Scotland - Edinburgh and Haggis tour - pre-engagement!!!

Jess and I dropped mum off at the airport and returned the rental car and argued for our discounts - beware Irish car rental companies, their bills don't add up and they'll sting you at any chance! all the travel review websites on the subject are right.

Anyhow, we spent most of the day in the airport waiting for our flight, which was delayed, but we made it to Edinburgh and caught the nice quick airlink bus into the city (the strange guy chatting to us notwithstanding)!

First impressions of Edinburgh; thank goodness I don't have to drive through it in a rental car(!); Jess says it's like a smaller, more relaxed version of London; with grey, soot covered buildings; little hills that the city traverses up, down and around everywhere; and so many little alleyways off main streets, with interesting little nook and crannies - I am really enjoying exploring and it will be a great place for Simon and I to have a few days to unwind.

After we'd checked in, been ribbed by the Aussies behind the desk of the hostel and wandered around the city for a little bit (nice view of the city from the nearby Dublin castle!), we had an early dinner and spent the rest of the night talking to the lovely Kerryn, an American with an English accent after living in London for four years.

Day two in Edinburgh was our walking day, we wandered around the pretty Princes gardens

Rolling hills of daffodils!

Princes St Gardens overlooking the new city

All of the chairs are dedicated, with little plaques detailing their message 

Gorgeous flowers everywhere!

 and Jess and I explored the beautiful city of Edinburgh, taking in a free tour the hostel put on (run by a Canadian guy who took great amusement from mocking the Scottish!). The tour was full of awesome little historical stories, like that of the statue of little Bobby. Reputedly one of the most photographed landmarks in Edinburgh, the statue of the dog, little Bobby, commemorates a 'wee dog' who never left his master's side. 

To paraphrase the story, his master was the warden of Greyfriar's graveyard, a church who had to employ security to stop grave-robbers entering, and once the warden died, he was buried in Greyfriar's as an exemption to their usually strict 'entrance' requirements to recognise his contribution. Little Bobby never left his master's grave, and when kicked out of Greyfriar's every night by the new warden, he would always find a way back in - no matter how many holes they filled, fences they built, or extended; little Bobby would be patiently resting next to his master's graveside for the rest of his long life. When the little dog finally passed away, the city chose to commemorate him by erecting a statue in his likeness near Greyfriars, so that he could always be by his master's side. So the story goes anyhow!

Edinburgh has a lot of pubs - all selling pretty great food, locally brewed and stored ales (beer from a cask - Simon tells me its banned in Australia - tastes different!), whisky (of course - they are the kings of whisky over here!) and it seems like every pub has a story that goes with its naming. For instance, there is Maggie Dickinsons' - the lady who evaded death by hanging (for adultery and having a child out of wedlock) by being so overweight that the noose only knocked her out rather than snapping her neck, with the sight of her sitting up in the undertaker's cart enough to strike fear into all of the superstitious Scots who saw her; she spent the rest of her days working at the pub that now bears her name, consoling all those about to be executed as they drank their final whisky. So many stories! 

(Public warning: Nasty details and gory stories replicated below! For those with a sensitive stomach, don't read immediately after eating...)

Another that stuck out for me was Princes St Gardens, which is now an incredibly lush, green rolling valley containing fields of daffodils (that brought an involuntary 'wow' to jess' lips, see above for amazing-ness!), gorgeous old trees and picturesque little flower arrangements. It was previously Nor Loch (a lake) where the waste of Edinburgh drained to, and its the sort of waste that they collected in the bathroom during the day and threw out of the window once the bell struck at 10pm. For a city which was, for its time, reasonably densely populated, the stench from this draining waste was enough to give Edinburgh the nickname old stinker (or something similar once translated!). The city drained the lake in the 1820's (such history!) and it was when it was removing one mighty stinking layer of sludge (ew!), that they found the bodies of over 300 people. The bodies were those who had perished after being accused of witchcraft; with the test of whether you were a witch or not being to tie your hands to your feet and throw you off Edinburgh castle into the stinking Loch below. Once you bounced off the rocks a few times on your way down, if you managed to somehow stay alive, you were deemed a witch (as 'obviously' the devil's hand was at play if you were managing to stay alive), and if you drowned, your name was cleared. Horrific! Even more nasty was the torture techniques used against those who did manage to float - one wife's limbs were stretched to the state of irreperable damage and agony and she was hung in this state over her husband who was being slowly killed by the addition of a weight, every half and hour onto his body until his ribs gave in and were crushed. Truly barbaric - the extent of truth to the stories who knows, but I heard similar from our bus tour guide, so it seems to be the consensus.

We also went up to Calton Hill, with nice views of the city and the 'National Disgrace' monument.

Monument of National Disgrace (they run out of money to finish it!)

Nice view, with a lonely park bench!

We met Sibel, a PEGS friend who came up from York for the Haggis tour, for dinner and worked out where we had to go in the morning to depart on our Haggis tour!

Our Haggis tour wasn't too big, around 30 people or so in a midibus, with two guides. Leo was our skilled bus driver, strict on talking when we should have been listening to his reverential tales, incredibly knowledgeable and great at making up the details as he chose! His cras humour was an amusing mix with his harry potter-esque glasses!

I'm bad at remembering details of our trip and I didn't take too many photos on the way, but our first day was up through Stirling and listening to stories of Scottish history, to Glencoe, a snack at a 'pit stop' famous for its 'heelan coo' (scottish for highland cow - they are just gorgeous - they have Cousin IT hair over their eyes, google them!), Hamish; Fort William for a whisky distillery tour (with a deadpan humour distill-er who was telling people off left right and centre!), through incredible scenery of the Great Glen and pulling up next to Loch Ness for a night in Fort Augustus.

Stunning!

One of the old castles on the way

We went on a 'Nessy' boat cruise on Loch Ness (pretty chilly!), it is a beautiful lake and is huuuuuge, the depths are just incredible, hundreds of metres in places - you may as well be in the ocean! The eccentric cap-i-tan showed us his IP protected 'sonar system' for seeking out the huge creatures, and let us have a glimpse of his mobile phone pictures, 'evidence', of the huge creatures, which showed up on his sonar at up to 13 tonne or something absolutely incredible. He even mentioned the 'evidence' he had MIT examining 'at the moment' - it is always hard to know just how much to believe with the 'scientific proof' you are shown (oooh, quotation marks sound so cynical!) - who knows, he might actually be right. In such an incredibly large lake, I could believe that there could have evolved a number of incredibly large and almost whale-like creatures - the mystery of Nessy lives on!

We went back to the hostel for a huge dinner and some trivia and drinks in the bar. We'd met some pretty cool people thus far on the tour, there were quite a few internationals working in London - Alesha a Sydney girl, Angela and Joseph who were Canadian flatmates and Andrew and Kelly, the New Zealanders.

On the second day we headed out to the Isle of Skye for some more spectacular scenery, an amazing hike up a mountain to see the old Man of Storr,

A-ma-zing.....

a walk around a cute little beach town,

dunking our heads in a cold stream to commemorate an old Faerie story and back to Fort Augustus for a 'Scottish highland' show by a descendent of the MacDonald clan, who showed us (with poor volunteers!) how to fold up and dress in a kilt and many stories of what life was like back then.

the little lambs were so cute!

The third day we tried a Scottish hakka to entice Nessie from the Loch and headed back along the way to Edinburgh, stopping to look at Culloden Moor, one of the most brutal battle sights between the Scottish and the English. It was a great tour, with a good bunch of friendly people and the Scottish scenery was just spectacular!

A castle that was quite protected by its historical society who really wanted everyone to pay 11 pounds entry and built big fences to stop any photos!

The sign next to a rock on a string - Scottish humour!

Ireland part two!

Killarney National Park

We set off from Killarney (and some interesting antics with paper feeds into the eftpos machine and forgetful keys) to find a nice walk to do in Killarney National Park. 


We walked past Muckross House, the country home of Jess' future husband, where she will receive you for non fat tea and scones (made with lemonade), and walked onto torc waterfall, which unlike other dam spillways labelled as waterfalls in Ireland, was actually a pretty decent waterfall. 

On the walk to the Waterfall, Muckross house in the background

Torc Waterfall, Mum and I

We drove around the coast, with a few pretty views along the way and a lot of cute little towns, but it took forever! The drive was pretty slow and although the scenery was nice and the towns cute, it wasn't worth the three hour detour and consequent headache of such crazy one way streets, 100km/hr roads that you don't get out of second, or if you are lucky, third gear on!

By the time we reached Cork, we headed straight for the much acclaimed English Market (note, lonely planet fail on this one), which was nice but not huge. Jess was happy, as she found, not her future husband unfortunately, but barleygrass (a close second apparently); which is the infamous ingredient in our Flemington gym's 'green drink'. The market was housed in a cool warehouse and we liked one of their interesting bread shops! We also picked up an interesting slice for breakfast for the next morning and stopped for coffee in the upstairs area overlooking it all.


We checked into our accommodation, argued that we didn't want to be charged in US dollars without first being asked (but it's the same thing? Um, no, not when (1) you are Australian and (2) your card only has euros on it and (3) you pressed signature verified before I've even signed it and now you're going to have to void the entire transaction and hope you haven't been charged for it - I think we were in a perfect mood to be annoyed by that guy!) and walked back down to cork city centre for dinner. Cork is a nice place, the main shopping street was packed full of after work shoppers and their university area is huge.


The next day we set off to visit Blarney castle, and even though we didn't kiss the stone, the castle and it's gardens were beautiful.

Where you kiss the Blarney stone - the darker grey, years of saliva buildup, shadow at the bottom there!

We drove from Blarney up to Kilkenny and stopped in a few cute towns along the way, like Cashel, which was quaint and their cafe's veggie soup pretty decent.

Rock of Cashel - undergoing renovations

After finding our hotel in the outskirts of Kilkenny (an amazing Internet rate though, 78 euros for the three of us including a full breakfast), we headed back into the town for dinner. Kilkenny Castle contains a brilliant (with a capital B) park area that is utilised by the entire town; it was teeming with groups of teenagers kicking soccer balls around, families keeping littlies amused, others running around the park's circuit and tourists strolling through, cameras at the ready!

Swans!

From Kilkenny we drove through the Wicklow Park area and stopped at Glendalough's lakes for some spectacular scenery, relaxing walks to a little waterfall and around the lower lake and a picturesque picnic by the upper lake. Definitely on the 'come back here again' list.

The picturesque Glendalough lakes

Picnic by the lake!

University square

With a few stops along the way, we headed up to our accommodation just out of Dublin and crashed for the night. The next day, having worked out our transport options, we hopped on a double decker bus into the city (sitting at the front of a double decker, going quite fast and stopping on the behind of another car is quite disturbing at first!).
Dublin isn't an incredibly aesthetic city, as far as European cities go, everything is pretty bleak and grey and there aren't too many tourist attractions. We spent the day walking around, and covered off all of the sites of the hop on hop off tourist bus'! We started at the University, where Jess had a look in at the Book of Kells, wandered around to the Cathedrals, 

had lunch in a nice park along the way and took in other city sights before venturing up to the Guinness Storehouse (where you almost choke on the smell of fermenting sugars and yeast within a two block radius!). We didn't really fancy the tourist tour, but just went into the shop and bought a few prezzies. After that we wandered up to one of the museums, had a look around, decided that the old silver coin collection didn't really grab our attention and headed back towards the bus stop. Over an early dinner we decided we couldn't leave Ireland without sampling a pot of Guinness, so shared one with our irish stews!


The next morning we said goodbye to Mum as she flew back to Thailand and Jess and I continued to Scotland!




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Location:South and east Ireland

Ireland on a micra scale

Mum and I flew into Dublin from Berlin with aer lingus and their suitably green colored planes and uniforms!

the little micra!

Our rental car for the week is a little red Nissan micra and it has been really easy to drive, even on the tiny (and I mean one lane, no verge and rock walls either side) roads we've come across so far on our trip. We rented a gps as well, and it's proved a godsend (mostly!) in us knowing road names when the signs are missing.

Outside the stallion's boxes

We set off from the airport bound for the Irish national stud. We walked around as the stallions were being led to service, paddock or stable; the mares and their super cute foals were put to bed for the night and listened as the tour guide made many euphemisms so the language would go over the head of the kids on the tour. It was an interesting insight into the peak of the industry.


From Kildare we drove across to our accommodation for the night, at Galway. Some of the roads are being re-done at the moment, and our gps was very confused so we had a bit of a detour along the new motorway to Limerick before correcting up to Galway.

Green, rocks and sheep!

On our drive we lots of animals; sheep, goats, some cows and horses; but what struck me was the green-ness of everything and the use of rock everywhere - road side fences are rock walls, everyone has rock wall driveway entrances and even a proportion of stone houses!

We pulled into our bnb for the night, found an Irish pub and awoke to Marian's (our bnb hostess), huge irish breakfast. The irish make interesting brown bread! Marian had a good chat with us, she's the president of the local flower association (you should see her garden!) and has a daughter studying in Adelaide. Everywhere we go we are told that the person's son/daughter/relative is living in Australia at the moment, I think the unemployment realities of Ireland are pushing people elsewhere.

We set off in the little red micra for a day of driving around the Connemarra. It was a drizzly day, so we just stopped quickly at lots of different places, but spent most of the day in the car.

Friar

We stopped at an old Franciscan Friar, which was down a one way 'lane' (if it can even be called that!) and wandered through the ruins. 

In the Friar - note the burial plaques on the ground, some from the 1970s - a strange wish to be buried in the middle of a Friar I think.....

We encountered some interesting roads on our journey, with one lane streets so little even the micra only just squeezed through, and blind corners that you hoped had no one coming the opposite direction. If we didn't have the gps we would have not had a clue! Although, it did take us down some interesting paths!

Some of the pretty views along the way

The towns over here are so little and quaint, with barely two pubs marking some, others are larger with one or two main streets, but a fabulous laid back attitude in all, I've really enjoyed having a walk along (usually on a quest for a bathroom!).

The scenery has been more barren than we had expected, with mountain after mountain covered only with tufts of grass between exposed rock and greenery only in the lower areas. There are sheep and cute little lambs everywhere, which may explain the lack of vegetation.

We had a lamb pie for dinner, just to try to even up the balance a bit (joking Chloe!)

Day Three:
We hoped to get to Cliffs of Moher on our way to picking up Jess, my friend from Melbourne who's teaching in London and currently has school holidays, but just ran out of time. We went through some towns close to the area and had a pretty good view of some of the cliffs as we went, there seems to be spectacular views at every turn here, it's pretty amazing.

We picked up Jess without any problems and headed out to the Dingle peninsula, had a very mediocre soup at a cafe in Glin (you win some, you lose some!) and traversed the Connor Pass on our way to Dingle.

View from the Connor Pass

The Connor Pass winds up through mountains, on a very little and at times quite precarious little road. Once at the top we pulled over and hiked up to the top of the hill for an even better view, but mainly just to get out of the car!

The one lane road for both direcctions of traffic - Connor Pass

Fungie, the Dingle dolphin...... hmmmmm.....

We drove onto Dingle, which is a cute little fishing village out on it's namesake's peninsula. We wandered down its streets, had a look in some of the gift stores, marvelled at the cutest little cheese shop (Simon you would be in heaven!) and had a coffee down on the dock area.

More at dingle

We drove back from Dingle to Killarney where we met our next bnb hostess, Greta, who was also very lovely and settled in for the night.

Day four:

After discovering that Jess likes horseriding, we looked up on the Internet a few places to ring and found one with availability for us in the morning (hopefully before it started raining again), so we were all set for a day of driving around the ring of Kerry and taking in some pretty special scenery as well as a trailride to start the day.

A roadside stop along the way - incredible!

Another hearty Irish breakfast under our belts (or expanding jeans!), we drove through some pretty incredible forest, lakeside and coastal views to get to our horses.

Our leader, Caroline, was a pretty typical horsey person, blunt, upfront and reasonably cautious. She relaxed a bit when we she could see we could ride. Mum was on a lovely plodder of a Clydesdale, Murphy, Jess had the piebald Clancy and I had the cheeky Gillipurn (spelling, who knows!)

The beautiful boys!

Me on Gillipurn

Our ride consisted of walking along the roads to get to the beach area, through a few inlets and sand dunes and a spell along the beach. We had some nice little trots with our horses flicking each other with their tails, or even kicking out in annoyance if one invaded the others personal space and I had a nice canter along. The scenery was spectacular, with mountains surrounding the deserted beach, and cute holiday homes dotted along the coast. It will be an awesome memory of the trip (even if we did have to wash our clothes again that night!)

After the excitement of the ride we drove around the Ring of Kerry and witnessed some pretty incredible views. Caroline had recommended we travel to Valentia island and we had a lovely lunch at Portmagee on the coast there.

Scenery along the drive

In the afternoon we came across the ruinous Ballycarbery castle, the place where Jess was held against her will awaiting rescue from her future fantasy husband on a white horse(!), and a stone fort dating from early AD, that was closely guarded by a herd of heifers (Jess asked them politely to move, but they must not have heard; although, she swears one of them gave her the evil eye for the rest of her walk!)

Stone fort

By the time we made it back to the bnb we were pretty zonked! Another long day of driving, but some great sights seen.

According to my trusty travel companions I must report on the fabulous Irish stew we had for dinner, sitting at the bar at Murphy's pub, and the rather large pint of bulmers I had that made for an interesting walk home. The end. (Jess and Mum's thoughts on the matter will receive no comment!)


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Location:Galway, Ireland