Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Travel memory: Scotland | A serendipitous find - the Commando Memorial

When: May 2012
Where: Scotland

Circa May 2012, a few of us from the Geneva Bong-gang (namely Kranti, Pavel and I) decided upon a Scottish road-trip partially owing to the fact that our esteemed Dr Kar (an erstwhile Geneva resident) had then moved base to Glasgow and we decided to make good use of his station.
A high level route of our trip was along the lines of: Glasgow- Loch-Lomond - Oban - Fort William - Isle of Skye and back - Loch-Ness - Inverness - round the north shore to Aberdeen - Stonehaven - Dundee - Perth - Stirling - Glasgow.

While writing about our entire Scotland trip - even a synopsis - would take quite awhile, given the sights, sounds and whiskies of the land & I will try to do it justice sometime; one of the incidents that stand out is our discovery of the Commando Memorial near Lochaber in the Scottish highlands.

This incident took place while we were on our way upwards from Loch Lomond via Fort Williams towards Eileen Donan and then Isle of Skye.

From Fort Williams onwards we had started getting quite a bit of hill terrain where the roads were undulating with the sway of the hillocks and the glens…and before long we had Dr Kar (also sometimes referred to as Deepak) and Kranti complaining of nausea with threats of a pukish follow-through. We were on the A82 highway having just crossed the Spean river and couldn't make a stop without a proper shoulder as it was a 2-lane highway mostly. With assurances flowing thickly from Pavel and I that we would definitely stop at the  next opportunity that he gets while hoping fervently the other two manages to hold it in for sometime we raced towards the next rest-pit on the highway.

Anyways, pretty soon we figured a sort of flatland opening ahead on the left side of the highway with a couple of cars swinging onto it and a statue of some kind rising up from there. Figuring it must either be a pit-stop or a view-point and seriously testing the sickness-retention capacity of Kranti and Deepak we swung onto it…and even before we stepped out of the car we knew this would be one of the finds of our trip!!

(Did I forget to mention that in all of this antiperistatical excitement we had failed to register that we were driving almost against a backdrop of the Aonach Mor and Ben Nevis…? This is what we were amidst...)
Ben Nevis and the Aonach Mor range

After taking in the absolutely majestic surroundings where we landed up -Ben Nevis towering right up front with the Aonach Mor range skirting it, the glens on the other sides and the Commandos' statue in the midst of it all, we started reading upon the antecedents of the statue and the history behind it.

It  figured that we had stumbled upon one of the oldest commando training grounds in the war history with this facility being set up during World War II for the original British Commando Forces and the statue was a commemoration to it and has come to signify the spirit, bravery and valour of Commandos since. It was like the prequel to the present British Commando forces like the SAS and all the ones worldwide which had drawn from this mode of specialized soldiers.
Some of the gutsiest men that walked the earth....whose lives might have been the stuff movies were made of....
This link might help to get a snapshot upon the history : Commando_Memorial

"United We Conquer"




...also there was the 'Garden of Tributes'; where friends and families of fallen Commando soldiers would pay their tributes to the fallen brave...the love of the Country and God etched forever in the memory of those who knew and these poignant surroundings. 

In memory of those who made the maximum sacrifice in the line of duty
The tributes, the sentries and the mountains beyond...
A wonderful find and one that stands out as a memory from Scotland.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Creatively procrastinating...

the last post from me on this blog has been years back...and it is not for lack of attempts on my part that it hasn't been replenished with fresh posts, but more for the lack of success of those random attempts that failed to convert the myriad thoughts in my head to some composed text over here. on top when i spoke to some near ones about re-starting it -i almost got branded as a dinosaur for wanting to get back to a blog in the age of micro-isms like instagram, twitter, fb, pinterest, etc. :-)

but...i am at a point again where i think i really need to re-order stuff in my life (like often) and one of the things i would like to bring on track is to catch up on my reading and writing; it is easier said than done - believe me.

...and to think that the things which consume most of my leisure bandwidth are the internet and smartphone; and here i am partaking the internet's ability to post my thoughts which i hope to gather away from the net and the phone...(the image expresses my present feelings)


i was thinking of putting in smaller pieces instead of long-drawn ones, maybe that will enable a higher frequency of posts. 2 themes that were swimming in my head were: (i) stand-alone incidents from my travels, (ii) moments where i remember experiencing happiness and sort of bliss...

as i write this sipping on some Spanish red, i have all the motivation reqd in my head...hoping to translate some of that onto the pages even when the wine has passed...