The Burren

I woke up this morning at a drizzly 8:45 and everyone was gone from the room already. Breakfast here is cereal and toast with coffee and weird orange juice. Could be worse. I put Paco in the locker room and had them hold my lap top behind the reception desk, went downstairs and booked some tours! I have excellent timing--the bus to the Cliffs of Moher was leaving in 20 minutes. When you book two tours you get a 10% discount. I'm going to the Aran Islands tomorrow. But first! It's been a great long day.

You get on the bus at the Galway coach station which is literally right around the corner from this hostel--there is a very lively drinking game going on in the kitchen right now by the way. I think they are "pre partying" the pub crawl. We say prefunk, they say preparty, Nate from Tennessee says pregame. Evs. The first thing the bus driver tells us is that we have to make a choice between seeing Aillwee Cave, or going on a walking tour of the Burren led by this guy who owns a hunk of land that has been in his family for 300 years. I didn't know there was more to this thing than just the cliffs. I saw brochure about this farm walk thing last night so I decided to do that one. The place is half an hour outside of Galway city centre. It was still only kind of wet when we got there, but the guide--John--made sure we all had rain jackets. I'd never heard of the Burren before this. Jon starts off by telling us that the Burren hills are an anglicized version of an Irish word that means "place of rock." It's a 250 sq km area of limestone. It's really cool looking. These hills are kind of terraced and from far away they look like they are just piles of limestone, but when you get closer--and actually hike up them--there is tons of thick grass coming up all around.

They don't have "grass" here. No lawn either. It's something more. It's thick and fluffy and more like green fur covering the ground. That stuff grows up out of limestone. I don't think we got the full tour because we were hiking up one of these hills--they call them mountains, but I guess I'm a mountain snob--and it started really raining. I was very grateful to have a Mom who's so much smarter than me and made me get a rain jacket before I left. It was "slippy" and muddy and the going was slow, but we got up to this tree he wanted to show us. It's an old tradition that if you have a problem you come up to one of these trees that look like bushes and tie something on the little branches. And then...something about the fairy world helping you out.

By the time we got up there my lower half was soaked through, but I could have cared less. It was beautiful up there--even from not very high up you can see so much around you. On the ride over the bus driver told us about the stone walls that you always see in Irish travel guides. They are mostly in this part--the north west where all this limestone is. Well those walls are everywhere and they are cool because they are just stacked like that--no cement holding it all together--and they stand for a really long time. Long enough to get overrun by bushes and to have trees growing through them. You can see these plot lines for miles around when you get up the mountain.

John had us go back down after this though. He said he wanted to tell us a story. We got back down to his granny's cottage which is where all this starts off and ends and he's set up a kind of cafe that his mom who lives next door bakes for. It was rather expensive so I settled for my first Irish coffee. That warmed me up as well as anything else was going to. He had the whole group congregate in the living room around the fire, and he did tell us a story--an old Irish oral tradition story. He's pretty funny--talking with his hands and sound effects and all that. It's not blog translatable...you can't read an Irish accent and I'm guessing you guys don't have any whiskey in you at the moment. Beer pong has begun. Or something. Too bad we only get wifi in the common room.

We passed through a town that has an annual matchmaking festival. It's called Lisdoonvarna. There is a guy there whose grandfather and father were matchmakers, now he and his daughter are. Apparently his reputation didn't suffer when his wife left him for someone else.

The cliffs were next. They really are beautiful. People here say "mile an hour" everything when they mean kilometers. The bus driver said they were expecting hundred mile an hour winds at the cliffs. That would have been intense. They weren't even hundred kilometer an hour winds though. There were some gusts and it was raining, but we could still see a long way so it was great. I guess a lot of times people get all the way out there and it's too foggy to see anything. Bus driver man kept calling the visitor's center "Teletubbie house." I don't get it...It's kind of built into a hill and is covered with grass. I thought that you would be able to walk along the cliffs farther though. They only have a nice walkway/path for a little ways and then you're just cut off. There's definitely a path that goes right along the edge all the way down, but it's not the official thing. At the highest point is O'Brian's Tower. I met some nice people that offered to take a few pictures of me. It's so awkward. But the girl was from Berkley and now teaches English in Vienna and the guy is from Pakistan and I have no idea what he's doing here. So, I have proof I was there this time.

Doolin and Fitzpatrick's pub for a late lunch was next. I was going for some beef and wild mushroom stew, but they ran out of that so I got a fish and shellfish pie. It was pretty good. Tour bus man also went on a bit about the powers of oysters. He called them "little slimy devils." There weren't any oysters in this thing, but there could have been. After we ate I walked across the street and talked to a burro for a few minutes. It was adorable.

Ballyreen is on the scenic drive back to Galway. It's like a mini cliffs of Moher--only like 50 or 60 feet. Guy from Pakistan (I never thought to ask for names) was asking us about the ocean. Where do the birds live? Do they fly back to land every night 'cause you can find them pretty far out there in the ocean. I don't know man, they have to don't they. Then he was making fun of us cause we should know and be able to inform people like him who come from a landlocked country. It was interesting to talk to him. He think it's cheating if you're looking out into the ocean and can see land across the way or coming in around like in a bay. He likes seeing nothing but water and sky. I can't imagine not living by the water.

Doonmara castle is still in use. Apparently you can tour it in the summer and they use it for medieval banquets. I don't know how you get invited to one of those. Or if you have to dress up. Anyway, we stopped there to take some more pictures. Before coming back into the city.

Tour guides are great people. They are so cheerful and goofy.