We were told bu our guide, that we had a long drive ahead of us to the Euro tunnel and then from there to London. The drive was 5 hours. Before getting into the Euro tunnel, we exhausted all our Euro coins, by purchasing snacks at one of the Auto Grilles.
We reached the Euro tunnel at 1430 hrs. Before that, we had to go through immigration, which took about 30 minutes. Our coach was to be driven into a train, and the train itself, through the tunnel to reach England. What an amazing engineering feat. The train drive was just 45 minutes. We had lunch on the train (outside the bus), and went on exploring the train from inside. We reached the other side in no time. The bus was driven out of the train, and we started driving around in England.
What surprised me though, was the efficiency of our coach driver. In England, you drive on the left hand side of the road, unlike Europe, where you drive on the right. The change over was not even noticed. And to drive through London traffic like this!
We passed through a lot of Indian (particularly Tamil( shops on the way to London. It made us feel at home. We were met by our London guide at Hyde Park.
We had a 3 hour session with the London guide. She was typically British, authoritative in whatever she said and extremely proud of herself. We were totally confined to our coach, except fro a short toilet stop and at the Buckingham Palace. The sight of the palace and guards, was exceptional, despite seeing these so often in movies. We drove through, the London Bridge, Tower Bridge, West Minister Abbey, Picadilly, Trafalgar square, Madame Tussaud's etc., The guide kept on giving anecdotes of each place in good humour. We saw an Iraqi, with a poster informing that it was now ...... days after the Iraq invasion, and justice was yet to be given. This was in Trafalgar square. We saw the Houses of Parliament, the famous Lords and Oval cricket grounds. All this done in less than 3 hours. We thanked ourselves for the decision to stay back in London with Vivek, for a few more days. I pitied the others in the group.
We checked into Hotel Ibis ( see a separate Blog on my Ibis experience). We then had dinner in an Indian restaurant. I wanted to call Vivek, to ask him to pick us up, the next day. We had no London coins, with us. It was past 2000 hrs, and there were no money changers open. We tried to use Euros, in and Indian shop to make a call. Although he would not accept Euros, the shopkeeper was kind enough to allow us to make a free call. Nice of him.
More about London in later blogs.
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