Trip 2015-16. Day 86. Ireland, Clonmacnoise. Ирландия: Клонмакнойз

Hitchhiking from Clara to Clonmacnoise

Today the three of us, an English man, a Chinese girl and a Russian immigrant from Israel, hitched along a dead empty country road from Clara to Clonmacnoise. I honestly thought we'd never move from that spot. But... after fifteen minutes a car stopped. It was an old lady who said she didn't like to drive people but we seemed to be too nice to be left stranded. She was going only ten kilometres down the road to see her daughter, a hair-dresser and a wife of a local detective. When we actually arrived at her daughter's house, a young lady greeted us and offered us a lift all the way to Clonmacnoise. So we just got out of her mother's car and got into hers.
Clonmacnoise, an ancient monastic site and a cemetery, turned out to be a horrible place with a new tourist bus arriving every thirty minutes and an entrance fee of seven euros. But since I'd already spent one month in Ireland hiking mostly on private farm lands, it was just a matter of walking around and opening a gate (“don't worry, it's just for cows”) before we got in for free.

Half an hour later we walked out through the main door disguising ourselves as normal British and Japanese tourists. The only difference was that we didn't have a bus to pick us up. But we were happy to hitchhike back, meet a couple of locals and discover a photogenic abandoned cottage on the way. “Before you showed me deserted and ruined places I'd never realized that they were much more beautiful than the well-preserved ones”, a Chinese girl said to me. “Yes, like all the other things which are off the ordinary path...” I replied.