We share our rooms with 2 students from germany, fenia and sammy, who are studying here in Ireland. They had a few vacation days and also decided to visit killarney.
After our breakfast in the hostel, me and svea went on our way to the killarney national park. We decided not to take the bus and walk instead.
We wanted to walk through the park, see the two lakes, the old cathedral and as our final goal, the torc waterfall.
It was a nice day, not to hot, not to cold, it was cloudy but that also meant no possible sunburn.
First we got to the old cathedral. It was free of charge to enter. Even though it was probably the coolest ruin that we had seen so far. With multiple floors, rooms and a large tree in the middle of it.
The nature park itself was also very beautiful and all the different trees gave a jungle-type feeling.
It even had a few maamoth trees.
While walking around we suddenly passed by Fenia and Sammy, who had also decided to visit the national park. Though they did take the bus directly to the waterfall and then walked from there.
They said that there was a route above the waterfall where they saw a few people come down from, that seemed very nice.
We continued our way and at some point reached a steep, rocky pathway up the mountain that seemed to be the way to the waterfall.
There was also a map that showed that this route should takes us to the waterfall but it had a red warning that it was only for very fit people with good equipment, health and experience.
So after a bit of discussion we decided to go this route.
And it was pretty steep. And slippery from the rain. And we really weren't that well equipped.
Also some people passed us and said that it wasn't really worth it.
But after the first climb the walkway got a lot better. So it really wasn't that bad.
We kept walking along the mountain side and started going down again. We expected to reach the waterfall any moment now.
It was only when two dutch people passed us and asked if the waterfall was "that way?" pointing in the direction where we just came from, that we knew that there was no waterfall anywhere around here.
We told them no and started to wonder if we had accidently passed it.
So all of us walked the rest of the way down and with the help of google maps we managed to find our way to the actual waterfall.
Which was nowhere close to where it said on the map. And also not close to the red 2hr route that we had just climbed.
We finally got to to the waterfall and then made our way back to a restaurant to have some lunch. We were both quite hungry after walking all in all over 5hrs.
We then headed back to our hostel which was still around 2hrs. On the way we passed a big traffic jam with many people revving their engines and honking.
We had heard that this weekend there was a race in killarney and we had already seen a few race cars. But this was different as there were so many people yelling around, already quite drunk and just generally hyped up.
We got back at around 17:30, after doing a little shopping for dinner.
We cooked spaghetti with some broccoli and a salsa sauce. Then played some boardgames until it was time for bed.
