It was damp, windy and generally miserable overnight and, continuing the theme, breakfast was essentially spent enveloped in some random cloud. On the upside, visibility wasn't so bad that views out over the bay were completely restricted and I was lucky enough to spot an otter hunting amongst the rocks and seaweed beds at around 6.30am.
As we didn't have much in the way of plans for this trip, other than to visit Spike Island and to do the Inis Meáin parkrun, we'd had a bit of a ponder yesterday and - having enjoyed the very authentic Gaeltacht island of Inis Meáin so much - had decided to try to have a look at the island of Inis Mór, too. This, the largest of the Aran Islands is most readily accessed from Rossaveel, a port village within the Connemara district close to where we happen to be.
And so, we booked online, went to Rossaveel, and by 11.30am were standing in Cill Rónáin the port-town capital of Inis Mór ... and were immediately unsure of our wisdom. Admittedly, the bleak, grey, mizzly conditions didn't help, but those things were secondary in trepidation terms to the sights that met us.
We - and the 200 or so others that decanted from the ferry - were immediately pounced upon by leaflet touters and other disingenuously friendly people trying to ply goods and services. There were all manner of pony-and-trap, minibus, 'safari' vans and bike hire protagonist etc vying for attention; and all set against a (bleak) backdrop of hundreds of tourists who were already on the island and milling in and out of an agglomeration of tat masquerading as traditional this-and-that type shops and eateries.
It all looked and felt very desperate and about as far from the authenticity and ambiance of neighbouring Inis Meáin as it was possible to be.
We hoped that hiring bikes and quitting the immediate Cill Rónáin area might improve matters some, so we headed for the smallest and apparently least busy bike hire facility we could see. For the record, there were at least four bike-hire companies within a couple of hundred metres of each other; a couple of them huge concerns.
The character we hired from operated from some sort of shed / trailer type thing and seemingly found it necessary to caricature what he presumably thought we presumed was a typical Irish man. He regaled us with tales, forced some craic upon us and smattered it all with far too many F bombs. We just wanted some crappy bikes to escape this crappy place.
Anyway, we did eventually reach that point and thereafter squeaked and rattled off on our ill-maintained steeds towards some semblance of sanity.
Except that didn't happen. The road out of town was - unsurprisingly I suppose - absolutely rammed with tourist laden pony-and-traps, 'safari' vans, minibuses, hikers and about 10,000 rain-soaked people wobbling about on ill-maintained bikes, who frequently randomly stopped to take selfies against a backdrop of unprepossessing things like a soaking wet and bored-looking grazing sheep.
It was awful. Absolutely everywhere we went for the first couple of hours was just rammed and full of opportunistic tat stands and mobile eateries. Even the Island's famous seal colony was something we just rode by in disgust. Unsurprisingly, not content with just looking at the hauled out and resting animals, several dozen idiots had decided they wanted to be amongst the colony and had made their way across beach and seaweed-strewn rocks to get a selfie with a selkie (or, to be pedantic, a few increasingly concerned looking common seals selfishly disturbed from their restorative time).
Having flashed despondently by the seal colony (and idiots) we headed for an attraction known as the Wormhole, a sea-carved blowhole set in a huge slab of limestone that had hosted a Red Bull sponsored cliff diving event a few years ago. Getting there want easy. It involved about a twenty minute slip-sliding trek over the clints and grykes of the karst landscape whilst also negotiating an Indian file of tourists heading both out to, and back, from the beleaguered attraction. Amongst the madness there was still a few gems of unusual flora, though; with a bonsai-like version of hemp agrimony doing particularly well (pic).
Once at the Wormhole, it was sort of impressive: but not very. We've come across more active blowholes under our own steam before and not even bothered to take a crappy picture of them. What was impressive was its bizarre and totally naturally-carved symmetry. This, apparently, is possible due to the fissures that naturally exist in karst formations. Well, we marvelled at that aspect of it for two seconds or so, and then jostled past dozens of others in order to slip-slide our way back to our ill-maintained steeds.
None of this was going very well so we decided to abort the notion of visiting any of the Island's promoted tourist attractions and just ride as far away from the madness as we could; to the very western tip of the island. Here, at least, tourist numbers were much reduced and it was possible to have a bit of a breather and look out with bins. There wasn't much to see, apart from good numbers of Manx shearwaters, who - for the record - didn't particularly seem to be lamenting the besieged fate of poor old Inis Mór.
After a bit of a recoup and wardrobe adjustment (it had faired up, a bit), we headed roughly back in the direction of Cill Rónáin and did, fortunately, manage to bag a couple of the island's more outlying celebrated attractions amongst ever-thinning tourist numbers en route. The 'Seven Churches' in particular was pretty interesting. It's a self-contained site that accommodates, well, guess what.
Back at the port we celebrated our survival / tried to cheer up a bit by having a massive ice cream. This was, unequivocally, the best part of the day.
All that remained was to endure the contrived chirpiness of the bike-hire man and return to the mainland. As it happened, he said something quite profound. I was lamenting the bespoiling nature of over-tourism and cynical tourist snares and he simply said, in a very different, quite serious, and what was very probably his normal voice: 'They've taken our fishing from us, what are we supposed to do'.
A maze of human / natural world exploitative impacts and the complex intertwined layers thereof immediately started running through my head. I concluded once again that the sooner our idiotic species self-destructs the better. After my 100th birthday, that is.
We're at the location shown, now. It's bleak, currently in a cloud, and doesn't feature on the TurnPlacesToShite app.
Post composed at 21:50 on Monday 27th July from our intended overnighting spot N 53.33143°, W 09.52903° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:53.33143%2C-09.52903
