Achill Debacle

So I was on Achill for awhile. Some people call their hometowns a vortex, but they're just exaggerating. Unless they're from Achill. It's an island off an island and even though I spent six weeks trapped there last year, I came crawling back again. Of course there's no internet, the buses run intermittently, and I wouldn't even be surprised if the newspapers reach there a day late. It's a great place if you want a break from the real world – and I really appreciate it for that – but, man, do you need to plan everything before you end up out there. The dates are from the 6^th through the 9^th.

***

*Old Friend, New Friends*

Getting a bus out to Achill is easy as pie, especially if you've done it a few times before. The only problem was that the only public toilet in Westport was closed, so I was in a pretty bad way before I even got on the final bus. The weather that morning in Galway was chilly and drizzling and I expected much the same up north, but Westport was like a blue hole. It was hot. It's always raining in Westport! So I buried my jacket in my backpack and wandered around taking pictures and looking for a bathroom before getting on the next bus.

The driver winked at me. I sighed because I already recognized him. He was the one that nearly left without us last year when my friend read the schedule wrong and we were at the pub. The whole town thought that was pretty funny. I recognized people on the bus. I already felt like I was entering a hole.

On the far end of Westport, an elderly lady flagged down the bus. "Sorry! I had to go to confessions!" she explained. "I had to go to confessions and they kept me there for an HOUR!" And then, as she walked through the aisles, possibly to no one in particular, "Them priests don't know what the hell they're talkin about!" I was suddenly glad I'd forgotten my headphones in my luggage. Ahhh, western Ireland.

The weather stayed nice and everything was peachy until we stopped at a schoolhouse and every kid on the island got on the bus. It was three to a seat in the back and standing room only everywhere else. They were nice enough kids, but in the way that all teenagers do, they had to shout at each other to communicate. I'm pretty sure people could hear that bus coming better than they'd hear a brigade of tanks.

I walked down to the fieldschool to meet Kate, my Canadian roommate from the fieldschool last year. She'd spent the summer working there this year and was about to move on to a different job somewhere in the Midlands. I met the rest of the new staff, including Ross the housemate of Kate and the field director at the school who I was staying with, and then we all went out to prepare for a beach barbecue. Yay beach party! Apparently, the weather had been crap all summer and it just cleared up right before I drove up. People were coming out of their houses to admire the view and breathe the air. It's nice that people can appreciate such little things.

The beach party was excellent, of course. We salvaged some washed up wood and turf for the fire and had kebabs and burgers and sausage and of course a lot of Guinness. Oh how I missed the ocean and drinking beer over conversations about archaeology.

*Happy Times*

The next day I hiked the long way around to the Deserted Village, where the dig is, to see what they'd done to my unit. The whole walk was gorgeous, and hot, and I took a bunch of pictures that now kind of all look alike. The house I'd been working on looks completely different, with the exception of a few stones that I'm intimately familiar with, after spending days measuring the corners and sketching. The fire pit I'd been working on is actually one of two fireplaces in the house, and a piece of stone with metal bits had been found toppled over, indicating it may have been a mantelpiece. Isn't that NEAT? I thought so.

Continuing the same direction, I took the back road to Dooagh which provided some gorgeous vistas that if I wasn't nearly about to pass out from hunger, I'd have lingered at the whole afternoon. Gielty's, the pub I practically lived at last year, was my goal for the afternoon, and I got there just in time to grab lunch and some (instant! When did they start that crap?) coffee and chat with Alan before meeting Ross to get a lift back. It turned out though, that we were going to have a few pints with a newish local at The Pub pub (Yeah, it's really just called 'The Pub') first. Did you know that the Irish government will fund film clubs? Ross is trying to get one going there. He'll get sent a few films a month and will show them at the fieldschool and people are going to arrange for a shuttle from other parts of the island. Does the American government do this? The way they were talking about it, it seemed common knowledge that one could get the government to send movies to watch with the town.

That night it was back to Gielty's to meet (for me) and re-meet (for everyone else) a professor from Cork and his archaeologist wife. They of course were friendly and incredibly knowledgeable, as all archaeologists seem to be. Plus, again like all archaeologists, they liked beer and bought everyone pints. That's how archaeology works in Ireland (and to some extent in the US, as well): you make connections and learn about other digs by meeting archaeologists at pubs and drinking many rounds.

That night I decided that since I need to use the internet, I'd combine the trip with the opportunity to meet with Jenn, another Canadian fieldschool survivor that now lives in Castlebar. I needed to book a room in Cork, figure out how to get down there, and maybe even work out a plane ticket to England. Besides, I'd only been through Castlebar on the bus; it'd be neat to see a new town. Kate was leaving the next day and Ross was driving her, but they were letting me stay an extra night so I could sort things out.

*May I Waste your Time, Too?*

What a colossal waste of time. I got out of bed and sneaked out of the house before Kate and Ross got up, so I didn't get to say goodbye to either of them, which was very disappointing. I needed to use the internet and I wanted to see my friend Jenn who lives in Castlebar, so I had to catch the 8:20 or 10:00 bus. I opted for the latter, as I figured Jenn wouldn't be awake either and that we would make an afternoon of it and I wouldn't need to get back to Achill until the evening. Well, I booked my room in Cork and wrote down the bus schedule for Sunday (8:35 from Achill, 10:15 Westport to Athlone, 1430 to Cork) in about twenty minutes. At that point, I could have caught the next bus to Achill and have been back in time to go for a hike, sit on the beach and then wander over to Gielty's to watch the soccer and have a few pints. But I waited for Jenn to get back to me, which she did… at three-thirty. Two hours after that bus had left. And she said she couldn't make it into town. Well, hell. So then I had to waste an afternoon wandering around Castlebar – the highlights include a Dunne's and a Tesco – and didn't get on the bus until 5:30. A small relief though, the bus driver didn't normally do that route and seemingly forgot to do the rest of the island, which was great for those of us heading all the way to Dooagh, since it cut an hour off of the journey time; hope no one was waiting to catch the bus in Dugort, though!

So a twenty-minute errand took over ten hours. That's life in Achill for ya. I got to Gielty's just in time for the Ireland-Slovakia game, but the place was really quiet. I chatted a bit with one of the servers who had worked there last year (the look on her face when I walked in was hilarious – so confused!), but otherwise I sat drinking my Guinness and watching the game. I tried to text Tim back home, but the message wouldn't send and then I somehow managed to lock the phone, rendering it useless until I got the pin # from my room. No one talked to me, which was ok until the soccer turned to shit and Slovakia kept getting shots on goal. Then Slovakia came back and tied it in stoppage time and I was furious. Can't anything go right? I nursed my drink until I decided that it was late enough that the field school students probably weren't going to show up, so I shook Alan's hand and started the three mile trek in the dark. By the time I got back to the empty house I was thoroughly depressed. No one to talk to! My phone wasn't working, I was on an island in the middle of nowhere, there's no internet access, I didn't have enough minutes to call home, blahblahblah. I went to bed early so that I could get up in time to walk back to Keel (two miles or so) to catch the 8:30 bus.

*Why We Call it "Achilltraz"*

There's no Sunday morning bus off Achill. There really is no escape! It seems that everyone except the bus company knows that there's no bus on Sunday mornings. An old man dressed in the standard attire of jacket-over-sweater, with wool cap pulled down informed me of this after I stood around the area in front of the store that serves as a bus stop.

"Good marning!" he says, after I greeted him. "You're not waitin fer de bus, are ye?"

"Yeah, I am, it's supposed to be—"

"No! Dare's nooooo bus on Sunday! Dare's one at four o'clock. It goes ta Galway. Dare'll be people wanderin inta da store here soon - you should enquire wit dem." (Funny, written down, the Mayo accent looks like a Jamaican one.)

Devastation! What do I do now? If the only bus leaves at four, there's no WAY I'll make it to Cork tonight. I'll have to find a place in Westport or Galway, but they seemed to fill up really quickly last week. I guess I could stay another night here, but I feel I've already overstayed my welcome and Ross is coming back tonight anyway and I don't think he wants to find some bum still in his house. Staying here is definitely a last resort option.

It being Sunday, the store was still closed at nine, so I wandered down to the beach to sit and calm down and look up phone numbers from my travel book. No internet access meant that I had to actually call and talk to people. Unfortunately, I then discovered that my phone had only 80 cents on it. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. I shouldn't have been surprised, really, what with how the past two days had been going. I formulated a few plans of attack, and pushed sand around into little smooth piles until ten when I went back to the store. I bought some frozen spaghetti and "Club Orange" fizzy drink, and a phone top-up. What a stupid day so far. It's only 1015!

*Is My Luck Changing?*

I glumly trudged back towards the house, four miles in a useless roundtrip, topping off my phone along the way. As I walked, thinking frantically how I was going to work the next few hours, a car pulled over and the reversed back towards me. The couple from UCC! "Would you like a lift?" she asked. "I would love a lift!" I chirped, and then hopped into the back seat. They said they would have taken me all the way to Cork, but they're stopping in Westport and Galway and wouldn't be arriving for a day or two. This is where I should have asked for a lift to Westport or Galway, so I could catch the train or bus down to Cork and everything would have worked itself out, but I'm an idiot, so I didn't. I was grateful enough for the lift to the house as it was, and they certainly empathized with the bus schedule snafu.

As I cooked my frozen spaghetti meal I called a hostel in Westport, fully expecting to be turned down, or at the very least, offered a four-bed private room which I could never afford. "Och, we have loads of beds!" Well, that took care of that. Then I rang the hostel in Cork to let them know that I wouldn't be coming tonight. "Ok, no problem. See you tomorrow!" What the hell, this is becoming easy! I may even get in a hike today, since that's really all I've wanted to do these past few days as it is.

The day turned out alright, though. The weather cleared up again, so I walked down to the far end of Keel beach that I hadn't been to. I deliberately left my camera behind. I wanted to experience the walk and the beach for myself, not for my digital film. Besides, while my camera could have shown you the gorgeous green-blue of the water, and the bright green terraced hills that rose straight up from the beach with sheep clinging impossibly on them, it wouldn't have been able to capture just how frigid the water was or how nice the breeze smelled. There was hardly anyone there, either, save for an old man in a tweed suit who was riding an old bicycle. There were lots of these kinds of men along the way and they all greeted me with "hawaya" which I've figured out is "how are you" which really means "hello." On the way back I realized a tractor had pulled up to where the road turns into rocks and hits the cliff walls. In front of the tractor a man with a wild, dark beard and hair stood, wearing a sweater that matched his tractor. He was just breathing in the view, himself, a man who lives here presumably full time. Again, it's good to see the local appreciate what they have. Hawaya, he said as I passed.

The four o'clock bus arrived when it was supposed to, just as the weather changed for the worst. There were ominous dark clouds suddenly in every direction and the wind caused me to put both jackets on. The driver had the radio tuned to an inter-county hurling match. Those Irish announcers could make golf exciting! Transcribed, the announcer's words wouldn't have any spaces between them, and everything would be capitalized. I wondered how he was even getting breaths in.

Westport was pretty boring, since I got there so late. I like the town and all, but I was tired and just wanted a burger from Cozy Joe's (is it sad that I have to travel halfway round the world to get a decent burger?) but they were out. Pooh. So I ate the curry and watched the first half of Ireland slaughtering Namibia in rugby.

*Last Tricks from the Vortex*

The bus to Cork wasn't labeled until I asked about it. The bus driver couldn't understand my accent. We stopped in Galway and he then turned the bus off. Why, if the bus isn't really going to Cork, would the bus say it was going to Cork? The driver said another bus would be leaving at half eleven. This would have given me enough time to get food, but I hung around for a few minutes and sure enough, the bus left at five after instead. The bus was completely crammed and the driver started telling people getting on, "Shannon ONLY!" and I figured I'd be stranded at the airport after yet another change of plans. Miraculously, we got into Cork at three-thirty or so, which added up to about seven hours of bus time for me.