On the road again...

I've made references to traveling companions in previous posts and the bonds formed with complete strangers when you find yourselves in bizarre situations or moments of extreme beauty in strange places. Thats where I met Mat (previously known as 'The American') as we bussed out of Beijing on a cold clear December morning towards the Great Wall of China.

The day we spent walking the wall was truely awesome. On countless occassions during the hike I had to remind myself I was in the middle of China standing on one of the wonders of the world in beautiful sunshine. Its an experience thats been hardcoded into my memory, and its a memory that Mat and I will always share.

Mat was in Paris when I was in Argentina but we'd promised to try to travel again together at somepoint and so dates were set and flights booked for an Irish roadtrip rendez-vous.

The last time I was in Belfast was back in 1995 when the Troubles were very much apparent. I remember driving up across the Newry checkpoint which resembled a war zone with armoured tanks and rocket launchers lining the road and I clearly remember the night I spent in the Stormont hotel looking out over the city as it burnt and wondering if the streets would be opened again by morning so that I could get to my meeting. Belfast was a broken city; divided and explosive with no sign of peace in sight.

When I arrived in Sarajevo back in 2001 SFOR were doing their best to keep the fragile peace but the tensions between the ethnic groups were all too tangiable and the violence bubbled up regularly in pockets around towns and on the borders. It felt like war and it felt all to famililar - it felt like Belfast. I've resisted the urge to go back to Sarajevo as i'm afraid nothing is going to have changed but since 1998 things have moved on in Belfast and the city I discovered was vibrant, booming and basking in good weather with students sunning themselves in the parks and sidewalk cafes spilling out into the streets.

There are still sparodic tensions (old habits die hard) and the wall that divided Catholics from Protestants is still in place and closed each night, but these days Belfast is celebrating its future whilst remembering its past and marketing its history in the form of black taxi tours - not to be proud of its Troubles but so as to learn and not to forget. The 90 min taxi tour that Mat and I took was truely a whistle stop tour of the history and geography of Ireland and Belfast, much of which is emblazoned on the buildings and walls in murals and it gave us a very broad and yet very real taste of what the city has been through, and how far its come in the last 12 years.

Next morning with the wind in our wheels we drove North to the Giant's Causeway and to explore the Northern Irish coast.

Back thousands of years ago when giants roamed the earth and the moon was made of cheese Fin McCool (the local Irish giant) built this causeway to Scotland so as to fight his Scottish nemisis, Benandonner. Since then some clever scientists have debunked this legend claiming that the huge hexagonal stones were formed when basaltic rock from volcanic eruptions cooled into these regular shapes. Either way, giants or volcanoes, the causeway definitly is cool and we had a great couple of hours clambering over the columns and up the stepped cliffs.

Although the main area was quite touristy armed with the Lonely Planet's 'Hiking in Ireland' guide book and picnics in our daypacks after only a short walk along the clifftops we pretty much had the place to ourselves and after lunch found the perfect place to snooze in the sunshine. This had become a bit of a habit; hike, picnic, snooze and if anyone from Lonely Planet is reading i'd be happy to contribute a couple of entries to the 'Napping in Ireland' guide book when its published.

The perfect spot for a snooze.

The other habit we feel into all to easily was that of frequenting Irish pubs...

Irish bars are legendary, quite literally the world over, for their hospitality and music, and none more so than in Ireland itself where going to the pub is almost a full body-contact sport when the band is playing and the place is jumping.

The good weather had left us and the usualy Irish showers and rain returned so next morning we jumped in the car, threw away the map, pulled out the compass and headed West until we hit the water.


This is the stuff that great road trips are made of; stunning scenery, good music, twisty winding lanes and nothing but the open road and the unexpected ahead.

What we'd certainly not expected was to find the small town of Ardara in which every pub and bar on the high street was hosting (inside and out) a band, group of fiddlers, flautists and whistler players for their weekend music festival.

It seems every kid in Ireland is born with an instrument tucked under their chin or in their mouth and even the most timid of 8-year olds in pink sweatshirts armed only with a junior sized accordian is capable of getting an entire pub up and jumping or singing. Like all good road trips our Irish jaunt needed a themesong and with 'Dirty old town', 'The gambler' and 'Molly Malone' being bashed out in every pub we set foot in we had plenty to choose from and hearing any of them ever again is sure to bring back the memories of that spectacular day.

Our final days were spent in Dublin wandering the town by day and the bars by night (cue 'Dirty old town'...) with some Irish friends Mat had made back in Thailand.



The next morning I picked up the headlines in the Irish Times to find that the country had completed its troubled journey and jumped into a new phase of peace with the end of control from London in Northern Ireland and power sharing agreed between two previous enemies, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness. History completes its cycle in Northern Ireland and I hope someday i'll see the same cycle run its course in Sarajevo. For now though our little roadtrip had run its course and Mat and I went our seperate ways at Dublin airport knowing our travels will probably cross again sometime, someplace now that we've some great Irish memories to tack up alongside those great wall moments.