It could only happen in Ireland. I've never hugged a hire car operator before. At least not until the day I collected a Fiat Panda from the Easirent office at Cork Airport. As I busied myself, photographing every inch of the bodywork using the date stamp mode on my phone, Fiona chatted to the man who'd rented it to me. Fiona's my cousin by the way. Number two of eight. There are a lot of big families here. “That's where he's going next,” she nodded in my direction once she'd established the fact that Victor was Egyptian. He’d made us guess and we’d toured most of the Middle East before we gave up and asked him to tell us. “I won't be hiring a car over there though,” I grinned in reply. Fly, flop and fill up with vitamin D and the all inclusive menu is going to be the order of the day there.
Happy that the car was blemish free, I was ready to begin my journey and hugged my cousin goodbye. I'd been staying in her guest quarters for a couple of nights, catching up on far too many years since I'd last been in Ireland. Victor almost looked disconsolate though. He was missing out on a hug. So I hugged him as well. I think he was really angling for a hug from Fiona - my Irish family were the ones who inherited our grandparents’ good looks. Once she'd hugged him too, he was happy. If ever you rent a car at Cork Airport, embrace the operator as you leave. You'll feel better for it. Love costs nothing after all.
The journey west was easy driving, especially along the pristine Macroom bypass, recently opened and blissfully quiet. There was so little traffic that I could almost have parked in the fast lane and had a cup of tea, risking neither insurance excess nor limbs, and I was soon at the Kerry border as the landscape began to grow into brown hills and boggy moorland. In just under an hour I was west of Killarney, on slower roads, gradually getting closer to the Dingle Peninsula in the extreme Atlantic reaches, a wild, sparsely populated country at the edge of existence in this far flung corner of Europe.
I stopped at the Lidl in Dingle for two days worth of supplies. The opening hours were only displayed in Gaelic, although everything else was written in English. At the checkout, the group in front of me spoke to the cashier in a language that I couldn't place. But they sounded decidedly Eastern European. I think they were all Polish or Lithuanian. Thanks to the cool bag that Fiona had loaned to me, I wouldn't need to drive back here later and add an unwanted hour to the end of the day.
And now I was in the last handful of miles, past Ventry and at the gateway to a secret enclave packed with rare landscape treasures. I knew roughly what I was going to find, but nothing could really prepare me for what I was about to see. Today I needed somewhere that wasn't too far from the car because I'd only have about ninety minutes of daylight, and there was just one location in my sights. I pulled into an almost completely deserted car parking area just after 3pm. Most of the people here seemed to be making their way down the slope towards Coumeenoole Beach. Good, it seemed I might have the place to myself. Unlike my generous cousins, I'm not that good at sharing.
The path was narrow, slippery and uncomfortably close to a perilously steep descent into oblivion. In my haste to get to the end of the headland I'd failed to notice the safer trail on flat ground that ran twenty yards parallel to it. But in time I made it down to the end of the headland where I was quite alone in this visceral Eden. Like Cornwall on steroids. I clambered down as far as I dared. In front of me was a Celtic dragon in the form of a group of huge rocks, and beyond that lay a succession of islands, the Blaskets. The stuff that dreams are made on. The sort of place you think can't possibly be real, yet here it was, home to a tiny number of humans and plenty of wildlife. And talking of the locals, a big grey bull seal floated in the water close to the rocks in front of me, watching the stranger looking back at him. Just like it so often happens at Godrevy near home. And here, I felt entirely at home, balancing on a small even platform among the endless stony needles that protruded like sharks’ fins, protected from the Atlantic by a high buttress where the sea poured in from the north, making waterfalls over a series of rocks between the land and the dragon.
The light was on my side in this distant wonderland, elegantly framing the dragon in a golden glow as I settled down to work, taking one shot after another while the water frothed and boiled in front of me. It was everything I'd hoped for, and quite a lot more besides. I don't need to tell you that it doesn't always happen like this. And today was just the start of what turned into three extremely rewarding days, each one very different from the others. Each one delivering moments that will stay with me for a very long time. In a land as blessed as this, where the gulls shriek, the winds whistle and the ocean thunders, it's really no wonder people lose themselves and do strange things like hugging car hire operators.
