Bikepacking the Kingdom – Day 1: Tralee to Annascaul Lake
Distance: 106.6km | Climbing: 1,210m – Click here for GPS Route
A 6am start, followed by three and a half hours of driving, seemed like an appropriate beginning for something our group had decided to call “The Misery Tour”.
Some much-needed context: Our particular friend group have a very peculiar habit of adding a bit of misery to otherwise enjoyable trips. For example, when going on outdoorsy weekends together for mountain biking, hiking or climbing, we’ll generally go in the depths of winter. And instead of staying in heated, comfortable accommodation, we’ll generally freeze our arses off wild camping or staying in a deserted camping/glamping site where we’re the only guests! Likewise, when planning a mountain biking route, we’ll try to take in the hardest climbs and most technical descents no matter what the weather.
This mindset of course carried over to this tour, with the aim to climb as many passes as possible, take in some tough off-road tracks, and wild camp both nights. The only concession being that we were doing it in summer! In the end, we wouldn’t be able to complete the full 370 kilometres with 4700 metres of climbing like we’d planned, and thus the misery tour became a quite thoroughly enjoyable tour all in all!
After a long drive from Dublin to Tralee (thank you Mark!), we caught up with Joe and Ciaran, and were soon on the bikes and rolling for 10:40am, beginning what would be a 2.5-day journey around Kerry’s Dingle and Iveragh peninsulas.
The journey couldn’t have started any smoother, with a smooth canal path taking us out of Tralee and past Ireland’s largest working windmill in Blennerville.
It was here that we were deposited onto the busy main road between Tralee and Dingle. With the Dingle peninsula being extremely narrow, and with the centre consisting of a continuous spine of mountains, there are really only two roads on and off it. One is on the northern end of the peninsula and one is on the southern, each wedged in between the mountains and the sea.
Combine this with the fact that this peninsula is one of the most scenic locations in the country, and it means you have a lot of traffic funnelled onto just these two roads. Here, it was thankfully only a 12-kilometre dash, before we could escape onto a quieter road towards the Conor Pass.
This would set the tone for the long weekend, where we were thrown between the maelstrom of busy, dangerous main roads and the most serene back roads and boreens you could imagine with barely any traffic to be seen.
Now onto the much quieter road up the Conor Pass, we could knock back the pace. Due to the unpleasantness of the busy main road, we had been charging along at 25km/h, eager to reach the solitude that we knew lay ahead. This wasn’t much of an effort for the other guys, being on a mixture of road and touring bikes, with narrow tyres and less luggage, but for me (on a mountain bike with knobbly tyres and a combined weight of 25+kgs between bike and gear) this was a struggle. So, I very much enjoyed settling back into a nice rhythm here, as we span our way up the steep 456-metre climb, taking in the cloud-swept views across the plains below.
For the final 1.5 kilometres of the climb, the road narrows to a single lane, clinging to the steep mountainside, with sheer bare-rock cliffs to the left and sheer drops to the right to the lake-scattered plains far below. It’s this section alone that makes the Conor Pass one of the most stunning road climbs in the country.
We inched our way up this snaking section of the climb, soaking up the amazing views while dodging sheep and pulling in to let cars by whenever we got a chance.
Before we knew it, we were over the top of the climb, and beginning the fast descent down to Dingle – one of the most well-known towns in Ireland, due to a mixture of its scenic location in the centre of Dingle Bay, as well as its cultural significance, being one of the largest predominately Irish-speaking towns remaining in the country. In a less-cultured move, we grabbed some wraps and sandwiches in Lidl here and then wolfed them down on a picnic bench in the town centre.
By this stage the sun had finally appeared, so Joe and Ciaran quickly grabbed some ice cream cones (a shining sun and blue skies can be a rare thing indeed during Irish summers, so you have to take every chance you can get to enjoy ice cream in this country).
After a nice pitstop here in Dingle, we hopped back on the bikes and started our loop around the outer Dingle Peninsula via Slea Head Drive, a 40-kilometre road loop, famous for its narrow cliff-side roads which hug the Atlantic Ocean.
Mark, Joe, Dan (who would be joining us the next day) and I had cycled this same loop the previous September in absolutely horrendous weather conditions (high winds, torrential rain and heavy fog), but thankfully today’s experience couldn’t have been any different. The wide vistas out to the Atlantic Ocean, its sparkling deep blue waters reflecting the sunlight, and the rugged peninsulas that were hidden by fog and rain on that previous journey were now proudly on display. And considering the fickle weather in this wild corner of Ireland, we relished catching it on a sun-drenched day like this.
After a gorgeous sunshine-filled cycle following the Atlantic coast along Dingle’s rugged headlands, we pointed back inland in the direction of the small village of Ballyferriter. It was here that I had a rendezvous planned with a friend, Tomás, an incredibly well travelled adventure cycle tourer who has previously cycled across the US, down Africa from Cairo to Cape Town, and had just recently finished cycling from New Zealand back to Ireland.
This most recent crazy journey had taken him five years, from being stuck in New Zealand during Covid, to crossing the wild islands of Indonesia, to traversing the length of Afghanistan, to being the first cyclist to venture into Syria in over 10 years, to finally making it home in one piece, he has quite a few stories to tell!
Now back home briefly between adventures, Tomás is helping to run his family pub (Tigh an tSaorsaigh), a proper traditional Irish pub with some of the best Guinness in the country. It would have been rude not to pop in and pay him a visit while sampling the local Guinness!
We ended up having a lovely catch up with Tomás here, to the background noise of native Irish speakers, thanks to this village being firmly in the Gaeltacht (a region of Ireland where Irish is the predominant language). We heard tales of his recent adventures, and talked about plans for another cycle tourer reunion in his pub (the last being a fantastic evening where him and his family held a welcoming home party for Nicko and Lorcan, two other Irish cyclists who had just finished cycling from Cairo to Cape Town!)
Back on the bikes again, we covered the last 10 kilometres back to Dingle (with just a brief stop for Mark to help out a rope-tangled goat). Here we stopped at the same picnic benches where we enjoyed lunch, and this time bought some traditional fish and chips from a nearby chipper.
While tucking into our fish and chips, we got talking to three German girls sitting at a nearby picnic bench who were on their own ten-day cycle tour around Ireland, taking a break from their architecture studies in Austria. They were having a wonderful time, and were amazed at the Irish hospitality, which was lovely to hear.
As it turned out, two of them were stuck without a place to stay in Dublin before their flight and asked if they could crash on my floor. Considering all the hospitality I had been fortunate enough to experience on my world cycle, it was nice to be able to pay some of it back, so Elana and I ended up hosting them the following Monday night (where we enjoyed some fantastic chats and laughs over the dinner table, while enjoying a bottle of lovely Moldovan red wine they brought along).
With our fish and chips demolished, we said goodbye to the German girls and hopped back on the bikes again, this time into some light rain and low cloud as we pedalled east out of Dingle in search of somewhere to wild camp.
We had to endure a bit of dicey cycling on another main road here before we escaped onto a single-lane road with grass growing down the middle. These were the type of roads I loved, so despite the rain I enjoyed the serenity of this boreen, which climbed its way into the hills in the centre of the Dingle peninsula.
With 100 kilometres in the bag, we were keeping an eye out for somewhere to wild camp. Our original plan was to wild camp at Annascaul Lake (a beautiful mountain lake situated in a steep river valley which I had cycled to as a fresh-faced 18 year-old on a short cycle tour 17 years previously). Mark only had a bivvy bag with him, however, so considering the rain we tried to look for a forest to wild camp in. In the end, nothing too promising came up, so we continued climbing onwards to the lake to see what our options were.
As we pedalled onto the narrow, dead-end road to the lake, we passed a farm building with a freshly painted, rather ominous message spread wide across the entire building, stating: “The LORD is my shepherd, I shall fear no EVIL. For those who pour out lies will PERISH”
Despite the warning, we continued onwards to Annascaul Lake to find the perfect camping location right by the lakeshore, as the rain clouds drifted off into the distance.
We quickly set up our tents and bivvy bags while being feasted upon by hundreds of the local midges.
With our tents set up I took my new drone up for its maiden flight. It took a little while to learn the controls, but I was lucky that it was such a calm evening, meaning it was the perfect place to get to grips with it.
With the sun setting, those who had brought stoves cooked up a second dinner, and we sat around in a circle eating and chatting away until we were surrounded by total darkness.
As I crawled into my tent and lay down, I thought back over how enjoyable a day it had been. This was actually my first cycle touring or bikepacking trip in over four years, and the day reminded me of exactly why I loved this way of travel so much. It was a reminder that I needed to get back doing more of these journeys as it really is one of the best ways to see the world, or in this case, discover another side of the country I’ve lived in for most of my life.
Irregular Adventures 