An Daingean Peninsula

11 April 2009

An Daingean Peninsula

On Saturday morning we got up at a decent hour. Ryan had survived his first official experience in a dorm room hostel. There was a bit if a queue to use the showers and they were far from luxury (lukewarm water with a push button controlling the faucet). The communal hostel kitchen was full of European backpackers toasting bread, preparing eggs and bacon (or rashers as they call them here). We collected our things, checked out, and quickly returned out bikes to O’Sullivan’s rentals and made our way to the bus station. We had a 10am bus north of Kerry to the Dingle peninsula with a transfer first in Tralee. First a bit about Dingle, it was actually decreed that the name should only be An Daingean which is Irish (gaelic) for Dingle. This area in Ireland is one of the more gaelic areas and has one of the highest percentages of Irish speakers. Politicians in the area also decreed that the signs should only be written in Irish and not English! The bus ride to Tralee was about an hour and a half and the scenery was beautiful still with the lush farmland and hills in every direction. The bus driver must have liked Tom Jones because it was all we heard for the entire journey!

Once we arrived in Tralee, one of the main towns on the Dingle Peninsula, we had a 45 minute wait until our bus to Dingle. We pulled out our umbrellas and brought our bags to Finnegan’s Hostel where we would be staying that night. Tralee was definitely not as beautiful as Killarney, but still had lots of pubs and shops lining the streets. Our hostel was in an old building with ivy covering it. The woman working there let us go upstairs and pick beds in the 12 person room! Ryan and I snagged one in the corner by the window and left again. There was a French street fair going on right outside the hostel and I wanted to get a crepe so badly! But €4 for a crepe seemed a bit steep! So back to the train station we went and hopped abroad the bus to Dingle town.

The ride was about another hour! It made stops along the way to pick people up. This one man got on halfway through and he truly looked like a leprechaun! He was about 4 feet tall, with red hair and a tweed hat! When we arrived in Dingle, Ryan said he just had to have a picture with the leprechaun! I felt a little doing it, but Ryan approached him and said, “You have the most Irish face in all of Ireland! Can we take a picture with you?” So we did…and then he chatted is up, telling us all about how he was visiting his mother in hospital here in Dingle for her second stroke, telling us about his visit to the US and even Johns Hopkins medical centre. He clearly would have been happy to talk to us all day but we said our thanks and goodbyes knowing that we had just a short day in Dingle and a lot to see!

Dingle is a very quaint town with colourful store fronts, mountain views, and a harbour with small fishing boats. We stopped at the tourist office first to figure out how we could somehow get a tour around the peninsula, but they had just gone on their lunch break 5 minutes ago and wouldn’t return for 1 hour! So we talked around the town, we stopped in the shops, saw a convent and a few churches, visited a bakery where we had carrot cake and apple pastry with fresh cream. The sun was out and the town’s homes and shops were painted every colour of the rainbow!

Back at the tourist office, we discovered the only way we could see the rest of the peninsula would be to hire a tour guide. We debated our options and pricing and finally ended up contacting a man named Denis Ryan who takes tourists around the peninsula on 2-3 hour tours in his car so he can only fit 4 people at most. For €20 a person we basically had our own personal tour of Dingle peninsula! Denis was an older man who was originally from Dublin but had moved out to Dingle for the beauty and work with tourism. He said the majority of the tourists he’d driven had been Americans and most of them with some kind of Irish ancestry. He said the winter was a tough time with tourism at a low and now with the recession to boot. Normally he wouldn’t have taken tourists out as late as us (3pm) but as he said, one must “make hay while the sun shines.” He said that most people in this area need to have 2-3 jobs to make ends meet. He also works as a musician playing traditional Irish music at large venues and also uses his car as a taxi to take people to the Kerry airport and other places.

We had a lovely afternoon with Denis. He showed us all of the main sites on the peninsula. The weather was absolutely perfect too! Dingle is full of mountains and rolling hills much like Kerry. The ancient rock walls were much more impressive here and the hillsides looked like they were cut into puzzle pieces from below. The road hugged the edge of the cliffs so we always had views of the ocean or bay. Dingle is also known for having many prehistoric “beehive” huts dotting the landscape. These stone structures were built in the 5th-8th century and they are not sure exactly what they were used for-perhaps shelter, perhaps religious purposes. They are quite well preserved as the Irish have respected them, built around them, and more or less left them alone for centuries. We also saw the ruins of many stone houses that are now overgrown with grass and vegetation. Denis explained that during the Great Famine, the English would burn down lots of homes. So on top of the potato blight induced famine, people were also being driven out of their homes and killed by the English.

Denis let us stop and take pictures whenever we wanted to. We stopped at Slea Head which is the most western point in all of Ireland and Europe. We gazed out in the direction of home but all we saw was the sun glittering of the water. We could also see the Blasket Islands from this viewpoint. There are a few Blasket Islands that are mainly just sheer rock and inhabited just by birds, however the Great Blasket Island does have human inhabitants. The small town is only located on the eastern face of the island as the other parts are too windy and harsh for living. The inhabitants are cut off from the mainland during the winter as the sea is just too rough for boats to land on the jagged shores. Back in the 1960’s the majority of the Blasket Island population all immigrated to Springfield, MA. They were clearly fed up with being isolated on an island for 5 months of a year and living with just the same few hundred people their whole lives! Denis told us to look down at the ocean below, that at this time of year they can usually see basking sharks trolling for fish right under the cliff. He said they are enormous too! We were not fortunate enough to see one though.

Our next stop was at a beach that was made famous by an Irish movie called “Ryan’s Daughter” as it was filmed right in this area. The sandy beach was just a small cut out in the cliffside, reminded me a bit of some of the California beaches. There were people actually swimming that day in the warm weather but I can only imagine how cold that water must have been! The ocean had a blue almost tropical colour to it and the views were spectacular with the mountains, rock walls, white cottages beyond.

The last stop we made before heading back to Dingle was at Gallarus Oratory. It is a stone structure also built in the 5th-8th century by a monk, it has the shape of an upside down boat. After all of these years, the structure has never had to been restored or fixed and is still in perfect condition. It is very tiny inside, maybe 9ft by 6ft and dark, cool and damp. Denis told us to look up at the ceiling inside. The stones never overlap and no one really quite knows how the roof supports itself! Next to the building, there is a old gravesite with stones covering the top, this was to prevent the animals from digging up the bodies way back when.

As we headed back into town, Denis drove by his own home and tooted the horn for his wife who works there making pottery. We definitely felt like we could have spent more time in this beautiful peninsula on this gorgeous day, but we had to start making our way back to Tralee. After we said goodbye to Denis, we had an early dinner at a pub called John Benny’s where we were sure to order seafood to eat! At 7pm, we met another taxi driver named Sean who drove us 45 minutes back to Tralee (as the last bus was hours ago). It wasn’t cheap but it was our only option! Back at our hostel, we hung out in the common room watching some TV with the other guests. There was a music show on and it was all in Irish with English subtitles! I had a long chat with the guy who was working at the hostel while I used the internet connection. He was telling me all about the crazy people that stay at the hostel, his diabetes and so on. The Irish are very quick to open up to you and tell you all about their lives. After another long day, we slept well in our bunk beds ready for another day!