Ennistymon (Inis Diomáin) is a bit of a dud. The Cascades are worth a look, yes, but there’s not much else to do in town. It’s probably the dullest location we’ve stayed in on this trip.
Which isn’t to say it’s completely without merit. As stated above, the Cascades are nice and it’s as good a stop-over location as any other, but I can see no reason anyone would choose to stay here a second night.
The grand surroundings of our hotel gave rise to expectations that the interior experience would dismally fail to meet or even approach.
The Falls Hotel is a bit of a shambles, really, which is a great shame. Given its grandiose setting, it could be fantastic, but the reality is sadly otherwise.
The Falls needs some love and attention. The air-conditioning in our room didn’t work and the western exposure meant the sun had been heating up our room all afternoon. With sunset around 21:50, it would be quite a while before our room dropped to a pleasant temperature.
We called down to reception, of course, to have someone look at it, but the woman they sent upstairs knew less about air-conditioning than we did. I asked her instead if we could have a fan and, several minutes later, she emerged with a fan that had less cooling power than one of those AA-battery operated hand-held pen-like affairs. It would have been more effective to stand next to the flapping wings of a butterfly.
As the evening wore on, a smell began to emanate from the bathroom. By midnight, the smell had reached stench status and I began to suspect that the previous occupant of the room may have been a murderer who had buried his latest victim somewhere in the bathroom. It was too late to do much about it, though, and the smell was nowhere near as pungent in our room, so I ignored it and went to bed.
The next day, it became clear that the source of the malodorous bathroom lay somewhere down the drain of the shower. Turning on the water provided relief, which was handy, because I needed to shower. God knows what’s going on down that drain. A dead body surely can’t smell much worse.
At breakfast, the restaurant staff were running around like headless chickens. Our waitress asked us if we wanted tea or coffee and then disappeared behind the cooked breakfast counter to dish up sausages and bacon to guests.
When I enquired with another woman where I could find slices of bread, I was told that toast would be coming out with our coffee order. She was then informed by our now former waitress, who was within earshot, that she had passed on our order for coffee to a harried looking young man by the entrance
to the restaurant. He said that he had given our order to “a lady”, however, so the woman I had addressed with my enquiry now went into the kitchen and emerged a couple of minutes later with some toast, which she placed on my tray, stating that she didn’t know which table to take it to.
My tray, by the way, was sticky and dirty with the spillage of its previous lender. Dirty trays were being taken from the breakfast tables and placed back at the front of the cooked breakfast area for new guests to use. No bastard was giving the things a quick once-over with a dishcloth first!
Let me tell you about the orange juice, too.
It was being served in shot glasses. Well, ‘served’ is the wrong word, because you had to help yourself from one of those vat-with-tap affairs; not that I mind that one bit, you understand. What bothered me was the shot glasses. I mean, we’re not talking the lovely freshly-squeezed, mucho-Euro per glass variety of orange juice here. No, I’m talking about your common-or-garden,
bargain-basement, pasteurised, no-pulp, watery old shite; the kind of stuff that you’d urinate within an hour if you were to eat a few fresh oranges.
And that’s what they gave you shot glasses to conserve. Really.
No item too trivial to blog about here, but you’d probably already noticed that.
Anyway, I complained and got €40 knocked off the bill. The hotel manager turned out to be the hapless restaurant manager from downstairs, who I had last seen replacing our original waitress on the cooked food counter. You know things are in disarray when one character is trying to man at least three posts simultaneously.
He made the kind of remarks that one has come to expect from people in the service industry, such as, “It’s very hard to please everyone”, to which I replied that I’d be very surprised if any of his guests were pleased by a foul-smelling room.
As Sarah would say, “What-ev-urr.”
The drive to Dingle (An Daingean) was very scenic. To avoid a large amount of inland dual-carriageway that would take us close to Limerick, we took a ferry from Killimer to Tarbert, which knocked quite a bit of time off our journey.
I had expected Dingle to be charming, but sleepy; rather like Roundstone (Cloch na Rón). It turned out to be a joy, however. The drive down the Dingle Peninsula (Corca Dhuibhne) was a pleasure from start to finish, throwing up one lush, green, undulating landscape after another.
The town of Dingle, too, was as lively as it was lovely. In the heart of Gaeltacht country, the streets were bustling with tourists and locals.
I was smitten. The place has a nice atmosphere and hasn’t sold out to tourism, although it clearly thrives on it. Indeed, we had trouble finding a place to eat and eventually had to settle for an unassuming little pub, which turned out to serve up delicious Guinness-and-beef stew.
As a home owner and someone who’s interested in the housing market in general, it’s impossible to resist looking in estate-agents’ windows when I’m out and about; especially when I fall for a new place the way I did for Dingle.
The have some beautiful properties for sale around Dingle. Robert Mitchum’s former home is up for grabs and very nice it looked, too. Prices are reasonable, at least by Amsterdam standards — and they’re positively giving the stuff away if Dublin is your frame of reference — although I’m sure the
born-and-bred locals would beg to differ. One can only wonder how much the holiday home market is serving to erode the Gaeltacht nature of this area, too.
The next day, we stayed as long as we could in Dingle, having lunch at Bee’s Teas, before heading off for Ballinskelligs.
We would have really liked to see the area of the Dingle Peninsula west of Dingle itself, but there was no time. We also missed the Connor Pass.
At this point, we have enough missed locations on our list to enable a second tour of Ireland’s coastline. I can’t help but wonder if we’ve approached this all wrong. Perhaps we shouldn’t have concerned ourselves with getting Eloïse back to Amsterdam for the start of the new school term and instead should have stayed in Ireland for the whole of August, too.
On the other hand, why try to see it all on a single trip? We still have the entire interior of the country left to see; not everything of interest is dotted along Ireland’s coastline. And, with new-found family in Ireland, it’s reasonable to assume we’ll be back again, so there will almost certainly be future trips over here.
It’s just that, the longer you’re away, the more travel becomes your lifestyle; your perception changes and it becomes what you do on a day to day basis, not merely a break away from what you normally do. It feels completely natural now to be on the road every day, which is funny, because when we’re at
home in Amsterdam, planning for a trip, I feel so heavy with inertia that I wonder whether we’ll ever actually embark on the trip. It just feels like so much work to prepare. Then, you hit the road and suddenly, it feels like the life you were meant to lead each and every day of your life.
Ballinskelligs (Baile na Sceilge) is located about half way down the famous Ring of Kerry loop, which is a 179 km circuit of the Iveragh Peninsula (Uíbh Ráthach). It provides the most stereotypically Irish-looking views of Ireland, from the perspective of a stereotypical touring coach passenger hoping to see the Ireland of their mind’s eye.
Speaking of which, I must spare a few moments to burden you with my dichotomous views on Ireland’s roads. From an environmentalist’s standpoint, I love them. Virtually the entire island is connected by narrow, single-lane strips of tarmac. How wonderful that Ireland’s lush, green landscape has not had to make way for swathes of ugly, car-carrying asphalt.
Unfortunately, though, I have to drive on these bloody things, too. From the standpoint of someone who sometimes has considerable distances to cover, sometimes had a screaming baby in the back of the car or at least a baby who might wake up and scream at any moment, and someone who cut his teeth on narrow, winding country roads, driving here is a bane.
Tractors, coaches and over-laden lorries carrying bales of hay all serve to get my goat. Far worse, however, are the hordes of car-renting tossers who are either too timid or talentless to overtake the aforementioned obstacles.
You can easily spot them, driving along with number-plates that start with 07-D or 08-D, denoting that the car was registered in Dublin in the last couple of years. That’s where they all pick up their hire car before making a beeline to wherever I happen to be to get in my way.
You can sit behind these people for what seems like an eternity before an opportunity presents itself to safely overtake sometimes several of them in a row, plus whatever farmyard vehicle they happen to be trailing.
Still, rant aside, the environmentalist in me wins the day. I’d rather suffer the woes of the Irish road network than have the government add more of them or widen the ones they already have. May the needs of the car driver long remain subordinate to the preservation of nature and the control of pollution.
And so we found ourselves in Ballinskelligs, a mere speck on the map, but a speck with a very scenic beach, which Eloïse enjoyed immensely.
Ballinskelligs, too, is in a Gaeltacht area, although sometimes you can’t quite be sure that you’re hearing actual Irish as opposed to very heavily accented English.
The Ballinskelligs Inn, where we stayed, was, as the name suggests, also a pub; Cable O’Leary’s Pub, it’s called. The Lonely Planet guidebook suggests
that the place had unreliable hot water and bad food. Right on both accounts!
Actually, the hot water supply, whilst iffy, was no worse than at many other places we’ve stayed, but rarely does a guidebook mention this detail. And it was only my starter and dessert that were really bad; my main course was actually quite tasty.
The next day, we drove along the second half of the Ring of Kerry. For the record, the scenery and views to the east of Ballinskelligs are definitely better than those to the west. In other words, the second half of the ring when going anti-clockwise is the more breathtaking by quite a margin.
That said, much of the Ring is actually not that spectacular. Large chunks of it weave along narrow roads with high banks of shrubs and bushes, so there’s not much to see. When the road opens up, however, which is most often along the stretches that follow the coast, the views are simply stunning.
With the Ring of Kerry behind us, we arrived in Killarney (Cill Airne), a nice enough town, but unremarkable aside from its fortuitous proximity to other interesting
things. We slowly ambled around town and then took Eloïse to a playground.
On any given day, Eloïse requires that we visit any or all of the following:
a church
a beach
a playground
a place that sells ice-cream
Most days, we manage at least one of those. Why a church? you may wonder. Because they have “lovely things”, she says. When I enquired what kind of lovely things, she told me “benches where I can sit down and read my books.”
And so to today.
This morning, we went to the Killarney National Park and took a boat-trip across the Lough Leane (Loch Léin), right next to Ross Castle (Caisleán an Rois). It was a pleasant way to
spend an hour, but the scenery wasn’t all that striking. The high point was when the boat passed close to Inisfallen Island, where the remains of a 6th century abbey can clearly be seen.
Just as we arrived back on land, the heavens opened and we rushed back to the car. We drove back to Killarney and had lunch in town.
After lunch, we started the drive to Cork, but Lucas clearly wasn’t in agreement and so this leg of our journey soon became hellish.
En route to Cork, we turned off and headed for Blarney (An Bhlárna), site of the famous castle, itself home to the even more famous Blarney Stone.
Once there, we paid the exorbitant €10 entrance fee, walked to the castle and ascended the spiral staircase. Amazingly — it’s a bank holiday weekend here — there was no queue to kiss the stone, so we prostrated ourselves, pursed our lips and joined the ranks of countless other idiotic tourists.
After a walk through the Rock Close gardens, it was time to head to our hotel in Cork.
My first impressions of Cork (Corcaigh) aren’t great. It looks a bit grim and grey at first sight, but we’ll know more tomorrow when we go exploring. We’re staying
in Cork for two nights, which is a relief after four consecutive one-night stays.