Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Day 23: Northern Coast and Belfast

We began the day heading up to the north coast for one of the big stops of the tour - the Giant's Causeway. It's a stretch of basalt columns that stretches towards Scotland. The surrounding cliffs are also dramatic scenery, but



Next we headed to the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge for some more scenery (and of course a short walk over the rope bridge to an island off the cliffs).




Around this point I started feeling pretty sick. I'm not sure if it was a delayed hangover or just too much time in the rain or in a bad position on the bus, but I've had a pretty upset stomach and been incredibly achey all day since. I skipped eating for lunch, and struggled through a black-taxi tour of Belfast when we got there. The tour focused again on a lot of the political troubles in Northern Ireland and we visited some of the former hotbeds of trouble and got a lot of history.



We then went out for a group dinner at a local pub that took until 10:30 or so. I definitely wasn't feeling up to going out again by this point so I'm just relaxing in the hostel and hopefully will get more sleep tonight and feel better tomorrow.

5 comments:

Jess said...

Get better!

Joe said...

Those columns make for very strange landscape. I've never seen nature so square.

iphynx said...

Most of them are hexagonal actually, which is even more odd. From what I gathered they were formed by the quick cooling of a volcanic plateau.

Unknown said...

Neat, do you recall what mineral they're made up of?

iphynx said...

Basalt, as stated in the original post.