Ireland tour, day one

After a hot, loud and relatively sleepless night, we were up early to start our tour. It turned out that seeing as it was half term, there were two buses instead of one, and we were doing a reverse tour - heading south first instead of north. We jumped on the big green bus and settled in.

Our first stop was actually still in Dublin, at Phoenix Park and the Papal Cross. Phoenix Park is 712 acres in size and is home to fallow deer, some of which we saw. It's also the location of Aras an Uachtarain, the home of the Irish president. The Papal Cross is a huge cross that was erected when Pope John Paul II visited in September 1979, and said mass to over one million people. We were only there for a few minutes, and then Connor (AKA Conrad and El Capitano), our guide and driver, got us back on the bus to get on the road properly.

The next stop was at the Rock of Dunamase. Apparently the rock was first settled in the 9th century, but the castle itself wasn't built until the second half of the 12th century. It's all ruins now, but it's clear to see why it was a desirable position. It's perched up high, overlooking the wide green valleys, so would be an excellent defensive position. This was the stop where Team Nerd really introduced themselves to each other. Tamara and I first spoke to Jen and Dorothy as we got on the bus in Dublin, and we chatted to Nicola and Tennille as we wandered around the ruins. I'm not quite sure, but I think it started there when Tamara and I were insulting each other rather loudly and we were overheard... All fun and games!

After pulling out the Peter Pan pose, we stumbled down the steep gravel path back to the bus. It turns out, contrary to popular belief, that it's not such a long way to Tipperary after all. It was our lunch stop for the day. We weren't there for long, enough time to be fed and watered and to empty out the bladder ready for the next leg of the trip. Oh, and time enough to buy the obligatory postcards and souvenirs!

Once again we jumped on the bus and hit the road. Our stop for the afternoon was at Blarney Castle, home of the famous blarney stone. It had been raining on and off on the drive down there, but magically enough it stopped raining for us to wander around the beautiful gardens and to make our way up to the top of the castle to kiss the stone. The legend is, of course, that those who kiss the stone are given the gift of the gab. So, we made our way up the steep spiral stairs to the top of the castle, and lined up ready to be dangled head first over the edge of the parapet to kiss a rock. You know, because I really needed an increase in my ability to shoot the breeze. Apparently the blarney stone has been ranked as the world's most unhygienic tourist attraction - not hard to see why! It's only slightly terrifying to place your safety into the hands of an old man who is holding you by the ankles. Ok, so there are also iron bars in place, but you don't see those when you're dangling there, you just see how very, very far it is to the ground below!
After a further wander around the gardens it was time to board the bus for the final leg of our trip for that day. We were to spend the night in Killarney, and it wasn't a great distance between the castle and our destination. There was a bit of a tour dinner that night, so the whole group trudged across town to a pub for a noisy meal. After that we all trudged up the street to a local pub that had some traditional Irish music. We were there for quite a few hours before eventually wandering back to the hostel to get some sleep, ready for another big day.

The first Irish Guiness of the trip!

The Emerald Isle

A few weeks after our weekend in Belgium, Tamara and I were off again, this time for a week in Ireland. We'd booked ourselves on a tour that would take us around both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The tour meant staying in hostels - something I'd only done once before, in Belgium. I wasn't looking forward to that part of the trip, but at least I had a seasoned pro with me. To be honest, I can't see myself staying in a hostel again if I can help it!

We flew out on the Sunday, arriving in beautiful, sunny Dublin. After breezing through immigration (and then waiting forever for Tamara - having dual citizenship is awesome :P), we made our way out of the airport and over to the big green Paddywagon bus, which would take us to Paddy's Palace, where we spent our first night. Our tour was to begin there the next day. I'd pre-booked the hostel, only to find out on arrival that they didn't have our booking. Of course. Luckily though they got us into another room, only and 8-bed instead of 4, so they refunded the money.

That drama over, we headed down the street for lunch and a little exploring. We were staying around the corner from the spire - known, amongst other things, as the Stiffy on the Liffey. Trust the Irish to tell it like it is! Other names for it include the Rod to God, the Binge Syringe, the Erection at the Intersection and a few others. I snapped off a couple of quick photos, picked up a sub from Quiznos, and then we continued down O'Connell Street. We had a map with us, and decided we wanted a photo of Little Britain Street, so headed for that. From there it was pretty simple. We were a short walk away from the Jameson's Distillery, so when in Ireland...

We didn't want to do the tour, but we did settle into the comfy leather chairs at the bar for a drink. Keeping in mind that I hadn't had a drink for over two years at this point, it only took one - very slowly sipped - drink to make me feel a bit of a buzz. Tamara thought this was hilarious, and laughed at me over it for the rest of the week!

We left the distillery and then headed back towards the centre of town. The weather was still glorious - sunshine and happiness! We wandered along the side of the River Liffey (unable to escape Essex no matter which country we were in), past another of Dublin's fine memorials, the Tart with the Cart, known more formally as Molly Malone. She too has other names - the Flirt in the Skirt, the Dolley with the Trolley, and the Dish with the Fish, along with a few more. Standing beside Ms Malone was a guy in a giant leprachaun costume. We also saw him at the end of the week, which I'd find somewhat odd, but hey, it's Ireland.

Just up the street from the Tart is a park. We decided to join in with the rest of Dublin and cob a squat and partake in a bit of people watching. It was awesome to sit in the sun and not have to think about how much work I wasn't doing and all the other dramas that were going on at the time. Eventually thought, like all good things, the time came to move along. The sun was starting to go down and it was a bit too cool in to sit in the shade. We soon warmed up though. Tamara, on one of her previosu trips to Dublin, had been to a restaurant called Luigi Malones. She had a vague memory of where it was, and wanted to go there again. Turns out she didn't really know where it was, and we walked all over Dublin, on both sides of the river, before giving up just near the Temple Bar region, and of course stumbling straight into it.

The food there was sooooooooooo good. We made early plans to go back there for dinner on our last night, just so that we could try more of the menu. Just thinking about it makes me want to go there now! By the time dinner was finished with, we decided to head back to the hostel as we had an early start the next morning. It was certainly a great start to the trip.

Western Front, day 2

After our rather rambunctious shenanigans the night before, and getting in after 3am (and remaining awake whilst the girls tried to get themselves into bed), it was a little difficult getting up the next morning. Nevertheless, we crawled out of bed, shivered through icy cold showers, picked up Leah's jocks off the floor for her and got ourselves organised.

Our first stop for the day was at Spanbroekmolen, also known as the Lone Tree Crater or Pool of Peace. It's a crater left behind after a mine explosion. The mine took six months to lay, and was one of 19 set off at exactly 3.10am on June 7, 1917. In actual fact this particular mine went off 15 seconds late, killing infantry who had been told to advance whether or not the mine had exploded. The blast from the mines was so loud that it was reported to have been heard in Downing Street and in Dublin. The land including and surrounding the crater was bought by a British lord in order to preserve it, and was eventually sold to a museum for a symbolic 1000 francs.

The next visit was to Hooge Crater Cemetery (nicknamed Huge Crater thanks to our very poor ability to pronounce words with an appropriate accent). This cemetery is the final resting place of Private Patrick Joseph Bugden, an Australian soldier who died aged 20. He was a posthumous recipient of the Victoria Cross. Private Bugden died in Polygon Wood, where we had been the day before.

From Hooge Crater we went down the road a little further, jumping off the bus on the side of the road and walking up a path, through the fields, finally arriving (after a quick llama/alpaca photo call) at a German medical bunker. As I noted about the road to Passchendaele from the day before, these bunkers are all over the place, left as they were in the middle of fields and whatnot. I think most of them are probably not overly safe to go into, but this one is a bit more of a tourist attraction, so I guess it's somewhat preserved. I've spent a lot of time reading and researching World War 1, given that I regularly teach poetry from the war, but I was completely unprepared for just how small and cramped this bunker was. It's not like I went in there thinking that it would be a full-sized hospital or anything, but it must have been absolute chaos to have casualties in there. I'm far from tall, and I struggled a bit with claustrophobia. There was literally no room to swing the proverbial cat. I assume it was just a clearing station for the front line, or at least I hope that's all it was - there's no way it was big enough for anything else.

We then made our way back over to Polygon Wood for a better look than we had the day before. We stood up on the butte and heard about its original use as a firing range, before moving down the steps and amongst the graves. We had to wait for quite a while for another group to finish up before we had a look at 5 graves of recently uncovered and identified Australian soldiers. They were the only graves that I saw all weekend that had a personal message on them.

Eventually we left Polygon Wood and headed for our lunch stop - a Tommy Tucker lunch. We ate at a cheese factory, featuring a globe that had the countries made of cheese. There were a few pieces of Australia missing, but Queensland was all there, so it was all good! Lunch was... interesting. We started with beef and ale soup (or beer soup as we called it), and this was followed by a kind of corned beef and vegetable pie. It was densely packed and very filling - I'm not sure that anybody actually got all the way through it. It's the kind of thing that the soldiers would eat during the war. They would often go days without a decent meal, so something like this was useful for them (but no so much for us after a big fry up breakfast!).

Our second last stop for the tour was probably one of the most poignant. We went to Langemark German war cemetery. The idea was to show us a different perspective of the war, and to be honest, it was a perspective that I'd truly never considered before. There was obvious significance in going to the dawn service, the Menin Gate and to Tyne Cot, but this was a place that really made me consider what I knew and thought about the war. The most striking thing about this particular cemetery is the stark contrast to the British Commonwealth cemeteries. All of those are open and light, with straight lines of upright, white marble headstones. Langemark is dark and gloomy, made so by the numbers of huge oak trees all over the place. As well as that, the headstones are a dark grey colour, and some are just flat square stones placed in the ground, whilst others are a vertical cross.

We walked through the gate and then stopped in front of a large square garden. Mark, our guide, told us a little of the history of the cemetery. Hitler himself walked through the gate that we had just passed through, and this certainly sent a shiver down the spine. The feeling grew worse as Mark explained about the garden in front of us. It's a mass grave, home to nearly 45 000 bodies (there are conflicting numbers on this - some say the mass grave has 25 000 bodies, others say the total number of bodies in the cemetery is 45 000 - our guide, smartest guide on Earth, says 45 000, and I'm sticking with that). Basically what happened is that during the clean up operation in the years after the war, the local people (rightly so, after so many years of occupation) didn't have a lot of respect for the bodies of the soldiers, and so threw them in whatever they could find and buried them all together. The Germans didn't begin to help clean up the area until at least two years after the war, so that was a long time to be collecting bodies. The bronze plinths that surround the garden give the names of the soldiers as much as possible.

Our final stop before going back to Ypres was at Essex Farm Cemetery. This place is home to two particular items of interest - one of the youngest British casualties of war (aged just 15) and the location where the famous "In Flanders Fields" poem was written by the army doctor Major John McCrae. The medical bunkers where he worked are still there, along with the original sandbags. I think they're smaller than the German bunker we went into earlier that day, but at least these were at ground level and therefore they had a lot more light and seemed to be more open than the other one.

Finally we headed back to Ypres for a little more chocolate shopping. By this stage we'd eaten so much chocolate that we couldn't imagine getting our own waffles, so we split one between the three of us! We also bought these peculiar sweets, but I have no idea what they're called (it's not like I've forgotten in the six months since I went and haven't blogged about them, I don't think any of us ever actually knew the name of them). They were these odd conical-shaped things, a dark purple colour. We asked if we could try one between us - our favourite chocolatier was selling them - but he gave us one each. We walked down the street nibbling on them, trying to figure out why we recognised the taste. Eventually I realised they were just like Allens red frogs! Massively excited, we went back and bought yet more from this guy. He was our favourite person by that point after all the free samples he'd given us!

Eventually the time came for us to board the bus and head over the border to Lille, ready to catch the Eurostar to London. It had been an amazing weekend, and we were absolutely shattered. The hardest part though was yet to come - going to work on the Monday morning!!

Western Battlefronts

A few of us decided that this year we wanted to go somewhere for Anzac Day, seeing as we were close to so many places that were significant during the war. Our first thought was, of course, Gallipoli, but as that meant taking time off work, it wasn't realistic. We decided on a weekend trip to Belgium, to the Western Battlefronts.

We met up at St Pancras to catch the Eurostar to Lille in France, where we jumped on a bus and went over the border to Belgium. The weekend was going to be pretty busy, and as it was almost midnight when we arrived at the hostel in Messines, we decided against going to the pub with the rest of the tour group. We had to be up at 5am the next morning, and it wasn't something that we wanted to be exhausted for.

5am came waaaaay too early, but we were up and showering before the wake up door knocking commenced anyway. Our first item on the itinerary was the dawn service at Buttes Polygon Wood. This was the first time that they had held a dawn service for Anzac Day, and the first time that any of us had been somewhere so significant for it. Polygon Wood was the scene for a large part of the Battle of Passchendaele in World War 1. It was captured by the Australians in 1917, and was part of the push for Ypres and the Menin Road. The service was amazing. There wasn't a dry eye around, even from the boys who'd been out at the pub probably until we were just getting up. It was eerie as well. We were standing with our backs to a mass of identical white headstones, facing the butte itself with the memorial for the 5th Australian Division, who had captured the area. The cemetery is surrounded by the woods, which had been wiped out by the time the Australians arrived during the war. It was basically an area of mud and trenches at that time. There was very little sound, certainly no traffic, and the bugle sent shivers down our spines as it played the Last Post and Reveille.

We had time for a little wander around, but fairly quickly headed back to the bus after the service had finished. We made our way to the war museum in Zonnebeke. The tour had two buses - one for the Aussies and one for the Kiwis. We had been together for the dawn service and were staying with them for a few other things that morning, before splitting up and going to visit places that were slightly more personal for each country. We were at the museum because they were opening a new exhibit that day, a sculpture from a New Zealand artist. The mayor of the town spoke (not that we could really hear what he was saying), and then we took a tour through the museum. It even has trenches recreated underneath.

After the museum we wandered across the road, to have breakfast with the Australian Ambassador to Belgium and the head of the Australian Army in Western Europe. They were there to mark the first Anzac services being held in the region, and so met up with us for a few of the events. When breakfast was over we jumped on the bus and went to Tyne Cot, the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world.

This is a place that I don't think I'll ever forget. There are 12 000 graves there, and only about 3000 of them actually have identified bodies in them. It's literally a sea of graves, most of which you don't even see until you're halfway through the cemetery. We had very little time to look around when we first came in, as we were there for another service. It was different from the first one, in that this time it was daylight, and whilst the cemetery was still important in Australian history, it wasn't quite the same as Polygon Wood.


After this service had ended, we had a few minutes to look around, but then it was straight back on the bus. We were part of the official convoy, with the ambassador and Army guy, going to Ypres and then marching through the town up to the Menin Gate for another service. The Menin Gate is where the names of the missing soldiers from each of the allied forces during World War 1 are listed. There are nearly 55 000 names in total. There was another service there once we arrived, and again the bugle playing sent shivers up my spine.



We had the opportunity to go to a talk after the service there, but decided it was time to take a break and have some lunch. We wandered around Ypres, and eventually found a cafe. Before we settled down though, we did check out a few chocolate shops, and made plans to go back. The chocolate shops are unreal - they're so keen for your business that they offer free samples and gifts with purchases.

After lunch we boarded the bus back to Zonnebeke, as we were going to walk the Road to Passchendaele. This road, or path as it now is, is the route that the allied forces, including the Anzac corps, fought to gain control of during one of the final pushes of the war. It's a couple of miles in length, ending at Tyne Cot. Along the way are bunkers, with their sandbags intact, the remains of a railyway line where a soldier was discovered and identified a couple of years ago, and the remains of other trenches and bunkers spread out across various fields. It's interesting to see all of them still there. It's not as if they need reminders of what went on, there are plenty of cemeteries for that. And yet people have chosen to leave them in place, and open for tourists to come and look at.

This time we spent a lot more time at Tyne Cot. Our guide, Mark (most knowledgable guy EVER), took us through the cemetery and told us a few of the stories of particular graves and soldiers. There are 4 graves there belonging to Germans, which seems odd given the history of the area. However, they were discovered there during the clean up operation at the end of the war, and in the end they were left where they were found. The memorial that runs along the top entrance of the cemetery had a message on it that says something along the lines of 'we were enemies in war, now we will look after each other as friends'. It truly is awful to think of how many families never had a body to bury, and how many of those bodies never had a family to mourn them at their final resting place.

Eventually we made our way back to Ypres for dinner and for the 8pm playing of the Last Post. Every single night since the 2nd of July, 1928, the Last Post has been played there as a mark of respect. It was halted briefly during German occupation in World War 2, but it was played every night in England to compensate. The first night of freedom after the town had been occupied saw the service resume. We watched the service, had dinner, bought some chocolate and headed back to the bus to go back to our accommodation in Messines.

That night we decided that, despite being seriously shattered, we'd go up to the town and go to the pub. Never have I been in a situation which has seen me so seriously outnumbered by Kiwis, to the point that we were embarrassed. We were out-drunk and out-sung, but as a matter of principle, we made damn sure we were the last ones in the bar! I think it was about 3am before we left, and even then I had to drag the others out of a different bar on the way back to the hostel. They had decided they weren't finished drinking yet, but we walked in, were glared at by some unfriendly looking people, and I literally dragged them back out and home. It had been an amazing day, and such a long day, but we had another one to go before we went back to England.