A Wee Scottish Trip
Day One
After a *tearful* goodbye with Cher and Hedwig, we popped into our wee right-driving rental car and whizzed away from Glasgow, headed north. I think I reminded Ari about 6 times during that first hour to keep left. Not that he admits he needed my reminders.
The carriageway faded into narrow two-lane country roads and grazing fields within minutes. Ari swerved with glee through tight corners and over the whoop-de-doo blind summits while I clung on for dear life for the next forty-five minutes. We approached Loch Lomond’s eastern shore as the clouds descended, threatening to soak our first venture into the Scottish Highlands.
Our first hike was a short climb up Conic Hill—a hill of minimal proportions but with grand views of the loch. The clouds did precipitate, but not in the form we expected. It snowed—in fact, it blizzarded—with a ferocity that I rarely experience in Colorado. The wind roared off the Trossachs from the east and hurled marble-sized snowflakes steadily for ¾ of the hike. We glimpsed Loch Lomond from the summit for just a minute through the haze of clouds before the curtains drew together again.
In the pub that evening, still shivering in our damp clothes, we shared an ale and toasted the start of our wee Scottish road trip.
Day Two
We woke up in Killin, a tiny village in the northeast corner of the Trossachs National Park, to find the world outside swathed in white. Our travel plan for that day was to weave our way to the western coast, to admire many a loch and the occasional ruined castle, and to spend as little time as possible in the drab drizzle of sleet.
The Trossachs have a series of structures designed by architecture students in scenic locations that were designed to blend in, or enhance, the landscape. Ari wanted to see a structure in a grazing field next to a small loch that was entirely veiled in mirrors, so we veered off the already narrow road onto an even skinnier one. This building excelled at both its intended purposes; Ari couldn’t see the mirror box until we were only 200 feet away. We wedged ourselves into the cutout bench and sat there in silence for a few minutes, wholly unaware that we were in a country with 67 million people squashed into an area about half the size of Sweden.
The route we took to our eventual destination that evening became an emblematic of our road trip. By taking the “road less traveled” or the “scenic” route, we often found ourselves landing in our destinations with a lopsided sense of direction. The benefit of our slow meandering was that we could appreciate places that would have otherwise been blips in our peripherals as we blasted down a freeway. One of such locations we visited that day was Kilchurn Castle on Loch Awe; another was the port village of Oban. We wouldn’t score well for point-to-point driving efficiency, but we succeed at covering lots of ground.
Day Three
When you roll out of bed and peer out the window of your bed & breakfast in a valley many people have told you is the most beautiful landscape in Scotland, you certainly don’t envision that landscape seems to have vanished like a stagy magician in a milky fog. The light made the land looked as flat as a crisp sheet of paper. The disappointment sank in—it’s true, snow does follow us everywhere.
Glencoe goes by many other identifiers as well: the setting of Bond and M’s famous scene in Skyfall; the location of Hagrid’s hut outside the gates of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts; the outdoor mecca of Scotland; the site of a horrid and famous massacre in the era of the Jacobites (1692). Hopefully it’s obvious by now what we were here to do (hint: we were missing one thing for our fandom reenactment—a pale grey Aston), so we ignored the crappy weather, suited up, and then took refuge in our car for the next three hours.
We turned our steed to ride into the heart of the storm (up the valley). Our little Cleo’s engine droned at 4000 rpm until the apex of the mountain pass, where we turned off towards Glen Etive. The pastiness of the day started to fade away as we descended into the glen; grass in shades of auburn, gold, and jade cloaked the floor and edges of the valley like the decoration of a Highland kilt. I could almost imagine Skyfall manor looming in the distance. A stag nibbled on a bank of moss across the creek from where we paused. We struggled to turn around—I don’t mean this only metaphorically— the way we’d come. The one-lane road is a kicker.
Later that day, the air was clear enough to see Beinn Leamhain across Loch Linnhe from our viewpoint above Glencoe. Only when Ari and I stood in knee-deep snow on the side of Sgorr na Ciche were we able to appreciate the arresting vistas of Glencoe. Like powdered sugar sprinkled on Christmas truffles, the valley emanated a coziness that draws people back. We will be back.
Day Four and Five
Nak the ferry dog greeted us at the dock in Glenelg on this handsome April morning. He barked circles around the two waiting cars, seeming to forget that they were inanimate objects and not a herd of nervous sheep.
The ferry remained in the middle of the channel between us and the Isle of Skye for the moment, billowing a concerning amount of smoke as its captains revved it into life. When the ferry arrived at the shore for boarding, Ari’s eyes bugged out. The 49-year-old ferry swiveled like a giant lazy Susan to accommodate the non-retrofitted docks on either side of the channel. Ari yelped in alarm as Nak nimbly avoided being mashed by the hand powered turntable with so much inertia it would take Hercules to stop it, still circumnavigating the lot of us. We pushed off towards Skye.
A ferry ride isn’t essential to reach the Isle of Skye, but it was up until 1975 when they installed the bridge. It is the last operating turntable ferry in the world and provided a dramatic admittance to one of the most impressive places in Scotland.
It takes over ninety minutes to drive the length of the Isle of Skye (but likely much longer, because detours are essential). In the south, the coastline around Kylerhea delivers an astute introduction to the scenery to come. Midway up, the Cuillin—named after the Norse word for a conical-shaped mountain—stop people in their tracks, momentarily fooling them into thinking they’re in the heart of the glacier-cloaked Swiss Alps; not Highland Scotland. In the north, my favorite part of the island, the length of a grassy 30-kilometer ridge appears to have been rudely sliced with a serrated knife. This is Tatternish Ridge—Europe’s largest landslip. We stayed for two nights at the northern tip of it, hiking the past the odd, mushroom-topped stacks and droopy overhangs along the base of the landslip as well as the northernmost point, Rubha Hunish, where a bothy perches on a columnar cliff looking over the sea.
The moment you feel proud for summiting Tatternish Ridge is also the precise moment you realize that hill-walking in Scotland is humbling. Without creating a spectacle, a herd of sheep materializes in the gilded, early-spring grass. They graze fearlessly, skirting the edges of the cliff like the calm tight line acrobats of Cirque de Soleil. The views are fantastic from the top; apparently, the feed is too.
Day Six
Our departure off the Isle of Skye tool us past Eilean Donan Castle—Scotland’s most photographed stone fortress (for good reason). An exquisite, bowed bridge leads to its peaceful roost in the glassy waters of Loch Duich. The morning showers chose that moment to retreat into their bed of clouds, swaddling the earth below in an insulating duvet. We arrived before the noontide crowds and savored our leisurely tour of the castle’s displays as well as the crumbly scones they served in the café overlooking the bridge.
Our plans dissipated into the Scottish Highland air with each zig-zag along the coast north of Skye. Two more days lay ahead, but our motivation to meticulously hit every site along the way was petering out to a mere mumble. We knew that snaking up the far northern coast of Scotland—the one with fjords and vistas as impressive as Norway’s—was out of the question for this trip but that the Cairngorms National Park was a definite destination on our way southward to Glasgow. The road on the map fragmented into a cobweb of possible routes.
We reminded ourselves what the rental car was for: meandering to places we’d otherwise have missed. That mindset worked like a charm—within minutes of leaving Eilean Donan without a clue of where we were headed next, we disembarked in a tiny village that served seafood of our dreams. Housed in a pale blue cottage with a view of the sea, we slurped oysters and savored every bite of wood-smoked baked salmon, marveling that all the seafood served here was fished within a 30-mile radius. I felt like Remy in Ratatouille; each flavor bursting into vibrant fireworks within my closed eyelids. I could have never guessed I’d find culinary heaven on the backroads of Scotland.
Day Seven
Dawn arrived to find the ocean shore outside our hostel in Gairloch utterly silent. We crept downstairs past the vacant rooms and packed into our car in the wind-still, muted light. I could taste incoming rain on the air.
Our mighty steed carried us the final stretch north to Ullapool. The roads nipped-and-tucked their width to a sliver of pavement that barely reached beyond the wheels of our car. Even so, our car looked cartoonishly small when we met caravan after caravan head-on. We screeched to a halt in the gravel shoulder beside yet another idyllic loch—not because we were about to be smooshed—to fawn over a herd of mama and baby goats grazing in the bushes. And to breathe.
Ullapool is a seaport for ferries and fishing boats that reach out to the Outer Hebrides. While we walked the length of the quaint main street, the hulking Seaforth glided out of the harbor, its air horn piercing through the mist. The rain finally arrived in the ferry’s wake as we ascended the hills overlooking Ullapool’s Loch Broom. It felt like a curtain descending to mark the end of our private Highland Scotland performance; a cue telling us that it was time to leave. We typed “Inverness” into our navigation and reluctantly steered south.
We couldn’t resist one last taste of the Highlands, however. Corrieshalloch Gorge—a 60 meter (~197-foot) cut in the earth south of Loch Broom—boasts a waterfall that is guaranteed to induce vertigo. A footbridge hangs suspended directly above the Falls of Mesach, forcing you to lean over the edge while white-knuckling the cold metal bannister at your waist. The fact that we reached maximum capacity (six people) on the bridge was more than enough thrill for me.
The inner peace we had been relishing in our seaside hostel that morning was a far cry from the disorder that we arrived to in our Inverness hostel. Each room seemed to be teeming the kind of people I have nightmares about. In our dorm room, we encountered a heated conversation occurring between a conspiracist Trump-supporter (who happened to be Scottish, of all things), a young French gentleman, and a Spanish woman who kept muttering under her breath, “Stupid sexist.” We escaped to the lounge, only to find it to be overridden by the hostel’s staff—who were having a staff dinner that filled the entire lounge—hearing snippets of conversations with claims such as, “The biggest issue for Africa is…” I cringed and slinked out the door, crying mentally, “Take me back, Scottish Highlands!”
Day Eight
The Cairngorms were beckoning, and so we devoted our final full day in Scotland to exploring their grandeur. We settled on hiking the Lairig Ghru, Scotland’s most famous mountain pass route. If done in full, the path stretches 24 miles between the centers of Aviemore in the northern Cairngorms to Braemar in the south and crosses abundant types of terrain. The trail is thoroughly established because it was commonly used for droving—driving livestock—up until the late 19th century.
If you start from the north (the more common direction), the first 3 miles bend through the Rothiemurchus Estate—which contains Scotland’s largest remnants of Caledonian forest—before climbing steeply and spitting you out in an elongated, narrow canyon that eventually leads to the pass. The early spring hill walking conditions above the tree line of Scots pine were trash, leaving us mostly scurrying and post-holing up the valley on a layer of compacted snow. Our goal was to reach the pass and retreat before the departing sun inked the sky.
The final stretch of ascent up the valley had me wondering if we were moving at all. It seemed we were stuck on nature’s treadmill, never to reach our destination, always looking up at the same edges of the long glacial cut that sliced this valley into the plateau. I hadn’t seen the plateau’s four Munros since we passed the tree line. I missed the coastal Highlands. Suddenly, our eyes were drawn down. A new valley lay ahead, cloaked in a cerulean blue light. An old avalanche sluff to my left pointed like an arrow to the crux of the pass. We had reached our destination, and yet, I didn’t feel my usual glee. Maybe it was because I didn’t see the famed Scottish wildcat in the Caledonian Forest that I’d dreamed of seeing for years, or maybe my subconscious had realized I wouldn’t get to eat Scottish scones every morning. More likely, I felt melancholy because I knew we had reached the end of our elation. Tomorrow, we’d go home, but at least we’d leave knowing that Scotland would never disappear from our minds.
Be back soon!
-Sofia