Today was a 'river' day whereby we can use our London Passes to get 24 hours travel on the City Cruises ferries. These travel from Westminster Pier to London Eye Pier (actually just across the river and downstream about 200m). Then on to Tower Pier and, finally, a longer run to Greenwich. After breakfast we walked to the London Eye Pier and got our Red River Rover tickets. First stop was Tower Pier so we decided to have a quick look at the Tower (again). We last did this back in 78-79 but it is as popular as ever. In fact, I would hate to see it in the peak tourist season! There was a cold niggly wind blowing and temperature about 13C - but there were still thousands of people queuing to get in. Luckily, our London Passes didn't require 'purchasing' a ticket as we were just scanned in at the gate.
The tower is much as it was the last time we saw it but it is still an interesting place to visit being so intact. We even popped in to see the Crown jewels which involved some queuing; but it was bearable. The crowns, sceptres etc. look quite unreal and you could be looking at something artificial.
Back on the boat we headed off for Greenwich. This was really just for the boat trip and the London Waterman chappy doing the 'free' commentary was very entertaining and informative. The development of apartments and the Canary Wharf complex south of Tower Bridge is quite remarkable. Our guide pointed out things like the London residences of Helen Mirren, Michael Crawford, Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen. At Greenwich, we simply walked around the streets a bit, had a look through a fairly tacky 'Vintage Market' and finished with a drink and nibble in a pub. Then it was back on the boat to Tower Pier again.
Our next visit was the HMS Belfast. This involved walking down to Tower Bridge, across the bridge and then up river to the ship. This was essentually directly opposite the Tower Pier terminal! A distance of about 2km and it involved negotiating thousands of tourists most of whom were busily taking selfies with their new 'selfie stick'!!
The HMS Belfast is something we had not done before but it is well worth a visit. The way they have presented it you can really get a feel for what life was like on this war ship. The visit involves climbing down (and eventually up) many steep metal gangways - always facing the steps as they are too steep to use like a normal staircase. Miriam got a bit sick of this but I was having a ball. It was so engrossing that we eventually got chucked off at closing time!
To use our boat passes, we then headed back over to Tower Pier (another 2km walk) and only just made the last boat up river to the London Eye Pier. At which point Miriam was pretty well done in so we had a quick and very nice evening meal at the same sushi place where we had lunch on our first day here.
To finish the evening we bought a bottle of wine from a local Sainsbury's and headed back to our hotel room to watch the All Blacks annihilate the French!!! Well done those guys - I have to say it was a pretty good game by the AB's.