Chapter 3: Nature, the smell of BBQ and hazardous free-climbing

Hello people!
What to do at the ‘holy’ Sunday? According to the sunny weather the question were quite fast answered. Since the very beginning of our arrival in Belfast we wanted to climb one of the mountains nearby Belfast – so it was settled. We took all the things we could need on this journey, above all the camera, and walked (or better hiked) straight through the city towards the approximately 7 miles in the north distant ‘Cave-Hill’.

Already at the foot of the mountain I was impressed about the beautiful view of the nature. On the way up we took a lot of photos and were more amazed of the sight the more we came higher. We saw many guys driving up and down the hill on mountain bikes, hardly surprising because most of the paths and trails seemed to be made for biking.

probably the highest point

Finally on the top of the Cave-Hill (approximately 350m) we all got stunned by the amazing clear and wide sight above Belfast with its harbour, the surrounding land, the distant mountains and even narrow the coast of Scotland(look at the panorama-picture from Friedrich)! As a result of that the view reminds me a bit of the sight while gliding. 😀 After a few minutes we discovered something funny: On a lower laid peak, not far from us, sat a single guy having a BBQ, such epic funny scene!

view from the abyss of the highest point to the BBQ-Guy

After a couple of minutes and a hundreds of photos later we decided to go down. About the same time, maybe a bit earlier, rain clouds appeared at the horizon, by the way. Half way down we discovered two small caves… Wait a sec… Yay, that’s why it’s called ‘Cave-Hill’! xD Whatever… One of the caves was about 30m high on the crag and the other maybe about 4-5m. We wanted to begin in a small way, so we climbed into the lower one, nevertheless it was quiet tough because we all had the wrong footwear thus we had barely grip. At the same time it starts to rain, to our disadvantage because the rocks getting even more slippy. After a short break in the cave, the rain is still falling, we decided to climb back down at last. That was really hard and dangerous at once but the adrenaline was soaring, a very exciting moment!

exploring the 'mysterious' cave

Finally we left the mountain behind and we came across a nice castle somewhere in the woods. The door of the fence was closed, so we can’t get very close to it. Because we were quiet exhausted we took the bus to Belfast City Centre but walked the remaining way to our apartment anyways.
All things considered it was a very cool, fascinating and exciting day so that I just can recommend it to you to do similar on any sunny weekend, if you interested in nature and adventures! 😉

Next time, maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell you something about my workplace and I hope I can post pictures of it, too.

See you then!