we're already in Dingle, but we're heading to Dingle. it's a little confusing, especially when you wind up on a boat leaving Dingle Harbor in Dingle to go chasing the Dingle Dolphins off the Dingle Penninsula. there was once a fisherman who lived in those parts known affectionately as Fungus due to his general lack of hygiene and microbiologically curious growths who had a dolphin as a companion. Fungus is gone, but Fungi the dolphin remains and is regularly pestered by tourists - myself included. after wandering around the charming little town of Dingle i couldn't resist the chance to hop on a boat and bother the wildlife, and had a lovely time watching them splash around while i got to know the Claires (Sydney and Perth in order of age). i'd have taken more photos, but my camera battery was dying a death and i had no idea when i'd next get a chance to charge it so i kept it in my pocket a lot of the time. i'm just glad that most of the ones i did take came out nicely.
we're doing a bog-lap of the Dingle Penninsula. the next one along is Kerry which is the popular one. the route around it is referred to as "The Ring of Kerry", which you may have heard of. Dingle is the same sort of area, but smaller, more densely packed and fits more easily into the tour which is why we get it instead. i've grabbed a seat next to Nathan which may have been a miscalculation since we're both largeish gentlemen and the seating's a little cramped. still, i grabbed as an opportunity to get to know him a little better and it works out well enough. i manage to get some charge on my camera in the cafe overlooking the Sleeping Giant (an island which, if you look at it right, strongly resembles a colossal man lying on his back in the ocean) which means that Ginelle and i get to play our now-standard "grab one of me, i'll get one of you" game before we hop back on the bus for a nap before we get to Killarney.
Galway's a university town. Killarney's a tourist town through and through. word is that the population triples in the summer when everyone comes down to enjoy the National Park - one of only four in Ireland. when i think National Parks, my cultural bias is for large swathes of bushland, untouched but for fire trails and walking paths. Killarney's a lovingly tended park - tended grass and patches of forest, rivers, streams and lakes (with castles in the middle of them). i'm an "optional extras" junkie, so i take the chance to sit on a horse-drawn carriage rather than walking and we spend an hour clip-clopping our way through the place before getting dropped at our hostel. my body's screaming out to lie down on my bunk and do nothing for a while, but i can't bring myself to so i ditch the tourists and head of for a walk around the town. Killarney's a small town though, so it's not long before i run into Vic (England) who tags a long until i randomly find Paul and the other sibs at a pub. Vic keeps going and i stop for a pint and we hang out until we have to go get cleaned up tea. i don't feel that i have to spell out where we wind up later that evening. to cover band was decent and for the fourth time that day i hear Kids by MGMT played. everyone else is well into it, but i'm feeling a bit ill for some reason. the drinks don't taste right and i only have a couple before i leave them to it and head for bed. it was a great "one last hurrah", but it's been a long week and i need sleep, and i wind up sitting around the common room for another hour reading my book while the night-attendant sleeps on the couch across from my comfy armchair.
a solid night of unconsciousness and i'm feeling fucking great, ready to hit the last day with gusto. Paul and Jodie don't look so great, but sweet jebus they're troopers. they've drunk me under the table every night and they're still moving. i'd try to blame it on my greatly-reduced mass, but that would be a cop-out. the glorious weather's taken a break and the clouds have moved in, promising rain Vic tells me. we've been hanging out a lot on the bus while i educate her in the joys of melodic death metal and oz-rock. it helps that she's small so we don't get much in each other's way. it starts drizzling when we get back on the bus after wandering Blarney Castle.
the story goes that there once was a prince who knew he could be king, should be king, but had a bit of an embarrassing speech-impediment. one day he was on one of his long walks around the forest when he came across a witch to whom he poured out his story. she told him to head back home, but look for a stone along the way (he'd know it when he saw it, she said), give it a kiss, keep it close and one day he would indeed be king. fast-forward past the obvious and he does indeed become king of the land and his reign is prosperous, owing in great part to him being able to talk himself out of wars and whatnot, and he built the stone into his castle to keep it safe. now it's a tourist-trap that's disinfected four times a day (more often at the moment, i'd hope, what with the Swine Flu paranoia going around) that you have to lie down and hang down a metre or so backwards to touch your lips to while a beefy Irishman holds you by your coat. it's a gorgeous castle with grounds i could have spent half a day walking around. Nathan and i walk and talk and take each other's photos before we load up and hit Tipperary for lunch (it wasn't really a long way) and then spin on back to Dublin.
i drank a lot of Guinness in Ireland, and it does taste better. because you're in Ireland. and Ireland's awesome. i tended to alternate between Guinness Extra Stout and Bulmers Apple Cider. of course, say Guinness in relation to Dublin and everyone goes on about the Guinness Storehouse at the site of the original brewery at St James Gate and i'm here to tell you that... well... it's not all that. after the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam the Guinness Storehouse was pretty crappy. it's in a fantastic building, with vaguely interesting exhibits, but what you want to do if you go is to go through the "this is how we make our beer" and "here's how we advertise our beer" and "here's the history of the Guinness Phenomenon" shit in the first 20 minutes then fuck off at speed up the elevator to the Gravity Bar at the top of the building. go to the bar and get your free (by which they mean included in the entry fee) pint and find a seat with a view. this shouldn't be too hard. it has windows around ~350 degrees (the elevators aren't transparent) of its circumference with a commanding view of Dublin. it's off in the west of town, so it's not like you're on top of Hilite 33 in Perth, but it's a great view nonetheless. it's a shame we were all a bit too wrecked to enjoy it properly. a week of constant "see things, go drinking, wash, rinse, repeat" has Paul, Jodie and me sitting there trying to enjoy ourselves while we wait to get the fuck out and go have a lie down.
oh, and the gift shop's not all that, either. sorry, i don't need the same tshirt as 300,000 other fuckheads and i've got enough bottle openers.
the Kiwis are out after tea - we hit a chinese buffet in central Dublin because it's a) good, b) plentiful and c) not fucking pub food. they're dead on their feet, which is a shame because i'm in the mood to go exploring. daylight savings means that it's light well past 9PM around this end of the world. luckily, Nathan comes to the rescue with an idea, which is why we find our way to the Brazen Head: the oldest pub in Ireland, established in 1198. it was only supposed to be for a pint, then we'd head back to the hostel but we weren't done so we headed into Temple Bar to have a pint at... Temple Bar. we're still not done, so we find a quiet little local pub near the hostel and have a pint there, walking around in the rain while we compare notes and talk about this, that and nothing.
the next night we're meeting up again. i've spent the day doing a 3-hour walking tour around Dublin (the sort run by students and paid in tips), then wearing myself out hiking around to places that look interesting on the map. Dublin's a fantastic place to wander around. it's small enough that it's pretty much all foot-accessible, big enough that there's plenty of stuff and dense enough that there's plenty to see between point A and point B. i get to pose next to Oscar Wilde again in Mirian Park, emulating a photo i was shown by my good friend Eduardo J. Bovine when i saw him last in Perth all that time ago, saw the sites of the old Viking settlement, the bullet holes in the GPO and the spot where the Rebellion surrendered in 1916 (marked by a red spot on the map, and nothing whatsoever at the site. there IS a great bookshop at the top of the T-intersection which i can strongly recommend. they had possibly the best second-hand section i've ever seen). 7:30PM and i'm at the Dublin Spire (erected for the Millennium, completed in 2002. nuff said, really) meeting up with Nathan, Sydney-Claire, Vic and her mum Julia and do you want to guess what we did? that's right - how better to cap off a week of drinking than by hitting a few pubs? spin forward to somewhere past midnight and Nathan and i are saying farewell with a bear-hug, a promise to find each other on Facebook and offers of lodgings should either of us be in the other's home-town (hmm... now i have a reason to go to Edmonton, Canada :).
i want to fill in what's left of my time in Dublin by seeing as much of it as possible, but after an hour of walking i'm spent. i can see me coming back one day if the stars align, but i think i've had enough for now. unlike the arrival, my departure's uneventful. bus to the ferryport, ferry to Holyhead, the train arrives early and i have no problems changing at Chester. i fall through the door into a dark room at basecamp - louise is out doing whatever she does when she's out - unpack and settle into bed to watch some of the TV i've missed in last week. she rolls in somewhere after midnight and we trade hello's as if i've been out the day not a week, and that's all good with me. i'm still high from the joy of travel and forming embryonic plans for the next trip. it really is a good time to be alive...
Showing posts with label Ireland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ireland. Show all posts
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Ireland: Is it where you were or who you met while you were there that makes the cider taste so sweet?
by the time i woke up in Dublin 6 days had passed, day after day driving through beautiful countryside, night after night in a different pub and hostel. our hostel in Derry was comfortable and well organised. the hostel in Belfast considerably less so. Galway was EXCELLENT, whereas the interior of the one in Annascaul i barely remember since i spent so little time in it, and almost none of it sober. Killarney was somewhere around average and Dublin did the job well enough, even with the radiators fused to "BLAST FURNACE" (nothing leaving the window ajar didn't fix). after a night out on the piss in Derry i woke up feeling amazingly good considering and stepped out into the dark, overcast morning with my coffee and realised that my mind was blank. nothing to worry about, nothing to plan or consider, just get on the bus and see what the day had in store for me: something i've been hanging out for since before i left Oz all those months ago.
over the rest of the week our merry bus meandered through most of the island of Ireland - the pins in the map on my Picasa album that misses a chunk of the south-east. we didn't really stop much in County Cork, i'm afraid. it's times like this that make me wish my camera auto-geotagged my shots, but micronised GPS is still a ways off, i guess. we managed to get to all the places i wanted to go to (Giant's Causeway, Blarney Castle), as well as places i never knew i wanted to see (The Burren, Cliffs of Moher).
i have a fascination for the Giant's Causeway - an area of volcanic rock which somehow cooled into an array of hexagonal columns marching out into the ocean. it's an almost unique rock formation where mathematical elegance meets the real world to the tune of the waves rolling in off the Irish Sea. it's the sort of place all the tourists want to see and while it's smaller than i'd expected it was still awesome to see and while every man and his dog's been there and wandered around, i kinda wonder how many people have stood in the freezing rain and flung poi around...
most of the tourists didn't hang around long - it was too cold and windy for most of them, but i got in as much as i could before heading back for the bus. next stop was the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge which started life as an access route for fishermen to get nicely in the path of migratory salmon, now another tourist trap. don't be fooled; it's safe as safe, but the views are incredible and EVERYONE wants a photo of them walking back and forth. i'm just glad it was open - they close it off when the wind's too strong. as far as i was concerned, it was worth it just to be able to look back and look out on the coastline. standing on a plank of wood suspended over 26 metres of air by a few ropes was just a bonus.
before we know it we're in Belfast, sitting in a couple of Black Cabs being driven around some of the political landmarks of the city, and there are many. after the definite bias of the last day it was refreshing when our driver told us that they consider themselves to be neutral - "we hate everyone equally," he says, and we laugh. i'm still not sure whether he was kidding. where in Derry there are murals illustrating the Catholics struggle, in Belfast we found ourselves in a Protestant low-rent area where they all came from the other side. we hear stories about the perils of disloyalty, both real and perceived. we sign the Peace Wall built to separate the residential zones which to this day have gates which close at night in an attempt to kerb the violence (it's explained that soon after the gates were installed the IRA fired an RPG over the top of them to prove a point, demolishing a church in the process. point made, i guess). we go to see the Sinn Fein HQ, site of even more bloodshed, and a prison where ten men died in a hunger strike over their status as Political Prisoners. we're warned to leave the pub half an hour or so before closing time so that anyone watching is less likely to guess at our allegiances based on the direction we head off in. by the time we hit the pub everyone's a little... wary. we're not far from the Europa Hotel which is claimed to be the most bombed building in the world (at one point the IRA decided that the best way to get the attention of the journalists was to start blowing a few of them up. it worked, apparently), and somehow after that we never did feel particularly comfortable.
that night had to be the least fun we had on the entire trip. we fetched up in a pub which was fairly OK for a while, then went off to try another which, while pretty cool, was packed and had nowhere to sit. we moved on to another we'd been recommended to find out it was student disco night, too loud and full of fat girls wearing far too little. back to the original venue and it was louder, messier and irritating. i would up walking a couple of the girls back to the hostel and sitting up chatting with one of the americans while she finished her pizza.
i can't say i'd recommend Belfast as The Place To Visit in Ireland. Dublin is nicer by far IMHO, although your mileage may vary. i got talking to a Brit the other day who's opinion was entirely the opposite. still, i may mention this a few times later until i feel like the point's been driven home enough.
the hostel was crappy, but at least i wasn't in it long. next morning we're off towards Galway way out on the west coast. the weather's cleared up and it's warm, sunny, clouds decorating the sky because plain blue's just so BORING DAHLING! out on the road and the world is green and blue and white, magnificent, glorious, perfect. we've a lot of driving ahead of us, so Tom's grabbed a copy of "In The Name Of The Father" - a movie about a group of Irish folk from Belfast wrongly imprisoned for a bombing in the 70's in the English town of Guildford. more political propaganda, but it's illustrative of the sort of things that went on in the Troubles. i let it play in the background while i watch the scenery i wish would never end scrolls past, thinking of nothing much more than how to frame the next shot. we stop at the shady green cemetery which is the final resting place of W.B. Yeats (as in "tread softly, for you tread on my dreams") and rattle off photos before blasting down to a little seaside town called Strand Hill where i get to dip my toe into the North Atlantic and go nuts with my poi. as i'm packing up Ginelle (Canadian) comes running up to join in and we almost miss the bus, dancing around the beach and generally having a ball, then onto Galway.
i fucking loved Galway. i was about ready to piss into my water bottle by the time we got there (i piss-bolted (pardon the pun) down an alleyway when we pulled up i was so desperate. long drives + diabetes = bladder strain), but soon enough our kit's stowed the sibs and i went a-wandering, fetching up down the docks after a bit of tourist-tat shopping to find that the grass is covered in students sitting around having a beer. beer. on the grass. next to the water. we're down the bottlo faster than you can say 'scuse mate, which way to the offie? and 20 minutes later we're in the middle of it, lying around the grass, enjoying the sunshine and generally having a glorious time of it and while it's only a footnote here, it was one of the highlights of the trip. the pace of the tour was just about right - plenty of things to see, but also plenty of time to chill out and soak up the atmosphere.
another night, another pub and we're in The Quay where i've decided that tonight i'm on cider and we watch the cover band. we're having a blast and laughing like drains - Paul and i get rowdy when they play All Along The Watchtower while Jodie runs around with her plushie sheep. after too many drinks we find the rest of the group at Bar 903 up the road after posing for photos with the Oscar Wilde statue and i call it at somewhere around 1AM to sleep.
the Cliffs of Moher are out in Connaught, the area Oliver Cromwell pushed the Catholics into during the Plantation. after the plush, fertile lands in the east the west is next-to-barren, rocky and hard to cultivate. much of it is bare limestone with shallow soil in the low-areas, contrasting grey and green. during the 17th century the kings of England decided to confiscate catholic lands and hand them over to protestant nobles and army veterans. the Irish were forced to rent their lands back, and anyone surplus to requirements was pushed west "Death or Connaught" was the choice, and millions wound up trying to eke out a living in the Burren. during the Potato Famine nearly 2 million people died out there when their cash crops were barely enough to pay the rent and their food crop shrivelled black with Blight. now it's a tourist mecca and we're driving around looking at the rock walls build all over the place - Famine Walls. some were built to divvy up land for farming, some just to give people something to do. they had a lot of rocks to get out of the way so that they could till the soil they had to go somewhere, so they went into the walls. now the walls remain protected by the National Trust as a reminder and a county-wide monument.
meanwhile, limestone is a pretty soft, fragile sort of rock. unlike the volcanics like granite which are hard and wear slowly, limestone erodes like nobody's business. the waves of the North Atlantic have been battering at these shores for millenia, grinding away from the bottom and undermining the landscape which makes for some unbelieveable cliffs (think Great Ocean Road region in Victoria, Australia). we stop in an area that gives a great idea of what the Burren is all about on one side of the road, then drops off not far from the other. of course, i HAVE to go horsing around and my new friend Nathan (Canadian) helps out taking some insane photos.
from 30-40 metre drops to 250, our next stop is at the Cliffs of Moher which i'd not actually heard of prior to the tour. gentle green slopes drop off into the abyss and the water is so far down you can't even hear the waves. a section of it's been nannyfied and safetied with walls and pavement with a sign which reads "Please do not go past this point" blocking the way to the old goat-trail along the top of the cliffs to the south and is easily defeated. Ginelle's camera's just died - she tried to turn it on as we got off the bus and it's not playing anymore. she's shattered. i know the feeling - that's happened to me twice now in the last few years, so i tell her that's fucked up, but look: come along with me, use my camera for any shots you want to take and i'll copy them over to your card with my laptop later. over the next half-hour we take some mind-blowing photos, and even get videos of us flinging poi around on top of the cliff, two paces away from the dropoff. it's yet another insane part of the world and whenever i look at the photos i'm speechless.
it's also stuck me with a new hobby - getting photos and video of me playing with my fire-toys in amazing parts of the world. sure, Where The Hell Is Matt? got in first, but i'm not getting paid to do it motherfucker. meanwhile, all this adventuring is thirsty work, so it's onwards to the Dingle Penninsula and our introduction to the Irish Carbomb.
Paddywagon Tours decided at one point to set up shop in a little town called Annascaul. it's one of those quiet little villages with somewhere around 330 people living within a 6 mile radius. it's rural and pleasant and fairly conservative, which is of course why they took over a hostel, painted it bright green and named it the Randy Leprechaun. don't ask me, i'm just a fucking tourist, ok? it caused a... um... small amount of controversy, but they finally talked the townsfolk around and so there it sits. it's only open when the tour's there, and i have the feeling it owes its existence mostly to its convenient location for the next day's bog-lap around the Dingle Penninsula. still, it's neat, tidy and has its own bar, and in that they serve Irish Carbombs at 3 for a tenner. it's a bizarre, but entertaining concoction which i have the feeling you'd have to be mad to come up with, and Irish to name so ironically, but what the fuck? take a half-pint of Guinness in a glass. sit it next to a shot of 50/50 Baileys Irish Cream and whiskey. now pick them both up, depth-charge the shot and scull it. now to the other 2 in rapid succession. the men's record is 29 in a night. the lady's record is now 15 since Jodie went in with a bunch of Euros and something to prove. me? i only had 6, and a couple of pints. i was pacing myself... which somehow didn't stop me being talked into doing karaoke. call it peer-pressure. call it i'm surrounded by relative strangers so what the fuck? either way, i was in Ireland, so i sang U2, and i'm at that sort of stage of my life so i sang "i Still Haven't Found What i'm Looking For" and everyone must have been good and drunk by that point because they answered with roaring applause. don't ask me, i can't sing for shit, ok? they must have just been too polite to yell "Get off the stage!"
after that things got messy. Jodie spent some hours searching for her lost camera, only to find that it had fallen under Paul's jeans when she put him to bed. Pam was so sick that she spent most of the next morning clutching a double-plastic bag. faces on the bus were a mixture of "oh god i need more sleep" weariness and "please kill me" despair. no time. NO TIME! we're off to Dingle!
over the rest of the week our merry bus meandered through most of the island of Ireland - the pins in the map on my Picasa album that misses a chunk of the south-east. we didn't really stop much in County Cork, i'm afraid. it's times like this that make me wish my camera auto-geotagged my shots, but micronised GPS is still a ways off, i guess. we managed to get to all the places i wanted to go to (Giant's Causeway, Blarney Castle), as well as places i never knew i wanted to see (The Burren, Cliffs of Moher).
i have a fascination for the Giant's Causeway - an area of volcanic rock which somehow cooled into an array of hexagonal columns marching out into the ocean. it's an almost unique rock formation where mathematical elegance meets the real world to the tune of the waves rolling in off the Irish Sea. it's the sort of place all the tourists want to see and while it's smaller than i'd expected it was still awesome to see and while every man and his dog's been there and wandered around, i kinda wonder how many people have stood in the freezing rain and flung poi around...
most of the tourists didn't hang around long - it was too cold and windy for most of them, but i got in as much as i could before heading back for the bus. next stop was the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge which started life as an access route for fishermen to get nicely in the path of migratory salmon, now another tourist trap. don't be fooled; it's safe as safe, but the views are incredible and EVERYONE wants a photo of them walking back and forth. i'm just glad it was open - they close it off when the wind's too strong. as far as i was concerned, it was worth it just to be able to look back and look out on the coastline. standing on a plank of wood suspended over 26 metres of air by a few ropes was just a bonus.
before we know it we're in Belfast, sitting in a couple of Black Cabs being driven around some of the political landmarks of the city, and there are many. after the definite bias of the last day it was refreshing when our driver told us that they consider themselves to be neutral - "we hate everyone equally," he says, and we laugh. i'm still not sure whether he was kidding. where in Derry there are murals illustrating the Catholics struggle, in Belfast we found ourselves in a Protestant low-rent area where they all came from the other side. we hear stories about the perils of disloyalty, both real and perceived. we sign the Peace Wall built to separate the residential zones which to this day have gates which close at night in an attempt to kerb the violence (it's explained that soon after the gates were installed the IRA fired an RPG over the top of them to prove a point, demolishing a church in the process. point made, i guess). we go to see the Sinn Fein HQ, site of even more bloodshed, and a prison where ten men died in a hunger strike over their status as Political Prisoners. we're warned to leave the pub half an hour or so before closing time so that anyone watching is less likely to guess at our allegiances based on the direction we head off in. by the time we hit the pub everyone's a little... wary. we're not far from the Europa Hotel which is claimed to be the most bombed building in the world (at one point the IRA decided that the best way to get the attention of the journalists was to start blowing a few of them up. it worked, apparently), and somehow after that we never did feel particularly comfortable.
that night had to be the least fun we had on the entire trip. we fetched up in a pub which was fairly OK for a while, then went off to try another which, while pretty cool, was packed and had nowhere to sit. we moved on to another we'd been recommended to find out it was student disco night, too loud and full of fat girls wearing far too little. back to the original venue and it was louder, messier and irritating. i would up walking a couple of the girls back to the hostel and sitting up chatting with one of the americans while she finished her pizza.
i can't say i'd recommend Belfast as The Place To Visit in Ireland. Dublin is nicer by far IMHO, although your mileage may vary. i got talking to a Brit the other day who's opinion was entirely the opposite. still, i may mention this a few times later until i feel like the point's been driven home enough.
the hostel was crappy, but at least i wasn't in it long. next morning we're off towards Galway way out on the west coast. the weather's cleared up and it's warm, sunny, clouds decorating the sky because plain blue's just so BORING DAHLING! out on the road and the world is green and blue and white, magnificent, glorious, perfect. we've a lot of driving ahead of us, so Tom's grabbed a copy of "In The Name Of The Father" - a movie about a group of Irish folk from Belfast wrongly imprisoned for a bombing in the 70's in the English town of Guildford. more political propaganda, but it's illustrative of the sort of things that went on in the Troubles. i let it play in the background while i watch the scenery i wish would never end scrolls past, thinking of nothing much more than how to frame the next shot. we stop at the shady green cemetery which is the final resting place of W.B. Yeats (as in "tread softly, for you tread on my dreams") and rattle off photos before blasting down to a little seaside town called Strand Hill where i get to dip my toe into the North Atlantic and go nuts with my poi. as i'm packing up Ginelle (Canadian) comes running up to join in and we almost miss the bus, dancing around the beach and generally having a ball, then onto Galway.
i fucking loved Galway. i was about ready to piss into my water bottle by the time we got there (i piss-bolted (pardon the pun) down an alleyway when we pulled up i was so desperate. long drives + diabetes = bladder strain), but soon enough our kit's stowed the sibs and i went a-wandering, fetching up down the docks after a bit of tourist-tat shopping to find that the grass is covered in students sitting around having a beer. beer. on the grass. next to the water. we're down the bottlo faster than you can say 'scuse mate, which way to the offie? and 20 minutes later we're in the middle of it, lying around the grass, enjoying the sunshine and generally having a glorious time of it and while it's only a footnote here, it was one of the highlights of the trip. the pace of the tour was just about right - plenty of things to see, but also plenty of time to chill out and soak up the atmosphere.
another night, another pub and we're in The Quay where i've decided that tonight i'm on cider and we watch the cover band. we're having a blast and laughing like drains - Paul and i get rowdy when they play All Along The Watchtower while Jodie runs around with her plushie sheep. after too many drinks we find the rest of the group at Bar 903 up the road after posing for photos with the Oscar Wilde statue and i call it at somewhere around 1AM to sleep.
the Cliffs of Moher are out in Connaught, the area Oliver Cromwell pushed the Catholics into during the Plantation. after the plush, fertile lands in the east the west is next-to-barren, rocky and hard to cultivate. much of it is bare limestone with shallow soil in the low-areas, contrasting grey and green. during the 17th century the kings of England decided to confiscate catholic lands and hand them over to protestant nobles and army veterans. the Irish were forced to rent their lands back, and anyone surplus to requirements was pushed west "Death or Connaught" was the choice, and millions wound up trying to eke out a living in the Burren. during the Potato Famine nearly 2 million people died out there when their cash crops were barely enough to pay the rent and their food crop shrivelled black with Blight. now it's a tourist mecca and we're driving around looking at the rock walls build all over the place - Famine Walls. some were built to divvy up land for farming, some just to give people something to do. they had a lot of rocks to get out of the way so that they could till the soil they had to go somewhere, so they went into the walls. now the walls remain protected by the National Trust as a reminder and a county-wide monument.
meanwhile, limestone is a pretty soft, fragile sort of rock. unlike the volcanics like granite which are hard and wear slowly, limestone erodes like nobody's business. the waves of the North Atlantic have been battering at these shores for millenia, grinding away from the bottom and undermining the landscape which makes for some unbelieveable cliffs (think Great Ocean Road region in Victoria, Australia). we stop in an area that gives a great idea of what the Burren is all about on one side of the road, then drops off not far from the other. of course, i HAVE to go horsing around and my new friend Nathan (Canadian) helps out taking some insane photos.
from 30-40 metre drops to 250, our next stop is at the Cliffs of Moher which i'd not actually heard of prior to the tour. gentle green slopes drop off into the abyss and the water is so far down you can't even hear the waves. a section of it's been nannyfied and safetied with walls and pavement with a sign which reads "Please do not go past this point" blocking the way to the old goat-trail along the top of the cliffs to the south and is easily defeated. Ginelle's camera's just died - she tried to turn it on as we got off the bus and it's not playing anymore. she's shattered. i know the feeling - that's happened to me twice now in the last few years, so i tell her that's fucked up, but look: come along with me, use my camera for any shots you want to take and i'll copy them over to your card with my laptop later. over the next half-hour we take some mind-blowing photos, and even get videos of us flinging poi around on top of the cliff, two paces away from the dropoff. it's yet another insane part of the world and whenever i look at the photos i'm speechless.
it's also stuck me with a new hobby - getting photos and video of me playing with my fire-toys in amazing parts of the world. sure, Where The Hell Is Matt? got in first, but i'm not getting paid to do it motherfucker. meanwhile, all this adventuring is thirsty work, so it's onwards to the Dingle Penninsula and our introduction to the Irish Carbomb.
Paddywagon Tours decided at one point to set up shop in a little town called Annascaul. it's one of those quiet little villages with somewhere around 330 people living within a 6 mile radius. it's rural and pleasant and fairly conservative, which is of course why they took over a hostel, painted it bright green and named it the Randy Leprechaun. don't ask me, i'm just a fucking tourist, ok? it caused a... um... small amount of controversy, but they finally talked the townsfolk around and so there it sits. it's only open when the tour's there, and i have the feeling it owes its existence mostly to its convenient location for the next day's bog-lap around the Dingle Penninsula. still, it's neat, tidy and has its own bar, and in that they serve Irish Carbombs at 3 for a tenner. it's a bizarre, but entertaining concoction which i have the feeling you'd have to be mad to come up with, and Irish to name so ironically, but what the fuck? take a half-pint of Guinness in a glass. sit it next to a shot of 50/50 Baileys Irish Cream and whiskey. now pick them both up, depth-charge the shot and scull it. now to the other 2 in rapid succession. the men's record is 29 in a night. the lady's record is now 15 since Jodie went in with a bunch of Euros and something to prove. me? i only had 6, and a couple of pints. i was pacing myself... which somehow didn't stop me being talked into doing karaoke. call it peer-pressure. call it i'm surrounded by relative strangers so what the fuck? either way, i was in Ireland, so i sang U2, and i'm at that sort of stage of my life so i sang "i Still Haven't Found What i'm Looking For" and everyone must have been good and drunk by that point because they answered with roaring applause. don't ask me, i can't sing for shit, ok? they must have just been too polite to yell "Get off the stage!"
after that things got messy. Jodie spent some hours searching for her lost camera, only to find that it had fallen under Paul's jeans when she put him to bed. Pam was so sick that she spent most of the next morning clutching a double-plastic bag. faces on the bus were a mixture of "oh god i need more sleep" weariness and "please kill me" despair. no time. NO TIME! we're off to Dingle!
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Ireland: leave your troubles on your doorstep with the junkmail and get on the Paddywagon...
i stepped off the train at Euston Station and into a wall of noise that slammed in through my optic nerve, London's high-density stimulus bombarding me like i'd spent a week in sensory deprivation and opened the casket to find i'd been left on the median strip of a freeway at rush hour. standing outside for a moment before hopping on the tube, rain pattering on my coat, it took a minute to remember what the fuck i was doing, where i was going, who am i again? it's only 7:35PM, it's not too late. no, it's 9:35PM. that means i was on that last train for 4 hours. no, that's not right. yes it is. fuck i'm tired, i've been travelling since midday to get back here. i can't be tired, i haven't done anything. shut the fuck up and get on the fucking train - you're not allowed to be in culture-shock, it's only London for fuck's sake. you know London. you're home again. do NOT argue that point with me now, you're not in the mood.
sir, yes sir. this is no time to be arguing with myself. don't fight a battle you know you're going to lose. follow your feet - they know where i'm going.
i've just got back from 8 days in Ireland, out of the green and into the grey. the tension i'd dumped at Euston on Wednesday-last waited for me like a faithful puppy-dog and immediately got back to humping my leg and getting slobber everywhere. it's no wonder i prefer cats. 9 days ago i'd walked into Euston Station with a spring in my step and the smell of escape in the air. another trip booked at the last minute, bag packed the night before and hidden so that it wouldn't be obvious i was going away and snagged on the way out the door. i've got a few things to do today, i'd said on the way out the door. a few things to do involve a tube, 2 trains and a ferry to the Emerald Isle followed by the location of a pub or three in Dublin. Virgin Trains have to be the most comfortable i've ever been on - they even have power points in the cheap seats which allowed me to bash out a couple of thousand words on the way to Chester. 15 minutes after arriving i'm on Arriva Wales and firing on towards Holyhead, a drab and somewhat charmless little village notable only for its ferry port. i pulled up to the Irish Ferrys counter an hour before scheduled departure with everything lining up nicely to find out that the 17:15 service had been cancelled due to poor weather on the Irish Sea.
fuck!
um... i've gotta be in Dublin in the morning. so what do i do?
"You can still get on the 02:40 service if you like. that gets in at 6:00AM"
riiiight. ok. no worries. shit happens i guess. so where's the nearest pub?
next thing i know i'm sitting more or less alone in a pleasant little pub called bar2two cruising the free wifi and making my drinks last, engaged in the fine art of killing time with 10 hours to slaughter. i'd complain, but what the hell? i wound up chatting with the locals for most of it, meeting a nice guy called Trev who was keen to learn about this wonderful thing we call the "interweb". suddenly it's midnight, i haven't bought a beer in a long long time despite there being quite the collection of pint glasses in front of me and the pub's closing. "I've got beers in the fridge - come back to my place. It's only 10 minutes down the road and I'll get you to the ferryport by 2," he says. how could i say no? by the time i stagger through check-in i'm sloshed and i've made a good friend in Holyhead. i've rolled out my sleeping bag on a bench and passed out for 3 hours sleep before the ship even leaves port.
7AM sees me standing outside the central bus station in Dublin, immigrated, a pocketfull of Euros, vaguely awake, looking bleary-eyed at the streets. i'd been fortunate to spot the pickup point for my tour - a hostel called "Paddy's Palace" - on the bus out of the ferryport so at least i didn't have to wander around in circles trying to find the place. i'd booked to stay there the night before and because of the 24 hour notice policy my fee was gone which sucked a little, making for an extremely expensive rushed shower, coffee and bowl of cornflakes. when i emerge from the kitchen the foyer's full of tourists. there are 4 different tours starting from here today - i've booked in for the 6-day All Ireland tour through Paddywagon. i used to be dubious of guided tours, but after Egypt i'm warming to the idea. doing the maths, i'd easily have blown the cost of the tour if i'd hired a car and booked my own hostels, let alone the entry fees for the parks and sites i wanted to go to, and i'd likely have missed a lot of the interesting things i got to see, or taken far too long to get to them when i missed turns or got lost. our guide/driver was a tall Irish guy called Tom who was, to be honest, a bit of a dick. that said, he was entertaining and knew his stuff. one thing you miss when you do these things on your own is the stories and commentary and over the days he drove us around we heard the history of the Protestant/Catholic conflict, folklore, tales and songs, explanations of the significance of a lot of what we were driving past - the colour which is lost if you only have a Lonely Planet as a guide.
loaded up on the bus, we headed north towards Derry (or Londonderry, depending on your political bias) past a couple of sites of interest - the town of Drogheda to see the cathedral which is home to the mummified head of St. Oliver Plunket (where i managed to find some desperately-needed energy drinks), and a picturesque little cemetery wherein there is a Round Tower (where monks would hide in times of Viking raids) for us to wander around and take pictures of. we spent a lot of time on the bus - 6 days isn't really a very long time to see all of a place like Ireland, so a lot of our stops were "quick, jump out, take some photos and then we're off again" sort of affairs. the last thing i wanted to do was to sleep on the bus - not when the scenery was rolling by to show another beautiful view every 84 seconds. in Egypt i read or blogged while we cruised through the desert. once you've seen half an hour of desert you've pretty much seen the lot. in Ireland i wound up sitting around with my eyes glued to the window and my camera in my hand, trying to capture what i was seeing at 100kph and knowing that it just wouldn't be the same in 2D.
by the time we pulled into Derry and loaded into the hostel i'd made friends with Paul and Jodie - a pair of Kiwi siblings having their last hurrah before she went off to Cypress for a while and he went back to Edinburgh, and Jordan and Jamie - Canadian siblings doing something similar. we were all to be met by a local who took us for a wander through the walled city (the only one remaining in Europe, apparently), then down to the Bogside to see the political murals. Derry is in the far north of Northern Ireland. the change from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland is marked, even to this day. once upon a time there'd have been a checkpoint on the road manned by British Army soldiers carrying live ammunition. now it's just a sudden change of steet-signs and currency: RoA uses the Euro, NA still has the Pound. Derry is a charming little town which is fairly peaceful now, but still obviously divided. the hardline Loyalist areas wear the blue, red and white of the Union Jack on the kerbs and light poles. Republican areas wear green and RIRA graffiti. in the times of the Troubles Derry was the site of a number of the Civil Rights marches demanding the right to vote for Catholics (as well as the abolition of various other abuses of human rights), the most famous of which ended in the massacre called Bloody Sunday. Bogside is a low-rent area which became a Catholic ghetto so named because... well, it used to be a bog (i don't make this shit up, i just regurgitate. blame the Irish). when you walk out of the walled city and down the hillside you can see the neat rows of estate housing in a broad bowl, marked by a wall on which is painted "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY" - a declaration and a challenge to the Powers That Be with the flag of Palestine flying overhead in a show of solidarity. all around on any wall big enough you'll see the murals painted over the years by the Bogside Artists - 2 storey high political artworks illustrating the oppression of the Catholics in the area. not far from the "FREE DERRY" sign is a small monument to Bloody Sunday inscribed with the names of the dead. there are still fresh flowers sitting around its base. the memories do not fade quickly in this place, part of why a conflict that started 400 years ago with Oliver Cromwell simmers on to this day.
it's still sinking in when we get our shit together a little while later to go find some food and head to the pub we've been recommended for the evening - the Peadar O'Donnell's which we're told is still IRA owned and run to this day, and where there'll be traditional Irish music. the political bias of the place is obvious when you walk in the door - it's a lovely little pub with the Irish, Palestinian and Basque flags pinned to the ceiling. there's a bastardised Australian flag too, with the Irish green, white and orange covering the Union Jack which makes me smile, so i snap a photo, trigger-happy as ever (there are over 1100 photos sitting on my Eee to sort through making for a snap-rate of around double my time in Egypt). by the time i walk out of there i'm feeling like i've just had the longest day in memory, but the night air is cool and clean, i've a skin-full of Guinness and as far as i'm concerned things are right with the world. the trip's only just begun, but i can smell the makings of a craic'in good time on the horizon and that night i sleep better than i have in months.
sir, yes sir. this is no time to be arguing with myself. don't fight a battle you know you're going to lose. follow your feet - they know where i'm going.
i've just got back from 8 days in Ireland, out of the green and into the grey. the tension i'd dumped at Euston on Wednesday-last waited for me like a faithful puppy-dog and immediately got back to humping my leg and getting slobber everywhere. it's no wonder i prefer cats. 9 days ago i'd walked into Euston Station with a spring in my step and the smell of escape in the air. another trip booked at the last minute, bag packed the night before and hidden so that it wouldn't be obvious i was going away and snagged on the way out the door. i've got a few things to do today, i'd said on the way out the door. a few things to do involve a tube, 2 trains and a ferry to the Emerald Isle followed by the location of a pub or three in Dublin. Virgin Trains have to be the most comfortable i've ever been on - they even have power points in the cheap seats which allowed me to bash out a couple of thousand words on the way to Chester. 15 minutes after arriving i'm on Arriva Wales and firing on towards Holyhead, a drab and somewhat charmless little village notable only for its ferry port. i pulled up to the Irish Ferrys counter an hour before scheduled departure with everything lining up nicely to find out that the 17:15 service had been cancelled due to poor weather on the Irish Sea.
fuck!
um... i've gotta be in Dublin in the morning. so what do i do?
"You can still get on the 02:40 service if you like. that gets in at 6:00AM"
riiiight. ok. no worries. shit happens i guess. so where's the nearest pub?
next thing i know i'm sitting more or less alone in a pleasant little pub called bar2two cruising the free wifi and making my drinks last, engaged in the fine art of killing time with 10 hours to slaughter. i'd complain, but what the hell? i wound up chatting with the locals for most of it, meeting a nice guy called Trev who was keen to learn about this wonderful thing we call the "interweb". suddenly it's midnight, i haven't bought a beer in a long long time despite there being quite the collection of pint glasses in front of me and the pub's closing. "I've got beers in the fridge - come back to my place. It's only 10 minutes down the road and I'll get you to the ferryport by 2," he says. how could i say no? by the time i stagger through check-in i'm sloshed and i've made a good friend in Holyhead. i've rolled out my sleeping bag on a bench and passed out for 3 hours sleep before the ship even leaves port.
7AM sees me standing outside the central bus station in Dublin, immigrated, a pocketfull of Euros, vaguely awake, looking bleary-eyed at the streets. i'd been fortunate to spot the pickup point for my tour - a hostel called "Paddy's Palace" - on the bus out of the ferryport so at least i didn't have to wander around in circles trying to find the place. i'd booked to stay there the night before and because of the 24 hour notice policy my fee was gone which sucked a little, making for an extremely expensive rushed shower, coffee and bowl of cornflakes. when i emerge from the kitchen the foyer's full of tourists. there are 4 different tours starting from here today - i've booked in for the 6-day All Ireland tour through Paddywagon. i used to be dubious of guided tours, but after Egypt i'm warming to the idea. doing the maths, i'd easily have blown the cost of the tour if i'd hired a car and booked my own hostels, let alone the entry fees for the parks and sites i wanted to go to, and i'd likely have missed a lot of the interesting things i got to see, or taken far too long to get to them when i missed turns or got lost. our guide/driver was a tall Irish guy called Tom who was, to be honest, a bit of a dick. that said, he was entertaining and knew his stuff. one thing you miss when you do these things on your own is the stories and commentary and over the days he drove us around we heard the history of the Protestant/Catholic conflict, folklore, tales and songs, explanations of the significance of a lot of what we were driving past - the colour which is lost if you only have a Lonely Planet as a guide.
loaded up on the bus, we headed north towards Derry (or Londonderry, depending on your political bias) past a couple of sites of interest - the town of Drogheda to see the cathedral which is home to the mummified head of St. Oliver Plunket (where i managed to find some desperately-needed energy drinks), and a picturesque little cemetery wherein there is a Round Tower (where monks would hide in times of Viking raids) for us to wander around and take pictures of. we spent a lot of time on the bus - 6 days isn't really a very long time to see all of a place like Ireland, so a lot of our stops were "quick, jump out, take some photos and then we're off again" sort of affairs. the last thing i wanted to do was to sleep on the bus - not when the scenery was rolling by to show another beautiful view every 84 seconds. in Egypt i read or blogged while we cruised through the desert. once you've seen half an hour of desert you've pretty much seen the lot. in Ireland i wound up sitting around with my eyes glued to the window and my camera in my hand, trying to capture what i was seeing at 100kph and knowing that it just wouldn't be the same in 2D.
by the time we pulled into Derry and loaded into the hostel i'd made friends with Paul and Jodie - a pair of Kiwi siblings having their last hurrah before she went off to Cypress for a while and he went back to Edinburgh, and Jordan and Jamie - Canadian siblings doing something similar. we were all to be met by a local who took us for a wander through the walled city (the only one remaining in Europe, apparently), then down to the Bogside to see the political murals. Derry is in the far north of Northern Ireland. the change from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland is marked, even to this day. once upon a time there'd have been a checkpoint on the road manned by British Army soldiers carrying live ammunition. now it's just a sudden change of steet-signs and currency: RoA uses the Euro, NA still has the Pound. Derry is a charming little town which is fairly peaceful now, but still obviously divided. the hardline Loyalist areas wear the blue, red and white of the Union Jack on the kerbs and light poles. Republican areas wear green and RIRA graffiti. in the times of the Troubles Derry was the site of a number of the Civil Rights marches demanding the right to vote for Catholics (as well as the abolition of various other abuses of human rights), the most famous of which ended in the massacre called Bloody Sunday. Bogside is a low-rent area which became a Catholic ghetto so named because... well, it used to be a bog (i don't make this shit up, i just regurgitate. blame the Irish). when you walk out of the walled city and down the hillside you can see the neat rows of estate housing in a broad bowl, marked by a wall on which is painted "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY" - a declaration and a challenge to the Powers That Be with the flag of Palestine flying overhead in a show of solidarity. all around on any wall big enough you'll see the murals painted over the years by the Bogside Artists - 2 storey high political artworks illustrating the oppression of the Catholics in the area. not far from the "FREE DERRY" sign is a small monument to Bloody Sunday inscribed with the names of the dead. there are still fresh flowers sitting around its base. the memories do not fade quickly in this place, part of why a conflict that started 400 years ago with Oliver Cromwell simmers on to this day.
it's still sinking in when we get our shit together a little while later to go find some food and head to the pub we've been recommended for the evening - the Peadar O'Donnell's which we're told is still IRA owned and run to this day, and where there'll be traditional Irish music. the political bias of the place is obvious when you walk in the door - it's a lovely little pub with the Irish, Palestinian and Basque flags pinned to the ceiling. there's a bastardised Australian flag too, with the Irish green, white and orange covering the Union Jack which makes me smile, so i snap a photo, trigger-happy as ever (there are over 1100 photos sitting on my Eee to sort through making for a snap-rate of around double my time in Egypt). by the time i walk out of there i'm feeling like i've just had the longest day in memory, but the night air is cool and clean, i've a skin-full of Guinness and as far as i'm concerned things are right with the world. the trip's only just begun, but i can smell the makings of a craic'in good time on the horizon and that night i sleep better than i have in months.
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