Derry; Saturday, 25 July, 2009

After a very healthy (portion size not wellbeing) breakfast I headed out into town and over to the railway station. I purchased a one day ticket which gave me unlimited use of all the buses and trains in Northern Ireland, not bad for £15!

First stop of the morning was Castlerock and a walk along the cliffs to the Mussenden Temple and Downhill Demesne. I spent over two hours walking to and around the site, and as I wandered back to the station I realised that I had managed to time it just so that I would miss trains in both directions and have a nearly two hour wait. Thankfully the trains were playing up and the Belfast train was still sitting in the station (and diverted to Portrush) when I arrived.

It left a few moments later and 30 minutes further down and then up the line I found myself in Portrush.

This is Northern Ireland’s premier beach resort, and it is just like any major British sea-side town on a sunny Saturday, absolutely packed and unbearable, so I headed out to the bus station and into the countryside.

I caught the open-top bus out towards the Giants Causeway, with the intention of changing there onto another bus to take me onto the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge which had been closed when I had gone on the Giants Causeway tour from Belfast last November. I felt quite glad to be going on from the Causeway as it was absolutely heaving with tourists and coaches; a far cry from the peacefully quiet place I remembered from November.

I got to the rope bridge with just over an hour before the final bus of the day back. Not a problem I thought, how wrong I was. Firstly from the entrance kiosks it’s a walk of just over a Kilometre, or 10 minutes to get to the bridge, and then you have to queue to get over and then queue to get back over. When I got to the bridge the queue was over 30 minutes in each direction, meaning that if I joined the queue I would miss the last bus of the day by at least 20 minutes, so I decided to take some photos of the bridge (and a couple of people freaking out on it and freezing to the spot and having to be pulled over, possibly another cause of the long delays crossing), before heading back to the car park and start the journey back.

Whilst getting to the rope-bridge had taken over 6 hours (albeit that it wasn’t my original intention of going there, I had thought Portrush might have been more pleasant, and on the way out I did spend two hours wandering around Castlerock), the journey back was decidedly more speedy.

As the weather was starting to look a little ropey (and there were still masses of tourists at the Causeway), I caught the bus back into Bushmills and picked up the open-top bus on it’s outward bound journey to the causeway. Consequently I had a comfy seat out of the light drizzle when it left the causeway loaded town with tourists.

There was an event going on in Portstewart so the bus went straight down the main road into Coleraine rather than following the coast which made the connection in Coleraine for the train back to Derry even more comfortable that it had previously been. On arrival in Derry there was a bus waiting to go back to the bus station so less than three hours after leaving the Rope Bridge I was walking into a restaurant in Derry for a bite to eat before heading back to the hotel to pack, ready to move on the following morning.