I’m still in Ireland, and the Coronavirus continues to make travel increasingly fraught. I’ve been avoiding the sort of rapid country-hopping I was doing last year — I used up every single day on my visa in South Korea, and I’m doing the same in Ireland — and I’m only swapping countries when I’m legally obligated to. But while hunkering down somewhere for 9 months¹ until everyone’s gotten a handle on it might be the smart move, the only place I’d be able to do that is the United States, and the disastrous response to the virus and the nascent totalitarianism there makes that a non-starter.

I’m still staying with friends here, which I’m immensely grateful for.² But after a month, I really wanted to give them a break. So when Ireland entered Phase 3 of reopening, I decided to take three weeks traveling around, seeing the country. I don’t often spend enough time in a country to do this sort of thing. I did in Mexico and India last year. I should do it more often.

I started by heading to Dublin on the afternoon train, and promptly crashed in my hotel for the night. I found a chipper with an extensive vegan menu which delivered³ and just ordered in. You’d think after a month being moderately shut-in in Galway I’d have wanted to get out, but apparently not.

The next few days were better; I’ve been to Dublin a few times, so the various places which were closed due to COVID-19 — the Guinness Brewery, the Book of Kells, most of the bars in the Temple Bar⁴ — didn’t bother me much. I made it to Christ Church, which I can’t recall visiting before, although I’ve no idea why I would have missed it as a tourist. And otherwise I went to some restaurants⁵ and just wandered around the area for a few long walks.⁶

After the weekend I headed up to Belfast. I took the time to take a Black Taxi tour, and it was just devastating. The drivers are people who grew up here during the worst of the conflict in Northern Ireland,⁷ and they’ll take you around to the various murals and remembrance gardens and peace walls, talking all the time. That’s the real value of it — you won’t get the best sense of when it started or the steady progression of events without finding a book — but hearing someone who was there point out the pubs where bombs went off and how the fault lines shifted as events unfolded⁸ was unforgettable.

One thing that’s often forgotten is that the original outbreaks of violence were caused by civil rights marches; at that time the vote in Northern Ireland was restricted to householders, and Catholics were significantly less likely to own property than Protestants were, so their political power was significantly less than their ⅓ of the population would indicate.⁹ The Protestant majority was worried the civil rights movement was a backdoor attempt to unify Ireland with Northern Ireland and reacted with increasing violence, which eventually did convince a significant number of Catholics that reunification was the only viable alternative. But it didn’t have to be that way.

I’ve been through enough former war zones while traveling that I’m starting to notice commonalities between them. These sorts of civil wars seem to break out when one group starts to fear losing their grip on power. Maybe a minority starts agitating for more rights, or the majority’s electoral advantages start to erode. They respond with propaganda campaigns where they demonize the opposition coupled with weaponizing the judicial and law-enforcement apparatus, and paramilitary groups start to spring up. Violence on the part of those in power sparks violence on the part of those who aren’t and pretty soon you’ve got Unionists burning Catholics out of Protestant neighborhoods.

It’s a simple pattern, easy to execute, and once you’ve seen it it’s easy to spot. Harder to figure out what to do about it.

From Belfast I rented a car, and started to visit some of the scenic places in Ireland.¹⁰ This seemed to make a lot of sense; I got to avoid buses and trains, visit some out-of-the-way places, and avoid the crowds I’d inevitably run into in larger cities. And to be fair, it does have a lot to recommend it. You get to set your own timetable, leave later if you’re fascinated or earlier if you’re bored, take impromptu side trips without being worried about how often the bus runs or whether this is the last train for the night. And it’s almost inevitably cheaper and faster than taking the bus or the train.¹¹

It’s also especially suited to Ireland, which is packed with all sorts of natural beauty and crumbling monasteries, most scattered variously across the landscape. Many of the places I’ve visited in the past few weeks have involved driving 20–30 minutes into the countryside¹² and while maybe they’re occasionally on a bus route, at best you’d be catching a bus out, seeing something, then waiting around for an hour for a ride back into town. With a car, you can zip around to two or three sites in the same amount of time.

The drawback, of course, is that you have to drive, and I hate driving. I’m always nervous I’m going to get in an accident, especially when I have to drive on the wrong side of the road.¹³ So naturally that’s exactly what happened. I was passing through a small town when I came up behind a line of cars backed up at an intersection. I tried to swing around them to the right, and then had to cut left to avoid to provide room for oncoming traffic. But I had misjudged the amount of space I had¹⁴ and scraped the side of my rental car along the rear bumper of the other vehicle.

I suppose I’m grateful no one was injured. And the damages were entirely cosmetic. It just feels like one of those things; I wasn’t traveling at any sort of unsafe speed, I wasn’t going the wrong way or traveling in the wrong lane, I just misjudged the room I had by a couple inches. But it did mean I had to exchange insurance information with the other driver, and sit around for 20 minutes for the Garda to show up. And it looks like the policy of Budget Rent-a-Car is the same whether you dent a fender or get T-boned by a tractor trailer: you must immediately return the car, forfeit your whole deposit, and if you paid for full insurance you get another car. If you didn’t, you don’t. Doesn’t matter who was at fault, or what condition the car is in.

So I spent half the time driving around, then had to go back to Dublin and drop off the car. And I should have just immediately rented another car from a different company,¹⁵ but instead I thought I’d save a little money and just pick up another rental later. I ended up spending some time on the trains and buses I had hoped to avoid¹⁶ before picking up another rental after a couple days.

Still, I saw a lot. I suppose you can divide the touristy stuff in Ireland into four main categories:

Culture: I’d say this is for sitting around pubs listening to music or chatting with locals. It’s basically nonexistent with COVID-19.

History: Museums are still closed, but there’s a lot of castles to tour or 12^th century abbeys to visit. Most are outside already — not a lot of roofs left on 12^th century ruins — and you can wander through the sunshine and take your time exploring. These haven’t seemed especially crowded to me, or at least there’s always been room to spread out in and avoid others.

The standout here for me was Birr Castle, home to the 7^th Earl of Rosse¹⁷ and with a surprising scientific history. It’s the site of the “Leviathan of Parsonstown,” a 72-inch reflecting telescope built by the 3^rd Earl of Rosse and the largest telescope in the world from 1845 to 1917.¹⁸ In a nice correspondence, it’s currently home to the I-LOFAR, the Irish Low Frequency Array radio telescope and part of the International LOFAR telescope. It’s good to see places updating themselves with the times.

Leisure: There are a number of beaches around,¹⁹ but for me this mostly comprises of going to fancy hotels and eating at fancy restaurants. The fancy hotels seem to mostly be reopened, with the caveat that I generally can’t actually afford them. I’m talking about the grand manor houses that have been converted into B&Bs and the castle hotels with extensive grounds and four-star catering.²⁰ Most let you on to the site if you book in for afternoon tea or dinner, so if you’re mostly interested in the architecture or the gardens you can wander around for far less and just stay down the road.

There are a fair number of nicer restaurants open with distanced tables and masks on all the servers.²¹ I’ve hit a few of those. But in general it’s just a lot of anxiety and hassle going out someplace semi-crowded in the first place, and if I’m going to just end up getting a burger or a pizza anyway I’d just as soon order in.

Nature: This is virtually unchanged. There are some heritage sites which require prebooked admission, and a few places are shut down. But it’s not like it’s feasible to block off every hiking trail in the country, if that were even a good idea. And you can scramble to the top of a mountain and watch the sunset same as before. So this I did a lot of.

I saw the Giant’s Causeway²² and the Victor’s Way Indian Sculpture Garden,²³ the gardens of Birr Castle²⁴ and the landscapes of Benbulben in Yeats Country, a secret Catholic altar in the countryside²⁵ and the coast off Mullaghmore.²⁶ And I ended with a night at the Liss Ard Estate in Skibbereen,²⁷ a Georgian manor house adjoining 163 acres of gardens²⁸ and a 50 acre lake, and the site of the Irish Sky Garden, an art installation by James Turrell which is kind of an open-air naked-eye observatory for the sky. So I ended my whirlwind tour of Irish nature lying flat on my back on a stone plinth, in utter calm, watching the clouds go by. There are worse ways to kill an afternoon.

I’ve only just arrived back with my friends for another couple weeks in Galway. My permission to remain in Ireland is set to expire on September 8^th. I’m hoping they extend it for at least another month — they’ve been announcing the extensions around the 17^th, so I should know pretty soon if that’s the case — but until I do I haven’t been making plans.

If I can stay I’m likely to spend some time seeing some of the places I didn’t quite get to in the past two weeks.²⁹ If I can’t, I’ll be making my goodbyes and looking to a country which still allows visits from Americans. But until then, I’m just waiting to see what happens next. Welcome to 2020.

Next: Galway to Kinsale
Prev: Galway to Dublin

Footnotes

¹ 12 months? 18 months?

² I would normally drop in on friends for a weekend or maybe a week once or twice a month while I was traveling, and being unable to do that for the two months I was in Southeast Asia (expected) and then the three months in Korea (not) wasn’t great for my mental health.

³ McGuinness’s with vegan burgers and battered sausages and chicken nuggets and the like. It was … well, it’s a chipper. I think you know what you’re gonna get, and that’s what I got.

All I can tell you is I was delighted with my cheese steak and curry fries.

⁴ I found a great hotel right in the heart of the Temple Bar. Remarkably good rates, for what should be pretty obvious reasons.

⁵ Places seem to be doing a decent attempt at keeping things safe, with servers wearing masks, additional steps taken to disinfect everything, and tables being spaced out around dividers. Biggest change seems to be running separate entrances and exits, with a couple places routing you through the back stairs on your way out in order to comply.

⁶ My knee is still far from great, but the exercise seems to be helping a lot. It’s gone from “somewhat immobile and insensate” before treatment to “vaguely sore a lot but working.”

The more troubling part is the way that it occasionally feels like it won’t support my weight. Sometimes I’ll put my weight on it and it doesn’t hurt, but it feels kind of wobbly, like it might give out. It hasn’t yet — I think it just feels that way, as I adjust to the new normal — but if I go bouncing down some cliff along the coast that’s probably the reason.

⁷ My driver objected to the term “The Troubles,” because it certainly felt to him more like a full-on military occupation.

⁸ Apparently the British soldiers were originally welcomed by most of the Catholics — my driver talked about his mother bringing them tea and baked goods when they were on watch — on the assumption they would be helping prevent attacks by Unionists. It took a year or two before sentiment turned against them.

⁹ Making things even worse, if you owned more than one property, you got more than one vote.

¹⁰ I suppose, if you’re trying to sit out a pandemic without getting bored off your ass, you could do worse than be stuck someplace renowned for its natural environment. And it’s not like Ireland lacks for expats willing to talk your ear off about how beautiful it is.

¹¹ At least in Ireland, where the train routes tend to meander through a number of other destinations if you’re going any sort of distance at all. Buses are likely cheaper unless you’re traveling in a group, but often take 2 or 3 times as long to get where you’re going. It’s a pet peeve of mine; if you want people to take mass transit, why do some countries make it so damn expensive to do so?

¹² Many of the places I’ve visited have been the countryside

¹³ The wrong side of the road is, of course, the opposite side of the one you learned on.

¹⁴ Figuring out how much room you have on the left is a serious problem if you learned on left hand drive

¹⁵ I discovered a direct train to Sligo, and figured I could save a few bucks by catching it, then getting down to Galway and renting a car there, since I could avoid the cost of returning a car in a different city than I started. But between the 15€ taxi ride to the train station, the 40€ train ticket and the 20€ bus ticket, I’m not sure I saved all that much.

The real problem came later. Sligo wasn’t so bad; I just found a local tour guide to drive me around for a day to see the sights, and got to see some things I wouldn’t have thought to see any other way. But when I tried to get to Galway I discovered they had canceled the 10am bus and had to catch the noon one instead. And that meant the car rental agency in Galway, which closed at 2pm on Sundays, wouldn’t be open when I arrived. I had to catch the bus out to my hotel in Connemara, and didn’t have a car while I was there.

And while there are day tours through Connemara, they all leave out of Galway. I’m not sure they’re running yet with COVID, or if I’d feel comfortable with whatever precautions they’ve taken — I was literally the only one on the tour in Sligo, so that felt pretty safe — but it’s not really an option. Were I on vacation I’d have caught the early bus to Galway, picked up the rental car, and come back for at least a half day of driving around. But I figured I could use a day of rest anyway.

¹⁶ At least there’s solid mask compliance on them, as far as I can tell

¹⁷ And as the 7^th Earl is 83 and still occupying the castle, even while they’ve reopened some indoor tours, I hope he’s keeping locked upstairs or staying elsewhere.

¹⁸ The 3^rd Earl was able to use the telescope to discern the difference between elliptical and spiral galaxies, and may have been the first person to determine they were composed of individual stars, as had been conjectured.

¹⁹ Sligo has a surprisingly active surfing scene.

²⁰ One I looked into quoted me a rate of 900€ for a three-night stay, which was already ridiculously out of my price range, and that was before I noticed it was the per night rate.

They did offer falconry on-site, however. I bet that would have been fun.

²¹ Many of them attached to the out-of-my-price-range hotels

²² Timed admission, still fairly crowded. I’m terrified to imagine what it’s normally like.

²³ East Indian, not Native American. The sculptures are designed to communicate Buddhist ideas. Most of them, anyway — the one of Ganesh playing the Uilleann pipes while wearing a flat cap probably not.

²⁴ Including a newly-planted grove of California redwoods

²⁵ When Catholicism was illegal, you had wandering priests performing masses at secret shrines dotting the countryside.

²⁶ Lord Mountbatten was assassinated just off the coast

²⁷ Irish place names are pretty great. I traveled through Tubbercurry on my route south from Sligo.

²⁸ The gardens weren’t the usual ordered rows of flowers and hedges but instead a kind of naturalistic design, with reed ponds and brooks and wildflower meadows and meandering paths through groves of trees. It was the sort of garden you could spend most of the day hiking through.

²⁹ I’m thinking Cork and Donegal