Before I travelled to the Scottish Highlands, I thought I already knew what to expect.
They were the magic world of Harry Potter, where a steam train drifted through the clouds, slowly wound through mist-covered mountains, of the Loch Ness Monster lurking beneath dark waters, of Romantic poets who taught me that nature was meant to be admired from a distance. I believed that I was travelling towards a landscape I had imagined long before I ever set foot in Scotland.
Out of my expectation, the Highlands quietly resisted the fantasy I had brought with me.
Walking through Glencoe, the mountains did not stand silently like scenery. They surrounded me. The stillness felt almost tangible, as though I could touch it with my skin, while the mist dissolved the boundary between summit and the sky. When sunlight pierced the clouds like a spear thrown by Zeus and illuminated the valley, the moment refused to become a photograph. I felt as though I had accidently stepped into an ancient epic. For the first time, I understood what the Romantics meant by the sublime: not beauty that pleased, but beauty that humbled.
Weeks later, back in Edinburgh, one of my lecturers spoke about the romanticization of the Highlands. The landscape that I had admired was also carefully constructed through literature, paintings, tourism, and nationalism. I had arrived carrying centuries of stories in my luggage. I did not simply invent my expectations; I inherited them. Yet, the professor ended the lecture with a question, “Does knowing these stories prevent us from truly seeing the place itself?” I suddenly realized that my expectations had never really been mine.
Like others, I believed that sustainable travel was mostly about making practical choices like taking public transport over driving, cooking instead of relying on takeaway meals, and staying longer in one spot rather than rushing through attractions. During my study in Edinburgh, I tried to make those choices whenever possible. They mattered, and they still do.
But I gradually realized that sustainability also begins with attention.
Sustainable travel is not only about reducing the footprint we leave on a place, but also to lessen the assumptions and projections we impose upon it. It asks us to let a destination exist beyond personal fantasies, to recognize that local people are not characters in a story written for tourists, and that the landscape is not stages set for our photographs. Sometimes the most respectful thing we can do is to spend a little more time observing, and a little less time assuming we already understand. Only then can a place begin to narrate its own story.
I never received a Hogwarts acceptance letter.
I left realizing that the most meaningful journeys begin when we stop expecting a place to become the stories we brought with us.
