Adventures in Europe: Dublin, Ireland

Yesterday, with my bike trip behind me, I walked around Dublin city centre for awhile.

At some point I wandered into a souvenir shop to buy a postcard, and I saw posters of puffins. After visiting Newfoundland last year and seeing puffins, I am crazy about them, so I looked up if there are puffins around Dublin and, indeed, there are! So I quickly booked a puffin tour and headed out by bus to the Howth Peninsula. Here, there is a little harbour, and the setting was lovely.

Basically, for 25 euro I had chartered the boat for myself (this was just luck, the boat can hold more than twenty), and so it was just me and the boatmen heading out to the island known as Ireland's Eye.

There are about a dozen pairs of puffins that breed on the island, which is a very small number compared to what I saw in Newfoundland (I think there are almost 500,000 on that island!), and I only saw two puffins. So, what was actually more impressive were all the grey seals (which I don't think I have ever seen before) . . .

. . . and countless guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes, cormorants, and the particularly beautiful and impressive gannets. My phone could not capture any of the birds, but they were beautiful and fascinating to watch on the cliffs, in the water, and in the sky.

The island is protected now, but was once the location of a monastery, as well as a Martello tower, which dates back two hundred years to Napoleonic times, when Britain built these towers all along the coastline of the British isles to protect against invasion. 

The loop around the island takes about an hour, and back onshore I enjoyed fish and chips on the wharf before heading back into the city.

This morning I left Ireland by ferry, heading over to Wales.