Tuesday - Skellig Michael

The big event of the day for Tuesday was a trip to Skellig Michael. It's a special place in the world awarded to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We had to drive from Kenmare at the base of the peninsula to Portmagee at the very tip, which covers half the famous Ring of Kerry. Though the roads are equally famously narrow, because we left in the morning, we were off the ring before the tour buses came charging through. I had to drive kinda fast to make it there in time, which was kinda fun :). Sharon drove back; she's much more comfortable than she was (as I am), but I think she must be thinking of converting to Catholicism after spending time in this country because she keeps exclaiming "Jesus!" when oncoming trucks suddenly appear in a narrow country lane.

The trip to Skellig was a much more, er, direct, experience than I'd anticipated. Twelve of us got onto a a small boat, and with little ceremony headed out to sea. Skellig Michael is 6 km straight out into the Atlantic. WE all perched on what seemed like a large deck hatch, and Connor & I lucked out and had the windward side. I was vindicated in my Connor-nagging because he'd whined about wearing anything other than old running shoes, jeans, and a hoodie pullover. At our insistence he wore his new Gore-Tex light hikers and brought his waterproof / breathable jacket. One of the crewmen handed out slicker jackets, and we zipped up our jackets and used the slickers to keep our legs dry. MY legs dry; Connor got his pants soaked because he didn't need the slicker in the first 2 minutes of the ride, so he removed them from his pants. Live and learn - maybe.

We were very lucky in general, though, because the weather was again so mild. The debarkation from the boats to the tiny pier is up a very narrow, exposed steep set of steps with a rope as a rail. This is the very beginning of your upward journey at SM. After an inital flight of steps, you follow an inclined path for a ways (some of which is covered to keep you guano-free in a bend favored by the local gannets).

Not far past a heliport jutting out over the water, you come to the first in a series of almost 600 steps up the side of the island. Now, any one that's done a moderate amount of hiking can say that though they're steep, the steps are wide and excellent. The would be a small part of a mainland hike. However, they're very exposed - a fall would seriously hurt you, and quite possibly put you in the ocean with little chance of rescue. I suspect this is why the heliport is there.

Where it's not steps or rock, it's green ground cover of some kind, dotted with tiny white flowers - a uniform carpet.

The place is simply spectacular. You spend almost the entire time exposed on one side or another because SM is basically a jagged volcanic rock ("skellig" means "splinter" in Gaelic) jutting up out of the ocean. The peak of the island is 700 ft above sea level, and at the very top is a cross that pilgrims climed up to, then kissed. (The monastery is on the other peak.) This very tough pilgrimage was apparently enough to buy your way out of many sins! Other than where the small monastery was, we saw one place on the entire island that was flat enough to hold about 30 people. The island is not large at all, and a fear of falling could make the trip a real challenge. I had to keep reminding myself we saw it on a sunny, fairly clear day. Most of the time it's cloudy, misty, foggy, with much rougher waters - making the climb much tougher.

Skellig Michael was founded by monks in the 6th Century, to be isolated from the restof the world (they accomplished THAT) and the monastery was inhabited for 500 years. Hard to imagine, scraping out a cold life there. But 10 lifetimes, probably 33 generations, did. They fought off Viking raids, one of which took their abbott.

On the return, the pilot took us right up to Little Skellig island. This is preserved as a bird sanctuary, and it's well-used by them. There are 20,000 pairs of gannets (a sea bird that dives from 30 meters into the water to catch fish as deep as 15m - they sound like a large rock dropped into the water) on this rock, so many that the flanks are white with them (and their guano) and thousands of birds form a loose cloud wheeling overhead.

Wehn we passed close, we saw some seals and most amazingly a man maneuvering a currach boat in the inner lagoons. He might have been some kind of scientific observer; if he rowed the 6 km out to the island in that little boat, that's very impressive! And probably very unsafe.

After our Skellig adventure, we had lunch at the Bridge Bar in Portmagee, where Sharon declared it had the best brown bread (aka Irish soda bread) she'd yet tasted. A sunny drive back to Kenmare completed our day.