Scribe and Photo by Website Kang
Date: 15-09-2004

By the original plan, we intended to go to Edinburgh after Inverness, but because we could not secure an accommodation, so we changed plan. Instead we headed to St Andrews to put up a night and planned to go to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews the next morning. Sing Sung and I am staunch golfers and it has always been our ambition to have our pilgrimage to this holy land of golf since day one. It is impossible to book a place to play golf there because the queue is more than one year long. However we found out that the course was closed for public on Sunday. So, we had planned for that.

The bus ride from inverness to St Andrews was comparatively short and we reached St Andrews by noon. The distance from the bus station to the hostel was a short one and quickly we had settled down. We had a good fish and chips for lunch, and after that we roamed around the touristy spots of this coastal town, full of historical remains of theological tales.The University of St Andrews is about 700 years old and is famous for theology studies and mathematics. We met an Indian tea plantation owner who sent his son to study mathematics there. He came to visit his son who happened to have some visitors, so he temporarily stayed in the hostel with us.

I liked the hostel which was well managed by a manageress Erin who wore many hats. She was the manageress, housekeeper, everything. I particularly like the amusing slogan in the kitchen. " Your mother does not live here, so please tidy and clean up after meals." She was able to maintain the discipline and patched up the shortfalls in between.

The weather was very fine, and we had a nice walk along the seaside, the old churches, graveyards of many generations. The locals told us that the rich one would bought a plot of burial ground where the generations would be buried together there. But we found the plot of land was very small perhaps for one, but to squeeze so many generations inside was quite impossible unless they were put on top of each other or buried vertically, anyway, it was amazing.

We visited the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews the next morning. We borrowed a club from Erin and managed to tour the whole golf course and snapped a number of photos. We found that the bunkers and the thorny bushes were the difficult ones, and perhaps to really playing in the course, one had to take an approach by playing safe. The course is quite flate. We took a few photos at the Swilcan Bridge, probably the most well-known landmark in golf, the bridge is said to date back to the 13th century. Golfers who play the old course walk over the bridge after teeing off on the 18th. The Scottish invented the golf game and the old course of the RAAGC of St Andrews was the place where the first game of golf was played 600 years ago. The invention of the playing around this little white ball does make the whole world crazy.

After the visit of the golf course and saying goodbye to Erin, we continued our journey by bus heading to Edinburgh.