Day 3

Today we travel west from Belfast to Galway. Because we arrived a little late into Belfast yesterday we postponed the 'Black Taxi tour' until this morning, so we were up early ready to take in a bit of history in the troubled city of Belfast.

The tour took us into the peace sector a kind of no mans land between the conflicting sides. Throughout this area there were murals painted all over the sides of the houses, we were told that they are starting to get painted over so we had better see them while they were still there. These murals ranged from pictures in memory of 'soldiers' who had died in the conflict to symbols of each sector to people holding machine guns which seemed to follow you wherever you would walk.

Our machine gun friend

The taxi drivers told us that some people, usual local youths, would still cause some trouble here(evidence in all the smashed glass) but in general things had settled down. We drove on to see one of the tallest wall still in belfast where we each wrote our little message of peace for others to read.........then write over with their own message i guess. some funny old messages included this one 'you think you've got problems!! the Americans steal our FISH!' written by a Canadian visitor.

This is my message for the world, to quote from monty pyhton.

Peace from the Albatross!!

From here we visited some more murals including one long wall covered in about 10 or so which had a mural of george bush sucking all the oil out of iraq with the bodies piling up and the cash flowing towards him with the help of a british hook. It was titled 'Americas greatest failure'

Moving out of Belfast we crossed the border again into southern Ireland and back to the Euro. The scenery was quite beautiful in this heartland of the country. We stopped off at a waterfall and had a bit of a gander at the local scenery before heading into the party town of Galway.

Galway is a great little town, there were plenty of places to visit at night as we found out staying out until around 3 on a weekday i think. The website does say that its the party capital of Ireland.

With the conflict behind us it was now time to explore the south of Ireland....