Eclectic Belfast Evening Walking Tour

Eclectic is the right word for this tour. It was very informative with the odd random fact thrown in for good measure. Marty was interesting, sharing some of his past experiences with us and his recommendation to eat at Fish City proved to be a little gem as we ate there the following evening too

I usually only book private tours, but due to the excellent reviews I thought we'd give this group tour a try. Unfortunately, it didn't go as well as I'd hoped. It started out on a frustrating note, because our emailed instructions said to look for the guide wearing a purple hat. When we got there, we looked everywhere for someone with a purple hat, but the only person was an elderly woman in a purple baseball cap sitting on the grass. We kept thinking, that can't be her can it? Finally I had to dig the email out of my bag, look up the phone number and call. I turns out we were standing only about 40 feet from Marty, but we didn't recognize him because he wasn't wearing a purple hat. (Everyone else had received instructions to look for a particular backpack; I'm not sure why ours were different.) I'm sure it was frustrating for them as well, because they were standing there waiting for us when we were late because we spent so much time looking for the hat. I think there were somewhere around 12 people signed up for this tour. Unfortunately for us, we were older and slower than everyone else. Marty walked quite fast, and talked as he walked. Therefore, unless you were right up there with him (and had good hearing), you would miss what he was saying. He would start talking as soon as he stopped at the next location, before we had a chance to catch up. Also, when a loud truck or motorcycle would drive by, he would not pause to let it go by but just kept talking. I'm sure that everyone else didn't want to be kept waiting just to wait for the slower people to catch up, but we missed at least half of what he was saying, probably more. We ended up breaking off and leaving about 2/3 of the way through the tour, as we felt we were just not getting anything out of it at all. I think if you are energetic and able to keep up with no problem, this tour would probably be quite interesting, but it was not good for us.