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I Don't Like Canada! At Black Lion we crossed the river into Northern Ireland. No guard manned the border-crossing station. Our first shock was the extremely fortified police station in Belcoo. The imposing cop shop displayed a twenty-five-foot high barbed-wire perimeter fence with surveillance cameras pointing down every angle of the street. A fortified lookout tower brazenly topped the street corner. There was more security than Fort Knox. Even the people, noticeably the kids, weren't as friendly. Four kids loitered outside the police station. One delinquent spotting my flag spat, "I don't like Canada!" Studying our map we deducted we could follow a low density road paralleling the opposite bank of the river in southern Ireland for a few more kilometers. We returned across the bridge into Black Lion, where the first two kids we passed, waved and shouted a lighthearted hello. Amazing. Right across the river was a different world. Out of Black Lion we followed the sparsely trafficked white road slowly progressing its way back into Northern Ireland. A spot next to the river on the Ulster Way hiking trail provided us with our first night's camping in Northern Ireland. Ulster had been in the news the last few days. Demonstrators had burned two hundred cars and buses during protests of the release of Private Clegg. I hoped they liked tents. |
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