Transit Hopping Northern Ireland’s Causeway Coast
It’s been hard to get back into the rhythm of work and kids in school after spending a couple of weeks in Ireland. I haven’t decided if I will do a couple of articles, or just this one. We shall see.
I wanted to write this article because it highlights something that I have noticed on many of my trips outside of North America, we are still doing transit wrong. It is not easy to say what it is we are doing wrong because it is so hard to show what is not happening. This little trip I did on one day in Northern Ireland showed me what could be done though. Bonus is that this is as much a travel story as a transit story so it should appeal to a few more people across the breadth of my readership!
As I said, we went to Ireland for a couple of weeks with the majority of the time spent in the North travelling with family. For a few of the days at the end, when we were on our own, we went to Derry. We stayed a few kilometres south of the city and would travel in by bus each day. On one of the days, we planned a trip to the Causeway Coast to see the Giant’s Causeway and a few other sites. It seemed ambitious as there were quite a few stops and we were going to do it all with a mix of trains and buses in a single day, even hoping to be back by dinner time.
From where we were staying to the Giant’s Causeway was a distance of about 80 kilometres, about the same as the distance between Victoria and Chemainus. I think it might be technically possible to get to Chemainus and back in a single day on transit with the bus that goes to Duncan, but you would have one chance to make it (or maybe the bus only runs into Victoria in the mornings…).
As we did each day, we caught the bus from near Newbuildings into Derry. Our first stop this morning was going to be the train station and we were a bit late. While when it comes to transit, Europe and Northern Ireland in this instance, are far ahead of us; when it comes to pedestrian crossings, we are leading the way. After getting off the bus, we needed to navigate a busy intersection. To get to the corner we needed to get to, we needed to cross three times and the lights took forever and lasted only moments. By the time we got to the sidewalk that lead to the train station, we had to run, otherwise we were going to have to wait an hour for the next one. We did make it though, just. The train started moving the moment we sat down.
One of the really good deals in Northern Ireland is that for 24 pounds (about $45 CDN) a day, you and a family of up to five, can travel anywhere in Northern Ireland on the trains, Belfast Glider and the buses. Due to the great connections and the frequency, this means you can see a lot. This ticket is what we used on this day.
We took the train about 40 minutes to the town of Coleraine. Here we simply walked outside the train station and there was our bus to the Causeway Coast. We knew that this bus travelled about every 30 minutes all day so we planned around that. For our first stop, we took the bus to Bushmills, the town of the whiskey fame. We had a little snack and a coffee and walked around an artist collective before hopping back on the bus to see the Giant’s Causeway.
As you get driven along the little coastal roads, the scenery is truly amazing, with the bright, vibrant green farms ending in a dramatic cliff and the North Atlantic beyond. In no time we were off the bus and walking down to the Giant’s Causeway. We skipped the visitors centre, which looked nice and gets into both the mythology and the geology of the site, but we really wanted to see the sight itself and get our walk in. Also as it gets closer to mid-day, the crowds apparently thicken and there were already quite a lot of people walking down. I knew that the Giant’s Causeway was something you should see, but was unprepared for just how cool it is. It is a bit of a walk down and I can imagine on a stormy day it could be quite wild and wet. There is a small little shuttle that goes down there if you need it as well. The actual basalt stacks are more impressive in person and I can see why there would have been some thought that they were made by a giant. I imagine that there are quite a few accidents on the rocks and they have a couple of staff trying to keep people off the more difficult and dangerous areas.
By the time we were walking back up towards the bus, it had gotten quite warm out. We made it back to the bus stop with ten minutes to spare before the next departure which gave us time to eat some of our picnic lunch. The next stop was Dunluce Castle, which we had passed on the way out to Bushmills and it looked amazing. Perched on the edge of the cliff above the ocean there is this still fairly complete castle ruin. It was originally built sometime in the early 1500s and most of the current ruins date from the 1600s. You get to walk around both the remains of the small village that was on the mainland part of the land and then cross a chasm to the rocky outcropping where the actual castle was. I would highly recommend it. The views were absolutely breathtaking and it really felt like one of the castles I would picture from the story books of my youth. I could have spent a lot more time there, but a large bus crowd was arriving and it was also starting to rain so we moved back out to the bus stop across the road to head into Port Rush a nearby vacation town.
Port Rush, at least the central town part of it, is built out on a peninsula with a very nice looking beach and a midway on one side and shops on the other. It was quiet on the day we went. The local kids had gone back to school the Tuesday before we arrived in Derry and I expect most visitors had left too. We did manage to find an open cafe and had one of the best cortados of the trip to that point, which was something to celebrate as coffee prepared the way I am used to was hard to find. I guess the best way to describe what Port Rush felt like to me was a small Irish version of Atlantic City, if you have been there. Lots of arcades and small gambling halls, alongside restaurants that looked targeted at tourists. Most of it was closed. We wandered around a little more and then headed to the Port Rush Train Station which has a short train for visitors right back to Coleraine. There were only about three stops and we were back waiting for the train back to Derry. We had left at 9 that morning and here we were getting off the bus by our place at just after 5pm having been able to see so much along the coast and not had to worry about driving on the left-hand side with a rental or booking a tour. It was truly wonderful and so easy.
The whole experience got me thinking, as I said at the beginning, about how challenging a trip like this would be here with our more limited transit. That said, maybe I am also not looking at it right. I am going to write a couple of articles over the next few months on some of the best opportunities for transit tourism in Victoria and see what I can come up with. If you have a suggestion, I would love to hear about it in the comments. If you have been to the Causeway Coast and I missed including something integral, please also let us know!