You can’t go to Cornwall without visiting the Eden Project, its almost compulsory...
I went when it was first built and it was amazing, all these plants from all over the world in growing in 2 huge biomes.
Its fascinating seeing what plants you get which resources from, I always think the banana tree looks beautiful, a big stalk of bananas and the red flower underneath.
The flags are also really bright, interesting and almost Chinese in the style, waving you into the centre.Then you have the weird gigantic models in the gardens and the gorgeous lavender gardens.
I walked passed some horrified American kids in the lavender gardens... their Mom was stealing lavender flowers complete with roots.
Parents really let you down sometimes...
So all in all it’s a good little trip… apart from in the height of summer when half the world is there! Hmmmm..
We made it through the huge entrance hall, the water activities and the eateries.
Then joined the tropical biome queue.
We went around the whole biome in a large slow moving snake. No time to stand and take pictures, or explore the exhibits we just had to keep trudging upwards through the trees and plants, in the heat and humidity, its quite hard to do! The funniest thing was seeing this family from Hong Kong charge into the cool down tent half way through the exhibit, even though it’s probably hotter in Hong Kong!
So basically we did the tropical biome in 20 minutes, queuing up in the entrance hall took longer!
We were going to have food next, to lengthen out the trip a bit but the whole food court was a throbbing mass of people, so we headed over to the temperate biome.
This was slightly less packed but there’s also far less to see as you are talking about desert and scrub landplants and the funny thing about those areas is that they are quite empty…
We walked past the olives and the orange trees that you usually see in Spain and I thought,
“ Damn, Wish I’d gone to Spain this year!”
I don’t know if that was what everyone else was thinking but it was quite quiet in there…
Suddenly, the tanoy sounded with this weird two tone noise and everyone stopped moving, it was like something out of The Stepford Wives. The noise sounded again and this disembodied voice said,
“Attention, attention please, you may be asked to evacuate the building.”
Then out of the corner of my eye I saw men with walkie talkies rushing into this little room, off from the main exhibits.
Well that got everyone moving again.
2 seconds later the whole exhibit was empty!
LOL
So much for our relaxing, stress free day at Eden!
