A clifftop ramble

Music wasn’t the only reason we visited the little seaside village of Doolin in County Clare. This windswept stretch of Ireland’s west coast is famous around the world for the starkly beautiful Cliffs of Moher. In a country that’s known for its gorgeous coastline, surely this string of brooding black crags could lay claim to being the most stunning stretch of all.

Places like this were made for solitude and quiet contemplation, but unfortunately it’s been a while since the Cliffs of Moher were a local secret. Being featured prominently in a Harry Potter movie probably hasn’t helped much. The cliffs are Ireland’s most popular tourist attraction, with almost a million visitors per year.

On our way north from County Kerry, we stopped by the Cliffs of Moher Visitor Centre, a huge complex whose parking lots seems to rival the cliffs themselves for sheer square acreage. The view from the lookout here is definitely incredible (that’s where I was when I took the picture above), but we hoped that by staying in a little town like Doolin, we could discover the rugged beauty of the cliffs from a slightly different perspective – on foot, from a quieter slice of the coast.

We asked our hostel owner Karl how far it was from Doolin to the cliffs, whether it was realistic to walk there. Of course, he said. You’ll just need to head right at the main street, go over the first stile, walk another ten minutes, go over another stile, then make a direct beeline for the cliff edge, then you’ll come to an inlet, which you’ll need to go around, then watch out for the sea cave... at some point, our eyes glazed over and rolled back into our heads and Karl realised it would be better to just write it all down.

After a stupidly good breakfast of fresh-from-the-oven fruit scones from the local deli (omnomnom), we headed with map in hand to the end of the Doolin main street, over a stile and into someone’s farm. We picked our way along a muddy unpaved road for a while, before turning off to follow the fenceline along the ocean. It was quiet and brooding and beautiful.

We skirted the cliff edge for a good couple of hours, occasionally jumping the fence to avoid the particularly crumbly-looking bits. We didn’t encounter another soul for most of the way – our only company was the occasional four-legged farm creature chewing torpidly in the grass.

Soon we came to a patch of farmland that was a little different from the rest. It was clear that at some point in time, there had been more here than just the cattle and the gusting breeze. Several stone buildings were scattered across the gently sloping field, now fallen into ruin and overgrown with gorse and blackberry. We had seen abandoned houses like this all over the Irish countryside – sombre reminders of horrors of the Irish Famine.

The Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century is one of the central events in the Irish national consciousness. In 1841, a census counted Ireland’s population at just over 8 million. During the four years of the famine (1845-8), which was triggered by crop failures, one million people died of starvation and disease in Ireland. The famine sparked the mass emigration that Ireland has been known for ever since. By 1900, Ireland’s population was only half what it was in 1841.

Life was full of desperation during the Famine. Growing up in Australia, our primary school history lessons were full of stories of the First Fleet – the flotilla of British prison ships that brought convicts to the Port Jackson penal colony (now the city of Sydney). One of the things we were taught, which took on a fresher poignancy for me after visiting Ireland, was that many of the prisoners who were sentenced to transportation had been found guilty of nothing more heinous than pinching a loaf of bread to feed their children. Very Jean Valjean, isn’t it?

One of Ireland’s most famous songs, and one of my favourites, is about a man who is sent to Australia for stealing food for his family during the Famine. Have a listen, it’s sad but very beautiful.

In short, the Famine was just awful. But as with many countries that have thrown off the colonial yoke, the horrors and injustices of this period became a rallying point and a major catalyst of the Irish independence movement. For centuries, the Irish people had been harshly marginalised in their own lands – under British rule, Catholics could not vote, own land, hold political office, serve in the army or attend university. The utter failure of the British administration to ensure people were getting the basic necessities of life (incredibly, Ireland was still a net exporter of food during the famine!) was the final straw. From here it was just a matter of time before serious organised resistance formed and kicked out the British.

But anyway, back to our late summer day in County Clare.

As we continued past the old abandoned village, we left the farms behind and entered the protected wildlife area that spans about 200 hectares of maritime grasslands. You could certainly tell that no bovine lawnmowers were allowed here – the grass was long, pillowy and soft. But what the wildlife refuge lacks in cows, it more than makes up for in birds. We lay on the matted grass by the cliff edge, and watched as white water crashed into black rock, the wind whipped through the waving emerald grass, and hundreds upon hundreds of gulls carved graceful arcs out and back from their cliff, like so many paper aeroplanes at a Microsoft company meeting.

It was hard to believe that just half an hour’s walk away was Ireland’s heaviest concentration of tourist coaches and a Cliffs of Moher penny stamping machine. If I had to pick a highlight of our whole Ireland trip, this would be it!

Tunes and pints

The tiny, isolated village of Doolin, population 250, is about as unlikely a tourist hotspot as one could imagine. You could easily be forgiven for driving past on your way through the silent green expanse of coastal County Clare, without suspecting it to be anything more than an unremarkable smattering of farmhouses interspersed with the odd tumbledown church and the occasional horse.

But to those in the know (which happily included us), this miniscule seaside town transforms at night into Ireland’s hoppin’ and boppin’ capital of traditional music.

I’ve been fascinated with Celtic music since I was a kid. The first CD I ever bought, at age 10, was Forgiven, Not Forgotten, by the Irish pop group the Corrs. I first fell in love with the album because of Andrea Corr’s crystalline voice, but as the years went by, the songs I found myself going back to again and again were not the radio-friendly pop ballads, but the vignettes of traditional Irish instrumental music that ran in between the vocal tracks. The Corrs eventually left their distinctly Celtic sound behind and started to release very generic-sounding stuff*, but not before they planted in me a deep-seated love for the lilt and rhythm of Irish music – the dizzying fury of the fiddle, the delicate tabla-like reverberations of the bodhran, and the plaintive high notes of the tin whistle.

This, combined with Sean’s genetically-inherited love for Irish music, made coming to Doolin a no-brainer for us. We dropped our bags off at our too-cute-to-be-true hostel (a converted 17th-century farmhouse) and headed out into the night in search of Celtic melodies.

Considering that there are generally more tourists than locals in town at any given time, it wouldn’t be too hard to fear the worst about the Doolin pub scene – kitschy costumes, green beer, and drunk tourists attempting to channel Michael Flatley. Happily, our night involved none of those things – the live music scene in Doolin is pleasantly low-key. I guess it’s a little off the beaten track to be invaded by giant in-and-out tour buses.

We hopped between pubs, each with a different set of musicians and combination of instruments. To call what we saw “shows” would probably be an overstatement. The musicians mainly sat at the same level as the patrons as opposed to elevated on a stage, and seemed like they were playing whatever they felt like, whenever they felt like it - the breaks between songs would often be five or ten minutes long. In one of the pubs, Fitzgerald’s, which seemed like it had actually a higher percentage of locals, there was only a guitarist playing and singing when we walked in. About halfway through our first beer, two of the guys sitting at the table next to us polished off the last of their Smithwicks, told their friends they’d be back in a jiffy, and went to join the guitarist with bagpipes and a fiddle. On the whole, you got the feeling that the musicians would be jamming whether the tourists were there or not, which was nice.

The style of performance reminded me of jazz, in that there is a canon of well-known tunes that every musician learns to play very early on. So you’ll often be hearing a song that you’ve heard many times before, but if the musicians you’re listening to are any good, you’ll never have heard it played like this before. The band will start and finish the songs together, but in between each musician will get a chance to put their own stamp on the familiar tune with a virtuosic solo.

I guess the proof of how much I enjoyed our night in Doolin was that I was yawning ominously when we set out for dinner at 8pm, and yet managed to remain wide awake tapping my feet and lost in the music till the wee hours of the morning. I don’t know what else can I write in mere words about a pleasure that simply has to be savoured first-hand. So I’ll say no more, except “get thee to Doolin”!

*This has a happy ending. About a decade later the Corrs released a full-length album of traditional Irish songs, called Home. It’s awesome.

The peat, ah, the peat

So, Dublin? I spent two weeks trying to fill up a blog post about you and failed. So for the sake of my sanity, I’m just kinda sorta going to skip over you altogether. Please don’t take it personally, it’s not you, it’s me, and all that good stuff. Raincheck?

(Steve, my colleague from the Irish Midlands, would be proud of me. Apparently Irish people who aren’t from Dublin have the same attitude to Dublin as non-Torontonian Canadians have for the big TO.)

Instead, I’ll start my Ireland recap at the point where we picked up Sinead, our little black rental car (I told you before, I compulsively name all cars!), and puttered off down the highway towards Ireland’s southern shores. A first for this trip was that I was the primary driver, and not Sean – the main reason being that I was the only one with driving-on-the-left experience. You would think that the Irish would drive on the right to stick it to their former oppressors across the pond, but I guess the die was cast by the time they kicked them out.

Our planned route mainly hugged the coast, with most of our time concentrated on the famously scenic southeast and northern shores. We weren’t blessed with the best weather the first few days, but we managed to stay in good spirits, mostly thanks to our ritual of sitting down for cream tea instead of lunch each day. There really is something spiritual about a hot pot of tea and a good crumbly scone, especially when one is a little damp.

Our very first stop outside Dublin was the tiny village of Ballon – a completely unremarkable place apart from the fact that Sean’s maternal grandfather was born and raised there. In fact, we could even track down the very house where Grandpa Morris grew up. Now it’s a pub!

As we headed south, we drove through Kilkenny and Tipperary, the two counties that had contested the All-Ireland Hurling Final just the previous day. Hurling is a Gaelic sport whose origins that dates back at least two thousand years. The best way I can describe it is as the bastard love child of field hockey and lacrosse, or perhaps golf converted to a team sport and played under the influence of amphetamines. The play is physical, the pace is furious, and watching the game in a Dublin pub as a novice spectator, I never managed to shake the instinct to cringe every ten seconds in anticipation of someone getting belted across the skull by a heavy wooden bat. Curious? Here you go.

The All-Ireland Final is Ireland’s Superbowl – the game the whole country stops to watch. And yet one of the most interesting things about hurling is that even in this day and age, it’s still a strictly amateur sport. The players and team managers all have day jobs and have to their own funds, annual leave and free time (which can be up to forty hours a week) to play for their native county.

In an age where even “gentlemen’s games” like cricket have professionalised, it’s kind of cool to watch a sport where teams have to make the most of the talent they have and can’t use money to make trades and buy the best players. It’s certainly easier to emotionally invest in a team like that, and from what we could see from our drive, the good people of Tipp and Kilkenny were all in. In each town we passed through, every shop on the main streets had a special hurling-themed display, and on the back streets almost every house was decked out in the team colours.

The other major stop on our first day was the Rock of Cashel – actually not a rock at all, but a big green hill looming over the otherwise unexceptional flatlands of County Tipperary. Atop the hill is a Catholic cathedral and monastery dating from the 12th century. During the Irish Confederate Wars in the 17th century, Protestant soldiers sacked Cashel, laying waste to the unique and historic buildings on the Rock, and indiscriminately massacring not only the clergymen on the hill but also hundreds of ordinary folk in the town below.

The New Model Army might have let their horses relieve themselves inside Cormac’s Chapel and scraped off every ancient piece of Catholic ornamentation that irked them, but they didn’t manage to wreck the place completely. Today, you can still visit the Rock of Cashel and walk around in the shells of the old buildings, pondering their former glory and the turbulent times gone by, all the while soaking in the verdure and peaceful silence that the Tipperary countryside enjoys today.

Our first day finished up in Cork, the namesake town of Ireland’s southernmost county. While we didn’t get much time to explore the place, we did have probably the best meal of our entire trip here, at a restaurant called Market Lane. Foodies take note!

On Day 2 we headed right to the south coast of Ireland, and that’s when things started getting seriously beautiful. But not before they started getting NARROW.

The pretty bits of Ireland are full of these tiny, windy roads. They barely even seem like they should be two-way, but every so often you’ll have to make way for a gigantic touring coach coming in the opposite direction, with all of about two seconds to get out of the way because of the tall hedgerow and trees on both sides. The bizarre thing is that all of these roads are signposted with a speed limit of 100kph. I could barely make it over 80 without having mini-heart attacks, and yet would often end up with a queue of cars behind me.

But we avoided any major car-tastrophes and made it to Baltimore, a tiny port town where we got our first gander at the Irish Sea. We washed down some fish and chips with a stout and enjoyed the fresh air. Then the road started going up, up and up as we entered County Kerry.

The Ring of Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula are two fingers of land that jut out of Ireland’s southwestern corner. Both are blessed with absolutely incredible natural beauty. Driving through this place, you wonder whether your windscreen is photoshopping the view as you go along. Unbelievably green hills crisscrossed by ancient stone walls slope gently towards the clear blue sea. Whether they meet the water at sheer, dramatic cliffs or gentle arcs of picture-perfect beach, it’s impossible not to want to stop at every single pullout on the road. In the distance, chains of windswept, unspoiled islands fade into the haze of the Atlantic horizon. I think I simply have to accept that County Kerry defies any pathetic attempt of mine to describe it in prose. So I’m going to shut up now and let my pictures do the talking.

In Kerry we made our first foray into a Gaeltacht, or officially Irish-speaking region of Ireland. Although English is the most widely-used language in everyday life in most parts of Ireland, the primary official language of the Republic as enshrined in the constitution is in fact Irish. Historians point to several reasons for the decline of the Irish language – the ban on teaching Irish in schools during British rule, and the mass emigration of native speakers to North America during the Great Famine are big ones. Economic realities also compelled many families to educate their children primarily in English. For all these reasons, Irish is now the only official language of the EU that isn’t the most widely spoken language in its home country.

But since Irish independence in 1922, the government has been actively working to preserve Ireland’s linguistic heritage – hence the creation of the Gaeltachtai, areas where Irish is still the natural local vernacular, and measures are continuously being put in place to keep it that way. It goes without saying that all schools in the Gaeltachtai are Irish-medium. In 2003, the government passed the Official Language Act, which took all English road signs out of the Gaeltachtai. (In the rest of the Republic, road signs are in both Irish and English.) The stated aim of the Irish government is to have a quarter of a million daily speakers of Irish by 2030.

It’s an uphill battle when your Irish-only zones are so freaking beautiful, though. Much of people’s income in areas like the Kerry Gaeltacht comes from tourism, which obviously means that the siren song of English is still very strong. And more and more property in these picture-postcard places is being snapped by outsiders, which is both diluting the Irish-speaking nature of the Gaeltachtai, and pushing up prices beyond the reach of young Irish-speakers, forcing them to move to more affordable, predominantly English-speaking parts of Ireland.

In the Kerry Gaeltacht, we stopped for petrol and snacks in a small town on the Dingle peninsula. I was sitting in the driver’s seat waiting for Sean to go pay, when a middle-aged lady carrying a baby and a shopping bag peered into the open window on the passenger side and asked politely, in very broken English, whether I could please move my car so she could pull hers in. As she walked away, my ears caught a snippet of her conversation with the child on her hip – she was speaking in Irish! I’d met a real proper Gaeilge speaker, proper enough that her English sucked. That made me at least a little optimistic that Ireland can claw a bit of its history back.

More road trip in my next...

Ein wenig zum Essen: Part 1

(This post is proudly brought to you by:

a) My two weeks of intractable writer’s block,
b) Alida’s suggestion that trying to write about something other than Ireland might prise open the floodgates, and
c) My curious talent for meditating on the topic of food for inordinate amounts of time.

Fingers crossed!)

Ringed as Germany is by bona fide gourmet meccas like France and Italy, food isn’t exactly top of mind for people who come and visit this particular corner of Europe. I can certainly vouch that when I moved to Munich, I wasn’t expecting anything beyond brats and beer. Happily, I can report that Germany underpromises and overdelivers in the culinary department.

Let’s start in the bakery, shall we? Pretty much every native I’ve asked has said that the first thing they miss when they leave Germany is the bread. This I can wholly understand, because the second thing I realised upon moving here (the first was that Bavarians like to stare at other people on public transport) was that the Germans got their baking lessons from GOD. And when the big guy upstairs is writing your recipes, the only thing that can follow is INCOMPARABLE DELICIOUSNESS.

I will warn anyone on a low carb diet here and now that you should just steer clear of Germany. Visiting this country and being on Atkins would be the equivalent of a vegan planning a trip to the Arctic Circle.

It took me a lot longer to break the following habit than to form it: when Punit was staying with me last year, every morning I would go to the bakery (there were four within two blocks of my first apartment) and buy a big loaf of bread, still warm from the oven. On some days, a Nutella croissant or cheese and onion scroll would mysteriously end up in my bag as well - a girl can only have so much willpower! I would come home, load up the bread with some delicious Bergkäse (hard mountain cheese), Schwarzwälder Schinken (Black Forest ham), and veggies, and that would be our breakfast. Sometimes, it would be too good and we would just have to eat seconds. Okay, almost every day we would eat seconds. But that was the start of my love affair with German baked goods.

Before I moved to Munich, sandwiches were always the backup lunch when I couldn’t find something hot and more delicious. These days? I’ll pick up a sandwich because I want a sandwich. The Germans make a freakin’ mean sambo.

Something I didn’t expect to love with bread: leberwurst (liver sausage). After my horrendous Hungarian liver experience, I hoped that liver and I would never cross paths again for as long as I liv(er)ed. (Ha.) Then one day, Jon came to stay, and brought home a sausage from the supermarket. Not just any sausage, but a spreadable sausage. A liver sausage that you could spread on bread with a knife. Who knew? Despite my previous liver trauma, I was too curious to resist. I let Jon spread some leberwurst on my bread at breakfast, and thus were liver and I happily reconciled. Thanks, Jon!

Bread is just the tip of Germany’s baking iceberg, though. The glories of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest cake), which I sang the praises of in an earlier post, are already world-famous, but there are many other kinds of cake that I’d never even heard of before I moved here. Unfortunately I don’t let myself eat cake as much as I’d like to, but here are some that I’ve tried and loved:

• Prinzregententorte – a delicious layer cake of chocolate buttercream and sponge, covered in a thin layer of dark chocolate. You can’t get more Munich than this.
• Marzipantorte – Similar but with marzipan layers instead of buttercream. The top layer is often marzipan as well instead of chocolate. So obviously, you have to be a marzipan fan. The konditorei (cake shop) across the street from my place does a mean one that's hard to resist. Mmmm!
• Sachertorte – This cake is technically from Austria, but you’ll find it in any konditorei in Munich that’s worth its salt. It’s two layers of chocolate cake, very dense but not very sweet, with a surprise layer of apricot jam (!) in the middle. All covered in another layer of dark chocolate. Pure genius. Phwoar.

The wonderful thing about German cakes is that they are extremely light, and not overly sweet. So even at the end of a filling meal, you’ll always have room for cake! (And a great hunk of it at that. My eyes almost popped out of my head when I ordered my first slice.) Of course, I will love the classic heart-stopping American cakes till death do us part – red velvet cake, New York cheesecake, anything involving cream cheese icing... but you need to consciously save up stomach real estate for those.

The weather’s getting cold and grey again these days, and that would be 100% a bummer if I didn’t know about all the delicious winter baked treats that are just around the corner. Winter in Bavaria means that the bakers get out all their sweet, warm Christmas spices: ginger, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, anise, allspice...

Winter means lebkuchen.

Lebkuchen is surely one of this country’s greatest contributions to humanity. The Germans can make gingerbread like nobody’s business - don’t be fooled by the touristy gingerbread hearts at Oktoberfest that taste like cardboard. The gingerbread you want is the round, soft, puffy, moist Elisenlebkuchen, from the Bavarian city of Nürnberg. Over more than half a millennium, the bakers of Nürnberg have truly perfected the art of gingerbread-making (they even have their own geographical trademark, like Champagne or Parma ham). All the spices you hope for are there, along with unexpected notes like lemon zest, pepper, and the light crunch of chopped nuts. These days, you can get lebkuchen all year round in Nürnberg, and in a few select shops in Munich that truck it in. But if you want to eat lebkuchen right? Then it’s got to be the dead of winter, with snow in your lashes, frozen feet, a mug of glühwein still warming your oesophagus, and the glow and buzz of Christmas market stalls all around you.

Germany, I’m going to miss you and all your delicious baked things. You make the world a better place, one oven-load at a time. Peace.