Punting in Cambridge

While in Cambridge going punting is a must! 

If you go to the center of Cambridge, near the river Cam, you will find Cambridge Chaffeur Punts, where you can hire some punts and even professional punters to punt you through the river Cam exploring all the colleges from the riverside and enjoying the trip.

And, I think, you all know those famous photos of King's College taken from the side of the river Cam. Well, I had a chance to take such photos, too.

We went punting with our German friends _ Anna and Dennis.  It was great. The river Cam was very beautiful with bridges on it and people waving to us from above.

Pirates of the Cammian

You know that scene in the Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, when Pintel and Ragetti are dressed in women’s clothes to distract Norrington’s army entering Isla de Muerta? Well, we were kind of like that. We were given a punt, a punting pole and an oar to guide our way through the river. And while one of us was punting with pole, the other one would pull an oar to coordinate the punt. But it was not an easy thing to do for us _ amateurs. And I just remembered how Ragetti is rolling the oar in that scene and we rolled our oar like that, too.

Our punt was going here and there for about two hours, because some genius said we didn't need a professional punter and we could punt ourselves. We all liked the idea initially, but soon we realised it was a mistake. But,  great memories are made because of silly ideas, right? So despite the struggle to punt through the river, we did have fun. And nobody cared about our little problem except the one in the role of a punter.

The landscape was astonishing! There were white swans swimming so close to us that we could nearly touch them, and the colleges' buildings were breathtaking. 

The lost pole

Then something happened. Something that maybe we all faired in our minds! While punting the pole stuck in the ground beneath the water and our boat swam away.

We were all shocked _ how were we going to return to where we started. And we saw a man sitting there on a bench near the river, reading a magazine and at the same time looking at us with amusement. He was just smiling at us and probably having fun looking at our desperate faces. So that made us laugh at our situation. Well, then, somehow with a huge effort we went back to our pole and took it and kept on punting. 

That was a great experience for us and we will never forget the things that happened to us during punting and they are some good memories to tell. So if you want some memories like that, you should really go punting in Cambridge, trust me on that!