Scotland and Ireland

Hi all, it's been a while since I've written a group email so here's one that Liz has written recently. It covers our Scotland and Ireland trip. Hopefully I will find the time to write my own version with some other stories and info. Hopefully this will be enough for now.

Glenn

Hello everyone, I know it has been a long long time. I have been meaning to send out an update on my whereabouts for the last 3 months, but there was so much to tell I never found the time to tell it, so you can imagine how the cycle went.

So ignoring that we spent a few months in mainland europe staying in hostels, living out of our backpacks, abandoning our daily hygeine routines, the regular backpacker thing, we are now living and working in London, and have also done much travelling about the Isles.

Most recently we spent 1 week each in Scotland and Ireland. In Scotland we started out in Glasgow for two days and one night where we visited the cathedral, which was so huge it was like 5 cathedrals in 1. One of them was called Blacader's Aisle, but all the signs pointing to it said Blackadder's Aisle, so that was funny. That seems to be the only attraction we deliberately visited, as the other highlights of our short stay there were, in keeping with the style of our whole trip really, accidents that we stumbled across. For example, our hostel was a little way out of the city, and we had to hang around there for a few hours early in the morning before we could check in, so we wandered around what we later realised was the nice part of the river (in the city centre it was pretty ugly), and found an old flint mill ruin. Then later we went to the botanical gardens which were pretty standard except there was one section on carnivorous plants and all the ways they trap their prey, and actually it was quite amazing.

From Glasgow we went to Edinburgh where we left on a 5 day tour of the Highlands. We did alot of stuff everyday, so I won't give you a day by day account, but highlights included visiting Culloden battlefield, where the last Jacobite rebellion was annihilated by the British. The morning we went it was very cold, and the whole place was covered in mist, which kind of helped to set the mood for hearing all the stories and seeing all the grave stones. I got totally lost, but luckily Glenn was able to keep his sense of direction and we made it out of there okay. Another highlight was the little cruise we took on Loch Ness, where the captain of the boat showed us some interesting photos and was surprisingly convincing in his stories about creature sightings. The night after that we stayed in a castle which was hard to get good photos of because it was surrounded by forest. Glenn and I tried to follow one of the walking tracks, and this time I got both of us lost, but in the end we found a beautiful, still, isolated loch with fish jumping in it (well, a fish, the rest was just Glenn throwing rocks to trick me), and it was lovely. The castle was supposed to be haunted, but the ghosts were not very mischievous.

We also spent an entire day on the Isle of Skye, where we did everything from stick our faces in the River of Youth and Beauty to climbing one of the Bens (spectacular views were had). The morning we left Glenn and I attempted to visit the ruins of a castle where a Viking Princess (allegedly she used to flash sailors so they wouldn't complain about the tolls) used to live, but we were thwarted by high tide, rain, and slippery rocks.

Returning to Edinburgh, we soaked up some of the Fringe festival atmosphere without actually paying to see a show. We climbed what we thought was Arthur's seat until we got to the top and saw the much bigger real Arthur's seat, so we climbed that too and got some incredible 360 views of Edinburgh and surrounds. Our last night in Scotland we went to the castle to watch the Military Tattoo, which, when described with words is nowhere near as cool as it actually was. As we have grown accustomed to saying alot on our holiday - "Could not wipe the smile off my face". It was basically 2 hours of bagpipes, dancing and marching, with the odd explosion of fireworks, but there was also something in the air. The main legion of tourists there seemed to be from other parts of Scotland and the UK, so there was lots of deep, scottish love about.

We nearly weren't allowed on the ferry to Belfast, because there was something wrong with our tickets (which we still don't really understand). Still, we looked innocent enough so the girl let us on. We arrived in Belfast on a late Sunday afternoon and there was therefore nothing to do. Up until now apart from from the odd bit of rain and mist, Scotland had been quite sunny (we could actually see the summit of Ben Nevis which is only visible 50 days every year), once we hit Belfast the weather turned teary. We still managed a Black cab tour which took us round two of the Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, and we saw murals, memorials and the "peace" wall which is the hugest fence I've ever seen, that separates the two areas. The gates used to be closed all the time, but now with the peace talks it's only closed at night.

That same day we took a boat ride around and saw all the places of interest to do with the Titanic and its sister ships. At night, faced again with the fact that everything was closed by 7pm, we sought out a few pubs. One had the most delicious pub food we had had in a while, as well as large statues of politicians. The other we had to be buzzed in by the barman, and inside we were met with a small room chocked full of Elvis memorabilia, and about 5 elderly patrons who got drunk and sang along to old rock and modern dance tunes alike. They spoke to us, but it was difficult to understand their drunken Irish accents. I think one of them asked if I was chinese!?!

We spent the next day getting rained on at the Antrim coast. We visited a rope bridge that fisherman used to use, but it is now tourist-ised so it is not scary or dangerous like it was advertised as being. The line was long but it meant we got to visit a small island for a while. We also visited the gift shop of a whiskey distillery before the main event which was the Giant's Causeway. We arrived there just in time for the rain.

The Causeway is an interesting geological feauture caused millions of years ago by cooling magma. The way that it cracked during the cooling looks like huge paving stones, and they descend in to the sea looking very cool. What is also interesting is that the only other place in the world where this has happened is on the coast of Scotland, so there is obviously a legend associated with it. The legend we were told in Scotland was that an Irish giant built it to go visit his Scottish girlfriend, whereas the Irish version says it was to fight another giant. Either way it was brilliant, and even though we got soaked through our raincoats it was fun and we even risked the longevity of my camera (but actually that got stolen just last weekend so it doesn't really matter anymore) by getting really great photos of it - photos are up on facebook (if you want to see them but are not a member ask me to email you the link), or you can wait until we get home to see it.

We left Northern Ireland the next day for Dublin. We had planned to visit the Western coast of Ireland first and see some of the places where my convict ancestors once lived, but public transport seemed determined to thwart us, so we headed into the Republic, where prices suddenly soared, but we were still glad that we went there anyway, as there was more than enough stuff to do there with our extra days.

We found lots to do in what I suspect is a very touristy but was still very charismatic area of town called Temple Bar. The pubs there were warm and cheery and they all had some form of live music playing every night. From Dublin we took a day out of town to visit Newgrange and Knowth, which are both huge Neolithic earthen monuments made out of stones and earth. Because of time, nature and continued occupation through later time periods, the mounds did not stay untouched for so long, but have been reconstructed. Newgrange is the more famous one, and seemingly more spectacular until the guide tells you that the stone pattern on the face of it is how the archaeologist "thought" it should look based on the amount of stone they found. Knowth was interesting and needed the least amount of reconstruction so was therefore the most authentic. Both mounds had tunnels built in to them to align with various solstices and equinoxes, similar to Stonehenge (which we did visit on the summer solstice, but that's another story). There was also a third monument nearby with a similar kind of thing, but they don't really know much about it because it is being "saved" for future archaeologists.

Back in Dublin, we tried our hand at getting lost once more before the end of our trip. We had bought tickets for the ferry from Dublin to Wales where we would get the train to London. Being as our tickets were virtually identical to our Belfast ones we were a bit worried, but our city map showed the ferry terminal as being quite close to our hostel so off we trundled to check our tickets in advance. 2 hours later we arrived, and the man did not even look at our tickets - just said, "they're fine". We forced him to look and he okayed them, then we found a bus to take us back to the city. It wasted an entire afternoon but the good news was that we now knew that the ferry was not a short walk away, and so the next morning we didn't try walking it with our backpacks on, but caught a cab instead.

We also visited Kilmainham Gaol, famous for its political prisoners, and has been in movies because it is a good example of the panoptican, 'we can see you but you can't see us' approach to correcting undesirable behaviour. It was very educational, and taught us a bit of Irish history but also put it into context because we got to see the cells, and the wall where people were executed. In the museum there they also had a section called "Last Words" which had letters and artefacts from some of the political prisoners that had been executed there. The handwriting of the letters was hard to read, but it was worth the effort to do. It added a lot to imagining what it would have been like in Dublin before the Republic.

I am sure we probably did other things too, but this email is already very long, so I will stop now and sign off. Congratulations if you made it this far in one go, please reward yourself by replying with your own indulgent account of how things have been going down your end. As much fun as it all is, and living in London is pretty neat, I miss home lots so would be good to know what's going on.

Cheers, Liz (and Glenn).

Below is a video of Liz at the Notting Hill carnival.