David suggested that we went to the Chinese Garden and showed us a photograph n his phone of two pagodas beside a lake that looked quite beautiful, so we concurred and off we set. We travelled on the tube for quite a long time, in fact further than we had ever travelled before , heading for Malaysia.
David informed us that we were only about ten kilometres from the border.
We arrived at the appropriately named Chinese Garden station and stepped straight off the train into a huge park, admittedly there were four step down from the station but it front of us was a huge expanse of green at least the size of Hyde Park.
A few hundred yards away stood a huge solitary pagoda, and off we walked in that direction. On finding a map of the park, as usual we had done no research at all, we found that there was a Chinese Garden, A Japanese Garden, a Turtle and Tortoise Museum, a tea room and a Bonzai garden in the park.
It is the tour dirctor's firm opinion that pagoda are there to be climbed so we made our way to the seventh floor where the views were interesting. All around the park were tall tower blocks of flat's housing workers for the growing city, but the park itself was an oasis of tranquility.
Having explored the first pagoda we made our way to the Japanese garden, at which point it started to rain. We decided to avoid the rain by paying to go into the tortoise and turtle museum, which apparently is in the Guiness book of Records for having the largest collection of such animals in one building.
The first room was full of models of turtles and tortoises, hundreds of them in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The second room contained aquaria which contained a variety of turtles, some of them very nasty looking things indeed. I particularly disliked the snake head turtle, with the alligator snapping title coming a close second. As we were in this room the rain abated and we were able to go into an outside enclosure where there were several more animals in cages and pools. Whilst I had not generally been in favour of entering, it proved to very interesting.
As the rain had cease we walked to the twin pagodas which rest beside a large lake and which were very scenic. Again we climbed to the top and admired the view.
We then made our way to China town where we had du lungs for lunch before asking through several streets to look at the decorations for the Chinese New Year which was going to be celebrated that evening. The red and gold decorations were amazing. The crowds were there in force and after a little while we walked back to David's flat.