saturday: day 3, scotland

today was our inverness day. inverness is the "big" city in the famous scottish highlands, where most things are untouched by man, everything is breaktaking, and by loch ness where the monster lives! we woke up at 530 to catch the first train, and because of d's clock being wrong we were 2 minutes late to make it; we ended up on the next one, two hours later.

we arrived and met kumar, our couchsurfing host, who picked us up from the station and drove us to his little place and made us lunch. expecting to take a bus tour to see nessie, we were surprised that he cleared his day to spend it with us and drive us around. we hopped in his car and jammed to rod stewart, oddly, on the way there. we made it to the loch, got out and skipped rocks. searching high and low, for some reason nessie was nowhere to be found (we think she went to warmer waters for vacation). turns out, loch (lake) ness is more than 230 meters deep- over 700 feet deep! and the water is really red/brown, pretty nasty looking up close.

the scenery was surreal. every shade of green, orange, red and yellow blanketing every patch of dirt around. we convinced kumar (side note: he is indian, has lived in scotland three years and is a bridge engineer) to put on some lively scottish music, and he drove us to ruins from a 14th century castle on the loch. we drove some more, saw the town, and then returned to his place barely able to keep our eyes open. we watched waterhorse: legends from the deep, the disney version of nessie's story, while he prepared what became my first and delicious curry experience. his kiwi friend who recently moved to the uk came over too, and we swapped stories until bedtime.