My favourite holiday: Alan Rough loved seeing leopards on safari, but it was a pity about the spiders…

AS a Scotland goalkeeper, Alan Rough won 53 caps for Scotland, went to three World Cups and is a member of the Scottish Football Hall Of Fame.

His club career included winning the Scottish League Cup with Partick Thistle with a famous 4-1 win over Celtic in 1971.

Alan is on STV screens every Friday night at 8pm with Peter & Roughie’s Friday Football Show.

I WAS fortunate to travel all over the world with my Scotland career – Brazil, Chile, Peru and so many other countries.

I’ve maybe not seen them all, but I’ve certainly been in them.

Holiday-wise it’s a package that included a week on safari in Kenya, a stopover in Madagascar and then another week in Mauritius that sticks most in my mind.

The safari was something I had to be sold on as it certainly wasn’t high on my bucket list.

My daughter Sarah and her boyfriend had taken a year out of university and had been working on the reserve for the summer and the chap who owned the place had invited us over.

On the first day I saw everything crawling around but was told we’d be fine as we were in a sealed tent.

That was reassuring until Sarah said there was one spider whose bite numbed your leg and then it kept eating away at you until it was fed up!

We did all the early morning rides and we’d been told about these three leopards which were very rarely seen.

Our luck was in because we saw them on the very first day.

They were stalking an antelope. We didn’t see them go in for the kill, but it was absolutely fascinating to see how they operated, working perfectly together.

After the night in Madagascar, which was beautiful but seemed such a poor country, we flew on to Mauritius.

I’d been before on an over-40s football tournament with Scotland, but it was lovely to be there just to relax.

We had a thatched roof apartment right on the beach. Unfortunately, I took my golf clubs as did my wife Maggie, who’d just taken up golf.

The one lesson I learned from that was never to do it again as it just spoils the holiday!

All of the travelling I’ve done was very different from my childhood holidays which were to Girvan.

We used to rent a wee bungalow on the main street and my memories are of playing football in the park round the corner with my brother.