I've spent the last few days braving the stinging rain walking around Belfast's centre, and warming up with pints in the cafes and bars on Botanic Ave. Then on my last day here, I hop in a black taxi.

When I book the taxi tour, I'm assuming it'll be impartial. It starts out that way as the burly guy at the wheel, with a shaved head covered by a beanie, drives few blocks west to the Falls and Shankill roads. He points out the high-rise apartment building, the top floors of which were occupied by police as a watch tower, and where residents from the other side of the political divide lived without fear of attack. And points out the tri-band colours painted on the gutters (green, orange and white stripes in the Republican areas; red, white and blue in the Loyalist areas). Then slows down alongside murals starkly portraying the Republican sympathies with Palestine and the Loyalist sympathies with Israel.

We come to the huge, 12m-high walls running through the residential streets: the 'peace line'. There were 18 of these walls (most around 500m long) in the early 1990s; today in Northern Ireland there are 57 walls. The cabbie shows me the gates that are locked at night (and at the first sign of trouble during the day).

As we drive through the gates, the cabbie tells me about his father-figure, whose lap he sat on as a kid, who was killed in this part of town. Then tells me about his own involvement in riots - as recently as a couple of years ago - and shows me bullets that he keeps in the cab. People from both sides work together in the city, he says, and they'll fight each other in the streets. And then go to work the next day together as if nothing had happened. It's normal.

But things have improved since the peace line expanded, he reckons: everyone knows which side they're supposed to be on. And if things stay as they are, he says, it'll be alright.

The taxi creaks to a halt back where he picked me up: outside the same cafes, bars and everyday activity of an hour-and-a-half before. If this was all I'd seen of Belfast, it could have been any Irish or British metropolis. But this is still a tale of two cities.

Several operators take visitors on black taxi tours; most cost around £25. There's no telling what political affiliation the driver might have, and whatever the case, it's an eye-opener.