PERU-BOLIVIA: Day 3

After a romantic night in Broomhall castle our first destination today was Pitlochry, a small village north of Perth. The main attraction of the village is a fish ladder built for the salmons swimming up the river. Since there is a dam on the river, this construction was necessary to re-establish natural circumstances. There are 5000 salmons yearly passing the ladder on their way to mate in the upper section of the river.

After looking at the ladder and the charming High street of the village we drove into Cairngorms National Park, which consists of a large elevated plateau adorned with low, rounded glacial mountains and home to the famous Caledonian forest.

Nevertheless it features also some nice ski resorts and a weekend house (Balmoral Castle) of the Royal family. The 20,000 hectares estate contains a wide variety of landscapes. There are seven hills over 910 m in the estate, the highest being Lochnagar at 1,155 metres. The house itself was completed in 1850s and features several rooms and a 24.5-metre tall clock tower topped with turrets. The Royal family is coming out there to do some gardening or hunting and is serves a nice hide away for the young couple Will and Kate.

The most interesting part of the day followed, when we were visiting The Glenlivet Distillery in the Speyside. It was founded in 1824 and it has operated almost continuously since producing 6million ltr whiskeys a year.

Whiskey making is an art in itself, wherein Single Malts are the best ones made from a fermented mash and defined as

Produced at a distillery in Scotland from water and malted barley all of which have been:

Processed at that distillery into a mash
Converted at that distillery to a fermentable substrate only by endogenous enzyme systems
Fermented at that distillery only by adding yeast
Distilled

Wholly matured in an excise warehouse in Scotland in oak casks of a capacity not exceeding 700 litres for at least three years
Retaining the colour, aroma, and taste of the raw materials used in, and the method of, its production and maturation
Containing no added substances, other than water
Comprising a minimum alcoholic strength by volume of 40%.

Interesting fact that during the aging process 2% of the whiskey is evaporating from the cask, i.e. for a 25years old whiskey half of the cask is gone. You can smell it very well when entering the warehouses.

Our final destination for today was Drumnadrochit , a village at the lake "Loch Ness", where we were chasing the monster all evening unsuccessfully. The lake is 56.4 km²
and 230m at its deepest point.

The earliest report of a monster associated with the vicinity of Loch Ness appears in the 7th century. It became really famous in the 1930-50s, when numerous attempts/explorations were made to find hard evidence of its existence.