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Showing posts with the label cemetery

A weekend in the Dingle, late afternoon in the graveyard

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As we continued with the Slea Head Drive the weather deteriorated even further, so after lunch in a bar we decided to cut our losses and head towards home, or Dingle in this case. But, in keeping with the Tom Crean theme and feeling sorry for the poor buggers out in the hills on the 19 mile endurance walk, we returned via the cemetery in which Tom Crean and his wife are buried.  This lies just outside Annascaul in the hamlet of Ballynacourty. Howard said it would be a little bit different and he was surely right. The graveyard was overgrown and damp but what was striking about it was that most of the burials seemed to be above ground in little mausoleums. Maybe the ground was too stony and hard to dig, but it made it into a unique place. Some of the tombs were completely covered over with moss and seemed to be sliding back into the earth. In better preserved ones you could see the slabs that could be removed to place the coffins inside. As you can imagine I took a number of photos w

Croatia and a couple of Balkans, Day 3 Montenegro, a little ham and cheese above Kotor

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Carrying on our trip around the bay we decided to ignore the main town of Kotor for the moment and climb Mount Lovçen which lies at the end of the bay, directly behind Kotor. This is done in a series of 25 hairpin bends over 17km of narrow road which Anne negotiated with aplomb. We stopped in a lay-by close to the top of the ascent to have some lunch and were enjoying the view until a coach of tourists stopped and engulfed us. We stopped and waited until they had driven away and we could continue our journey. The top of the mountain broadens out into a green plain dotted with small farms and alpine-like houses. We carried on along the main road until we shortly came to the village of Pršut. Little did we know that this is the ham capital of Montenegro. We could see the small smokehouses and several homes were advertising ham and cheese for sale. We stopped at one and bought a couple of bags of sliced ham and an extremely tasty cheese. The mother who served us was

5th, 6th May - Sucre, the Colonial Capital of Bolivia

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We discovered that there was very little to do in Potosi on a Sunday. It is difficult to tour the churches as they are only open for services, and you cannot really walk around taking photographs during mass. Any vestige of a museum was also closed. So we went down to the spanking new palatial bus station and caught a bus out for Sucre which lies north east of Potosi.  The first taxi driver dropped us off at the wrong bus station, in spite of being told where we were going, after being surly about luggage and generally taking us anywhere at all. Perhaps he had had too much of a good time on Saturday night... or maybe not. We thought that we were going to miss the 11.00 am coach but found that it fortunately left at 11.20. On reaching Sucre we dropped our stuff off at the hostel - the Seven Pesos, which fortunately was fairly central. We then had a walk around the city and lunched. The dish of Sucre is the saltena, which is like a Cornish pasty except spicier. It is possible to get th