The last three weeks we have been whizzing about learning even more new things:
Atlanta Airport at 10 am is not crowded and is very efficient. The immigration people were pleasant and friendly!
Boston airport later in the day is different. One should not say, “That is bloody ridiculous,” when ordered by a security person to remove one’s handkerchief from one’s pocket before going through a metal detector. One’s wife was also not happy about one’s response.
Iceland sits on the edges of two big tectonic plates thus the big cracks in the ground, thermal activity, and volcanoes that like causing airlines problems.
Twenty years on from our last visit Dublin is still scruffy around the edges. The pavements have lots of traces of spilt liquids and cigarette butts. There are plenty of street sleepers and old pissed guys talking to themselves.
Belfast is similar but the accent is harder to deal with and they have a big wall to separate the the two tribes. I didn’t know they still lock gates in it at night.
In Northern Ireland you can make a reasonable living milking 130 cows.
When you are driving on the wrong side of the road it is possible to smash the passenger side wing mirror on a roadside pole without doing any panel damage. I would rather have not learnt that – it rather spoilt our first day in the Faroe Islands and cost a lot.
The starting point for working out how expensive things are there is to double NZ prices and then begin adding more.
Edinburgh during its Festival is crazy. But it has a tramway from the airport right into the middle of the city. How civilized. Why can’t Auckland do the same?
The Orkney Islands are mostly flat and the local buses drive very fast.
Viking era drains can still work.
The shortest scheduled air flight in the world is between the islands of Papa and Westray in the Orkneys, and we timed it at 1 minute 18 seconds. You can watch it take off on one island and land on the other.
We left Mexico City early one dark morning and arrived in Dublin after a night in Iceland, and were in need of a little lie down. I had done something new which was to book my first airbnb accommodation there. The instructions were to pick up the key from Connor at a nearby bar in the Smithfield area. It was about 2 in the afternoon so I went to the bar, which wasn’t open. I executed a series of knockings and kicks on the 3 doors and eventually a young guy appeared who wasn’t Connor and knew nothing about a key. After 3 phone calls he found it and we got into a quite nice modern apartment which had an extremely uncomfortable bed. I can sleep on most surfaces and under a towel, which allowed Kay to fold the duvet in half and cover the sensation of being assaulted by multiple springs. After two nights we bussed into new territory, Northern Ireland, starting in Belfast. I think it is compulsory to do the black taxi tour and view all the public displays of how to make sure the violent years are not forgotten. So we did it and on a lesser scale it was a bit like going to Auschwitz, in that you know all about it, have seen all the photos and TV programs, and yet actually seeing it is more worrying than I thought. All the memorials and murals are basically glorification of a conflict that each side justifies by pointing at what the others did. I think it can be simplified as a conflict between colonisers and the colonised with an overlay of religion and nationalism. It has gone on since the 1600s and still isn’t finished. The mural that I found the most disturbing was a Unionist one promoting the wonderful Stephen “Top Gun” McKeag who was the person with the highest score of killings of Catholics. One is tempted to say it is so stupid, but of course that doesn’t help. Just after we left there was a stabbing incident while one side was annoying the other with provocative bonfires. Segregated schooling helps perpetuate the situation, although it seems the common ground of the city centre becoming an entertainment area, and integrated tertiary education are promoting some mutual understanding. But to an outsider it looks like the people who are involved in the provocations are neither well educated or responsive to reason.
When we left Belfast for a few days drive around we had lunch in Enniskillen with two couples, two of them being distant relations of mine. Of the men one was the 130 cow dairy farmer, and the other was a retired policeman who had been in the old RUC and the new integrated police force. He took us for a tour before lunch and slowed by a nice peaceful park, pointed out the station he used to work in about 300m away, and then motioned at the park and explained that was where a mortar attack on the police station came from during the troubles.
There are quite a few of you who like fancy whisky and by coincidence we stayed right beside Jamesons in Dublin, and very close to Bushmills in the north. I had a quick look in the former and saw a lot of smiling noisy people, but I wasn’t tempted. Our next stop was Edinburgh and the airport duty free had about ten different wines, and hundreds of local whiskies. We had a night in Edinburgh to go to the amazing Tattoo and wander in the madness of the Festival. I would leave town for the duration if I lived there but it was fun just being on the streets. On the way out to the Faroe Islands flight I bought a couple of unknown wines at the airport which turned out to be a wise financial move.
The Faroe Islands landscape is dramatic and treeless. Driving our soon-to-be trimmed hire car the 50km into Tórshavn was an experience because of the very different scenery, and also the tension of driving on the wrong side of the road through very long tunnels with not much lighting in them. The longest (11km) tunnels go under the sea between islands and seem to be never ending when you are the driver. Navigator Kay didn’t enjoy the delights of getting in and out of the old part if Tórshavn where we stayed. We got quite good at the out bit after four days, but never really nailed getting in. We drove around four of the islands and saw lots of waterfalls, cute little villages, houses with grass roofs, lots of big fishing boats, and heaps of scenery. The roads are either wide and good or very skinny with lots of small passing bays. Pulling into one of these on the edge of a switchback up a very steep hill is no fun. The hills are green because of grass growing, and there are plenty of small sheep wandering about. Occasionally things get less steep and hay was being made with pitchforks or funny little hand pushed tedders. But agriculture is a sideline to the major industry which is fishing. These guys are serious players with lots of big fishing ships and each little village has a harbour with some sort of processing plant. They also farm salmon on a large scale, and a report I read suggested there are a few seriously rich people in the fishing industry who have a lot of clout with the government. The Faroes are nominally part of Denmark but that only applies to defence, the legal system, and foreign affairs. Currently they are annoying Denmark by trading significantly with Russia (salmon) in defiance of the EU sanctions. They do not belong to the EU so are happy to go where the money is.
The local people are descended from the Vikings and are not exactly smiley friendly, but not grumpy. There are 52,000 of them and they produce a football team that occasionally beats a continental team.
From there it was back to Edinburgh and on to the Orkney Islands. Flying in there it looked very flat and covered in little paddocks of grass and about to be harvested crops, and lots of solid houses. On the ground it was a bit undulating but completely different from the Faroes. The people were friendlier and the local bus system relieved us of the need for a car. We did the main archeological sites and now know that Norse people built houses there 6000 years ago, well before Stonehenge and the pyramids. We did a ferry ride out to an island called Westray and had a lovely day looking at local stuff, including the Viking drains that still work. We also stood on the edge of very high cliffs, in strong winds, and peered over the edge to see nesting gannets. Unfortunately the last of the puffins had flown away a few days before.
People in Orkney have strong Norse heritage and several mentioned that if brexit happens they should leave the UK and join Norway. Everyone in the UK we talked to is heartily sick of the brexit disaster. If I owned a farm on the Scottish isles I would be worried as they have no ability to exist without the large subsidies they get. Although they have been promised these won’t change after brexit, no one I spoke to has any confidence about that. We listened to one Boris supporter but most are skeptical about him. Interestingly very few people seem to appreciate the financial costs of leaving.
Leaving Orkney involved the most inefficient and aggravating security check ever. Kay is usually telling me to behave in such places, but she laughed in a rather cynical way when the guy did his interminable routine with her. We think he missed out on being a school prefect and was now extracting revenge.
We are presently on a train in Wales heading for my sister Ruth’s place for a couple of nights, and then Kay heads home and I head east for a few weeks. We arrived in Cardiff to the Wales v Poms rugby which we watched in a pub where earlier we watched the ABs do good things. The centre of the city was a big party after their victory and it was good to be able to talk about something familiar. Everyone thinks the ABs will win the World Cup. I am far from certain.