Ireland Travel Experience - Part 15

This time it is a historical visit - NEWGRANGE. Started at 8.30 am in the morning and reached New grange at 9.15 am at the visitors center. By 10 am reached the 3200 B.C constructed place which was really historical. The tour guide showed how, why and when it was constructed. It took 80 men to move a big stone in 3 miles a day. This was even before the invention of wheel and before horses were used for transport. It would have taken 2 to 3 generations to complete this historical place. 

We had to enter into newgrange by bending low and was surprised to see how the stones are balancing one above the other without any support. It is believed that on 21st of December sun light will pass through the tomb to enlighten the spirits of ancestors. Then we went to the audio visual room and learned more about newgrange. 

After that we went to monastery called Monasterboice  . The tour guide explained about the different crosses there. Also he told that vikings didn't have the horns on their hats. As we know now a days stories are more in place than histories. We don't know what to believe and what not. Then we went to a place called Slane. There was an abbey over there. Had a quick stroll and went to Hill of Tara. The weather was changing every now and then throughout the tour. As the tourist guide told, you can see 4 seasons in 10 minutes. Then he asked what the colors in the Irish flag meant? Green refers Catholic. Orange refers protestants and White refers Unity. He told about politics too mentioning 2 times females were elected as president for Ireland. That brings an end to the Newgrange tour. So readers, it is time to wrap up the Ireland Travel experience. You can browse through my tumblr site for more gallery or photo archive of Ireland. Thanks for travelling along with me in all the parts of Ireland through my blog posts.

The End....

Ireland Travel Experience - Part 14

                                          The journey continued next to Wicklow mountains where the movies like "Brave heart" and "P.S. I Love you" were filmed. It is a perfect place for natural photography. You will be surrounded by mountains in all colors - brown, blue, green, yellow, red, maroon and so on. 

We had some quick snaps and moved on to Glendalough - which is a valley of monasteries located in County Wicklow. There were lot of monastic towers including the Round Tower. We started exploring the valleys, rivers and trees joined together. It is a perfect place for mountain trekking as well as to shoot song sequences for a movie. 

All rocks, trees, herbs and shrubs all the way in Glendalough remind you about all adventurous movies like Hobbit, Lord of the Rings etc. We did some walking, jogging etc around the nature to refresh ourselves. Also there were flowing lakes surrounded by abundant flowers glowing in yellow and white. Then we started our way back to Dublin listening to some Irish music in the tourist bus. Relishing on the natural beauty is a relaxation to your day to day stressful life. Lets meet on more historical beauty as well in my next blog post.

To be continued..

Ireland Travel Experience - Part 13

                   To discover the south east of Ireland - we planned Glendalough Kilkenny Wicklow Mountains Dunmore Caves Day Tour arranged by Wild Rover tours. Our first visit in this tour was Kilkenny - we had an option to either roam in the city and visit the castle or visit the Dunmore caves and then back to Kilkenny Castle. So we opted for the Dunmore caves which was really a different experience. There was a separate tourist guide to explain about the history of Dunmore caves. 

Once we were inside the caves, it was full of stalactites and stalagmites which reminded me of the geography classes I studied during my school time. The stalactites were in various unique forms looking like an angel with wings, eagle or hawk staring at you, hanging bats etc..When we were standing inside the core of the caves, the tourist guide switched off the lights setup there and it was complete dark as if you had gone blind. The guide explained about the Viking massacre happened there too. As per archaeologists, mostly the bones recovered were of women and children. 

After our survey of the caves, we went back to the Kilkenny castle. Entered into the audio visual room to learn more on the history of the castle, kings ruled etc. So lets have a break here until my next blog post.

To be continued...

Ireland Travel Experience - Part 12

                       Our next halt in the Connemara tour was Kylemore Castle. The first sight of entry was near Kylemore castle or Abbey. Also it was surrounded by the Church and Victorian walled garden.. Along side, we saw the snowy mountains, rivers and sheep which was painted on the back with different colors by the sheep farmers to be identified. 

Then we went to the Killary sheep farm where we got a demonstration of turf cutting and we were standing on a place which was 5000 years old. It was really surprising when the trained dog of the sheep farmer was riding the sheeps by just hearing the signals and words of his master. When he just tells come by, it starts and then when he tell stand by it stops... It was really cool, and then by hearing the whistle sound, it starts moving... Really well trained.Then he showed us feeding 2 young sheep calves with a feeding bottle. Then we signed off back to the Galway city and enjoyed a city tour for an hour there... All along we saw mountains, rivers, valleys and lakes - It was a natural visual treat... River Shannon was one of the biggest river and Phoenix park on of the longest park (11 km walled) in Europe itself.

Then it was good to know about the Number plates in cars of Ireland - The first 2 digits start with the year and the next is an alphabet which denotes the city e.g: D for Dublin, G for Galway etc.. Starting from 2013, the car owners changed it as 3 digits as 13 is considered as unlucky or bad omen in many parts of the country... So they changed it to 131 and 132 (131 - first half of year 2013 and second half of year as 132) Then if you see a car with 141 - D- 299124 - then its a brand new car released now in the year 2014. That ends the Connemara tour and lets talk on another tour we went later on..

To be continued ...

Ireland Travel Experience - Part 11

                                                             Connemara Tour - We started @ 6:50 am from Tourist Office Dublin. Weather was normal and it took 2 and half hours to reach the entry of Connemara. It was almost 9:30 am when we reached there.  The tourist guide as well as the driver of the bus was an old lady with 25 years of experience as a tourist guide. She was from Switzerland and been in Dublin for last 3 years now. She was providing abundant information on Irish history, music, games, sports etc as well as on places such as Connemara, Galway, Dublin and Northern Ireland (Belfast). It was really interesting to learn about historical kings, queens and intellectuals such as Henry the Eighth, Anne Boleyn, James Joyce. She even talked more about the history of Gaelic and Irish languages.

                                                   Irish having spoken rarely now a days which contains 18 alphabets. The reason for Irish to be spoken less was it had become old fashioned and not in use among the youngsters. Also it was difficult to learn.She also shared some personal stories happened to her when she reached Belfast the first time and told Irish people are so nice. 

The examples were from Irish Garda being so nice to her serving cookies and tea to her without any panic signals and to find her lost car back to the multistar hotel persons helping her to pull her damaged car which was out of battery with a beautiful Rolls Royce car. With all these narrations and natural view of snowy mountains all the way, the adventure still moved on ...

To be continued ...

Ireland Travel Experience - Part 10

                                                                Once more we started to explore more Dublin on the areas which we missed in the beginning parts of Ireland tour. This time it was Dublin Zoo. This largest zoo of Ireland is located in Phoenix park, Ireland. The zoo is composed with a variety of animals, birds, snakes, amphibians etc. To name the major animals which we saw there - Tigers (Sumatran, Indonesia), mandarin ducks, snow leopards, penguins, panda, peacocks, zebras, ostriches, elephants,monkeys, gorillas, chimpanzees, swans, cranes, flamingos, seals, snakes, crocodiles, tortoises, deer, giraffes, wolves and so on.. But we missed to see the king - Lion :)

Zebras, Giraffes, Ostriches etc were put under the same region of the zoo in an open wide large space. It was also funny to see the cranes and penguins fighting for the fish which have been fed to them by the zoo keepers. The seals were swimming with full joy in the pool. It was also good to watch the peacocks roaming near you eating the rice grains.

Once we were done with the Dublin zoo, we went again for a long tour the next week after the zoo visit. It was to Connemara located west of Ireland - Will update on that tour in my next post.

To be continued ...

Ireland Travel Experience - Part 9

Reached the main tour location Giants Causeway at 1.10 pm after finishing lunch . We had vegetable lasagne and potato chips for 8.95 pounds.  There we spent 90 min with a trekking over mountain and then to sea coast where we saw hexagonal rocks black, brown and grey in colors with ocean waves splashing over our head. These rocks were also formed out of volcanic eruption.Took some photo session and it was raining all the way back.

Reached Belfast City back at 4.10 pm and wandered around the streets and caught a glimpse of river Lagan, Victoria street, Victoria square and Titanic memorial garden along the city hall. Then we started our way back to Dublin city at 5.15 pm. It took another 2 hours to reach Dublin . Belfast is around 170 km from Dublin. Also it was drizzling in Belfast too. The rain was due to the storm effect  in Ireland coastal areas.

That brings an end to our Northern Ireland tour but not to my travel experience with Ireland..

To be continued...

Ireland Travel Experience - Part 8

Northern Ireland - which is part of UK and north east of Ireland is one of our tourist spot when we were in Ireland. Belfast is the capital city. Currency is Pound Sterling. We reached Belfast by 9.00 am. Travelling around the coastal area, the tourist guide explained about how Ireland was split into Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland had civil war between Catholics and Protestants in 1912 till 1960. The protestants wanted some part of Ireland to be formed under part of England. So the country was split and 6 counties came under Northern Ireland and 26 counties for the rest. 

We passed the sleeping giant mountain near Belfast city main road which was the inspiration for Jonathan swift to write Gulliver's travels.. Then we passed over the north channel where we saw Scotland 10 miles away from the northern most point of Ireland. Sea farming is famous over the coastal regions..Lime stones and black stones were seen all over the coastal way which were formed due to volcanic eruption some million years ago. 

We stopped at rede rope bridge at 11. am. where entrance was 4.5 pounds per adult. And last admission ticket was before 2.45 pm.We had to do a 15-20 min walk to reach the bridge. Took some snaps and we dropped at white bay view point for some more quick snaps..

The tourist guide also mentioned a funny incident happened in the rede rope bridge. During the visit of this bridge, a lady was so much afraid to cross it. But somehow she crossed it and was not able to cross back again. Then she was accompanied back with the help of a helicopter :)

After we finished exploring the bridge, we started heading to our main tourist spot of the day. Let that tourist spot wait until my next post....

To be continued...

Ireland Travel Experience - Part 7

                                       The next day trip which we planned was to Howth Harbour - Howth is a village located in the outer suburb of Dublin. We took the Dart service from Tara Street to Howth. The ticket costs around 5.20 euro. By 10:40 a.m we got the Dart and reached Howth by 11:10 a.m. Roamed around the harbour and took some scenic shots. Saw some mini ships sailing around as well across the sea. The weather was as usual - cold and windy. Finished our lunch by taking burgers and potato chips from Fish N Chips. There were so many sea gulls flying, walking and echoing around the Howth harbour. We fed some potato chips to few of the sea gulls and soon we were surrounded by so many. Then walked back to the Howth dart station @ 1:40 p.m and reached back Tara Street.

Then we went to the Trinity College - the place we always used to pass by while going for lunch during office hours. Though we have clicked some basic snaps inside Trinity College, this time we had gone inside to visit Book of Kells containing the four gospels of Christ from Bible. Book of Armagh, Book of Mulling, Book of Dimma were the other manuscripts displayed.

All alphabets forming words, sentences and languages were so different that time. Then we entered the long room inside the Trinity college library and was awestruck by the books aligned up and down as a treasure. Statues of all time great personalities like Socrates, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Plato were present beside the book shelves as two straight rows. After that we went to the National Library exhibition center to know more about W.B.Yeats and his collections of poems, articles and books. A list of poems read by famous friends of W.B.Yeats were shown in the audio visual room. Books are always our companions. It gives us more insight into different topics, thoughts and aspects of life. After visiting those libraries in Dublin, you will get interested in knowing more about Irish history, culture, art , language and places. Stay tuned to get more updates on my Northern Ireland tour as well...

To be continued ...

Ireland Travel Experience - Part 6

                                                    We continued the day tour of Dublin by heading back to Phoenix Park - one of the largest city park in Europe. Our main aim was to cover Dublin Zoo here - but again we were disappointed as the last admission to the zoo was closed by 3 pm itself.

Though we were not able to visit the Zoo that day, we have seen the zoo another day - will explain more on that in the upcoming articles. But we did some more walking around the phoenix park exploring the green beauty of nature.

We were totally tired, exhausted and finally grabbed a taxi back to National Wax Museum to wrap up our day tour in Dublin. The wax museum was fully filled with wax figures of all celebrities, Hollywood stars, movie characters, political and historical figures etc. I particularly liked the wax figures of Smeagol or Gollum from Lord of the Rings and Yoda from Starwars. They were looking so real.

Other wax figures included Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw,Michael Jackson, Frankenstein, Dracula, Pierce Brosnan, Harry Potter & team and so on.. 

You would have already guessed that we would have stood beside these wax figures and completed our photo sessions. Yes you are right :)

By the end of day, we would have covered the major visitor attractions of Dublin. You can make use of all the major transport in Dublin if you are up to do a day tour. 

Other than walking, you can go in double deck Dublin bus, or tram (which is like a mini train between the roads) or dart (Dublin Area Rapid transit - It is same like the metro train between small stations). 

Also there are Hop on Hop Off buses, Dublin tour buses, Viking bus / splash tour, Dublin Ghost bus tour etc. 
Though we have not taken all these transport there, I guess the viking splash tour is fun and adventurous. 
As I have seen the visitors feeling the Viking effect by putting on the Viking helmet and roaring with enthusiasm all the way from road to water. 

OK, I will explain on our next day trip with a different location in my next part of the article.


-- To be Continued.....