Killarney, Co. Kerry

17th - 19th August 2009 - Happy Birthday Biks!!

We had resigned to the fact that we were going to spend most of the day on a bus, or in between catching buses, so it didn't disappoint us too much when, of course, the liquid sunshine was falling from the sky. We raced down the hill and had to do a little sprint (with all our packs on) to catch the bus into town, and avoid 20 minutes waiting in the rain. We made it into town and headed straight up to the bus station to collect our tickets and board a bus to Limerick. We waited at bus stop 4, where there was a small crowd of others, and had overheard a girl telling another man that this was the bus to Limerick. Swell. We were in the right spot so we threw our bags as far under the bus they could go. When the bus opened its doors, we saw the same girl and man making their way back to the luggage compartment and having to climb in to retrieve their bags. When I asked the bus driver if this was the bus to Limerick, he confirmed my suspicions that the young blonde was in fact, wrong. I let Dan climb in under the bus to get the bags out, and we finally got them under the right bus (I asked the driver before throwing the bags in), and found some comfy seats on the bus. The bus ride was a completely uneventful 2 hours to Limerick. We grabbed bags and set out for the city to get some lunch, as we had 90 minutes before we had to get our next bus. We wandered around for a bit and finally settled on a chain takeaway place called "Abrakebabra". I was amused by the name when we saw it in Dublin, so was glad we finally got to dine in the place. It was nothing special, just wraps and stuff, but it filled the hole. We wandered back up to the bus station in nice timing to see our bus pulling into the stop. Load the packs up underneath the bus and find us some more seats. Two and a half hours and we found ourselves coming into the mountainous and picturesque town of Killarney, in South West Ireland. After setting off at 11am, and finally arriving just after 5pm, we were stuffed. We'd done nothing but sit on our arses (and nap for some time in my case), but I was still amazed at how much just sitting can take it out of you. We had to walk straight through the middle of the town to get down to our hostel, but we found it with ease. Checked in, and to our surprise we found that if you book on line you get a night free! Bonus! We ended up paying a bargain price for the 3 nights accommodation. We dropped off our bags and headed out to explore the town. We spent the afternoon just walking around, and I managed to drag Dan into nearly every souvenir shop in the place (you'd be surprised at just how many there are in a town of only 14,000 people) in the search of a necklace that was the same as one that I'd seen in Dublin. No luck. The town was crawling with tourists, and it wasn't until a couple of days later that I found out that this small town was the number 1 tourist town in Ireland until a few years ago when Dublin overtook it. We also had to locate where our tour that we'd booked for the following day, departed from. No issues there, the office was on the main street. We scouted out a nice little pub to have tea. Dan tried an oily cottage pie, while my burger was bland and dry. It was now clear why there weren't too many people in the place. We decided that we were too stuffed to do anything else so we headed back to the hostel and watched some TV on the laptop before retiring for the night.

Next morning, after having cold showers (after waiting many minutes, no hot water appeared) we helped ourselves to breakfast at the hostel, then made our way into town to catch our bus for the Ring of Kerry tour that we'd booked. We arrived at the office to pay for our tickets and were greeted by a kind, elderly, mostly blind lady. She filled in the wrong tickets for us, and couldn't see the buttons on the eftpos machine to work it so we had to go to the bank next door. Cause we were a bit early she headed us off to the train station to catch the second bus which would have less people on it. The walk only took us a couple of minutes and we saw two buses from the same company, but one was a bit further up the road. After asking the guy what bus to get on, he just told us to jump on the closest one and thered be no issue. It ended up being the bus that was going back down into the main street and filling up quite quickly.

The Ring of Kerry is basically a 170km circular road that goes around the peninsula starting and finishing in Killarney. This trip was pretty much the only reason why we made the journey to Killarney. The weather was incredibly ordinary, and the mist and fog made obscured the views from the bus. If the weather had been fine we would have been able to see 13 of 16 of Irelands highest mountains. I don't think I saw the peak of any of them. The first stop was at a 'Bog Village', not to sure what it was about, as we didn't bother going in. The coffee shop/pub next door was selling Irish Coffees, so we decided to hit up an 11am drink instead. It was damn good. Back on the bus, and we made a few more photo stops of scenes that were pretty much just grey mist. We arrived at a little seaside village for lunch. After a quick lunch at a local pub, I got my photo taken with a life size statue of Charlie Chaplain. Apparently he spent a lot of nhis retirement at this little place on the coast. I wanted to dip my feet into the water, so it was off with the shoes and into the Atlantic Ocean. A bit more of a walk around and it was back onto the bus. We made a couple of more stops for photos, and then we stopped at another little village for a bit of a look around. We found a souvenir shop that also sold homemade ice cream. It was the most delicious Baileys Ice-cream I've ever eaten. And it was cheap, which made it so much better! Our final stop was at "Ladies Lookout" which was in the Gap of Dunloe looking between some mountains and lakes. It was very nice, but again the weather made it not as good as it could've been.

After arriving back into the town we grabbed some dinner supplies and had a cook up at the hostel. After dinner we decided that we'd find some traditional music in a pub and have a few drinks. Apparently "The Grand" is the place to go. We headed up there and found some s***ty stools right at the back and grabbed some beers. The music was rather boring and depressing and there wasn't much of a crowd, so we decided to go find somewhere more livelily. After looking into about 10 pubs, all of which we're crowded, we decided to give up, get out of the rain, and go to bed. Just was we were about to reach the hostel we found a bigger pub, with some seats and a band. We strolled in, got some drinks, took a seat and enjoyed the music for a few hours. They were really good, played lots of traditional s***, with accordions, tin whistles, elbow pipes and the rest. They had the crowd clapping and foot tapping the whole time we were there. The only song I knew was Whisky in the Jar, and that's only because Metallica's done a version of it, but Dan knew most of them and sung along quite proudly. We called it a night at around midnight and I fell quickly to sleep.

We woke up this morning to more terrible rain and cold weather. We did have ambitions to walk (or hire a bike) out to the national park and have a look around, but the weather had changed our minds for us. We persevered and spent a few hours walking around, but we ended up just heading back to the hostel for a relaxing afternoon. This hostel closes between 2pm and 4pm for cleaning or some other lame excuse, so we just hid in the room and watched a DVD on the laptop (Thanks Jords for all the movies!!) We ventured out later in the afternoon to get some dinner supplies, and ended up just spending the evening in the hostel lounge room, playing on the Internet and watching TV. The little Irish man who works at the hostel has kept me entertained for the last half an hour. He has been sitting on the couch watching the Champions League football, but every time he has to get up to open the door or check someone in, someone scores a goal. It's happened 4 times now, once he was only gone for less than a minute, and he was not a happy man when he returned. He even resorted to calling a couple of German girls 'Giants' and continued to rant at them for a bit (Anyone over 5 ft would be a giant to this guy though), before plonking himself on the couch with a few more expletives let out.

Tomorrow we make another bus journey (only the 1 tomorrow) to Cork, which is taking us back east, where we will spend another 3 nights, before heading up to Kilkenny, then finally back to Dublin where we fly to London before onto to Venice next week.