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The Derry Girls, Buses and Hostelling

Lesley, who grew up in n or there Ireland, said that if I wanted to understand what it was like living in Ireland during “The Troubles,” I should watch the Netflix series, “The Derry Girls.” I am beginning to get a taste of it and it’s made me realize why the holdout in areas where the local bus stops are only posted in Irish and I can’t make out what folks are saying, not because the brogue is thick, but because they are speaking Irish. And why would I expect them to speak English, conforming to a Crown they resent subjugating them? I took the bus to Coleraine and the train to Derry/Londonderry. It was kind of kooky how many times I took the bus past the Giant’s Causeway for just a few euros - for example, I had to go into the nearby tower where the Bushmills’ Distillery is, traveling along the spectacular coastline. Had I been driving, I would likely have had only one chance to pass by and would have been half-focused on driving. Actually, I probably would have been fully focused on driving as I have been driving on the right side of the road not the left for fifty years and only a momentary lapse in attention could have meant a head-on collision. I don’t need that kind of stress. The train ride to Londonderry was also spectacular, running along the coast, often only ten feet from the beach. It hardly even seemed that it was possible high tide wouldn’t flood it.





Bus stops photo
The MLink timetable was just plain wrong. The train runs every two hours from Coleraine to Donegal on Sundays. The train station does have a coffee shop though.



The walls of Derry, renamed Londonderry by the Crown in the 1600s but clearly not roundly accepted as the town still goes by both names, Derry and Londonderry. They are among the best-preserved city walls in Europe. My photos aren’t too impressive. Trust me. They look like walls. Eight meters high and nine meters thick, the limestone and sandstone quarried locally of course. You can walk the full circuit and that seems to be. A popular Sunday afternoon activity according to a couple I met on the bus that shuttles you from the bus station to the train station. By the way, keep your train ticket no one came around on the train to view because you won’t get into the train station and out to the street without it. Exit the station, cross the street and hop on the free shuttle taking you to the train station. The walls surrounding the city were built by the Irish Society during the Plantation of Ulster, a colonization program carried out in the early 1600s after the defeat of the Gaelic lords in the Nine Years’ War organized by the English Crown under King James I to gain control of Ulster. He gave land to wealthy English and Scottish landlords, to soldiers as a reward for their service and to the London Guilds who managed the new city of Londonderry.  The walls were built  to defend the new English and Scottish settlers in the city against attackers from the native Irish as you can imagine this didn’t go over so well with the locals. In 1689, another war broke out here, the Williamite War, when these Protestant settlers rejected James II’s efforts to make the nation Catholic. The Protestant citizens closed the gate against James’ forces, shouting “No surrender.” They were sealed in for 105 days during which time things became pretty bleak as one might imagine with no food or medical help. This conflict, known as the Siege of Londonderry mirrored the Williamite-Jacobite conflict across Britain and Europe.

The Peace Bridge appears as skewed as the photo I took, roughly S-shaped, as the axes on the respective river banks aren’t aligned. The overlap of two halves of steel in the middle was intended as a symbolic handshake across the River Foley, representing reconciliation between communities historically divided by sectarian conflict. 

I had wanted to check out the city for murals. It’s not like matters between the English and the Irish, between the Protestants and the Catholics settled down. By the 1960s, Derry had a Catholic majority population, but once again, through corrupt measures, Protestants controlled the local government. Inspired by the US civil rights movement, Catholics in Derry organized peaceful marches in protest, but these were banned or worse, attacked by the police. A major altercation occurred inn the Catholic Bogside neighborhood in 1969 and the British Army was deployed. The protest continued and on January 309, 1972, known as Bloody Sunday, British soldiers opened fire, killing 14 unarmed protestors. This drove many Catholics into supporting or joining the IRA. Derry really was Ground Zero for “The Troubles.” Emotions run so strong here, I expected them to be powerful, but if I missed my bus to Donegal, there might not be another. 


Derry/Londonderry city center.


This pub predates the Siege.                                                                                                                                                                            

If you are traveling by bus, you should buy a Leap Card from TFI, the Transportation for Ireland. I bought mine online from the US and it was mailed promptly, so that I received it within a week. I’m not sure what to say about the bus lines with any certainty. Yes, the bus schedules are published and yes, google maps and ChatGPT will give you a pretty good idea of their schedules and pickup places, but my take, bottom line is that the bus drivers rule. If they say they won’t accept the Leap Card you have loaded up with money and which works much like a credit card when you tap it, well, then you’ll have to come up with a credit card or sometimes, cash. Carry smaller denominations for shorter rides. The advantage of the Leap Card if you’ve got it loaded is that it will reduce your fare by one-third. It will work on the longer Expressway buses as a form of payment, but you won’t get a discount on those, so I’d use the credit card as you need a good internet connection and a credit card that isn’t going to require authentication you may not be able to get of they only send their OTP via text and you’ve got an eSIM which is incompatible with your cell phone carrier. Verizon and Saily don’t mix and I’ll be switching carriers when I return to the US. The other caveat to watch out for is that when you load your Leap Card and it says confirmed, that’s not the end of the story. Yes, you’ve transferred money to TFI, but you’ve got to scan your Leap Card a second time to actually get it on to the card.

ChatGPT told me to get change in euros in small denominations in Derry, before I re-entered Ireland from Northern Ireland in case the bus drivers demanded cash. I wasn’t paying close enough attention and received change for a 50 euro note in pounds, which were worthless to me at that point, so I had to spend my change from the grocery store. The bus fare from Donegal to Ardara was twenty pounds, so I bought a six-pack of Guinness which was silly as it proved heavy to carry and being a stout, it’s a heavy drink to polish off quickly. I only had enough time in Derry to see the walls and the Peace Bridge, and chat with a couple local ladies who’d been waiting for the bus for a few hours as it truly is a bit unpredictable no matter what the schedules say. It’s safer to just sit there as your bus could show up at any time… and the other bus drivers, no matter how confidently they advise you, often dispense misinformation. Sundays are particularly tricky days to travel. Several locals have expressed that they don’t understand the rationale of fewer rides to remote places on the weekends and holidays as that is exactly when everyone wants to travel to and from the cities. It’s only in the past few years that Ireland has made the superlative effort of connecting remote places to the bus grid. A lot of the local links are smaller vans rather than large buses not only because the population is smaller, but because many of the roads are narrow and winding. I have been on many buses where cars must pull off and even back up along pretty scary roadscapes, like the edges of cliffs. The telephone numbers of local link drivers are available as they don’t necessarily run regularly, so you can schedule a pickup, sometimes in front of your house. Having cell service is a definite plus for this reason alone if you can understand the accent. For some reason, everyone could understand mine. I wondered if it was because I sound slow and stupid. A fellow at a pub in Belfast laughed heartily when I asked him if he could understand me as I was asking him to repeat each sentence and  said, “Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I can understand you.” So I asked ChatGPT what Americans sound like to foreigners. To me,  most American tourists sound self-entitled, demanding and I want to run and hide. ChatGPT says we sound nasal - surely that’s just New Yorkers and northeasterners, maybe those from the Midwest… not me? That our “Rs” sound hard and rough. I get that. No one else seems to pronounce Rs with any real definition. Here they sound more like H’s, if they are articulated at all. And we drag out some of our vowels. It didn’t say anything about sounding like morons, but then I have found ChatGPT to be diplomatic to the point of patronizing.  “Good question,” he often says, when I know in my heart what I was asking was elementary.



Killybegs. I passed through this port town a couple times and was captivated by the charm of the boats.


Often these screens on the bus alternate to show the stops in English or Irish, but sometimes they are simply in Irish.

The bus ride to Ardara was beautiful, although the bus driver was more than a mite cranky. There’s a sign on the bus telling passengers not to talk to the driver. Nonetheless a woman stood next to the driver, chatting with him for quite awhile. I thought maybe it was his wife until he suddenly slammed on the brakes, causing my backpack to fly against the seat in front of me and the woman to smash into the dash of the bus. He yelled, “Get out!” As he opened the door.

She was rubbing her elbow and looking dismayed as we pulled away. So, not sure what happened there, but I kept my head down and arrived in this one-horse town in the early evening. I was by this time, with the exception of my stay at Whitepark Bay hostel, finding Ireland more expensive than I anticipated. Part of it was because there are not hostels in the more remote areas, though I must say that the Wild Atlantic Way, the 1500 mile road around the west and southwest coast I was roughly following, is wildly popular with tourists and could probably support more than there are, at least in the summer months. 



So in Ardara I booked a bed and breakfast. I liked mine because I liked the woman who ran it, Louise. She was very conscientious, especially about providing a full Irish breakfast, which I indulged in at the beginning of my trip because it was included in my price, but which I had to back off from because it means an awful lot of processed meat and that doesn’t make my stomach happy. She was a lovely lady and trying very hard, but all of the bread along with beans and three different meats, potatoes and eggs, juice, jam and tea, well, my stomach is not that large and I don’t want it to be.

Something happens to you after you get used to staying in hostels. There’s a mind shift and you don’t understand why you should pay so much for a bed to sleep in. Hostels usually have a pretty entertaining crowd of fellow travelers, are artsy, comfy and laid back. You have access to the kitchen when you want it. Louise had hers locked when she wasn’t home. She did provide a hot water warmer in the room and a pitcher of water, but I wanted a fridge and a table on my own schedule. Still, you do have privacy, even if it’s just a small bedroom, and you can usually rely on a clean bathroom and towels. As you can imagine, hostels often don’t provide towels for drying your hands or stepping out from the shower on as they only get soaked and are breeding grounds for fungus and disease. Sometimes the showers are cramped spaces and not necessarily comfortably clean by the time you get in there. And it’s a toss of dice whether you’ll get hot water. Too, many of them dispense water in five to ten second squirts. And there aren’t always hooks to hang your stuff. And if there are shelves outside of the showers themselves and it’s a communal space, there’s no guarantee that every available space won’t be covered with wet rain gear sodden cyclists are trying to dry. Sometimes you just wish things were a little more accommodating. And that you didn’t have to be quiet in your room even in the middle of the day because someone is sleeping, or that you weren’t irritated with the girl chatting on her phone and someone turning on the bright overhead light when you’d like to be sleeping. 

In Lisdoonvarna, the night of the matchmaking festival four ladies came stumbling in, in the wee hours sloppyu drunk. One of them was up most of the night wandering around, calling out, “Mary! Mary” in a loud grating voice, long after Mary had fallen asleep, ignoring her. 

Before them, I had thought the worst roommates were girls in their twenties who came in drunk and loud and hung out sick over the toilet, but I’ve revised my prejudice to believing the worst roommates are those selfsame girls twenty-five years later. 

I often stay in mixed dorms as I don’t really care about the modesty factor. What matters most is whether someone snores loudly. And guys don’t take as much time in the shared bathrooms. The morning after Lisdoonvarna I compared war stories with once of my roommates. What was her worst experience? And it was having a roommate who walked in his sleep and pissed on her bed. There’s an advantage to a top bunk. And not hitting your head, which you’d be surprised how often you forget that hazard of having a lower bunk.

Too, when I arrive late in the night when everyone else is slumbering and I have to be quiet, sometimes I just feel like screaming.