I’m back in England playing tourist, and one of my friends now lives in Liverpool so I thought I’d go and see him. Of course one of the obvious things to do whilst in Liverpool was to take the ferry across the Mersey river. We were in Birkenhead – which is on the Wirral side (to the left of the river, whereas Liverpool city centre is on the right hand side) – so it made sense for us to hop on the ferry going towards Liverpool.
The tickets are usually £10 each, but me and my friend Lee bought a Walrus card at Birkenhead bus station the day before for £6.40 each, and that entitled us to use any ferry, bus or train around the Mersey area for the whole day. So we ended up saving £3.40, and on top of that any trains or buses from then onwards were essentially free, so we definitely got our money’s worth!
We got on the first ferry which was at 10:30 in the morning, and since it was raining and about five degrees outside (and possibly because it was the first one) we were the only two people to get on it. My friend did the generic old man speech saying ‘in my day this used to be packed…’ and so on. I didn’t mind; I kind of liked having the place to myself. I took unobstructed photos and pretended I was a world class photographer until the ferry rocked up.
We hopped on a ferry called The Royal Iris. My friend told me it had been in use for over 50 years! I have no way to fact check this so I’m just going to blindly say that it is true. I mean, I’m sure a simple Google or Wikipedia search would prove or disprove the statement, but I’d rather listen to some Spyro The Dragon music instead:
Anyway, after rocking out to Stewart Copeland I had a casual wander around the ferry. Interestingly it didn’t go straight across from one side to another. Instead it did a sort of loop whilst the audio tour of sorts listed off facts about the Mersey river, Liverpool, and possibly something Beatles related. Of course, it blared the traditional ‘Ferry Across The Mersey’ song by Gerry And The Pacemakers over the tannoy as well. I could post the video on this fine blog, but instead I think we should both continue to rock out to Spyro…
And that was it! I think it only took around 15-20 minutes in total. As I mentioned before it could have been a lot quicker if we’d just darted across, but I think logically it made more sense to take a bit longer because now there are buses, tunnels and a decent train system connecting the towns that most local people don’t use the ferry for everyday travel as it’s far more convenient to use other forms of transport. I assume the ferry is now just a tourist attraction for people like me who are impressed easily…
