Seeing London From Inside a Duck

Over 65 years ago, an amphibious craft called the DUKW was designed to carry the troops ashore in the D-day landings. Twenty years later, Ian Fleming created the magical car Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which could drive on land and float on sea. Now this design has reached the masses.

The London Duck Tour is an adventure on road and river, giving a different perspective of the city, revealing unfamiliar sites and divulging unknown facts. Cheerfully yellow and with seats for 30, the tour bus travels an original route around London and then plunges into the Thames for a river-based view of the city. Each Duck in the fleet is named after a Shakespearean heroine; unsurprisingly, there’s no Ophelia.

While I usually disembark from a London tour feeling less than enthused, having zoned out somewhere in-between Trafalgar Square and did-you-know-that-London-is-the-ninth-largest-city-in-the-world, the Duck Tour reminded me why London is such a tremendous place to live.

I saw the pub where Charles Dickens drank beer and the oldest chemist shop in the city. I discovered that Big Ben is not the tower but the bell inside (yes, I realise I’m the last to know). I learned that the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square has an electric current running through it so birds can’t perch (or poo) on his head. Oh, and that the Thames is the cleanest river in Europe – although I’m a bit dubious about this one.

Despite being whisked amphibiously around one of the world’s most famous and interesting cities, I could hardly take my eyes off the tour guide, whose charm and humour made for a very entertaining 75 minutes. There’s a direct way to my heart which is paved with MPs’ expenses jokes and royal wedding trivia.

So there I was, blissfully absorbed in the beauty of the city (read: the tour guide’s alluring wit) when it happened. The tour bus transformed in one rather bumpy swoop as it plunged, next to the MI6 building, from the safety of dry land to the undulant River Thames. You know that scene in The Spy Who Loved Me, when James Bond bursts out of MI6 on a jetski against the backdrop of an extravagant splash framing his rippling body? It’s a bit like that. A very tiny bit.

It is only once you are on sea legs and you spot another Duck paddling along in the other direction, bobbing a mere two feet above water level, that you realise how ridiculous you look. But, in true quackmaraderie, no one seems to mind.

Back on dry land, the bus-cum-boat returned to its starting point. Thirsty for more London fun, reluctant to end the excursion and seduced by the riverside location, I then went on the London Eye – which, as I learned on the Duck Tour, is the most popular tourist site in Europe and the continent’s second most popular marriage proposal spot. Alas, I had no such luck.

Book your own Duck tour by visiting their website.

Image by Martin Pettitt courtesy of Flickr