On Sunday morning I had to finally say goodbye to Dublin. We missed the bus we wanted (it was at 7:30am and we’d been out pretty late for my last night in Dublin pubs), but after waiting in the bus station for an hour, we got on the bus and rode along the river Liiffey giving me one last view of Dear Dirty Dublin. It was odd to leave not knowing when or if I’d be back after being there for such a long time, and I was certainly sad to leave (though excited for our trip). I think it’s difficult to be anywhere for such a long time and not become a little attached.
The bus was very, very long though, it took 3 hours to get to Limerick, we waited there for the next bus for an hour, and then took a two hour busride to Tralee, waited there for an hour, and then another hour ride from Tralee to Dingle. The last ride was astonishing, and we knew that we had chosen a good place to go. The bus wound through mountains, and down in the valleys there were farms with cows and sheep which Allie was very happy to see (she claims she’s never really been in the countryside). Finally we arrived in Dingle at about 5, and were picked up by our hostels van service which brought us to our hostel about 1km from Dingle town. The hostel was called Rainbow Hostel, and Allie thought it was great because it had an old-looking wood paneled kitchen, and the rooms had nice views of the country.
After unpacking we walked down into town in search of a grocery store. Little did we know how sleepy tiny Dingle, a town of about 1600, actually was. At 630PM we were unable to find a place even to find some bread and fruit for us to eat for lunch then next day. Though everything was closed, the town remained charming. It had the colorful buildings that can be found in many rural Irish towns and a beautiful harbor with sailboats gently rocking in the shadow of mountains. So we walked around a bit and went back to the hostel empty-handed to make dinner, a delicious medley of pasta, jarred tomato sauce and spaghetti—all that had been left over from my house in Dublin. We then went out to J.Curran's’(a pub in town). A few of the pubs in Dingle aren’t like the pubs I’ve been anywhere else in Ireland, and they are surely a far cry from what we were used to in Dublin. Some of them are totally silent except for the famed ‘craic,’ there is no music (unless someone breaks out into live music). For some people this is kind of unsettling but we sort of enjoyed it. Allie slowly enjoyed a pint of Bulmer’s cider while I went with Guinness, knowing that I was down to my final few, while we watched the locals chat and exchanged knowing glances with the young bartender, who was about our age, had to listen to a very old, very drunk man at the bar say something about another young girl who was in the pub.After our long day of travel one was enough (especially for Allie), and we walked back to the hostel on a very narrow country road under a sea of stars.
Many speak of the pubs in Dingle, but the main draw is the natural beauty of the peninsula. To experience this, most people either drive around the perimeter of it, rent bikes, or hike if they have more than one day. With only one day and no means of renting a car we wanted to rent bikes to make the 25 mile ride. However, when we woke up it seemed that mother nature would not cooperate on my last day in Ireland. A light rain feel, giving what had been a vibrant harbor the previous day a dull, dreary look. Still, we persevered, and eventually were rewarded. We rented our bikes from a place called Foxy John’s, a pub in town (which like J. Curran’s, also sells something else) where several old men were drinking Guinness at ten in the morning. Their accents and their crustiness forced me to believe that they were not tourists.
Bikes underneath us, we set out into the dreary morning, following the signs for the slea head drive, a scenic ride around the coast of the peninsula. At first the cold rain made this difficult, but this shortly subsided. I could try to describe how beautiful the ride was, as we snaked our way through farms perched on the edges of cliffs plunging into the Atlantic, all against a backdrop of some of the bigger mountains I’ve seen in Ireland, but my words would certainly fall short, so just look at the pictures. To get a better idea of it, we’ve been told that a movie called Ryan’s Daughter (supposedly not a very good movie) which was shot on the peninsula does a great job of capturing its natural beauty. Allie may have previously told some of you that Dingle is featured in a chick flick movie called “Leapyear” (similarly bad), but we’d find out later that night from a local that this movie was not in fact shot in Dingle.
We stopped at a few places along the way, first at the ruins of an old fort teetering on the side of a cliff, believed to be really, really old. Supposedly the Celts were active there over 2,000 years ago, but the fort we saw was probably built about 1,000 years ago. Further along the rode we were able to explore some beehive huts, probably built around 1200 AD. The simplicity of these makes it clear to anyone of Irish descent that the Irish were pretty far behind the rest of Europe not too long ago. While they were building tiny beehive huts and probably packing their huge families into them, countries like France were contemporaneously erecting magnificant cathedrals and castles. We went on and stopped to eat lunch on the edge of a cliff, where we met a very nice old British couple and chatted with them for a while. Further on we stopped at an amazing beach at the foot of a cliff and saw them again, revealing to us how small the peninsula is. Our last stop before finishing the ride was at a pub a couple of miles from Dingle town (so really in the middle of nowhere). I saw a sign that they brewed their own beer, something which is very rare in Ireland, so I stopped in for just a half pint (Allie ordered pinapple juice) and chatted with the very friendly owner and brewer, who was tasting a pint of the stuff behind the bar as he had just made a fresh batch. We then headed back to town, cutting across the mountains which dot the peninsula, needing to take some breaks as the hills were quite steep.We did hurry back though, because Murphy’s Ice Cream parlor closes at 6, and Allie had gone the whole week without ice cream, so this was a must. We returned our bikes to the still crowded pub and rushed down to share one scoop of Kerry cream and one scoop of Bailey’s flavored ice cream (they also had Guinness and Kilbeggan whiskey). Allie wanted her own, but this was the most expensive ice cream I’ve ever seen in my life—it was 5 euros for two tiny scoops, so we decided to share.
We went back to the hostel and freshened up, and because it was my last night in Ireland and this trip was technically my gift to Allie for her 21st birthday, we decided to go out to dinner at a place in town called An Canteen (‘An’ means ‘The’ in Irish, and as the 25 year old from Dingle who worked there told me with a smile on his face when I asked, ‘Canteen’ means ‘Canteen’ in English. We shared some fancy appeteizer called Ham Terrene, and for the main course we shared fish and chips and calamari, hopefully freshly caught by Dingle fisherman. Afterwards we spoke to the guy who worked there for a while and got some recommendations on which pubs to go that night.
For my last night after 4 months in Ireland we did a bit of a pub crawl, beginning at Dick Mack’s, a place which has been there for over one hundred years and is quite famous. Dick Mack himself is now dead, but the pub lives on, and its fame is made obvious by the hollywoodesque stars in the sidewalk outside of the pub, one of them belonging to Julia Roberts, who visited at some point. Here we met a nice couple from Australia and two nice Dingle residents. We were worried that it would be too touristy, but it ended up being nice. Like Foxy John’s and J Curran’s it also used to be a shop in addition to a pub, the locals who were there said that 20 or 30 years ago it doubled as a shoe shine and repair shop, and that men would be working behind the bar on shoes while simultaneously serving up pints. We had a good time there and got some recommendations for the rest of the night. Next we went to O’Flaherty’s for some music. We heard two or three really good songs by what seemed to be the pub’s owner and his wife, but then they decided they needed a beer break, so we went elsewhere. Allie got an Irish Coffee here, which she’d been wanting to try. She enjoyed the first half of it, but once she drank her way through the whipped cream I was left to finish the rest, consisting of whiskey, coffee, and sugar. Finally, we finished the night at Foxy John’s, where we’d rented our bikes earlier. There was no short supply of characters here, and being late in the night it seemed that everyone was pretty intoxicated and happy to talk to anyone in sight. We talked to a few men, two who grew up in Dingle and one who lived there but was from Britain. The accents of the Dinglers were so thick that the British guy was essentially translating for us. The other highlight of this pub was that there were three Munster rugby players there. Dingle is in the province of Munster, and we’d just seen Munster’s season end two days ago in their semifinal loss to Leinster (as chronicled by Allie). When we arrived the British guy leaned over and told us they were there and that they had been there drinking continuously since 2:30 in the afternoon (it was now around midnight). As such they were kind of a mess and were trying very hard with some of the girls of Dingle. We thought about telling them that we saw them lose the night before, but I didn’t want to stir up any bad memories with these very large men, and we were well entertained by the other people at the pub anyways. I finished my last pint of Guinness and we headed home to get ready to leave at 6:45 tommorow.
At 645 the next morning we walked twenty minutes through the worst weather I experienced in Ireland, high winds and heavy rain, with our packs on our backs, to get to the bus. We finally made it, and rode back down the Dingle peninsula and on to Kerry airport, where we said goodbye to Ireland.
