"In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light" - Mahatma Gandhi

Greetings from the Ring of Kerry! We're officially out on the road now, but we've managed to find internet at a local library in the small town of Cahersiveen.

Over the last two days, we've passed through some incredibly spiritual places. The first was Ballaghisheen Pass, which can only be described as an enormous bowl of a valley.



Passing through it on bike, with no other traffic for miles, makes you feel so incredibly small. The silence, as it mingled with some low clouds, was almost oppresive.



The next place is Skellig Michael, which is a rock jutting out of the ocean 12 km from shore, only accesible by local fisherman's boats. As we approached through the swelling waves in our 25' vessel, it slowly emerged out of the fog. Imposing. Following the initial shock of the appearance out of the fog and the sketchy disembarkment from the boat, we had a climb up 600 stone steps initially laid down almost 1500 years ago by monks seeking solitude in this VERY secluded hinterland.

The monastery at the top could only be described as eerie, like (we would find) many of the spots here in Ireland. We heard one of our fellow travellers refer to it as "the Machu Picchu of Ireland". If eerie isolation for the purposes of contemplation is what these monks were after, then we couldn't imagine a better spot. We couldn't even figure out how they got here in that day and age, or what they ate while they lived here! Amazingly, the settlement was in full operation for about 600 years.





The Skellig Rocks, in addition to being a geological curiosity and historical monument, are also a bird sanctuary. Of the many seabirds there, possibly the most interesting were the puffins. Puffins! The island was covered in them! Monika took about 7314 pictures of them! "Like flying penguins," she called them. Not exactly the most graceful birds. I watched one try to land on a step. It basically just slammed into the side of it, though, and slid down. It kept flapping its wings for about 10 more seconds, maybe thinking it could still recover, until it finally gave up and flopped down into the flower bush below.



The Small Skellig is the breeding ground for garnets, and they flock to it by the thousands. In the photo on the left, the white that seems to coat the cliff like icing is actually flocks of the bird.