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Belfast's city hall, an impressive building. There was a display of photos related to the Titanic at the front.

Vicki at the big fish, down by the riverside. Brilliantly, the comment posted to Google maps for this is 'well its a fish'.

This is the 'Beacon of Hope' sculpture.

Outside the Custom House with 'the speaker'.

This is the Albert Memorial clock tower, which is interestingly leaning at something like 1.3m off vertical.

In the afternoon we took a taxi tour of the murals and learned about NI's history, particularly the troubles. I think this is King William of Orange.

There are massive murals like this painted on the sides of houses all around the Shankill area.

Detail on one of the murals.

The murals range in content, some promoting organisations or portraying parts of Northern Ireland's history, some are simply memorials to those killed.

This is the wall that still separates two communities. It was covered in amazing artwork and grafitti promoting peace. Although Belfast is a lot more peaceful these days, our driver said that the area was not ready for the wall to come down yet.

Bombay street. In 1969 a riot took place here and almost the entire street was burned. Today this memorial garden commemorates a number of those killed during the troubles. This is just the other side of the wall and you can see the protective cage around the back gardens of the houses.

A mural depicting Bobby Sands, who died on hunger strike in 1981.

There are a staggering amount of murals around Belfast and they are still being repainted today.

This is Falls road, where there's this long stretch of murals.

Friday evening we had dinner out on the north coast in Portrush. Despite being still full from giant burritos in Belfast we found space for pudding.

Saturday featured a visit to the Giant's Causeway, on the north coast.

The causeway looks like this close up. It's quite amazing.

The rock was apparently pushed up through the ground by some kind of volcanic activity.

There's two main bits to it, and this is definitely the most impressive.

Panorama-rama!

The weather wasn't spectacular, but it meant most of the tourists had stayed away.

Amazingly, you're allowed to clamber all over the causeway.

As if the causeway alone wasn't enough to draw people here, there's more. This is the giant's boot, a strangely curvy rock.

Then a bit further round the corner is this, the organ. Essentially the same structure as the causeway but embedded in a cliffside.

A closer shot of the organ.

Panoramic shot of the bay. The causeway is the bit jutting out into the sea from the left.

This is the next bay round from the causeway, that you go through to get to it. It's also quite pretty. There's a rock formation called the camel or the dromedary or something here as well, but it's less impressive.

After we'd seen the causeway we took a drive east along the coast and stopped where it was beautiful i.e. almost everywhere.

The whole of the north coast is basically stunning.

A bit further along and we found a tiny little fishing village down a steep windy road to the sea. I like this photo.

There was some kind of coastal marathon happening that day, so the beautiful scenery was occasionally punctuated by exhausted looking people in shorts.

There's always one, isn't there.

Mmmm scenery.

Our tiny hire car, with its tiny boot, that was only just big enough for our stuff.

Further down the coast is the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, which leads from the mainland out onto a tiny little chunk of cliff.

Here's me, like, totally crossing it and stuff.

It's a very nice spot, although the National Trust charge you 5 quid for the privilege.

Fishermen originally built the bridge to fish the waters around the rock. Ocean salmon, I think it was.

It's a long way down.

View from the mainland of the bridge and what it leads to.

There are a few other outcrops of rock along that part of the coast where fishermen have done similar construction work to help them fish.

Our next bed and breakfast, a bit further down the coast. The view was amazing.

On Sunday we continued our coastal meandering. This is somewhere in the middle of nowhere, down a tiny steep winding road (the hire car needed 1st gear to get back up). Note the road subsidence on the right.

And we saw a seal out in the water! A distant, tiny, blurry seal.

A bit further down the coast and Vicki found something to climb.

This is the view from the headland back to the land. There was an old abandoned coast guard station behind us.

I think this photo's brilliant. Enjoy it now, before I'm told to take it down.

View back down onto the place we just were.

Sunday afternoon and despite the poor weather and lack of footpath, we decided to climb Slemish mountain.

At the top of Slemish.

Coming down Slemish was considerably more hazardous than expected, but offered some good views.

And then I took this photo of a wall, which looked interesting against the sky.