Lolling in London: Cruising down River Thames

November 03, 2014

Lolling in London: Cruising down River Thames

The sun stretched through the puffs of grey clouds, determined to give you a tan. God help you if you are without sunblock. It was a particularly blue and sunny day in Central London, despite fluffs of irritatingly erratic grey clouds dotting the sky, and I am in a fretful mood. Sweat bubbled out of me to continuously layer my skin with a sticky clingy film. I am hot and bothered, but being the determined (maybe just resigned) tourist, my friend and I continued marching on with our travel itinerary.

Mix of blue and grey (I'm talking about the sky).

Before our trip, we purchased a 1-day London Pass, which gives us free access to a host of tourist attractions (mainly the really popular ones). It even gives you fast-track entries into a few of the attractions (yay to cutting lines!). The London Pass doesn’t come cheap, but with proper planning of the attractions you want to visit and an eye on the time, you do spend less. In addition, if you purchase the London Pass together with the travel pass option, you get free travel on the London Tube, on all buses and on all over-ground train services, so you save on some travel expenses as well. Therefore, you may want to consider purchasing a pass on your trip to London, but do plan properly or you may end up spending more*.

That is how we found ourselves sitting on the top deck of a River Thames Boat Tour (included in the London Pass), under the perseveringly hot sun and useless grey clouds, listening to the guide –a short but entertaining man with an acerbic tongue. For boat tours, the scenery that you get from the riverbanks would be appealing in itself, but a funny/entertaining guide can kick the experience up a notch or two. The tour guide, for his part, provided introductions and little snippets of information to the various bridges that run across Thames, the iconic skyscrapers, and the buildings at both sides of the riverbanks, all delivered with biting wit, which his audience appreciates. However, there is nothing much that I can add on about the boat tour, other than that it was another touristy thing to do and experience. Whether you want to give it a go is entirely up to you, because even if you did not, I do not think you missed much.

Again, as with previous posts, I present to you visuals of the cruise down River Thames. There are two things I have to apologise for: the awkward angles in some pictures as this was taken in a boat while seated (simply because I have no intention whatsoever to stand on a moving boat), and the lack of description and names for most of the buildings/bridges pictured. The visuals act more like a tiny sneak preview of what you will see on the boat ride.