a couple of days, but I wasn’t taken by the place, and worse, I was only here for a couple of days. I’d arrived on day 197 of 200. It was impossible not to think of all the ‘lasts’: the last ferry, the last hostel, the last change of currency, the last bus to the airport that was only hours away. Bored and preoccupied, I found my way by accident to the Dublin train station. I sized up the departures board, playing with the notion of a last minute day trip to Belfast, Kilkenny, Limerick or Cork, but I was out of time, and anyway, I was tired. The bad news was there were so many places I’d not yet been to. The good news is there’s so many places I’ve not yet been to.
best travelogue ever
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