Public transport in London

To get from Victoria to the British Museum I could have taken the Underground, but before committing myself I thought I would check with Google maps and it told me that I could take a bus directly. Buses are MUCH better. You can see the city as you travel through. So off I went to find the stop.

Well the Victoria area is being redeveloped, so the whole place is a little difficult to negotiate. Added to that it wasn't obvious to me how the bus stop functioned! But despite my uncertainty I managed to find the stop, wait for the bus and hop on it, and I was pleased to find that it was one of those redesigned Routemaster Boris buses.

To pay for public transport in London you have several options. You can buy a ticket from a machine. You can load money onto your prepaid Oyster card and present that at the turnstiles. Or you can simply use your contactless credit or debit card. I have an Oyster card, but I didn't want to load money onto it unnecessarily, so I used my bank card.

On the buses you scan it once when you get on. On the trams you have to scan twice - once when you enter the station and once when you leave. I was a little perturbed by the way it doesn't tell you what it's charging you. In fact I think you don't get charged until the end of the day when a complicated computer algorithm works out what tariff to apply.

Anyway, the bus went along the back of Buckingham Palace garden, along Hyde Park, up to Marble Arch and along Oxford Street. It was great to see some of the sights.

Later, to get to Child's Hill, I took the tube. Boring, but much quicker further out of the city.

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