Slack-Jawed Wonderment in Kerryland

Be grateful, dear readers, that I took precisely 219 photographs of this past weekend; without these I would be too overwhelmed to string together in any logical sequence all the Irish wonders I saw between Friday and Sunday. As it is I have a chronological record of said wonders, and can, in the manner of the movie The Hangover, see a record of where I’ve been.

To begin at the beginning, I spent the past weekend touring the rings of Kerry and Skellig. The Ring of Kerry is one of the most happenin’ tourist loops on this island, inclusive of many natural wonders and conveniently-spaced hotels and restaurants and lavatories and gift shops. The Ring of Skellig is, size-wise, no more than an orbiting moon to Kerry’s Jupiter, but is not touristy at all- I daresay it’s authentic. I count myself lucky to have seen it.

UCC organizes bus trips to see these rings every weekend early in the year for visiting students, and I happened to be assigned to this weekend along with my dear friend and roommate Mary. I was a bit skeptical of the merits of such a trip at first (a bus tour with forty-odd other Americans? No thank you!) but, as you will see, was soundly proven wrong by Ireland’s pervading awesomeness.

Like rainbows on the ocean. That alone was worth the trip.

The trip was led by a fantastic lady by the name of Marian ni Shiulliobhan who is one of the professors of Irish language at UCC and comes from the town of Cahersiveen in the Ring of Skellig. I greatly admire her gumption at leading groups of loud and often unappreciative Americans with ungainly amounts of luggage around her beloved home county, whilst keeping up a steady flow of information, Irish language lessons, and kindness. Marian reminded me extremely of Maggie Smith’s portrayal of Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies, so (if you wish) you can imagine the weekend I’m about to describe being presided over by Professor McGonagall herself.

Minerva McGonagall says "Slainte"

  

We left Cork at about oh-fourteen-hundred on Friday and sped through a maze of winding Irish highway to reach our first destination, the Crag Caves. These are said to be the most impressive caves in Ireland. I, for one, was nonplussed. They were nice caves and all sure, and they featured a stalagmite shaped like a wine bottle, which was nice, but I hail from the land of the Shoshone ice caves and Craters of the Moon’s lava tubes. The Crag Caves, in comparison, were mighty small and mighty tame.

Wine bottle stalagmite, not to be confused with the shish kabob stalactite.
'Twas very thrilling

We reached our lodgings at Cahersiveen after dark, after a drive of a few hours narrated by Marian. The group, fifty strong and cranky, was shepherded into the dining room at the Ring of Kerry Hotel and assuaged by ridiculous amounts of fancy food.

A note on Irish food: I was warned before I came that all Irish people ever et was corned beef, cabbage, and baked potatoes. This is a lie, a dirty rotten lie, and don’t you ever believe it. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of corned beef or cabbage in this first month abroad and haven’t yet been faced with a single baked potato. If you want some Irish food to stereotype, try delicious seafood, brown bread, and ridiculous amounts of farm-fresh butter. Organic vegetables are also very much present. While potatoes are included in this vegetable presence, they are usually boiled, mashed, crisped into chips (fries), or fried into crisps (chips).

We were also fed Bailey’s-laced cheesecake for dessert. Those who led me to believe that food in Ireland would be dismal were dead wrong.

Thus, the fifty-strong cranky Americans were transformed into fifty-strong happy Americans, and as such were receptive to both a talk about life in rural coastal Kerry from a local woman and a lesson in ceili (pronounced like my name) dancing that lasted late into the night. It included live music and was, in my humble yet experienced opinion, quite fun as far as ceili dancing goes, although I tore the sole off one of my boots showing off a treble reel at the behest of the Kerry lecturer. I suppose pride cometh before a fall and all that.  

The next morning we woke up to sun.

Awwwwww yeeeaah

It was an incredibly gorgeous day. After having driven through driving rain, fog, and wind the day before, the clear, calm, bright morning was nothing short of miraculous, particularly since the group who had come the weekend before had been socked in by fog so as to not be able to see the sea- which is rather close to Cahersiveen, it being a coastal town and all.

The hotel again fed us excessive amounts of food before we loaded up on the bus and went cruising over to Valentia island, which lies just off of Kerry across a narrow channel. Valentia is the site of the landfall of the very first transatlantic telegraph cable back in the year 1866, and this is not even its most spectacular feature.    

We stopped the bus at the base of the highest mountain on Valentia and took a quick detour to see baby calves. I’ve gotta put it out there that being momentarily on a farm- even one that had peet stacks instead of haybales- was a lovely reminder of home. A majority of my fellow roadtrippers were from the cities of the Eastern coast and had never seen a cow, calf or otherwise, up close and personal before. There was much rejoicing.

The boots of Glory

The group was then left to its own devices for a few hours and allowed to go galloping around the Valentia hills. We were encouraged to hike to the top of the (quote, unquote) mountain to get the best possible view of the Skelligs (more on them later) and Cork and Kerry mountains to the East. As I had my hiking boots on (‘rugged,’ ‘intrepid,’ and ‘legitimate’ would be the three adjectives I would ascribe to them if pressed), I was ready for the trek and to reach the top, where Marian said it was “fair enough to see clear to America.”

Fair would be an understatement.

Please bask for a moment in the glory of these photographs.

Pretty much the whole day was like this. I was in a constant dramatic-sighing mouth-agape breath-intaking frenzy of slackjawed wonderment at everything I saw. The view was incredible, and I’m fairly sure I could see the coast of America, just barely, past the Skelligs and over the horizon.

And majestic sheep

February is consequently considered to be the first month of Spring here on the Emerald Isle. Since we were out enjoying the glories of Kerryland on February 2^nd, it was technically the second day of spring and acted accordingly. I was running around in a t-shirt by noon. Considering the amount of icy rain, hail, and even snow we’ve had recently in Cork city (to complement our Arctic monsoon winds, of course) this was impossibly splendid. I was literally beside myself all day with sheer joy.

I’m going to pare down this behemoth blog post and end this one here. Meanwhile, have a photo of a dead cormorant; it is a sneak peak of what's to come. 

Until we next meet, then!