The Cairngorms seen from the Highland Wildlife Park where I'd gone to see the macaques before my adopter status runs out.  I travelled up in a bus from Edinburgh that drops you at the end of the entrance road.  Because it comes off the A9 here and there the journey turns into a bit of a bus tour.  I was most impressed at how it arrived at every stop bang on the time listed in the timetable, rivalling Japanese railways.  The driver surely knew that Japanese macaques were my objective.

This is their playground but when I arrived it was close to empty.  There are some monkeys on the far side more or less invisible to the naked eye so I decided to look round the park and come back later.  First I took a picture of the heron on that little island.

On the way into the park I'd passed a clump or two of resting Bactrian camels and a cat that

was the spitting image of the cat that lived in Fiona's house sixty years ago.  It probably does a lot of spitting when provoked because it's a Scottish wildcat.  These animals are in danger of disappearing because they and domestic cats are making whoopee together so there's a project to save them presumably by restricting their sexual opportunities.

I managed to take out of focus pictures of tigers and polar bears and of arctic foxes with fence lines across their faces but better pics of a lynx and a snow leopard 

before coming back to the macaques now out in strength where I managed to take lots of out of focus pictures.  My camera liked to focus on the fence instead of the animals behind it and although it has a manual focus feature I'd no idea how to use it.  So it was a bit frustrating but now I've read the manual so may do better next time.  But I don't want to deprive you of the monkeys so feast your eyes.  They're not all out of focus.

 

There was more and there were more animals but eventually I left the park and caught a local bus to Kingussie to catch a train home.  I was the only human being in the station and was treated to a variety of pre-programmed announcements about time table changes, warnings to "see it, say it, sort it" etc including an announcement that the next train arriving at platform 1 was the 16.08 to Edinburgh.  Fortunately I had been pre-warned by the signalman who came out of his box and shouted to me that it would in fact be departing from platform 2 so I wasn't left in the wrong place gazing at a missed train.