Ireland Tour Day 3

Sun 17th Oct

Off to the Dingle Peninsula today...

Our tour guide is a funny older man i would guess to be in his late 50's... it must be cost cuts but he is doing really well driving the bus as well as giving us commentary on what we are seeing. But he said he has been doing it for ages. He has a rule for the tour... some penalties if you are late... if you are 2 mins late then you will be singing a song... 3 mins you will dance... and 5 mins late then you will be singing and dancing... in the spot where the bus was...
Anyway he kept us entertained with his great jokes all along the way.

First stop was another retail stop. Prices were reasonable at this place and they were good with providing us with tax rebate forms. VAT is like GST in Aust but it's 21%! - foreigners can claim it back upon leaving the country. The highlight of the stop was Irish coffee!!
You generally drink coffee in the mornings right? So trust the Irish to start drinking early by putting whisky in their coffee... but i must admit... it was yummm and i'm not a big coffee drinker!

i just liked the ripple of the sea with the wind...

We drove south along the west coast of Ireland. Stopped for a few photo opportunities as there is some beachside along the coast. Stopped at Dingle harbour for morning tea... the town is plastered with dolphins because in 1984 a dolphin appeared in the harbour. It would welcome the fishing boats into port by escorting them in and would also give divers gifts of fish... They named him 'Fungie'.

typical Irish countryside - lots of sheep!!

The fog over the countryside this morning actually reminded me of scenes in the movie "Far and Away" with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. How funny that later when i read the tour outline i found that some of the movie was shot here in the Dingle Peninsula. There's also another movie that was shot here called "Ryan's Daughter" but i've never seen it cos i think it might be an older movie.

primitave hut in south Kerry..  the Blasket people might have lived in similar huts

The Dingle Peninsula is in a county called Kerry which is the most south-western county in ROI. There are little islands off the coast of Ireland closest to the town of Dunquin and these are called the Blasket Islands. We went to visit the Blasket centre to learn about the history of the islands.

Basically the inhabitants of the islands lived in primitave huts on the islands and led quiet lives fishing and farming. The population of the biggest island which is the Great Blasket Island never rose above about 150 and the islands havent been inhabited since 1953. The islands are quite isolated due to weather and tidal conditions but it was a nice,clear day so we could actually see the Great Blasket Island.

They speak only Irish on the islands. There is great pride in the literary works of 3 of the island's authors. In a collection of short stories, they tell the tales of the life of the people living on the islands. These books have been translated into a few languages and are important to the Irish speaking people as they show some of the culture and values of Ireland.

Back to the hotel around 4pm for some free time. Killarney is a big tourist town so the shops are open till around 6pm. Es and i took a walk around town poking our heads into some souvenir shops.

more beer at O'Donoghues... and the Irish love their Guinness

After dinner we were pretty knackered but still wanted to experience some Irish nightlife... so we ended up just hanging out at the bar attached to the hotel called O'Donoghues. About half of our tour group thought similarly so we actually had quite a big group.

We also bumped into the other Irish Spirit tour bus there. Basically the tour i'm on is called the Irish Spirit tour as it is meant to go to the places that show the history and more traditional side of Ireland. So we visit a celtic crystal factory as opposed to the Waterford crystal factory. There just so happens to be another tour bus shadowing us on the same tour. There are 47 of them in a very full bus whereas we are only 24 which i think is nice. Plenty of spare seats to stretch out on.
So there were some interesting characters from the other bus. They were all quite nice but one guy was particularly loud and i'll always remember him as "O'neill" because he was commenting on Es's shirt which had the logo of the surfie brand O'Neill on it....
The funny part of the night was our older grandma 'R'... she was requesting some songs from the musicians and talking quite animatedly to them for a while... but in our eyes she was chatting up some young blokes yet again and we had to tease her about it for the rest of the trip...

Click here to view photo album.