Onion River Exploration Project: Northern Ireland

At the Peace Wall

Day 11 (8/13/15)

As I said in yesterdays blog this day got off to an early start. We had requested a breakfast to go last night so we stopped by the desk to grab it. We have a feeling that somebody had dropped the ball on the breakfast because when we asked the morning desk person about it he took off in a bit of a panic and said he would be right back. A little later he returned with what turned out to be three cheese sandwiches. We headed towards our designated Pickup sight. Unlike yesterday there were copious amounts of people waiting to get on buses. Our tour luck held though and when our bus pulled up and we showed our guide the voucher he said he had two seats reserved for us in the front row of the bus. Neither one of us ever figured out why we had reserved seating when we have to assume that most people bought their tickets as we did on line. I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth however and anyone who has ever taken a bus tour knows how nice it is to have the front seat. With the front seat you have the opportunity to look and photograph out both the front and side windows. You are also right next to the tour guide so if he is the type who likes to talk like our guide John you get information that is not broadcast to the rest of the bus, not to mention being the first off when you get to a place of interest. Our first stop, other than a quick rest stop, was Belfast. It turns out that not that many years ago a tour like this wouldn’t have been possible. Even if you could have gotten across the border into Northern Ireland there was no direct route between Dublin and Belfast and most of your day would have been taken up in just driving to Belfast and back. In the last ten years they have done away with the restrictions at the border and have built a bridge that allows for a more direct route to Belfast. It turns out that half our tour was going to the Titanic Museum and the other half, like us, were going on the “Black Taxi Tour”. I could write an entire blog on the Black Taxi Tour but in a nutshell the Black Taxi Tour is a bunch of taxi drivers, both Protestant and Catholic, who have joined together to promote peace by informing the world of what is going on behind the scenes in Northern Ireland. Peace is a very tentative thing in Northern Ireland and there are still a lot of hard feelings on both sides of the fence. The first stop on the tour was at the mural walls on the catholic side. It turns out that anyone who gets approval can paint a mural on these walls so there are even murals dealing with themes from the U.S. After a period of time they are painted over and a new mural goes up. You could tell that our driver and guide Jordi was very passionate about their mission. After the murals we went to the Catholic Church where one of the major players in negotiating peace, Fr Alec Reid, had been a priest. After that we headed to the so called Peace Wall. We had caught glimpses of it as we drove through the city but you don’t realize how massive it is until you are right next to it. In some areas it is thirty five feet tall and able to sustain the blast of a hand grenade. Here we stopped and continued our history lesson on the “troubles” as they call the events that have led up to such a divided Northern Ireland. Our bus guide John who was also from Belfast had pointed out the security cameras as we crossed the border and it turns out that Belfast has more security cameras per capita than any other city in the world. We then passed through the gates and went to the protestant side. The gates close down every night starting with the smaller side streets and finally the larger thoroughfares. When you get to the Protestant side the first thing that you notice is all the English flags. Just about every house flies a flag and many streets were lined with them. The other thing you notice is that most of the wealth is in the Protestant section. The Protestant section also had their walls of murals, but in my opinion, where the catholic side seemed to promote peace these murals here seemed to be more about glorifying their war heroes. We were told however that a lot of these buildings were being torn down and hopefully things will change. Our last stop was to sign the “Peace Wall” on the Protestant side. It had been a real eye opener for us and was hard to leave Jordi. In a very short time he had gained our respect and admiration. I gave him a piece of my “Peace Paper” and wished him the best of luck for peace in the future. We met up with the rest of our group at the Titanic Museum and after a quick look around the grounds reloaded the bus and headed north past the studio where “Game of Thrones” was currently filming. We continued north until we reached the northern coast where we stopped to photograph Dunluce Castle, one of the castles used in filming the Game of Thrones. We weren’t allowed to close since they were currently filming but we were able to get some shots from the road. We then worked our way along the coast until we came to the Giant’s Causeway. Giant’s Causeway is a natural landform made up of around forty thousand interlocking basalt columns caused by a volcanic eruption. It would be easy to spend an entire day there but after a little over an hour it was time to continue on to our last stop at Carrick-A-Rede Rope Bridge. Since arriving at the north coast the scenery had been breathtaking with glimpses of the coast of Scotland off in the distance. Carrick-A-Rede was no exception. Everywhere you looked there was something you wanted to explore. Eileen and I started immediately on the twenty minute hike to the bridge. We had heard that there could be long lines and we wanted to make sure that we were able to do the trip across the bridge. When we got there we were again lucky and the line was pretty short. On our way back across we did have to wait a little longer, which gave us time for photographs, but when we reached the other side we saw that the line was now extending way up the hill. We slowly worked our way back to where the bus was parked stopping to take photos as we went. Soon, unfortunately, it was time to start home. It had been a wonderful day and emotional rollercoaster, from the emotions of Belfast to the beauty of the north coast. The bus meandered its way back to Belfast through rural areas and small towns. Again, our guide continued our ongoing history/geography lesson. Because of heavy traffic we skirted Belfast on the east side this time and meandered through even more scenic areas. Eventually we hooked back up with the main highway south of Belfast and headed for Dublin. In spite of the diversions we ended back in Dublin almost right on time, tired but with our head swimming with all that we had seen.