Tuesday 4th October

At 10.30am I met Heather at the subway station to get the open top tour bus on the route we didn’t have time to do yesterday. We then got a taxi to the Shanghai Botanical gardens which were so beautiful. We started to walk around and realised that it was huge so we decided to hire a boat and see if we could see more from the small river that ran through it. The boat was a small speed boat size with a motor, I got in first so I was steering and we went off along the river. We turned a corner and realised that the river went through a low tunnel that was too narrow for us to go through so we had to turn around, trouble was it was actually a really narrow part of the river! We ended up trying to bounce the boat off the rocks to try and get it to turn around as there was literally no where else to go, we were killing ourselves laughing and a crowd of Chinese people had gathered on the bridge watching us and taking pictures of us, stuck on the rocks trying to turn the boat around, which just made us laugh even more! I finally turned the boat around and almost tipped the boat over climbing into the back so that Heather could have a go at steering the boat. We went the other way down the river and came to another dead end, so Heather had to try and turn the boat around and got us stuck on the rocks! I had to push us off the rocks and nearly fell in doing it, which made us laugh even more! While I was doing that a big frog (the size of a toad) came swimming up next to us and I honestly thought it was going to jump into the boat it was that close (anyone who knows me will know that frogs really freak me out) I was trying to judge if I could jump from the boat onto the bank if the frog jumped onto the boat! We finally got moving again and returned the boat to the docking area and as I was pulling myself up onto the dock, the boat started floating away and I nearly fell in, much to Heathers amusement!

After the excitement of the boat ride we were a bit tired so we jumped onto the sightseeing tour (a 12 seater golf buggy driven by a Chinese woman who kept stopping and pointing to trees!) and we were glad we did as we realised that we had only covered a quarter of the gardens, there was still a lot more to see! We went back to the entrance of the gardens and took a taxi back into the city to have lunch on the Bund which was nice.

For all the photos click here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66580104@N06/sets/72157627699974215/