In August 2016, Chester and I spent 2 weeks circumnavigating
Ireland, an island at the north-west outskirts of Europe. We flew to Shannon Airport,
on the west coast, rented a small car, VW Golf, and drove the island in
clockwise direction. We spent a day in Belfast and a day in Dublin. Weather was
generally moist. Most of the days we saw some rain, which with warm temperatures was no trouble although at times skies would open pouring buckets of
water on the island. If you head that way take an umbrella and do not count on
getting an awesome tan. We stayed four nights at Airbnb (price ranging from $45
to $87), most of the times camped at designated campsites (from €20 – €24 Euros),
enjoyed few nights of random camping, and even got invited by a very interesting Irish woman to
spend a night at her beautiful home west of Derry.
Renting a car was a great idea. It gave us full flexibility
with time and places we wanted to visit and allowed for our own pace. We did
not pay for extra GPS in the car. Instead we bought a Vodaphone Sim card and
heavily relied on iPhone’s maps. Without these we would be lost many times on
the dense network of Irish roads. We paid for car insurance, a good idea, given
that Irish drive on the wrong (left) side of the road, and many of their roads
tend to be super narrow. Small car was an asset on those narrow roads. We did not
check if our rental car had a spare tire, learning for next time. We caught a
flat. Luckily for us our little Golf had a donut, and we had no trouble getting
a new tire. However, Dutch people we run into on Ring of Beara were not that
lucky. They had no spare, were at “the end of the world”, and had a long wait for
the Enterprise rental sending them a tire, or a car replacement.
The island is a home to two countries: the south The
Republic of Ireland, which occupies about 80% of the island with 4.6 million
people, and the north, the Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK with 1.8
million people. Three things we enjoyed the most were:
- Landscape
- Irish driving, and
- People
The Landscape
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| Souvenir stores at Cliff of Moher |
Irish landscape can be described as a land of 50 shades of
green, which turns into 50 shades of grey, where the land meets the sky. Since
it is rather warm here in the summer, flowers are abundant and beautifully dot
the landscape. So do grey rocks. Rocks are not only scattered across the
fields, but are part of elaborate system of rock fences, castle remains, bridges,
churches, cathedrals, abbeys, houses, and anything that can possibly be
constructed with rocks of any size and shape. Remains of rock buildings,
whether castles, churches, or just houses are dispersed all over the island. If
you do not see a rock structure for few kilometers, you get a feeling of withdrawal.
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| Chester and Cliff of Moher (pronounced more) |
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| Marta at Cliff of Moher |
By comparison with Canada, the island occupies rather small
area (83 thousand kilometers square), and yet offers a variety of terrain. “The
wild Atlantic coast” was my favorite, coast meeting barren (“burren”) lands,
mountains raising often gently from the sea level to anywhere between 600 to
800 meters. The highest mountain Carrauntoohil is 1,038 meters. We
hiked a trail along Cliffs of Moher, with 250 meter cliffs dropping steeply to the
ocean. I was especially impressed with the Tourism building at Cliffs of Moher, structure very nicely cut into the ground. We also hiked a trail in Connemara National Park. Man-made trail was surrounded by a peat bog, rather wet and challenging to walk on. We
enjoyed travelling through little picturesque towns, always clean,
well-organized, with Irish character and many strong colours or stone-made
houses decorated with beautiful flowers, nicely contrasting with green
landscape and grey sky.
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| Cliff of Moher sculpture |
The entire island is converted into thousands of interesting
tourism attractions occurring every few kilometers, which can be visited for
few Euros. Once you see one of the kind you may skip the other ones of the
similar kind. We visited Bunratty Castle and Folk Park, one megalithic
tombstone, and one archaeological site. We very much enjoyed “hop-on-hop-off
tour” of Belfast and would strongly recommend it to travelers. For Dublin
strolling through the city was a true delight.
Irish Driving
Perhaps Irish driving is not such a special experience for
Europeans, but for Canadians, accustomed to wide, straight roads driving on the
Irish dense road network, is absolutely an extraordinary experience. First of
all everybody drives on the wrong (left-had) side. And it is confusing. Every
now and then there is a sign, reminding you to drive on the left. Clearly some
of us automatically revert to the right. Gear switching in the car is on the left,
and the foot pedals controls remain the same as ours.
There are many, truly many, roundabouts. Chester really
liked them. It seems like the entire country converted from traffic light
intersections to round intersections of various diameters. Generally they
worked really well and we rarely had to stop. This must be due to the size of
roundabouts, amount of traffic, and ability to use them. My experience with
Polish roundabouts is not that great, often being very difficult to join the
traffic circle. Chester liked them because if we ever missed a turn we could
drive round and round until we were sure what exit to take. Also if we took a wrong turn it was easy to
drive to the next roundabout and turn back. One unanswered question is how to
handle multiple circular lanes, but luckily there were not too many of these.
The entire island is covered with a dense network of roads.
Again this is not so surprising for a European, but in Canada, there are not
that many roads. Most of those Irish roads are very narrow. The narrowest ones
do not have any lines painted. Often vegetation creates a tunnel above, or
drops steeply onto a road. It is best to keep your window closed to avoid
getting waked by green branches. Wider roads may have a center line and
sometimes yellow shoulder lines, although most of the times there are no
shoulders. There are of course larger highways, but if you are in Ireland you
might as well experience this incredible feeling of driving narrow roads.
For us the highlight was driving Ring of Beara, just south of famous Ring
of Kerry. The road was so narrow, twisty, and obscured by vegetation that every
turn was a wild guess as to whether a car would be coming from the opposite
direction. And most interesting were speed limits. Many of these narrow roads
had 80 or 100 km/hour limit, where we felt comfortable driving up to 60km/h.
And we were not alone on our lanes. We had to share them
with random pedestrians, bicyclists, tractors or other farming equipment,
campers and double-decker buses not to mention vegetation, sheep and occasional rocks.
Quite a feast.
Sadly I did not have a chance to drive. This is because upon
arrival I discovered that my driver’s license expired 2 days earlier. Chester did
all the driving.
People
If you travel in Ireland, make sure to talk to people. What
a friendly bunch Irish are! Always curious where we were from, what we saw,
where we were going next, and always helpful. We enjoyed chatting, listening to
their music, seeing their kids enjoying music in Irish pubs, none of the North
American attitude that seeing adults drinking Guinness can demoralize a child.
Irish reminded us of Swiss people, competent, calm, good humored and organized.
Language
The Republic of Ireland is bilingual! This was a total
surprise to me. They speak English and Irish (ie, Gaelic). In fact Gaelic is
the first language in their constitution. As soon as we left the plane we saw
bilingual signage. I immediately took pictures as it did not cross my mind that
we will see it outside of the airport. I was wrong. It turned out that every
sign is bilingual. This is not the case Northern Ireland. Most of Gaelic
speaking population live on the west coast, like Ennis, Galeway. Kids study
Gaelic in elementary school and high school. There are also only-Gaelic speaking
schools, and if you want to be a teacher you must be fluent in Gaelic.
Music
The importance of music is stunning. Pubs will often have
musicians in the evening playing Irish tunes, or other popular songs, in smaller
or larger towns. We did music crawling in several places in Ireland but 3 stand
up in my memory. The first one was is Derry. We walked into 3 pubs, and music
was good, but a bit too loud for me. And then we came across a quiet pub. Music
was supposed to start later. We decided to come back, and when we did it turned
out very special. The small pub was filled with people from 97 years old to
about 6. Couple of people playing Irish music, a moment later a woman singing a capella with impressive voice, and another one. People joined in with singing. This
multi-generational event was heartwarming and impressive. As we set and enjoyed
the scene, an Irishman, Peter, started chatting with us. It turned out that we
came across saying good-bye to his great-aunt, Sheila McClean who passed away
in her eighties. She was a renowned Irish artist, a matriarch, and a sister of 7.
Sheila asked not to be upset with her leaving, and the family thought that
gathering in an Irish pub would be what Sheila would have enjoyed. As we
chatted with Peter, Sheila’s sister, Maureen joined us and after a bit of
conversation she invited us to stay with her that night. It was something so
extraordinary to us and so spontaneous to Maureen. When the event was over we followed
Maureen’s car, in pouring rain to her beautiful house located on a hill
overlooking the Magilligan Point. What an evening! What a generosity to strangers, what
an incredible good-bye to Sheila.
The second time we went pub-crawling was in Dublin. Again we
passed by several pubs with music, but did not stay in any. It was at the XXX
street. Coming back a gentleman invited us in, and we lucked out with great
performance of guitar-man/singer and a flute man, which was interlaced with 3
tap dancers.
And on our last evening in Ireland we spent in Ennis which was
hosting a music festival. The last such festival in Ennis was in 1977. The town
expected 400 thousand visitors in the upcoming week. Streets were filled out
with pedestrians. Kids on the streets, with serious faces, played flutes,
little accordions, banjos, guitars, and did some tap dancing. Adult musicians
scattered throughout town’s pubs and streets played their tunes. What a music
finale for us!
As we traveled through the country we run into many Polish
people who immigrated here, we saw polish food stores, polish food products,
including beer, and polish bakery. It was great talking to my country men. In
Ennis we run into a super friendly Polish dancing group and truly enjoyed
conversation with them.
Overall great trip. We learned tons, and enjoyed the Irish
way.
