Despite our planned-for early start in order to get ready and move towards the backpacker bus pick-up point on time, with five of us and only one bathroom it was a squeeze and we made it to our tour just in the nick of time.
We headed out from central Dublin, through O’Connell Street, and past the new Millennium Spike, which is making its arrival just about three years too late (and so in punctual Irish manner) and is already affectionately known to locals as “the syringe.” Once it was fully installed, the spoof, “I can see Clery’s now, the cranes are gone” became quite popular. Leaving the city through some of the new western superfast ringroad motorways, we headed into Co. Kildare. The amount of new development in Dublin’s suburbs (and nearly everywhere across the nation) was quite evident.
Our tour guide Colm (who really was much more of a driver, full-stop) hailed from near Gorey, Co. Wexford, and seemed perpetually hungover. He was fairly quiet and sombre for most of the trip, except when he espoused IRA or ETA political points of view (he was reading a history of the Basque liberation movement at the time).
The rest of the tour group were also quite interesting, and we spent quite a lot of time getting to know them over the next couple of days.
They were: Teneile, from Australia, who was a wild traveler/hippie/druggie/surfer chick, who was incredibly cool and with whom I bonded completely; Randy, and obnoxious older Hawaiian tourist who had done quite a bit of travel, but still acted touristy; Jeremy, a fairly quiet engineering major from Penn State, with whom Kavita hooked up and took off at the end of her trip; and Manuel and Andrea, a Portuguese and Croatian from Zagreb, who were involved in OSCE work. They (or Manuel, at least) loved to talk politics with Tom and myself, which, of course, suited Tom down to the ground.
Our first stop was at a Celtic High Cross at Moone, Co. Kildare. This was much taller and better preserved than its counterparts at Kells and in other places, but besides the cross itself and the walls of a very small ruined abbey in the middle of an old field, there was not much else to be seen there.
At lunchtime, we stopped at Kilkenny, where I picked up a much-needed camera battery. In the shop, I heard people talking about Wexford town and felt incredibly at home. Nearly the whole bus group traipsed down the town, took a shot of the castle from the bridge crossing the River Suir, then had lunch at a fairly large pub in an old mill adjacent to the River Bank, which was aptly named Mike the Miller’s. A good chicken curry and a decent pint of porter later, we motored on after a leisurely lunch, exceeding our time limit by nearly half an hour (the obvious result of having nearly half the group with Southern European mentalities, myself included!)
We next stopped at Cashel, to see the famed rock. For me, it was the fulfilment of a trip I never got to make years ago in the Cub Scouts, so it was especially nice to see after so long. The ruins are quite appealing, especially the tiny chapel with broken up frescoes on the ceiling; and the upstairs of the old castle with its wooden interiors and tapestries. Our tour guide there introduced himself and the welcomed us to the tour “as Gaeilge” and was quite taken aback when I responded “go raibh míle maith agat.”
We finished our day in Cork city, having passed by my natal town of Glanmire on the way in. We stayed at a fairly cozy hostel called Sheila’s that was quite close to the city centre. I purchased a phone card and made a few calls to Gran and home, where I found out that Aedín was in the city with her band of friends on the same night.
So we arranged to meet up after dinner (pizza at a little parlour on Patrick Street – the main drag, which was lit up in lovely holiday fashion, glittering alongside the River Lee) at a place called the Shelbourne on MacCurtain Street. We had discounted pints all night, thanks to the hostel, and McDow, George and Brian started doing Belfast car bombs, much to the amusement of the publicans and much of the clientele. As the evening wound down, Teneile, Kavita, Jeremy and myself talked about travel and politics, over many pints of Murphy’s.
That night, I found myself quite unable to sleep, so I retreated to the hostel lobby and worked on editing a freelance travel piece that may appear in National Geographic Adventures magazine. Also, I caught up on e-mails from all over the place, including a rundown of Audrey and Jen’s Christmas/New Year’s in Tokyo. Behind the computers in the hostel was a display case with one of the funniest shirts I’ve seen in a while, one which bore a red star and said “The People’s Republic of Cork.”
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