Showing posts for Netherlands
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C2A: Amsterdam, finally
Sam isn't feeling well in the morning so we ride together down to the Gouda station and I see her onto a train that will take her into Amsterdam. There are some disruptions due to someone stealing cable on the train lines, so it takes her longer than the expected 15 minutes.
I turn around and head north out of the city. There's a stiff crosswind blowing out over the Reeuwijk ponds, the result of peat overharvesting. These days it's amply serviced by the leisure watercraft industry. I cross the Old Rhine, (Oude Rijn), much diminished, in Bodegraven, then push on through the fields and canals to Nieuwkoop. I pass a lock: a first; I thought all the water was basically at the same level around here.
Big houses line the road in Nieuwkoop, with a little canal between the road and the front garden. There are little rowboats moored up between the lilypads, with water easements leading out onto the lakes behind the houses. I wonder how far one could travel by water alone. Probably pretty far, although I guess rights of way could get tricky.
I skirt Zevenhoven and then enter the sprawling industrial parks east of Schipol. A couple of airplanes take off and bank over my head; I try to get video but keep turning up like 5 seconds too late. I take a bridge over a highway and feel like I can see the entire country laid out before me. Man it's flat in the Netherlands.
Soon I'm riding through Amstelveen, which I suppose must be where all the rich people in Amsterdam live, judging by the number of Mercedes and Audis I see in the gravel drives abutting the enormous houses lining the road here. Then I arrive at the Amsterdamse Bos country park, but the cyclepath is closed so I follow a woman on a cargo bike up the main street towards the Amsterdam ring road. She easily outpaces me. I tell myself it's because she has a battery and I'm carrying two tents.
On the other side of the ring road I join a gaggle of cyclists heading up into town, but I peel off towards the museum and the tourist quarter with a painter on a bike. All of his kit is in a little tray attached to the back of his bakfiets; his brushes are in a case he wears on his back. I think it's just terrific, even if he's way faster than I am. He nearly obliterates a little tourist boy who wanders into the bike path. His grandmother pulls the boy back; the painter doesn't react at all: no swerve, no flinch, no look. Just keeps on riding. I eat his dust as we ride through the museum itself.
On the far side, I cross a bridge and suddenly I'm in the thick of it. There are people everywhere: Portugese women walking in groups, German families with maps, Americans on orange rental bicycles pulling out into traffic without looking. I have to make an emergency stop in front of a lady who pulls crosswise into the cyclepath; I hear her boyfriend say, "I always tell you to look both ways," in a tone that indicates he's an insufferable person to spend time with. I follow the lines that the locals take and sneer at a group of men in tight trousers, all of whom have their phone out, debating loudly which way it is to the sex museum. I feel a totally unearned sense of superiority, high up on my tourist bike.
Sam calls and tells me that due to the cable theft problem, she's been held up at the previous station. I ride under the central station, which smells powerfully of urine, and along the quayside, down to where Sam's waiting for me. I find her sitting on a wall with her head in her hands.
We're both mighty hungry so we head across the street for some food and a last Nice Beer before making our way out to the ferry by train. It's a short ride on the train from Amsterdam to Driehuis, and the train's empty; and then it's a short ride from Driehuis out to IJmuiden, where the ferry is waiting. We collect our ticket and take our bikes up onto the boat and leash them to the bulkhead. There are six or seven other bicycles on the boat with us: tourists heading up to Scotland maybe.
We head up a deck or two and find our cabin and then I immediately fall asleep.
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C2A: Into the Real Netherlands
The area around Standaarbuiten and Moerdijk seems to be one sprawling industrial/farming estate. Long stock-straight rows of potatoes on one side, idling lorries and docking bays on the other. Just beyond, a set of bridges and new housing estates. The houses are manicured and stylish, and a few of them confusingly have thatched roofs? Canals start to wind their way amid the fields on the way out to Hollands Diep.
We’re entering the Real Netherlands.
We pass through a sleepy town called Zevenbergen and then a village called Moerdijk, where the locals mounted a resistance to the invading Nazis who sought to control the Hollands Diep estuary. On both sides of the estuary there are the remnants of lines of concrete bunkers, placed by the Germans as defense and now scrawled with graffiti about love and totally caved in with dirt and nettles. We climb a hill on the far side of the town and find, at the top of the hill, the Hollands Diep itself, broad and roaring with traffic.
This is not the first time that we find rivers at the top of hills. (The hills are, it scarcely needs to be said, actually embankments keeping the North Sea out of the country.)
We cross the Moerdijk bridge into Zuid-Holland and the cut through the fields to the south side of Dordrecht. The suburbs are quiet and green and launch us with very little fanfare into the heart of the town, where we stop at Nobel Brood for a bit of brunch. I get a kanelbulle, which transports me directly back to Sweden a couple of years ago (although it’s nowhere near the real thing). Then we board our first waterbus across the Oude Maas: a pound each saves us going back on ourselves to cross the river via bridge.
On the way out of Dordrecht we pass through a type of residential area I’ve never seen before: houses on narrow islands abutting a tiny canal. There are gardens watered by the canal and little canoes moored at wooden decks, all abutting a cyclepath frequented almost entirely by girls in baggy jeans and pensioners in wraparound sunglasses. It seems somehow so idyllic. And then we climb a hill and find another canal crossing the previous one at a higher level than all of the houses.
We turn off and make our way through Nieuw-Lekkerland to catch our second waterbus of the day across the Lek. We time it perfectly and fly out of Lekkerkerk with the wind behind us.
From here it just gets more Dutch. On both sides now are long, narrow patches of grass, sometimes with cows or sheep or goats, sometimes with a couple of lapwings or seagulls, alternating with long rows of water, only a couple of inches below the land. I don’t know how the whole thing doesn’t flood under rain. There has got to be some serieus engineering at work here.
We fly past kids coming home from school, pitying their battle against 20 kph headwinds, before rolling into Gouda and joining the rush hour bike traffic. Sitting in a queue of bikes at a traffic light makes me feel extremely smug.
Eventually we arrive at the summerhouse where we’re staying for the night. It’s rustic and cosy in perfect proportions, so we settle in. I make a quick run to the shop for groceries on my bike. I think I could make a good Dutch person, if only I could learn the language.