Northern Ireland and the Giant's Causeway

So the next day I had signed up for a tour of Belfast and the Giant's Causeway. I wasn't too sure about this tour, but it turned out I really enjoyed it. I remember being on the tube in Londn and having to worry about the IRA bombs, soI had never really looked at the conflict from the pther side. This tour gave us a choice of a so-called "black taxi" tour focussing on the conflict or the Titanic museum.  To me it seemed like an obvious choice.

We had a woman tour guide this time and I really wanted her to be as warm and funny as our previous guides. Maybe I'd heard too many of the stories before, but somehow she wasn't as entertaining. Maybe she wasn't as connected to the things she was talking about. (She was not from the region we were visiting.)



We headed out of Dublin and passed this "Viking" Tour land/water vehicle.

 The earlier tours had covered very similar landscape, so  I didn't take many pictures until we got to the border.

I had never really thought about the Celts as a Proto-germanic tribe that was colonialized by the English before, so this trip gave me something to think about.

I thought this was a fascinating little building out in the middle of nowhere.

When we got to Belfast we were divided into the Titanic group and the Back Taxis group.



I got in my cab with 4 other people and it was off to the Catholic section of town.

This building was where protestors ended up holing up (although the police evidently came down and landed on the top of the building and fired at people from above. during the 1969 riots.

 

We next went to a politcal commemorative wall, that had left wing slogans and paintings.

The most prominent image was honoring Bobby Sands and the hunger strikers who were fighting for Catholic rights and recognition.

 

The panel below is intersting, because it protests the selling of arms to Saudi Arabia.
 

Next we went to Sinn Fein headquarters and a little gift shop, before going on to a little museum to the hunger strikers.

The museum had this little mock up of woman's prison cell.
 

This is part of the interior of the museum.

 This was a part of the tv surveillance system fo the prison. The tubes burned the images from the prisoninto the screen.

After the museum we visited a Catholic church and a memorial to the fallen.

I learned that the Irish flag represents the two Irelands with a stripe of white in between to represent peace. Liek so many others I hope it stays that way. There was some trepidation about what the effects of Brexit might be.

The English walled in the Catholic part of town and on the back side people (starting with Bill Clinton) have been writing their wishes for peace in the region.

The wall is now full of thousands of signatures.  They are getting ready to haul the wall away, but more and more people are signing every day.

Before we knew it the Black Taxi Tour was over and we were back at the Titanic museum to meet up with the rest of our tour.  The Titanic Museum is an amazing piece of contemporary architecture.  Each of those metal leaves represents a person who died on board.

The inside is also incredible - a huge space with these metal plates for walls.

The museum is located on the site where the Titanic was built. Those poles are the places where the pieces of the ship were assembled.

 

Here is a view of the museum as we began our departure from Belfast.

 

 

Belfast looks like a fascinating city and soemday it would be nice to see the rest of the city.

 

This was another strange bulding visible on the Belfast skyline. We also passed by the studios where some of the filming for Game of Thrones took place.

 

It turned out that Greyjoy castle from Game of Thrones was in Northern Ireland (and is actually the ruins of Dunluce Castle.)  There was another whole tour dedicated to The Game of Thrones, but just driving by the place wand seeing the "Iron Islands" was enough for me.

Here you can start to see the ruins.

As we went around the curve, the whole complex became more visible.

 

The rocky coast here was rugged and appealing. as we reached Bushmills our destination for viewing the "Giant's Causeway."

 

We had a geological guide here, but he spent more time telling us about the two giants (one in Scotland and one in Ireland and the quarrel that destroyed the causeway between the two countries.

The Causeway is a bunch (about 40,000)  roughly pentagonal interconnected prisms of Basalt formed by a volcanic fissure and the slower cooling time of the fissure as opposed to the faster cooling time of an eruption.

 

It is an intriguing phenomenon to see these tall prisms sticking up at different heights like weird steps.

 

 

Of course some are in interesting formations that have been proclaimed chairs, or the Shepherd's steps, or the camel's hump and stories are then attached to the formations. Like the place where old "Mary" illegally sold liquor to the visitors until stopped by the police. Supposedly from then on she sold the tourists glasses of water and then gave them the whiskey for free. (Bushmills is a very face place for the manufacture of Irish whiskey.

 

I thought this was an interesting color combination for gladiolis.

Very pretty!

Our last stop was the Carrick-A-Rede rope bridge, similar to the kind traditionally built by Fishermen for getting between cliffs.

 The line was fairly long to cross over to this little cliff island.  Here you can see the bridge from a distance.

I thought this would really scare me, because I am terrified of heights, but it really wasn't too bad.

Of course I wasn't brave enough to let go and take pictures without holdng onto the railing rope, so my pictures are a bit random.

This is what I saw when I dared to look! ;-)

 

From the island there you could see Scotland on the other side of the Ocean.

 

And then it was time to get back in the bus and head home again.