Ireland: like a whore's knickers

If you imagine the four peninsulae of this area as four 'fingers' sticking out into the Atlantic, our second day of cycling took us along the ring finger, the Beara (pronounced like Nearer) Penninsula. It's too large to circumnavigate in a single go, so we used the car to leapfrog - one person driving, two cycling - along the south coast. Even so, the mist that closed in around us made it hard to enjoy the scenery and eventually left us all pretty soaked/in need of some dry clothes from the back-up vehicle. 

Dry-ish, we arrived at the head, Dursey Island, on four wheels, singing along to Adele. As we pulled up, what appeared to be a garden shed swung through the mist, bizarrely hanging in the cloud. A cable car links the mainland to Dursey Island itself, though the idea of jumping in and being winched into the fog didn't have much appeal. Instead we ate our sandwiches and mooched around for a while reading up on the history of the O'Sullivan clan who were grand fromages around here in their day.

Eventually the fog lifted a bit and the island hove into view, just a couple of hundred meters away. But by then we'd had enough and decided to point our wheels homewards, along the north coast of the peninsula. As we did, the weather lifted a bit, revealing a stunning rugged stretch of the WaWa punctuated by little coves, a winding road that was not unlike parts of the Hebrides - water water everywhere in pools, tarns, inlets - and the road snaking its way round a series of beautiful little inlets and hidden coves,  quite different from the south coast. 

We were tempted to get the bikes off the car and start cycling but, on cue,  the mist would descend again frustrating our hopes of getting going again. The route was much longer than the southerly section too - all that winding about, up and down and round the twists and turns of the the coastline marked this as a place worth returning to, for a longer explore. 

And then we encountered Coln. 

This is Coln (not his real name; not a real photo of him). We met him in the middle of the road on the Beara Penninsula. Literally the middle of the road because he was standing there, leaning on his bike, possibly in trouble. So we stopped and asked if all was well. 

He started from his middle of the road reverie and pronounced that he was fine, but that he needed to fix the gears on his old bike because he'd been all over the world, including the Auvergne, and, pardon his French, but this road was the fecking worst he'd ever encountered and he was knackered.

He certainly looked it.  We began to size up this pirate-like figure, propped up against a bike held together with string and distinctly short of up-to-the-minute cycling accessories. The red nose was a bit of a giveaway: this was yer actual bag man on a bike.  

But there were no flies on Coln. He had managed to bring traffic to a halt and he had an audience. So off he went again, bemoaning the state of his bike and of the road. Why,  this road was a fecking bitch was it not, pardon his french, it was up down up down...like a pair of fecking whore's knickers!

There was no obvious answer to this gobbet of wisdom and it seemed a good moment to squeeze past, stifling our giggles and marvelling anew at the diversity of human life to be found on the road.