Kiwi Roaming

Next morning, full Scottish again (we have to stop eating all of this cooked food soon) and back on the train into Edinburgh. Today we focused on the Castle, Royal Mile, Victoria Street and went out to Leith as well. Again the city was heaving with people and many Christmas events, there are extensive Christmas Markets here which we simply ran out of time for but could see a carnival and other entertainment activities running as well.

The walk up to The Royal Mile from the train station takes you through small alleyways and up flights of stairs. The city skyline is dominated by the Castle which is the highest point with the Royal Mile shopping street taking you all the way up to the entrance. The Royal Mile is where all of the major outdoor events in Edinburgh happen so is protected by bollards at each intersection, about half is closed off to vehicles so pedestrian only. It’s also where many of the Harry Potter related places are so there were queues of people on Harry Potter tours and quests there.

I wanted to see the Thistle Chapel ceiling in the cathedral (I know we said no more churches) so we paid the voluntary entry fee to take a look around, only to find the chapel where the ceiling lives is closed today. The cathedral was pretty interesting and they had clearly employed the fund raising method of selling crypt space inside over the centuries. Next we walked past the justice sector and took a look at even more monuments and plaques dedicated to Sir Walter Scott along the way.

As we walked towards the Castle up the hill there were bag pipers busking, owls outside the Harry Potter museum – and wow owls are much bigger than I thought! In the Castle access way there are even more monuments to past conquests by the British along with food vendors and hundreds of people queuing or just taking photos of the view. A great viewing spot. We decided not to go into the castle with a long list of other parts of the city we wanted to see and like churches we have seen quite a few this trip.

Next we headed down steps on the other side of the hill towards Victoria Street, stumbling on Victoria Terrace on the way. The Terrace sits high above the street, probably two stories above, and runs parallel. It is lined with pubs and cafe’s, very narrow to walk along but provides a fantastic view of the highly coloured shop fronts below.

Victoria Street is steep and curved, the buildings are all fabulous colours. There were a couple of big queues here, one for a Harry Potter place and the other for a pulled pork sandwich place where they had a whole spit roasted pig in the window. It should have been a pedestrian only street but wasn’t with loads of lorries contending with the thousands of pedestrians.

In need of a loo break we popped into one of the many many pubs here. We chose The Last Drop a really old pub dating back to the 1400’s. In the 1600’s it became the place where people on death row would have their last drink before being taken to the gallows. Now owned by a chain it was packed with tourists but reasonably priced and gave us the whole old pub experience.

Next we wanted to go to Leith or The Shore as it’s called locally. The easiest option was to catch a tram which gave us a great perspective on some of the wider city. This area is part of the port infrastructure for Edinburgh and is a mixture of very old and very new buildings, lots of apartments, boutique shops and cafe’s alongside wharves. First order of business was finding somewhere for lunch and we chose a corner pub with a lovely outlook, here we shared fish and chips and a caesar salad.

Bellies full we took a walk around, the area we saw is lovely. When we got out to the port part we saw a massive ferry painted up with Tasmania, seems its new and undertaking sea trials here in Leith. We headed out to look at the Royal yacht Britannia but it got really really windy and cold so we decided to call time on our wee explore and hop back on the tram into the city.

We thoroughly enjoyed Edinburgh and could have spent weeks there. It has a great vibe and the mixture of modern and really old architecture makes it an interesting city worth visiting.