Well, compared to Wednesday’s whirlwind of activity, Thursday’s tour of Connemara, though scenic, was anticlimactic. We left late and returned early, despite being hurried through the one stop at which we could have stayed longer. Our guide was an older fellow named Joe whose sentences tended to sort of drift off and then abruptly resume, often with story-enders like, “...and.. she died.” Martin’s commentary the previous day had been clear and appropriate to the location, not too hokey, and though I imagine he’s said it a thousand times at least, it didn’t sound tired. This Joe fellow's commentary had the Canadians in the back of the coach howling like kids in the back row of a dotty English teacher’s classroom.
We headed out of Galway to the east, up into scenic Connemara, which looked just like northern Scotland: rocky brown hills dotted with sheep who graze there year-round. Joe told us how the farmers all mark their sheep with streaks of color and turn them out into the mountains. Then they all get together with their sheepdogs and collect up the flocks to be sorted by their markings and then bred, shorn or eaten. We drove past field upon field of neatly stacked peat, cut to be dried and used for heating fuel. We passed “Quiet Man Bridge,” where some pivotal scene of the John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara fill'em (it’s a two-syllable word here) was shot. Every shop had Quiet Man postcards and calendars, though I can't imagine the passage of the sixty years since its production hasn't somewhat decreased its marketability.
We stopped for lunch in the village of Leenane on Killary Harbor at the inland end of Ireland’s only fjord. Joe parked in front of a little pub and strongly discouraged us--practically forbade us, in fact--from going into the next one down, telling us the proprietor was “not a very nice man.” I got the impression it was some personal beef resulting in unwavering loyalty to the other pub.
From there, we continued on up to Kylemore Abbey. Usually when you come to Europe and visit an abbey, you are visiting the crumbling ruins of what was once an abbey. This was somewhat the opposite, an abbey founded in the former home of the very wealthy man who built it and still inhabited by a bunch of nuns and the girls who attend the fancy private school there. It is situated in a valley, on a lake with magnificent mountain views. There’s a little gothic cathedral, a mausoleum containing the remains of the original owner and his wife, and a meticulously manicured walled Victorian garden. You can only go into a few rooms of the house because most of them are still being used as abbey and school, and the ones you can go into are all chock-a-block with Victorian furnishings. With more time to stroll the garden or enjoy a leisurely cup of coffee in the Tea House, it would have been a nice enough spot, but we were given a limited amount of time to see everything. Joe told us some days it’s possible to stay longer but today, since we got a late start, we’d have to get going. So I was irritated when we returned to Galway 30 minutes early. And that’s why I am not a fan of bus tours.
The next day, I took another long walk, across the grossly polluted River Corrib (those are cans, not fish, in the picture below) to the Claddagh and up to the Catholic Cathedral. It wasn’t all filled with gold-leaf bric-a-brac, but the pomp was certainly there. It was built just 45 years ago, but seemingly made to look older, all bare stone and polished marble.
Back in town, I sorted out my transportation for the next few days, my ferries to and from Inis Mór (Inishmor) and the bus to Killarney on Monday. After a quick pizza dinner, I made my way to the King’s Head, a pub I was promised would have great music. The band was a cover band, playing Johnny Cash, Greenday, and the Strokes, as well as Steve Earle’s “Galway Girl,” which is quite popular here. They were pretty good, as generic cover bands go, but I’d been hoping for something a little more traditional. If I’d have met some Irish folks, I might have lingered, but they were all in little inebriated groups and the only person who approached me and struck up a conversation was an accountant from Washington DC who aimed to make his job sound really exciting with sentences like, “I mean some days, it’s like, I feel good, I know what’s up, like, I totally get this, but some days it’s just like, gotta go, bam bam bam, so much work to do, you know?”
I didn’t stay long.
Saturday, I got up and showered, only to find that while I had plenty of underwear, I had all but run out of clean shirts. I was trying to make it to Killarney before having to do the washing, so I decided to check out Dunnes, the Irish department store I’d heard had rock-bottom prices.
It’s amazing. I can’t think of a comparable store in the States. It is arranged like any department store, but with uglier clothing and much lower prices. You can buy a pair of shoes for three Euro, a swimsuit for four. I got two extremely tacky screen printed t-shirts for 6 Euro. And some of the clothes there were incredible--unlike anything I’ve ever seen except in yellowed photographs from thirty or forty years ago. Garish floral prints like your grandma’s sofa and pastel shirts with “Je t’aime Paris/Cherie Amour” in scripty writing with an Eiffel Tower for the ‘a’ in ‘Paris.’ Also very common were sweatpants and shorts with the names of American universities (real or imagined) emblazoned on one hip, sometimes peculiarly abbreviated: “NY Univ.”. I am fast losing my appreciation for “ironic t-shirts,” but I like my new ones for how awful they are.
That evening when I boarded the ferry for the 45 minute ride to Inis Mór, the largest of the three sparsely populated Aran Islands southwest of Galway, I should have understood why all the locals were grouped together in the lower deck’s rear seating area and all the tourists filled the front. As soon as we left the shelter of the harbor and got up to full speed, the boat started pitching up and down, back and forth and in twenty minutes I was slouching down so as not to see the horizon line rising up and falling below the edge of the window opposite me. I still felt sick when I got off but made it up to the hostel safely enough. At reception, I was greeted by Marco, a wiry, ebullient Italian who runs the hostel more or less by himself most of the time. Up in my room, I met Christina, a photojournalism student from St. Louis who had just finished a semester abroad in Dublin. We chatted a bit about Ireland and the Irish before making it an early night.
In the morning, we joined forces, since we had similar plans on how to spend the day. We grabbed some food from the Spar, the only grocery on the island, and hired bikes from the shop on the road just below the hostel. I had long-since resigned myself to the possibility of wind and rain and spending my day reading and drinking tea in the common room, but we were blessed with a gorgeous sunny day. Not a drop of rain and hardly a cloud in the sky until late afternoon. We pedaled out along the coast road, past seals playing in the ebbing tide on one side of us and the most tightly-knitted series of dry stone walls I’ve seen yet on the other. Cows looked up to watch us go by and we passed a couple of cyclists going back the other way, but other that that we saw very few other faces until we reached the visitor center at Dun Aengus, the ancient ringed hill fort which is the island’s main tourist attraction.
Unlike the Cliffs of Moher, Dun Aengus has no barrier whatsoever between the visitor and the cliff’s edge. Granted, it isn’t 700 feet up, but it’s got to be at least 150. And it’s windy up there, with gusts that could send a person over (and occasionally do). Most visitors who actually approach the edge to look into the water do so on their bellies. We walked around there for a while until a couple of tour buses flooded the site and we decided it was time to start riding again. I’d wanted to take a more southerly route back to town which, on the small, rudimentary map I had, would take us past a couple more sights. But we must have missed the turnoff because half an hour later, we were back in Kilronan. We had a little lunch at one of the picnic tables on the hostel’s patio and soaked up the sun and the warm wind of the gulf stream.
Fed and rested, we tried to take another route to see the second fort recommended in the brochure, but there was hardly any signage and we eventually turned back because the roads we guessed were right were too rough and too steep. That afternoon, Christina took the 5:00 ferry back to the mainland and I went upstairs for a nap before dinner. When I woke up, I went downstairs to ask Marco if there was a restaurant or a pub he could recommend for dinner. I found him in the kitchen with Ted, an Australian, and another Italian, a girl whose name I never caught. When I asked him about food, he looked doubtful. “Mmmm.. No… You eat here, with us. Plenty of food. Free. Issokay. Sit.” He insisted. So I sat around talking to a German woman who was staying in my room while the others cooked.
As we sat down for our first course, a delicious pesto pasta, we were joined by three Spaniards, a young woman, her friend Saul (Sah-OOL), and his mother Maria, who spoke no English. While we ate, they busied themselves preparing their contribution, some sort of cured ham and a fancy cheese, both brought from Spain and sliced up there in the kitchen. Marco brought out some wine and a carafe of water fashioned from a 2-liter Coke bottle. With the ham and cheese course came the “Australian” contribution, Australian only in the sense that it was a mish-mash of whatever was in the kitchen, which turned out to be rice, broccoli, onions, and cream of chicken soup mix. It wasn’t bad, especially as part of a meal in true Mediterranean style, taken in several courses stretching late into the evening. For hours we talked and laughed and ate and drank.
Maria had heard there would be salsa dancing at a nearby hotel, but insisted that if we went there, everyone had to dance, no wallflowers. A couple members of the party voiced their preference for having a pint at the pub, so we walked up to Joe Watty’s, reputedly the best pub on the island. The place was packed inside and a gust of warm air hit you when you opened the door. We ordered a round and took everything out to a vacant table just outside the front door, where we could hear the singer inside (covers again, but just one guy with a guitar this time; ‘Galway Girl’ made another appearance) at a comfortable background volume while we continued our boisterous conversation. At closing time, the crowd from inside the bar poured out and a couple of haggard locals joined our group for some inebriated, confused chatter. Saul’s banter with the more grizzled, toothless local fellow was priceless. In the wee hours, exhausted, we all piled back into the main building and into our various rooms for some much-needed rest.
In the morning, I got up and showered and packed my things before returning to the kitchen for a little breakfast of toast and coffee. I stood on the patio with my mug, watching the harbor. I dreaded my ferry coming in to unload another group of day-trippers and take me back to Galway. When I arrived, I didn’t understand how someone from a big city could choose to spend his life on a little island where life is so quiet, so slow. Marco came to Inis Mór four years ago with hardly a word of English in his head and never looked back. He visits his family in Napoli now and then, but the island captivated him and he’s become a contributing member of their tight little community. But by the time that ferry came in, I really didn’t want to leave. The hostel runs a deal where you can work a couple hours a day in exchange for a bed, with a minimum stay of one week. I’d considered it initially when planning my trip but decided I wouldn’t want to stay that long. I was wrong. I wanted nothing more. Suddenly I wondered why I had been so bent on seeing Killarney and Cashel, my next two stops. Yes, I had an exceptionally good time with the very international crowd who happened to be at the hostel that night, but I think it was more than that. Saul even tried to get me to stay, but ever the planner, I felt I had to stick to my itinerary.
I went on, south to Killarney and from there to Cashel two days later. I saw Killarney National Park and the Rock of Cashel, but it all felt kind of wrong, like I’d spent far too much time and money getting all the way down there only to be dreaming of Inis Mór. Every little town was starting to look the same. Same little butcher, same disgruntled café woman who’s had enough of tourists misunderstanding her menu, same hostel with the same wonky shower, same historically significant pile of rocks, same bus station, same everything.
From Cashel, I got on a bus back to Dublin to make the connection to my first farm, but suffered a frustrating transportation snafu and ended up staying in Dublin that night and catching a morning bus instead.
Inis Mór
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