Meet Andrea
Andrea Lippert, the founder of Andaire Ltd, offers a special range of extended tours and day tours. Andrea loves nature since she roamed the forests and fields of her childhood. She is an artist, practices Qigong and meditation and has many years experience in life coaching and she is a tour guide and chauffeur. All this is at your service.
These tours are for guests who cherish spending time with likeminded people, friends or family in small groups; being in nature; enjoying art, craft and culture and exploring Ireland.They like to calm their minds, take time out and restore their power to deal with life’s challenges especially during the current times.
Why I love being a guide in Ireland
I grew up in Germany, I remember arriving in Ireland at Cobh for the frst time in the 80s it felt like something signifcant was happening.
In a strange way Ireland has always felt more like home than Germany and after travelling the length and breadth of this beautiful country as a guide for more than a decade I fnd new stories and hidden wonders still, every time. For me exploring Ireland is a lifelong quest to know the place I call home now for half of my adult life.
The wild natural regions of Ireland are my favourite places, here we can connect to nature and to ourselves, Ireland is special with having those ‘wild’ places and I am passionate about protecting them.
Every tour, every journey I make in Ireland shows me more wonders and interesting features and facts, in between I read and talk to people to find more reference points and hidden wonders.
What I like about Ireland: its people, their friendliness and helpfulness, their art of communication and connection, their welcome. Hearing ‘Sure, it’ll be grand, it could be worse’ mellowed my perfectionism and strive to plan everything. I love the stories, the old tales, the literature, art and music.
Irish landscapes are so varied, the wild Atlantic with its coastline. The blanket bogs of Connemara and Donegal, the limestone karst of the Burren, the sunny South-East, the Wicklow mountains, the bogs of the midlands, the Shannon flowing through the length of the country, the Antrim coast and the Northern shores, the mountains of Kerry and the bays of Dingle, in between those precious forests, all so different and easily within reach.
I used to have not much interest in history, in school in Germany it was all dates or the war. When I trained as a tour guide and had to learn how to tell my guests about Irish history I had to fnd a different way of looking at it. If you want to talk about something you need to understand it first, find a structure, a sense. The people’s stories behind historical facts is what makes talks interesting. And travelling the country again and again I began to notice things and then eventually what I heard and read made sense. Now I enjoy history and love seeing connections and discovering interesting places and telling the stories of history.
I have many personal interests as an artist and craftsperson working with glass, as a practicioner of mindfulness and Tai Chi, an ocean swimmer, as a lover of books and stories. I love fnding those special places with great food, great drink in a lovely atmosphere, pubs and venues for great music, traditional and other. And I love chatting to people. All this is part of my tours.
Only recently I remembered how much forests and trees were part of my childhood, I guess this was so normal to me that I forgot to see the trees. We are focusing now more and more on our natural environment, realising if we want to survive and have a good life we can not do it outside of or without nature, we are part of nature. I love the ocean as a more recent part of my life, the trees and forests are old friends and I am passionate about increasing the number of trees in Ireland. Once upon a time in the far distance Ireland was covered in trees, what we have today is only a hint of what was. I want to plant trees, oaks and pine and birch and alder and hawthorn and holly and all the other old trees of Ireland.