Snapshots of Ireland, Part 2

by Alex in Ireland, In Transit
 
When we last spoke, our stalwart heroes were halfway through a massive undertaking: drive around the entire island of Ireland, trying to see as much as possible before Tash and I had to start our new job and Mum had to get back to Australia.

We had just left Galway, freshly clean clothes in our bags, and set our sights northwards. We passed through the (beautiful and picturesque) Connemara, stopping briefly to see what would soon be our new home and meet our new boss (albeit temporary), before climbing back into our rental car and setting off for part 2 of our epic, neatly-divided-into-two-convenient-halves road trip!

Cong:

The most significant thing about the small town of Cong is that it was the filming location for The Quiet Man, a 1952 romantic comedy starring John Wayne. And jeez, they won't let you forget it. The entire town tries to capitalise on it - at least 50% of all businesses named 'The Quiet Man' something. The hostel that we stayed at shows the movie every single night without fail - even if there are no guests there to watch it.

There's even a larger-than-life size bronze statue of John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara right in the middle of town, watching everything that goes on, watching and judging... their bronze eyes never blinking... only watching...

You'll forgive me if Irish statues freak me out these days...

Despite its slight John Wayne hero-worship, Cong itself is a lovely little town - even if we didn't get to spend much time there.We actually stayed just outside the town itself, near Ashmore Castle - an absolutely awesome castle which is still intact and operating as an uber-fancy hotel. While staying there was well and truly out of our price range - just to give you an idea of how fancy this place is, a butler in a top hat stopped us at the front gates - we did book in to go falconing, which was absolutely awesomepants.

Meet Lima, the Peruvian Something-or-other Falcon

There's no way to describe walking through the forest carrying a small feathery dinosaur on your arm without resorting to the sort of hyperbole that ends in calling a falcon a dinosaur, so I'll just say this: When my falcon suddenly took off and caught himself a squirrel, I don't think I've ever been more proud of a living creature that I only met an hour ago.

Andes, you magnificent little flying dinosaur!

Sligo:

All right, full disclosure: we never actually went into Sligo city itself. We actually stayed in a hostel about 40 minutes outside Sligo, which was actually kind of cool. While we've been on this road trip, we've stayed in cities and suburbs, in small towns and smaller towns, but for the two nights we spent in County Sligo, we stayed in the middle of nowhere. Like, literally, nowhere. The hostel lists its address as being in the town of Castlebaldwin, but is actually a good 10 minute drive away, on the opposite side of Lough Arrow. Castlebaldwin is just the closest place that any addresses are located.

Being in the middle of nowhere meant that, for the most part, our two days here were mostly R&R days, spent sleeping in, chatting to the staff of the otherwise-empty hostel and taking full advantage of those two beautiful words: Free wifi. That's not to say we spent all of our time was spent lounging in bed, though. County Sligo is also home to a number of paleolithic and neolithic Celtic burial sites, with many ancient tombs still standing in the surrounding countryside. The most famous of these in the area is Carrowmore, but there are plenty to be found all around the northwest of Ireland. As luck and a bit of pre-planning would have it, there was one such collection of burial mounds, on the top of a freaking mountain, no less, just 15 minutes away from our hostel.

When Mum and I decided to make our way up to the site, the weather was dreary, grey and overcast - and really, is there any better weather for investigating ancient grave sites and possibly invoking the wrath of ancient curses? The site (which, to the best of my knowledge, is unnamed) is pretty easily accessible. You can drive most of the way up the hill, although you do have to walk the final 600m or so. Luckily, it's a pretty straightforward route, following one single path up the hill, making it pretty difficult to get lost. So, naturally, get lost we did. Mum and I had been walking for around 15 minutes, when we noticed the ground start to slope away beneath our feet. Since the tombs are on the top of the hill, this was concerning. We started to look back the way we had come, to see if we had missed a turn, when Mum suddenly asked me, "What do you reckon M.B.S. stands for?" What? Where did 'M.B.S.' come from? "Well, there was a sign a few minutes back pointing to the M.B.S.... I thought it was just a farming thing, so I ignored it. Should we go back and check?"

...I'm sure you can already see where this is going.

We turned tail, and headed back to the sign, and sure enough, it had an arrow pointing up the hill, to the M.B.S. ...only, without the 'the'. It read, word for word, "To M.B.S.". After staring at it for an embarrassingly long time, it clicked. 'To M.B.S.'... 'TO MBS' ... TOMBS!!! Have you ever had that feeling of excitement and stupidity in equal measure? ...yeah. Needless to say, this little screwup brought me a lot of joy in the following days, and while investigating ancient Celtic grave sites was absolutely awesome, this story has stuck with me - to the point where now, months later, I'll still call Mum up on Skype, wait for her to answer, yell "TOMBS!!!" into my tablet and then hang up.

Because I am a mature, grown-up adult.

 

 

Northern Ireland:

 

I expected us to have some kind of trouble crossing over the border from the Republic of Ireland into Northern Ireland - which, for those of you who haven't been paying attention for the past 70 or so years, is part of the United Kingdom.

Driving across the international border, I was making sure we had our passports on hand, and our visas proving we were legally allowed in both of these countries. I was so focused on getting all our documentation ready, in fact, that I missed the one small sign signifying that we'd crossed the border as we sped on down the highway. Apparently, the fact that there's no clearly defined border between the UK and the ROI is pretty common knowledge, and Tash had been doing an excellent job of not laughing at me until after I found out.

I'd put a photo of the border here, but there's no border to take a photo of!

Derry:

Before I start talking about our time in Northern Ireland, a word of disclaimer. As I'm sure you are aware, the history of Northern Ireland throughout the entire 20th Century is a turbulent and often violent one. One which, frankly, deserves to be addressed with more detail than I have time for in this brief overview. So please don't take the lack of historical detail in this article to be disrespectful or dismissive - I simply feel that it deserves more attention than I'm able to give here.

Our first stop in Northern Ireland was Londonderry - also called Derry, depending on who you ask. The name of the city has been a political hot potato for a very long time. The official name given to the city and county by the English government is Londonderry, but to the majority of Irish in the Republic, the city is named Derry - which is derived from the traditional Gaelige name for the town. For the record, I call it 'Derry', both because after living in Ireland for almost a year, it's what I'm used to - and because I'm so lazy that the extra 2 syllables in 'Londonderry' are too much effort. This is, for the record, in no way a political point - purely a lazy one.

photo by:damiavos

Although Derry has its own rich history (enough for its own article) - we mostly used Derry as a launching point to get to the things we wanted to see along the northern coast, specifically the Bushmills whiskey distillery, the Giant's Causeway and the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge.

Mmm, Bushmills...

The Bushmills Distillery tour was the first such tour I've ever taken, and honestly, it was pretty awesome. When I was a kid, I used to love going to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney - a museum full of engines and machines and technological marvels, and the Bushmills Distillery reminded me of that joy I used to feel. While I'm not a big whiskey drinker (which is tantamount to heresy in this country!), I found it fascinating to learn about the fermenting and aging process, all surrounded by big steel vats and boilers and distillers that are 4 stories tall - and we got a free glass of Bushmills at the bar at the end of the tour. This was probably the part of the tour I was least enthusiastic about, but if a free glass of booze is a bullet I have to take... well, I guess I have to.

The Giant's Causeway is a mysterious formation of hexagonal rocks along the north coast of Ireland - which, legend has it, is all that's left of a bridge built by Irish giants so that they could pop across to Scotland for weekends getaways, or whatever reason giants visit Scotland. It's a pretty impressive geological formation, and knowing how certain people travelling with us feel about rock formations, we made sure we were there first thing in the morning - by which I mean around 10:30am. It was pretty cool, though - my outer grown-up was ready to take photos and learn about geology, but my inner child saw a giant stone jungle gym, just ripe for climbing on! No prizes for guessing which side won out in the end - especially once I started to take a closer look at the little pools in the rocks, and found shrimps! ...no one else seemed to find that as exciting as I did.

Seriously! Shrimps!!

Our other stop along the north coast was the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, which is exactly what it says on the sign. There's a small outcropping that sits about 10 metres out from the coast, where fishermen used to come to fish, connected by a seemingly flimsy rope bridge which sits about 100m above the water. After a bit of a walk, and then a nerve-wracking trip across the bridge - probably worse for the others since I was still jumping excitedly from finding shrimps - the views from the outcropping are pretty gorgeous. You can see all up and down the coast for miles in each direction, and you can get right up to the edge of the cliffs if you so wish - seriously! For an island that's at least 30% cliff, why does Ireland seem to have some kind of grudge against safety rails?!

While our day trips from Derry were all pretty awesome (Seriously! Shrimps!), the highlight for me is still that from the coast, if the sky is clear and you have good eyes, you can see Scotland. We've been travelling for over a year now - we caught a river boat from Thailand to Laos, stood on the coast of Denmark and watched Swedish headlights in the darkness, drove across an international border without even slowing down - but I'm still so Australian that standing in one country and looking at another blows my mind.

Belfast:

Oh, I wish I could like Belfast more than I do. It's a city that's been through so much trouble, that has seen - and still sees - so much violence and unrest, but still manages to get by, to keep living and working and being the major social and economic hub of Northern Ireland. If Belfast were a person, it would be a success story of 'overcoming'. People would interview Belfast on talk shows, share its quotes on social media, invite it to give motivational speeches, and make its eventual autobiography an overnight bestseller.

On our first day in the city, we took a black cab tour through some of the areas of the city worst affected during the Troubles. Our guide talked us through some of the history of the tensions between English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic (and those are not always the same thing...but again with the needs-its-own-article), stopping at memorials and murals and the Belfast peace wall. It's confronting, to see and hear that something so major happened so recently. 400 years ago, when it all started. 100 years ago, when it escalated. 50 years ago, when it boiled over.

King William III - the man who drew the line that would eventually be the border between North and South

If you can't see it clearly, the dates on this memorial go up to 2004. There have been more since then.

These stories all felt so distant, so long ago. But then we would pass a memorial for people killed since 2000, and it would become so real.

The fact that they have the Peace Wall running through the city - not to commemorate peace, but to enforce it. The fact that the gates and roadblocks still close off streets at night. The fact that they have to keep building the Wall higher and higher, as aggressive youths keep launching bricks and rocks and such over it - from both sides. These are all stark reminders that 'history', in many cases, is anything but. What I may have written off as the stuff of the past is a part of other people's everyday lives.

Don't worry, the graffiti isn't just legal, it's actively encouraged - or so we were told!

And I feel bad for the city, I really do. It's been through so much, seen so much bloodshed and still sees so much violence... it's just that outside it's fascinating history...the rest is kinda...bland. If Belfast were a person, it would be unfair to define Belfast only by its story. We should look past Belfast's traumatic past to the person underneath - the problem is, the city underneath Belfast's history is kinda dull. We spent much of the rest of our time exploring and shopping, and the city really left me sadly unimpressed.

That's not to say that Belfast was a complete letdown, mind you. Belfast does also have the distinction of being the city where the RMS Titanic was built - which, you will recall from last time, Tasha is almost creepily obsessed with. On the docks, near where the actual ship was built, they have the Titanic Museum - a huge, silver building comprising 4 levels of artefacts and recreations, detailing the entire process of planning, building and launching the infamous liner.

I actually found it quite interesting - because, like the Titanic Experience in Cong, it didn't focus much time on the sinking and excavation of the ship, but rather the actual construction. Tash, however, was like a kid at Disneyworld - dashing from exhibit to exhibit, poring over every little box of text and giggling with glee at all of the (admittedly super-fun) interactive games and rides. Yes, there are rides at the Titanic Museum. Yes, they are awesome.

It's hard to see, but this is basically the Small World ride through a turn-of-the-century shipyard. And it rocks!

After a few days in Belfast, it was time for us to cross the border again and head back down into the Republic for the last couple of days of our road trip.

Dublin:

The first time we came through Dublin, I wasn't very impressed. In retrospect, that seems like kind of a "no shit". We'd just gotten into the city at around 7pm, after spending the whole day either on a train, on a ferry or waiting in a bus station. Our hostel wasn't anywhere near the bus depot so we had to walk a long way to get there, then just as long back in the morning. All in all, we spend about 15 hours in Dublin when we first arrived in Ireland - and yet, for some reason, I thought that my bad impression of the city was purely its fault, and nothing to do with the circumstances in which we found ourselves.

This time around, we were able to take our time and actually see more of the city, and it turns out Dublin is actually pretty freaking awesome. We caught one of those jump-on-jump-off tourist buses around, stopping at Trinity College, as well as a few small historical libraries around the city. We also took proper, formal tours of the Guinness Storehouse and Kilmainham Gaol, which were both really great, albeit for very different reasons.

Silly tour-bus selfie time!

The Guinness Storehouse is, simply put, a really good tour. Situated in the former site of the Brewery (which has since moved down the road, and is strictly closed to the public), the tour starts out by taking you through the stages of brewing Guinness, letting you get a real feel and smell (literally hands-on) of the ingredients, with giant pits filled with barley, hops, water, yeast and so on. The whole process is narrated by pre-recorded video of the current Brewmaster - something I didn't like as much, but I just happen to personally find pre-recorded video guides to be the stuff of nightmares. To each their own.

This is basically a swimming pool filled with barley. No, you can't swim in it. Yes, I asked.

After you've moved through the brewing stages, they have a whole floor dedicated to the different ways that they use to transport Guinness around the world. Personally, this was the low point of the tour for me - I just don't find trucks and boats and planes to be particularly interesting.

On the top few floors, however, they go through some of the advertising campaigns that Guinness has used in its history, and this was a lot more interesting. Especially since Guinness advertising is, well, everywhere in this country. At the very top of the museum (which is, true to form, shaped like a giant glass of Guinness), they have a viewing deck where you can get a complimentary glass of the variety of your choice. Tash and I, being the exciting people that we are, opted for the sweet, non-alcoholic, cola-flavoured variety... ok, Coke. We had Coke. Don't judge us.

Silly view-from-the-top selfie time! (It's not the same photo with a different background, I promise!)

Our other main highlight was the old Kilmainham Gaol, which was a famous prison that's held almost every single leader of the Irish nationalist movement. Decommissioned as a gaol in 1924, the building is now a museum, offering hourly tours of the facilites, moving through the cell blocks from the more old-fashioned wings to the more modern Victorian era additions, and finally out into the excercise yards. The main focus of the tour is on the leaders of the 1916 uprising, who were imprisoned and executed within the prison exercise yard. 

photo by: logicalrealist

While I'm normally not a huge fan of history that focuses on particular individuals, I found it helpful in this case, since (unlike Tash) - despite having lived in Ireland for almost a year now - I'm not very familiar with Irish history, and the history of the independence movement in particular. The tour was well-run and informative, although a group of about 8 of us did miss the first few minutes, as the announcer didn't give a call for the start of our tour.

photo by: heardsy

Unfortunately, all good things must eventually draw to a close, and our epic travels around Ireland were no different. Once we left Dublin, we headed back across to the Connemara to start our job, and said a sad goodbye to mum. Not to worry, though - we'll meet up again soon!

Maybe not today... maybe not tomorrow... but soon!

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