Go Challenge: We asked four of our writers to see if they could travel for three days on a tight budget. Carl O'Brienand Rosita Bolandstayed in Ireland. Brian O'Connelland Frank McNallywent abroad
Bus north, save it, blow it
BUS. THAT’S my €200 brief. Three days somewhere in Ireland, by bus. After an urban summer I’m craving the western seaboard, wind-blasted remoteness and walking on beaches. Donegal is my destination.
A McGinley coach (€20) drops me in Dunfanaghy village late afternoon, and I’m afraid my attention is initially less on the wild green scenery than on my stomach. The Starfish cafe is out of soup, so I have a delicious but measly piece of spinach quiche for €4.50, and I’m still hungry.
At Ramsay’s, a lovely old grocery-cum-hardware-store where I stock up on provisions, a kind woman opens a bag to sell me loose potatoes. Then it’s a walk of three kilometres in the rain out the horribly busy road to Corcreggan Mill Hostel, frequently diving for the soggy verges. I’ve been instructed not to hitch, but, with the erratic driving, walking along the road seems far more dangerous.
The hostel lacks atmosphere and, overseen by temporary caretakers, appears to me to be neglected and gloomy: overflowing bins in the kitchen, missing light bulbs and a bathroom door that sticks infuriatingly. For €30 I’m offered a weird room without bathroom that has no direct access: you enter via a dormitory. I take it. When you’re travelling by bus in rural Ireland you don’t have getaway choices.
The outstanding asset about the place is Tramore Beach, a half-hour walk across fields and dunes. You don’t see it until you’re almost there, and then this vast, savagely gorgeous and utterly deserted curved beach slams into vision like a gale-force wind. It’s a world-class view. I walk it end to end twice.
That evening I cook dinner and share stories and my bottle of wine with two other hostellers, Gwen, who’s French, and Lesley, who’s American. Gwen is camping, and she’s on such a tight budget that her food for the next day’s long walk around Horn Head is three windfallen apples and pasta with a sauce of powdered tomato soup.
Lesley is dead keen for us to share a taxi to Dunfanaghy (€5 each direction) to listen to trad music in a bar over a pint. This will blow my budget. It’s a miserable realisation. In the end, none of us goes. We light a fire and talk over tea when the one bottle of wine runs out.
I wake twice in the night, cold, in my strange little room, with its thin duvet and broken blind.
Next morning I return to Tramore Beach and again walk it twice, inspecting a dead seal that the tide has brought in. Birds hover overhead impatiently, waiting for me to leave.
In the afternoon I walk back into Dunfanaghy and catch Feda O’Donnell’s bus to Ballyshannon (€10). Although I talk by phone to three people at Heron’s Cove, a “restaurant with rooms” on the road to Rossnowlagh that I’m staying at that evening, nobody seems to know how long it takes to walk out from where a bus will drop me. They suggest taking a taxi from Ballyshannon. It appears people who travel by bus don’t usually stay at Heron’s Cove.
The signpost to Rossnowlagh says nine kilometres when I walk in from the main road. I disobey my editor. I hitch-hike. In fact Heron’s Cove turns out to be only about four kilometres from Ballyshannon. I could easily have walked it.
My deal is room, dinner and breakfast for €89. The room is small but pleasant. What surprises me is that, even though four management people now know I’ve arrived with my rucksack by bus, walking and hitching, and this fairly remote place has only 10 rooms, not one person asks where I’ve come from or how long I’m travelling, or shows a scrap of interest in how I’m enjoying Donegal.
This experience is costing me almost half my budget, but it wouldn’t cost management anything to extend a warm verbal welcome. This annoys me tremendously.
Heron’s Cove is not on the beach. Rossnowlagh is six kilometres away, and it’s now 6pm. When I ask directions for an alternative walk, I get an excellent suggestion. It’s three or four kilometres to Creevy Pier, which is a staggeringly beautiful walk along a green-spined road that passes through a cross section of Irish history: ruined thatched cottages, the abandoned walled orchard of an old landlord estate, bungalows and empty new holiday houses. I can see beaches in the distance, the ocean glitters, the fields glow green. It’s glorious.
In the restaurant I’m presented with a menu with prices. What? They know I’m staying here. What about the deal I booked? The waitress makes a fuss about going off to check what I can and can’t have from the menu, and by the time she comes back and tells me what I already know – that dinner from the menu is included – I’m grumpy.
Next morning I take some brown bread from breakfast to make sandwiches for lunch with the last of my cheese, as I know I’m going to go over budget.
It takes 45 minutes to walk to Ballyshannon, and I catch a Bus Éireann service (€19.50) back to Dublin. I do the sums, and I’m over budget. I blame the quiche in Dunfanaghy. Way overpriced. Ironically, the best parts of my trip – walking along Tramore Beach and out to Creevy Pier – were free.
RB
The damage
Bus fares €49.50
Cafe lunch €4.50
Hostel €30
Groceries €23.81
Heron's Cove €89
Glass of wine €6
Total €202.81
Rosita Boland stayed at Corcreggan Mill Hostel (Corcreggan, Dunfanaghy, Co Donegal, 074-9136409, corcreggan.com) and Heron’s Cove (Creevy, Co Donegal, 071-9822070, heronscove.ie)
Fly south, camp, surf and surrender
IT WAS AT about 3.30am on a rainswept Tuesday that the downside to holidaying in Ireland on €200 arrived with a vengeance. The water bounced off the roof of the tent in an incessant drumbeat; it lapped against the side of the tent; it gathered in a pool and soaked my clothes. I could have sworn the tent was bobbing at one stage.
Camping can be fun. At least it looks that way in those sun-drenched photographs of immaculate French camping resorts. But The Irish Times'sludicrously small budget meant the closest I could get to the Continent was a soggy campsite in west Cork.
“It’ll be great!” the travel editor had gushed before I left. “Camping, the great outdoors, the Gulf Stream, tropical microclimates. You’ll have a ball. I’m quite jealous, actually.”
As I put on my damp jeans and squelched across the campsite the rain pelted down even harder. I could feel water soaking into my shoes. It dribbled down my face. I might have been crying at this stage. It was hard to tell.
I considered phoning the office to drown the travel editor in a torrent of expletives. I figured it would make me feel better. But my wet phone had given up the ghost. Instead I just sulked and counted down how many hours I’d left to endure.
The trip had started in high spirits. On a Monday afternoon I hopped on a €35 Ryanair flight from Dublin to Cork to meet up with my old school friends Rory and Paul. The plan was to head to the west of the county to camp, take surfing lessons and sink a few pints.
A bus from the airport to west Cork would have cost about €27 return, but I was able to bag a lift from Paul. He is a man for all seasons. Raincoats, torches, dry wood for a fire, wetsuit, waterproof trousers. You name it, he had it. I, on the other hand, am a cosseted media crybaby. I forgot to bring togs, a towel or wellies. At least I had a tent, even if it brought me perilously close to breaching Ryanair’s luggage allowance.
We set off on the road filled with images of lazy summer evenings outside whitewashed pubs. In a rush of giddy optimism I even bought a disposable barbecue (€6), garish beach towel (€10) and togs (€15).
Barleycove, our destination, is about a two-hour drive from the city. Just outside the charming village of Crookhaven, it hugs the Mizen Peninsula, Ireland’s most southwesterly point, and is the setting for one of our most stunning beaches.
My childhood memories are of cloudless August days on the beach, basking in the warm glow of summer.
By the time we arrived it was hard to make out where exactly the beach was, what with the windscreen wipers going full blast, the mist rolling over the hillside and the low clouds.
Some things never change, though. Camping is still by far the cheapest form of accommodation. Barleycove Holiday Park charges €15 per night for a couple and €20 per night for a family, including parking and showers.
Despite the rain we were determined to make the most of it. We headed off to the beach to boogie-board and generally flap around in the waves. The sea was scrotum-tighteningly cold; getting out of the water and into the drizzle was colder still.
The only respite was a packed O’Sullivans bar, in the heart of Crookhaven village. A young guitarist in the corner belted out some tunes, accompanied by a raucous crowd of locals, holiday-homers and sorry-looking campers. The price of pint was a wallet-friendly €4.30, which was cause for cheer. But then it rained. And rained and rained and rained.
By morning a mini lake had formed around the tents. Children splashed and raced their bikes through it, whooping with delight. It was probably a sight to gladden the most cheerless of hearts. But by that stage any sense of goodwill I had towards humanity had drained away.
We beat a retreat to Clonakilty, booking into O’Donovan’s, an old hotel still in the hands of the original family after some six generations. With its comfortable beds and warm showers it was like arriving in the promised land. It came at a price, though. Fifty euro a night might ordinarily be good value, but it shattered my €200 budget.
Needless to say, it was raining the next morning, but it didn’t matter. We were going surfing. We booked two-hour beginners’ lessons (€35) at West Cork Surf School, on the sandy beach of Inchdoney. The gentle slope of the shoreline is ideal for beginner and intermediate surfers.
Gulping and snorting saltwater aside, it was exhilarating fun. And almost enough to banish the blues. But no matter how you dress it up, or whether you can turn a blind eye to the hardship, a short break on an Irish campsite on €200 isn’t a holiday. It’s a penance.
CO’B
The damage
Dublin-Cork return flight €35
Airport-west Cork bus €27
Campsite €15
Hotel €50
Surfing lesson €35
Towel €10
Togs €15
Disposable barbecue €6
Food and drink €40
Total €233
Carl O’Brien stayed at Barleycove Holiday Park (Crookhaven, Skibbereen, Co Cork, 028- 35302) and O’Donovan’s Hotel (Pearse Street, Clonakilty, Co Cork, 023-8833250, odonovans hotel.com)
Ferry to Wales, then sing for your supper
THE DOZEN or so foot passengers waiting to be allowed on to Irish Ferries' Thursday- morning crossing to Wales from Rosslare included a strange mix of broken Irish and English accents, string-tied suitcases and single fathers with bored adolescents.
Perhaps for some, despite the advent of cheap airfares, there is still a loyalty to ferry travel, from the days when Paddy took the boat en masse. One group passed a bottle of Jameson around, others played cards or opened foil-wrapped sandwiches. Even the name of the ship, Isle of Inishmore, had a certain uncomfortable Irishness to it.
So with €140 left after paying for the ferry, Budget Brian took to Pembrokeshire, the birthplace of Tudor England – and, er, that was about all I knew of my mini-break destination. Far more pressing was the fact that I had little more than €40 a day to get around, eat and sleep. And it's not as if someone with a voice like mine can sing for his supper in a country full of singers.
Pembroke Dock struck me as the UK's version of Patras, in Greece, a place you go to only to get somewhere else. I had no itinerary or accommodation and hadn't given bus or rail timetables a cursory glance. There's only one thing to do when you land in a place like this, with little money
and no research. Find the nice man.
As I considered my options at a tourist-information stand in the terminal I happened to ask one of the staff, who turned out to be terminal manager Paddy Walsh, how far the town centre was and where I could spend the night.
I couldn't have asked a better person. Walsh and his wife, Maria, have a wonderful guest house called Flemish Court in St Florence, 10km away. She could offer bed and breakfast for £25 (€28.50), less than her usual rate of £30 (€35).
I booked over the phone and got a plan from the tourist office of how to get there and what sights I should see before making my way to St Florence.
But first I needed a cheap lunch, so I went to Browns Snack Bar, a fish-and-chip shop on the main street in Pembroke. The owner, Constance Brown, is 102 years old and still works behind the counter every day. Lunch was served by her great-granddaughter, Megan.
Then I walked a few hundred metres to Pembroke Castle (entrance £3.50/€4), just in time for a tour (£1/€1.15). The guide was called Linda Gray, and I was half-tempted to tell her she should have stuck it out at Southfork, especially after hearing the tribulations of the castle's past inhabitants.
The castle was the birthplace of Henry Tudor, who became King Henry VII, and it has never been breached in its near 1,000-year history, despite the best attempts of many, including Oliver Cromwell. Had it not been for this piece of fortified hill, the course of English history might have been vastly different, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers might not be on our televisions each week. Damn you, Pembrokeshire.
On the main street I caught a hop-on-hop-off coastal bus. The rain was hammering down when I got off at St Govan's Chapel, a sixth-century monastic settlement that reminded me of Lough Derg, albeit with nicer scenery. Around the corner was Broad Haven, a stunningly sheltered beach that was refreshingly bereft of chip vans or tourist infrastructure.
The guest house in St Florence was very comfortable, and dinner costs less than £10 (€11.50) at the Sun Inn, across the road.
Carew Castle, nearby, is said to be one of the most haunted in the region, and locals are also keen to point out that the new Harry Potter film and a Robin Hood adaptation starring Russell Crowe have been filmed locally in recent months. Indeed, the story goes that Crowe busked in the Carew Inn one night, and left a £600 (€690) tip.
Worth seeing in St Florence was Manor House Wildlife Park, owned by the celebrity interior designer Anna Ryder Richardson and her husband, Colin MacDougall. The couple and their children, who bought the park early last year, are trying to turn it into a modern wildlife and conservation experience. Good luck to them. They face a mammoth task, with the addition of two rhinos alone costing £160,000 (€182,500).
MacDougall showed me around, telling the sad tale of the resident gibbon, Steve, who has been in a cage and alone most of his adult life. If the paperwork can be completed, they hope to provide a mate for him from Fota Wildlife Park, in Cork. A new gibbon enclosure has been built for the pair, and it might just be the best coming together between Ireland and Wales since the British Irish Lions tour.
I spent my final night in Tenby, a beautifully traditional seaside resort popular with youngsters. As it was a bank-holiday weekend I was lucky to get a room at the Strathmore Hotel for £30 (€34.50). I tried my hand at archery and pitch and putt, giving the budget a fair old rattle in the process.
With night falling, having bought my bus ticket from there to the ferry at Pembroke Dock the next morning, I was down to my last few coins. The restaurants were slightly more upmarket, and several walks along the beach had built up an appetite. I was hungry and determined to enjoy one decent final meal. There was only one thing for it. I saw a busker in the town square and tapped him on the shoulder. "Excuse me," I said, "but how does Delilah go again?"
BO'C
The damage
Return ferry ticket €60
Guest house €28.50
Hotel €34.50
Wildlife park €9
Castle entrance €4
Castle tour €1.15
Archery €3.50
Pitch and putt €2.50
Travel €16.75
Food €31
Newspapers €4
Total €194.90
Brian O’Connell stayed at Flemish Court (St Florence, Pembrokeshire, Wales, 00-44-1834-871413, flemishcourt.tk) and Strathmore Hotel (23 Victoria Street, Tenby, Pembrokeshire, Wales, 00-44-1834-842323, strathmorehoteltenby.co.uk)
Fly to 'Munich', spend recklessly, pay the price
IT'S APT that Memmingen, one of Michael O'Leary's newer destinations, also known as Munich West, is close to the birthplace of another genius, Albert Einstein. The latter changed forever the way we think about time and space. And his work is now carried on by the former, who has convinced millions of otherwise unscientific minds that the shortest distance between two points is, as Einstein suggested, not a straight line.
That said, the afternoon I flew into Munich West the place still seemed to be subject to Newton's laws of physics rather than to O'Leary's or Einstein's. It emerged that the real Munich was still 110km, or a 90-minute bus journey, "away".
These were outdated concepts, of course. But there didn't seem to be any other way of completing the journey. And, humiliatingly, I found myself hanging around the airport for an hour even before the next bus left.
It wasn't the lost time I minded. Required to visit Munich for three days on €200, any time you can kill doing nothing is to be welcomed. But there's the rub. The Memmingen-Munich bus was €18 each way. Adding €36 to the low-cost airline's midweek fare of €102.45 left me €61.55 for two nights of accommodation, food and entertainment. Never mind advanced physics: I needed to study shoe-string theory, fast.
En route to the real Munich it occurred to me that the cheap B&B I had booked for my first night was in fact an unpardonable extravagance. At €41.60 – Munich is Germany's most expensive city, and even cheap B&Bs are not cheap – it had soaked up any potential beer money. But even food was now starting to look optional.
Irish B&Bs tend to be in bungalows where every guest has an en-suite bathroom. Munich B&Bs are not like this. Mine was a small room in someone else's apartment – that of a woman named Pauline – and we seemed to be sharing kitchen, bathroom and toilet. It was a cosy arrangement. Almost too cosy – and not helped by our inability to communicate.
I had about 15 words of German. She had perhaps twice that number of English. So we had to use a lot of gestures – although, it being a compact apartment, even these could not be theatrical.
Having shown me my room, Pauline also offered me a drink. I wasn't sure how to interpret this. In such a confined space, every move either of us made might have unintended intimacy. And anyway, what would we talk about? The discomfort aside, I had another concern. Might it be the local custom for B&Bs to add drinks to the bill, I wondered. Turned into a cheapskate by the travel editor, I politely declined.
According to Google, the B&B was a convenient 87 minutes' walk from the city centre. In fairness, it was lot quicker by the excellent U-Bahn. But I know the accuracy of the pedestrian estimate because I walked it myself: along the banks of the Isar, skirting the Englischer Garten, and into the old city.
Here, ravenous, I did as many locals do, buying a takeaway roll and heading for the nearest
Biergarten, where you could bring your own food so long as you bought the beverages. Strictly speaking, I could have skipped the beer. The huge garden was packed with thousands of the after-work crowd. Nobody would have noticed me skimping.
But I told myself that, being where I was, beer was research. After considering the smaller, €3.50 options, I also told myself that this would not be enough research. So I chose one of the chunky litre mugs, at €6.80, that everyone else was having. And sipping this under the trees on a balmy late-August evening, I thought: now I'm in Munich.
Of course I was living hopelessly beyond my means. As I ate Pauline's breakfast next morning I knew there was nothing for it but to move into a tent. And not just a tent – I didn't have one – but
theTent, a 100-bed canvas dormitory on the city's outer fringes.
My heart sank at the prospect, especially because I was growing used to Pauline's apartment, which now seemed quite comfortable, all things considered. In fact, when I asked if I could stay in my room for a few hours after breakfast while writing my newspaper column, she said: "Of course." And when I was still there at 1pm she brought me lunch – and a beer! – gratis, without even asking if I was hungry. Our parting was all the more sorrowful after that.
During my second afternoon in the city, thanks to that lunch, I paid only a subway fare and the €1.50 entry fee to the tower of St Peter's Church, climbing the 302 steps for a dizzying view of Munich's red roofs and of its many fine museums, none of which I could afford to visit. Then I caught the tram to the Tent.
This proved a pleasant surprise, being an impeccably run hostel with everything a budget traveller needed, either free – towels, blankets, toilet roll – or cheap. There was even a range of accommodation, all within shoestring parameters. And I confess – so sue me, travel editor – to choosing the de-luxe option: a bottom bunk with mattress (€10) instead of a space on the floor with air bed (€7.50).
I also splashed out on earplugs (€1). And, feeling reckless, I decided to eat, too, even though it had only been seven hours since my last meal.
The Tent cafe's excellent fish dinner and a beer set me back €8.20. Then it was time for bed, where the earplugs were so successful in reducing the noise from the nearby campfire party, and later the relentless coughing of one of my female neighbours, that I must have slept for at least an hour during the night.
Apart from the fact that everyone else there was at least 20 years younger than me, I felt completely at home.
FMcN
The damage
Airfare €102.45
Airport bus €36
B&B €41.60
Takeaway food €5.75
Beer €6.80
The Tent €10
Earplugs €1
U-Bahn and trams €9.20
Tent dinner €8.20
St Peter's tower €1.50
Total €222.50
Frank McNally stayed at the Tent (In den Kirschen 30, Munich, Germany, 00-49-89- 1414300, the-tent.com) and in a B&B that he found through bed-and-breakfast.de. You supply your travel dates and destination, then it e-mails you details of suitable B&Bs. If you accept an offer and submit credit-card details, it will forward the B&B’s address and contact number