When I was a kid, I used to ask my drawing teacher why did he make us fill blue color in water and sky when drawing a landscape picture. I asked too many questions. I would question almost everything. I would question practicality of lyrics of a romantic song when I was 5. I have spent most of my life in India. Until my late youth, when I traveled to certain parts of far north India, I had not seen clear blue sky and saw blue water first time even later. I would insist on leaving color of sky as white or some other color and ask teacher to show me blue sky pointing outside window. This used to land me in fairly serious troubles for that age. I wonder now, had I seen something like this then, I would have known – Sky is Blue. Water is Blue.

Life is mostly about first times and last laughs they say. I can think of a hundred other ‘first times’ which I saw/did/experienced/learnt while travelling.

We had taken a ferry from coastal village named Portmagee on a bright pleasant sunny day like this and had ‘hoped’ to visit the christian monastery (a christian pilgrimage site) on ‘Skellig Michael’ (the bigger of the two islands in the Atlantic off the west Irish coast). We could not land due to rough and windy Irish weather. This photo here is of Little Skellig, the other of the two islands. This one is smaller and entirely occupied by birds, mainly seagulls (I am scared of seagulls).

Two things to remember :

1. Keep calm and enjoy the view. Try not to get your hopes too high. Most days of the year, unless one is exceptionally lucky, has to return disappointed and even more tempted. But even if you fail to land and only get to take a trip around the islands, the views of islands, sea, sky, seagulls and a light house are absolutely stunning and totally worth the time and money spent. For me, it was the farthest (would be true for many of us) I had ever been into an ocean.

2. The boats/ferry you will ride on are fairly basic and unless you have practice, you are bound to feel sea sick on your way back. Avoid looking into camera screen/Phone continuously and don’t move around a lot (I know because I did both).

If you are travelling to Ireland and have limited time, visit Dublin, Cork and Ring of Kerry. That should cover most of your ‘Irish Experience’. I will post an entire series on experiences and pictures while travelling across Ireland. Republic of Ireland, I mean. 🙂