The Palunawack Tours - Episode 12: Ireland and why my liver hates me

I promised it, you get it. And it’s a short one too!

Ski week 6 revival

I had been looking forward to the Ireland leg of the trip ever since February ,when a group of Irish stayed at the ski resort and crashed a staff party. The results were hilarious. It was with these same guys I was staying and I had been told preparations had been in the making for me for months.

The fact that my birthday was in the same period and my parents were making a trip across to see me definitely added to my anticipation.

Health freak

Having just spent a week hiking around Corsica and another week climbing peaks in Switzerland, the day I landed at Dublin airport I was probably the fittest I have been for the entire trip so far. I felt limber, fresh and healthy. Ireland managed to beat this out of me within 24 hours.

10:00am - Landed at Dublin airport and caught bus to meet mates
12:00pm - Met mates and made our way to Slowey’s holiday house
12.30pm - Had my first Guiness in Ireland
1.30pm - Had my first whisky in Ireland

2pm - Drunk for the first time in Ireland
3pm - I’m somehow convinced to go swimming in the Irish Sea. Bloody freezing.
8pm - We are in the local pub and I’m attempting to speak Gaelic to the waitress.
10pm - I’m put to bed by the guys because I’m falling asleep on the table.
11pm - Woken up by Richard banging two woks together 3 inches from my head and towed back to the pub. Still drunk.
1-2am - Wrestling competition back at the house for reasons no one can recall
3am - Put back to bed after being found comatose on the couch.
8.30am - Woken by a phone call from Mum

8.30am and 15 seconds - Hangover kicks in. Continues for next 8 hours.

Now I love my parents, but being woken up after a big night of drinking by a phone call from your mother goes down as the second worst way of waking up of all time. Especially when you simultaneously discover that Guiness doesn’t so much give you a hangover as much as it simply shuts down your entire digestive system for two days. Not a pleasant experience.

Sacrificed to the fertility goddess

The second night in Ireland I spent with Richard at his parent’s holiday home in a caravan park by the coast. As it turned out there was a bit of a party going on that night for the residents of the park, so I tagged along. I met Richard’s folks and a few neighbours. And then I met Rosy. Rosy is somewhat of a local character in the park: built like a pagan fertility goddess, she has a similar attitude to one (use your imagination), and I was warned that if she found out I was Australian she would be all over me.

They weren’t kidding. I eventually met Rosy, who immediately took a shining to me in a rather terrifyingly persistent way. At one point during the party a live band was doing some pretty good tunes. I was hanging back with Richard and a couple of other guys when Rosy comes over, plants herself in front of us and announces “I need a dancer”.

Richard and his mates look at each other. They look at me. As one man they grab my arms, take my drink and throw me to the wolves.

Dancing with Rosy was an art-form of evasion. On the one hand you have to keep a pretense of dancing with her and not running away, while simultaneously avoiding roving hands, knees and feet at all times, and occasionally taking a moment to give Richard the finger across the room. I eventually made it through the song, relatively unmolested and beat a hasty retreat back to my beer and safety.

Surf’s up!

I am still not sure how he did it, but somehow Richard managed to convince us to go swimming in the Irish Sea for a second time. The boy is certainly persuasive. The water was absolutely freezing and I expected to last for no more than 2-3 minutes. And then we saw the board…

There are surf lifesavers on Irish beaches. This is a ridiculous concept of itself since anyone stupid enough to go into water that cold (and this is in summer) is obviously way beyond human help. But these lifesavers have the tools of the trade with them and that includes the long foam board used to ferry people back to land.

Now I’d never tried surfing with one of these things before, but after missing summer back home I was willing to give it a shot. I jogged up to them and asked if I could borrow the board. I was expecting a flat out 'no', but I had forgotten something - between the tan I picked up in Italy and the long hair I'm sporting these days, I'm now something of a stereotype in Europe: the 'Australian surfer dude'. So when I came up to these lifesavers and asked to borrow their board, they stared at me in this kind of reverent awe and all but laid the thing at my feet.

If only I could live up to the stereotype. Let's be clear here, I cannot surf. I can boogy-board, body-board and swim, but I am yet to even be able to stand up on a surfboard for more than 20 seconds. So me and Richard spent the next hour nose diving into the surf, which the lifesavers found pretty hilarious. Especially when the board shoots 4 meters out the back of the wave.

Car troubles

I was offered a lift back to Dublin by a mate of Richard's that night. I'm still not sure why I took it but it turned out to be a fairly poor decision. About 15 minutes down the freeway the car suddenly started making very strange noises. Very bad noises. Acting prudently, the driver decided to pull over and re-start. Except the car wasn't having any of that and refused to kick over. So we attempted a running start.

Now at this point I had yet to accept the fact that summer in Ireland is wet and cold, and was still wearing sandals around the place in a desperate bid to convince myself I was still in Italian weather. And on this particular car trip, I wasn't even wearing the sandals.

So here I find myself pushing a car down the freeway, in the rain, in the dark, in bare feet. The car get rolling but still won't start, but instead of stopping at this point, the driver decides to let it keep rolling with us chasing the bloody thing down the road. In bare feet.

And then I dropped my camera right in front of a truck. Happily it missed the poor thing but the impact and the wet probably wasn't good for it...

Eventually we got the thing off the road and they called some friends out, who actually got it running again, but with a catch: as soon as the revs drop the car will die. So we find ourselves with the driver being told "just keep your foot on the accelerator at all times! If you need to stop, use the clutch". And then the cabin started filling with smoke...

We caught a cab.

Your attitude!

After the first weekend I ended up spending the rest of my two weeks in Dublin at Richard’s place in the suburbs. This was a good base to see the city while not actually being in it and we ended up playing basketball with the locals on the nearby nets, by the primary school. In between games we messed around a bit and one of the guys climbed up on top of the ring at one point. And then we spotted the guy with the camera-phone.

This fella was walking up to the courts, holding up the camera like some sort of liberty torch. Naturally we all stopped to watch this odd behaviour and he pipes up with “This video is for the police! You are all trespassing on private property! You have 5 seconds to leave before I call the Guardia and have you all arrested!”

I’m pretty sure we would have complied if he hadn’t stuck his fingers up in the air and started ticking them off. But instead our little righteous citizen found himself in the middle of a group of thirty 15-25 year olds asking what his problem was. If there’s one thing that really stands out about the Irish attitude to life, it’s a complete intolerance of bullsh*t.

As it turns out, our man was the principal of the primary school next door, to whom the basket ball courts actually belong, which sort of explains his approach to the situation. At one point, when asked whether it was just the kid standing on the ring that was the problem, his reply was “No, there’s a second problem. Your attitude!”. At this point we gave up and went back to the game. We knew he would probably call the cops, but knew equally well they would care about the ‘offense’ about as much as we did.

Sure enough, about 45 minutes later the Guardia car rolls up. The Guardia are Ireland’s police force, and by all accounts, you’d be hard pressed to find a more relaxed police force anywhere in the world. These officers actually had a laugh with us about the situation and nearly apologised for having to kick us off the court.

Blue lights and cross dressing

The Blue Light is an awesome little pub up in the hill above Dublin where you can listen to some traditional Irish music, have a chat with some locals, and get prodigiously drunk on Guiness. It was my first time at this lovely little pub and after a night of pretty good fun and successfully avoiding my mate's attempts to get me to "sing us something Australian!" on the stage, we decided to continue the party at Richard's place.

Now to this day we're not entirely sure what Richard was thinking when he decided to give Slowey and the rest of the guys his keys and for me and him catch the second taxi. And it took Slowey about 15 seconds to come up with a plan to abuse this situation.

It was just a matter of luck that Richard's sister was sleeping in her parent's room that night because the plan was for me and Richard to be welcomed home by the guys, all of them wearing his Mum's dresses. Lucky for them that is, because the dresses would have been given quite a stretch and Richard's Mum would have slaughtered them...

So, robbed of their original scheme they decided on the more subtle idea of turning every painting, photo wall hanging in the house upside down. It took Richard about 2 days to find and fix everything after that. He had his revenge though. I now have a great photo of the moment Richard burst into the shed where we were carrying on from the Blue Light, wielding a chainsaw and screaming his head off. So needless to say, these boys know how to party.

More electronic casualties

The only real victim of the entire night turned out to be my camera. It still took pictures but the screen no longer worked, so since then I have a months worth of pictures that were pretty much guess work - should be interesting! But despite my best efforts of dismantling the poor thing and electrocuting myself twice in the process, the camera eventually packed up and died completely. After the amount of punishment the poor thing suffered at my hands, I'm very impressed it survived as long as it did. RIP little camera...

March of the Orange Men

Richard has the rare but extremely annoying quality that he doesn't get hangovers. So the morning after the Blue Light, he dragged me out of the house to go hiking up a beautiful spot in Northern Ireland. Now I know about the Troubles and the ongoing Irish-English dislike, but I never realised it was still a very current thing. Driving up through the north and seeing the Union Jack up everywhere was quite a surprise, as was the footpath being painted red, white and blue. This was an unpleasant surprise for me, especially since many of the songs I'd heard the night before were IRA protest anthems which I now could not get out of my head and had the urge to hum aloud...

The walk itself was lovely - the Irish countryside is very different to anything I've seen in Australia, though the Bogong High Plains come close for those who know what I'm talking about. The heather on the hills, rocky landscape and waterfalls everywhere made for a scene you often read about but rarely see. But on the way back down the mountain we ran into an Orange March.

One of the fellas walking with us was a rather political person, and while not in favour of the IRA, felt very strongly about Irish independence - a good fella to wind up for some fun. Now he was already a little on edge being up here in the north, so running into the Orange Men, the pro-British faction in Northern Ireland, putting on a festival to celebrate an old English protestant victory against the Irish catholics, was not exactly good timing.

And when one of the old guys at the entrance to the festival told us "Ye lads can walk", we beat a hasty retreat before things got out of hand.

Unbelievable irony

So there was a party. Someone had a bit of a birthday and it was all good fun. And one of the guys there had brough along a bit of a party trick: a glass that looks like it's full of orange liquid, but when you suddenly tip it on someone - wow! it's all in the rim of the glass and no on gets wet! What fun!

Well it would have been all fun if someone hadn't been mixing their drink with Fanta that night.

We were playing cards, I lost a hand and thought I'd have some fun and, you guessed it, use the joke glass on the guy who brought it. Only I got the wrong glass...

I've thought about this and I cannot conceive of a more ironic situation: getting covered in orange drink because some idiot mixed it up with the joke glass you brought with you.

Needless to say the guy was pretty pissed off. Unfortunately I couldn't stop laughing, which kind of undermined the whole outrage angle he was going for. There is something about watching a guy dry out his pants with a hair drier that just makes it very hard not to laugh.

Birthday with the family

My parents had been talking for quite a while about visiting me during my trip, and we eventually settled on Ireland for my birthday on the 15th August. So they flew in and we had a pretty great reunion in Dublin, a nice family dinner and I introduced them to Richard and his family.

But as good as it was to see the folks again, I was a little nervous about them being there for my birthday - you see I'd already told the Irish lads about my birthday and they were planning a big night back at the Blue Light. My parents have seen me prodigiously drunk before and it's not a situation I really wanted to repeat, but being in Ireland, I wasn't really going to get much choice.

Looking back through the photos my Mum took is pretty much the only record I have of the night. A combination of Guiness (including one which Richard forced me to scull), whisky and being assaulted with masking-tape mean I remember very very little of what actually happened that night. Here are some highlights we've since pieced together:

• Falling off the bar stool and taking out the musician. To his credit he kept right on playing with me at his feet, tangled in his electrical cords.
• Dipping my nose in my Guiness like in the add. Unfortunately I followed through with most of my forehead as well.
• Bouncing around like  pinball in the boot of some guy's truck because we couldn't find a taxi and the guy drove like a maniac. I had bruises the next morning...
• Dozing off on a couch and waking to find my legs being masking-taped together by Richard and friends.
• Biting off parts of Richard's hair in a desperate, but successful, attempt to get free.
• Suddenly realising about 30 minutes later I had a kettle taped to my left leg and couldn't be bothered getting it off
• Being found by Richard, passed out, face down in a near-by playground, still with the kettle taped to my leg
  

I can conclusively say the hangover I had the next morning (and for the three days following) is the worst I have ever had. Guiness is the beer equivalent of cement when it comes to hangovers and the results...well let's say whatever you're imagining is probably a pale imitation of the truth. And I got to spent this glorious day in the back seat of a car, with my parents.

If I've learned anything from the experience it is this; no matter what, my parents will always be my parents, and while that includes looking after me and offering me sympathy, it also comes with the impulsive need for them to make comments along the lines of; "I think you drunk a bit too much last night, don't you think Gordon?" and "You know you don't have to drink if you don't want to" and other equally frustratingly true comments, all of which are the last thing a half-dead, hungover man-child wants to be hearing at 9am in the morning. I find it equally hard to deal with when I know for a fact that there are stories out there about both my darling parents that completely overshadow any of my antics. And one day I'm going to find out exactly what they are...

Gaelic tours
Hangovers aside, the trip I took with the family around the south and then the north of Ireland was brilliant, with some of the most dramatic cliffs and hills you're likely to see, especially along he western coast. As anyone ho knows the family could probably guess, it was almost inevitable that we ended up climbing the highest mountain in Ireland while we were there. Generally the mountains in Ireland are pretty easy going - gentle curves, not too many cliffs and virtually no vegetation to get in the way. Carrantuohill on the other hand required us to climb up a waterfall.

The only thing that really prevents Ireland from being a number 1 tourist destination is the weather; I have seen more rain in one day during an Irish summer than the last three winters in Melbourne combined. Literally. So naturally, going up this mountain didn't really give us much in the way of views, though since I've managed to leave my raincoat in Sweden, it nearly gave me a dose of hypotermia.

The only real other challenges we had on our tours around were driving related. For the most part the signage in Ireland is fine, but in remote areas, they make a point of only speaking Gaelic. And since our road map was only in english, we promptly got lost. Speaking to the local around there wasn't that helpful either - evenb if they understood us, we sure didn't understand them. But eventually, thanks to plenty of hand gestures we got back to Dublin, though I made some pretty good attempts to prevent that.

Manual cars are bloody stupid and should be banned
Or so I was heard to say frequently as poor Mum attempted to teach me how to drive one. Between my inability to get into first gear and my stunning timing when it came to stalling in only the busiest of intersections, I nearly had Mum in dispair. If the gearbox on that rental car lasts for more than another couple of months after what I was doing to it, I'll be very surprised.

Seriously though - automatic transmissions were invented for a reason and you can go on about 'more control', and 'marginally better fuel economy' for as long as you like, the fact is that stuffing around with this ridiculous stick mechanism when a machine can do it better and with a hell of a lot less fuss, is absolutely moronic. Just because I can wash my clothes by hand doesn't make it a good idea!

Right, that's my bit said. Let it be a lesson toall you car manufacturers out there!

The Pink Pub and off the Scotland
Gettin back to Edinburgh was pretty good and catching up with Richard and the lads a good laugh, especially when they took me down to their local for a goodbye drink. Now this pub has a name, but I will forever remember it as The Pink Pub. Someone at some point has got it into their heads that "What this pub really needs is to be painted entirely pink. Yeah, that'll look masculine and pull in all the locals!". Well they must have been right because it's a pretty lively place to drop in and watch the game.

I also got introduced to hot whisky that night. I don't get along with whisky ever since an unfortunate incident during schoolies, but this stuff, lightly spiced with nutmeg orsomething, was actually pretty good! Strongly recommend.

And then the next morning we were on a ferry and shipping over to Scotland, another place of my ancestry and a location I had been looking forward to for quite some time.

That's where I am now and that's where I'm leaving you. So until next time people, stay happy, stay healthy, reply to this email and go and see my brother in 'Small Talk' at the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
More photos and videos up soon, as soon as I get a new camera...

What cheer!

Gordon