Ewan McGregor: A brothers’ guide to Scotland

“There’s always a moment of silence,” says Ewan McGregor, “when you reach the top of the mountain, and you don’t need words. You just stop and look and drink it in: that sense of scale and space. And then you open your sandwiches.” The actor swapped the forest-covered peaks of Scotland for the star-studded hills of Hollywood years ago, but his fierce love for his native land has never dimmed: its shimmering, majestic lochs, its ruined castles, its windswept, ever-changing weather, and its warm, whisky-laced welcome in cozy pubs with flickering fires. 

Expedia has brought McGregor—bona fide box-office superstar, travel obsessive and the voice of our TV ads—back to his homeland to be reunited with his brother Colin, a former Royal Air Force fighter pilot turned instructor. From Colin’s home in Elgin, 175 miles north of Edinburgh, the pair are headed into the Scottish wilderness in search of the northern lights. This natural phenomenon, which paints the night sky in spectacular swathes of green and blue, is currently doing its awe-inspiring thing in all sorts of places it never normally would (read more here)—lighting up both the epic mountains of the Highlands, and Scottish Twitter. 

A love of adventure was a force bred strong in the brothers on childhood forays around their home country, forging an intimate bond. As Ewan says now, “When you know someone as well as your brother, you don’t need words.” They would take road trips with their parents, go hill-climbing, vacation on rugged Scottish beaches, and immerse themselves in water so unfathomably cold it fired them up for the rest of the day. “A lot of my memories are of us scrambling across cliffs and looking in rock pools,” says Ewan. “There’s a freedom about being a kid in this rugged, weathered landscape that’s just fantastic.” 

This weekend’s adventure across the Cairngorms is no less memorable (see their route below). They bicker. They get nostalgic. They get sidetracked. They have a mishap with sheep. They even take a dip in a friend’s freezing loch. They stop for fuel and Tunnock’s teacakes, an iconic Scottish chocolate-and-marshmallow snack that transports them back to their childhoods. They have moments of awestruck silence and absolute solitude. But most of all, they reconnect with each other—and with the spectacular, otherworldly terrain they grew up surrounded by. 

“The Highlands feel so remote,” says Colin. “Even though you’re only 20 miles from a town, you find yourself in a landscape and wonder, ‘Has a human ever been here before?’ It might just be you and a stag on a hill, and you feel a connection to it.”

That connection, and the spirit and pull of this place, never truly go away for people who grow up here. “You don’t appreciate it properly when you’re young,” Ewan says, as the brothers’ adventure comes to a close. “This place is unique. The smell of everything, the color of the rock, the heather when it comes out, and the light: There’s nowhere else in the world that feels like this.”