Belgium - in passing

Our barge trip in Holland is preceded and followed by a week in France. Which means we travel through Belgium, twice.

Northbound from Reims we make an overnight stop to break the journey, staying in a very pleasant hotel east of Liege.

Southbound we make a longer stop in Bruges, which has been on my bucket list ever since I did a school project on the city. I'm pleased to find it as captivating as I hoped, very mediaeval, lovely vistas down the canals, splendidly ornate buildings. Our hotel is genuinely old, exposed beams in the bedroom, some just above the bed on which past occupants have carved initials. As usual we do much walking, giving our feet a break by catching a tourist bus which provides an overview of the city and an amazing demonstration of driving skills in the narrow streets and tight corners, not to mention dodging horse and carriage combos, another popular means of tourist transport. Food is good, if rather more expensive than in Holland, but that could be just because Bruges is a top tourist destination. We get good advice about restaurants from the concierge at the hotel, who gets full marks for helpfulness, Despite the crowds in the main square and tourist souvenir streets, we find quiet places to walk and a couple of museums that aren't full of people. We see a very interesting Picasso exhibition at St John Hospital, and Flemish Primitives at the Groenigen. For once we don't feel impelled to get on the water, partly because the tourist boats all seem very crowded, and partly because we've just had our fill of canals in Holland. After two evenings and one full day we are happy to move on to France.
More pictures here.

Barging about in Holland Part 2

We make our return trip through Amsterdam early on Sunday morning, a good choice as it was quiet and relatively free of traffic. Seems the Dutch still take Sundays seriously, at least in the morning - when we reach Weesp the streets and cafes stay empty until the afternoon.
From Weesp our itinerary is Sunday night in a countryside stop, 2 nights in the charming small town of Breukelen, after which our penichette is named, 2 nights in Utrecht, then Friday night back in the base at Loosdrecht, ready to give the boat back on Saturday morning.

Highspots of Part 2

• seeing a bunch of Dutch teenagers returning from a sailing and camping weekend in small steel-hulled yachts, 4-5m. They are gaff-rigged, with masts that can be dropped. When we first see them they are being towed, daisy-chained behind a motor boat, then we watch enviously as the kids use a single long oar to scull them expertly into their mooring spots, alongside us.
• Breukelen, where we have a lovely country walk, then a bit of a rest day because it is raining, and find two restaurants where we have very good food.
• Utrecht, where we enjoy more city walks, an archeological tour under the cathedral where ruins date back to Roman conquest, but also includes fragments of the nave of the huge gothic cathedral, destroyed by a massive storm in 1674, never rebuilt. Apse and transepts remain as does the tower from the West end, with a cobbled square between
• Speelklok Museum in Utrecht, filled with every imaginable mechanical music making device, from huge fairground organs to tiny music boxes, from Nickelodeons with circular metal disks to a Steinway player piano. Most amazing is a mechanical violin, extraordinarily ingenious construction involving 3 instruments each with only one string, and a circular bow rotating round all three. There is also a "woven music" display where a punched cardboard music "book" has been turned into cards for a Jacquard loom, then used to weave  a scarf. We stay until museum closes, fascinated.
• getting back to the Locoboat base and finding that they are very nice about the minor damage we did by clipping another boat in a very tricky un-mooring situation, and that the cost is covered by insurance in the "inclusive package".
• another serendipitous happening when we decide to break our trip from Holland back to France in a little village called Tholen, which just happens to be celebrating its 650th anniversary. And to Peter's delight, the town also has a working windmill. To see the windmill in motion and the amazing parade, click here.

Observations of Holland
- Sounds
Every town, large or small, has a carillon, and they ring out at least ever hour, sometimes on the quarters, playing tunes not always sounding particularly musical, but sometimes familiar (eg Fur Elise)

- Smells
Linden trees in flower, petunias, and a truly rural pong from the countryside, presumably silage, like a very powerful cheese

- Boats and bicycles
Dutch must start using both as soon as they can walk. Boats of all sizes skilfully manoeuvred everywhere. Bicycles ridden rapidly and vigorously in all weathers by people of all ages, some looking quite a bit older than us. Cycles range from rusty black treadlies to more modern numbers, but still mostly black. No one seems to bother with gears, it's so flat. They can and do dodge anything at a moment's notice, from other bikes to hapless tourists looking the wrong way when crossing roads. They often ride one-handed with the other hand used for a variety of purposes: talking on mobile, smoking, eating an ice-cream, nursing a child, holding a shopping bag, holding hands with another cyclist. The ultimate was an entire brass band playing while cycling.

- Gardens and flowers

In the height of summer, so everything is in full bloom. As in France gardens are well-tended, but where French gardens have a touch of careless rapture, Dutch gardens are generally clipped and mown within an inch.
Hydrangeas are big, in two senses, ubiquitous and huge, whole banks of plants canal-side, in colours from white through deep pink to blue and mauve.

Also as in France, all towns have hanging baskets and planters on all pillars and posts. Petunias are the municipal planting of choice, sometimes interspersed with geraniums. Whole towns are colour keyed, in Weesp the petunias were purple and white, in Amsterdam pink and white, in Utrecht all shades of pink.

- Houses

As in France, Dutch architecture is consistent - new houses echo the shapes of the past, stepped gables and steep roofs. Privacy is clearly unimportant, houses fronting right on the street generally have no blinds or curtains, and you can see through the immaculately clean windows into their living rooms, often right through open plan rooms to a well-kept garden at the back.  Houses built on floating platforms on the canals were equally open to view as we motored past.

- People

The French are mostly slim, the Dutch are lean and tanned (must be all that cycling). Older women are grey-haired, not dyed. You get a strong impression of organisation and efficiency. We found people extremely friendly and helpful. Language difficulties minimal as nearly everyone speaks English. The young are fluent and almost without an accent. We do find ourselves using sign language with a very sweet lady in her 80s, as we sat in a cafe in Monnickendam. She is joined by a slightly younger male friend and her granddaughter is waitressing, and they both help us out by translating. The friend slips away and returns with a little box containing Delft salt and pepper shakers in the shape of windmills, complete with moving sails. We buy a small pack of chocolates for grandma in return, and by the time we finish our coffee and appeltaart (to which Peter has become addicted), we are practically part of the family and I get a kiss on both cheeks from grandma as we say goodbye.

In summary

We really enjoyed Holland. Peter is not sure he would choose to go on the canals again as the amount of traffic and the frequent bridges mean that you need to be constantly alert while in motion, so not as relaxing as our previous French trips.

For the full photo album, with more boats, birds, bicycles and a spectacular sunset, click here.

Barging about in Holland Part 1

Amsterdam and the North

When planning this trip I had the occasional misgivings about our choice of Holland for the canal experience, thinking it might be boring - endless flat fields relieved only by the occasional windmill - and I would wish we had gone to Brittany instead. But not so, we are having a great time.




It is of course dead flat, which means very few locks, compared to France. Instead the excitement is provided by bridges, many too low even for our small boat so one has to tie up and wait for one of a variety of lifting mechanisms to operate. Then if there is no one coming the other way, off you go.
There is a lot of traffic. Unsurprisingly, in a waterlogged country, there are hundreds of thousands of boats, and in summer they are all out being sailed, rowed, or motored. We have dodged everything from people on paddle boards to vast barges over 100m long. There are tiny harbours or mooring places along the canal sides in every town, but it can be hard to find a parking spot. And although we have travelled along lengths of canal with only polders on either side, much of the time there are houses on at least one side of the canal, some of them floating on the canal.
Our itinerary to date:
We started from the canal base in Loosdrecht, went North to Weesp, then to Amsterdam where we spent 2 days and nights, further north to Alkmaar, then back to Amsterdam via Edam, Vollendam, Monnickendam and Broek in Waterland. We've taken more time than allowed for in our schedule, so instead of proceeding on a southern loop through Gouda, we are retracing our path toward Loosdrecht. From there we will just go on to Utrecht, then return to base next Friday.
Highspots

XXL Barge to be avoided in the Nordsee Canal

• Seeing Amsterdam from the canals, both in our barge and in the hop-on hop-off "canal bus". People braver than us navigate them in pedaloes, which are called canal bikes
• Doing the above without colliding with the dozens of tourist boats, and getting across the Nordsee Canal without getting run down
• Rembrandts in the Rijksmuseum
• NEMO, Amsterdam's equivalent of Scienceworks, where we happily spent most of a day. Big emphasis on energy conservation and renewables.
• Watching bottes manoeuvring in Monnickendam. We saw these big traditional wooden sailing boats coming back into the tiny harbour after a regatta, and were amazed to see them spin through 180 degrees before mooring or rafting up. See the video for this one.
• A museum in Edam, an old house furnished in the style of a couple of hundred years back, which had a floating cellar, an open brick box that you climbed down into, and where you could see the water level over the sides, less than a metre down.
• Witnessing two weddings, a high school graduation, and an a capella choir competition, all of which we just happened on. Very strange hearing Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" sung in Dutch.
• Birds. The canals are a twitcher's paradise. Even ignoramuses like us can identify several sorts of duck, geese (ordinary, Egyptian and Canada), swan, moorhen, grebes, heron, assorted gulls. Lots of gorgeous fluffy young being shepherded by anxious parent birds.

Bottes in Monnickendam Harbour

We enjoyed the contrast between Amsterdam and the more mediaeval towns of Edam, Alkmaar and Monnickendam. We've walked and walked in all of them.

Floating bike park, jam-packed...

The barge hire people, whom Peter described as a mine of misinformation, were negative about their capital - full of Muslims, rapists and bicycle thieves (categories possibly overlapping). We were told not to take our hired bikes in, as even if locked, they would be stolen in one minute. Hard to believe once you've been there that there is anyone in Amsterdam that doesn't already have a bicycle. There are 9,500 bikes parked around Central Station every day - God only knows how people remember where they put theirs. There are dedicated bicycle parks jam-packed with bikes. And everywhere you go there are bicycles whizzing past. On our boat trip we were told that the saying about Amsterdam's canals is that they are one third water, one third mud, and one third bicycles.

...and there's more.

More observations about boats, bicycles and Holland in general to follow in Part 2.

Burgundy, Champagne, and Geneva for lunch

Le Vieux Chateau

No, I didn't get that round the wrong way - it's where we've been, not what we've been drinking.
Our first week is spent in France, with a quick crossing into Geneva to visit friends Ben and Cam, now living and working there. We travel rather more than is our custom, with only one two-night stay in Dijon. Our little Eurodrive Renault Captur is great, and churns through the kms with amazing economy. Itinerary: Paris, Maçon, Geneva, Dijon, Reims, Liège (Belgium).

High spots of our week:

• having the first croissant and espresse breakfast, even if it is in the shuttle station near the Ibis Hotel at Charles de Gaulle airport. And then similar breakfasts all week but in better surroundings
• staying in Le Vieux Chateau, which is just that, on a hilltop overlooking vineyards in the Maçon area. Our chambre d'hôte is on two levels - the bed upstairs is in an alcove, rather like sleeping on Nahani. And there is a very friendly cat. We vow to return one day for a longer stay.
• sunshine and warmth after wintry Melbourne. It is low to mid-twenties, perfect for city strolling
• lunching with Ben and Cam, talking music and politics, and the politics of international music

Paddle steamer on Lake Leman, Geneva

• zipping back and forth on Lake Leman in Geneva via mouette, little ferries that are part of their public transport system
• crossing the Jura, on some very Tour de France roads. I enjoy this more than Peter, who is doing the driving and therefore can't look at the view much

• eating French food, best meal so far at Pourquoi Pas? in Dijon
• staying in a converted monastery in Dijon, another mezzanine room with bed upstairs



Dijon Carousel

• serendipitous moments in Dijon:

1. in the cathedral, woman in her sixties goes and stands directly under the crossing of nave and transept, sings the Bach Gounod Ave Maria unaccompanied, pitch perfect, beautifully expressive, with a second Amen pitched for maximum echo. Stunned tourists like us wanting to applaud at the end, but would not have been right. Singer rejoins husband and goes on walking round cathedral
2. as we walk across one of the squares in Dijon, we stop because some people are doing something odd with a half constructed barrel and some bits of wood. We ask what is going on, helpful person explains that in France they award gold medals to the no 1 master in various creative arts and crafts. This is a meeting of all of them (almost every neck we can see has a tricolour ribbon and medal) to honour one woman who is France's no 1 flower arranger (she recently spent 8 days in Dubai doing flowers for some prince's wedding). We watch as a figure is constructed with the barrel as a skirt (staves open at the bottom) wooden legs and feet, a steel mesh torso, tubular steel arms, steel frame head and beaten metal hat. The florist and assistant then decorate hat and body with flowers until "Caroline" is complete. By then the charming woman who has explained the whole proceedings has to go, and we have had enough of standing in the sun, so we don't wait to see "her" carried off in triumph

• finding that Reims Cathedral still gives me goosebumps and that Peter thinks it amazing too (he hasn't been before). Admiring wonderful new stained glass by a German artist, complements the Chagall window beautifully.

Low spots

• accidental abandonment of clothing, pajamas in Paris (his), shirt in Dijon (hers)
• accidental laundering of passport (his), retrieved before too wet and dried out successfully
• accidental acquisition of key to Belgian hotel - will have to post back
• finding Satnav not as good as Google maps - being led up windy narrow roads all around the vineyards, and being badly misdirected on to the wrong motorway where there has been recent road rearrangement. Takes a tense 20 mins getting back on course.
• paying 32 Swiss francs (more than $50) for parking behind Hotel in Geneva, when there was a public car park 50m down the road. Somewhat compensated by getting free parking in Dijon as payment machine was out of order and we were let out gratis by a disembodied voice, after 15 mins of struggle with machine and search for an attendant.

General impressions

We love the look of France, green fields, little bosky woods, consistent architecture, buildings ageing but still attractive, people with style. Hotel standards have gone up and we were getting last minute bookings for €88 for really good accommodation.

We have walked and walked, length of Geneva on both sides of the lake, from red light district to posh shopping, round and round Dijon following Parcours de la Chouette - little brass arrows with a owl on that guide you round all the points of interest. And all round Reims, more spacious, less mediaeval (probably because of wartime bombing) and to us less charming. Passers by not as charming, and some were seriously fat, which we hadn't seen in Dijon.

But overall, le ciel et bleu, les bois sont verts, et la vie est en rose.

More pictures

Packing and Panic (flying out today)

It's about 11 degrees in Melbourne. Checking forecasts in Europe suggests it isn't going to be too hot - in the 20s rather than 30s. I've just packed a second jumper.
Only hours left before we board our first flight.
Watch this space....

Events & Entertainments in England

England is having an event-led recovery this year: first the Queen's Jubilee, now the Olympics. I have never seen so many Union Jacks or so much bunting. Our aim was to enjoy England without bothering with either of the above, in particular to stay as far away as possible from the Olympic frenzy. We planned to hug the south coast en route to Devon, then travel to Yorkshire keeping well clear of London. But we forget to take the torch relay into account and when we arrive in Dover it is heading towards us. We manage to pass it in Hastings as we and the torch stay there on the same night, but we avoid getting caught up in any of the waving and cheering.
Nevertheless our time in England is full of events and entertainment. It begins with a trip to Glyndebourne to see La Boheme. I joined the Glyndebourne Returns Club in Australia in the hope of nabbing some returns for the performance on the Thursday after we arrive, and achieve this by phone from the ferry terminal in Calais. As we haven't packed Peter's dinner suit or my tiara, we then have the challenge of equipping ourselves with the appropriate apparel and accoutrements to attend a performance and have the traditional picnic in the gardens. A day in Lewes is spent going to all the op shops, or charity shops as they call them here, and we acquire, for a modest outlay, a dress shirt and bow tie for Peter to wear with his reefer jacket and grey pants, a velvet jacket for me to put on over my black and gold top and black pants, a picnic rug, real glass champagne flutes, smoked salmon, chicken, salad, cheese, strawberries and a bottle of bubbly. Amazingly, it is the first day that it hasn't rained for months, and although it isn't warm, I don't actually need the black throw I've bought for extra coverage. It serves to hide our French supermarket bag into which we've packed the picnic goodies. The uncertainty in the weather means that most of the audience that night choose to eat indoors, so we have our choice of prime picnic spots. And not only is the performance wonderful, but we have three empty seats in front of our seats in the fifth row of the stalls. It was Peter's first experience of Glyndebourne, so I am delighted that everything goes so well, especially the weather.
During our stay in Devon we manage a series of events, first of which is an art show and reading of poetry, all inspired by the local scenery. We later visit some of the beaches and walk on Dartmoor to see the places captured in words and paint. We have an amazing eight days of unbroken fine weather at this stage of our trip and it is so warm I even brave the sea for a swim. A "Round Robin" trip from Dartmouth to Totnes and back by ferry, steam train, bus and ferry is a highlight, as is watching our host perform as one of a bell-ringing team in the local parish church. But the best day for me is my birthday, when my step-daughter takes me sailing on her yacht in Salcombe, with our respective husbands, and we finish the day with a splendid dinner in an excellent local restaurant.
In our travels to Devon and from there to Yorkshire, we visit five of England's wonderful cathedrals: Salisbury on the way there, and Glastonbury (ruined), Tewkesbury, Ely and Lincoln on our way north. In Salisbury our visit coincides with a special evensong and we stay to enjoy that, but as a result we miss the opportunity to see the copy of Magna Carta held there, which particularly disappoints Peter. However we discover that there is an even older one at Lincoln so are able to go and gaze reverently at that one instead. Lincoln also holds an equally ancient and significant document called the Charter of the Forest, so we get two for the price of one. We also manage to tick off another one of the things I've always wanted to do by stopping in Stratford to see a Shakespeare performance there. It is a performance of Much Ado About Nothing, set in India and with an all-Indian cast (English Indians). The transposition works beautifully, even with Bollywood-style dancing. We love it, and the walk along the Avon to and from our B&B, rain-free despite heavy showers during the afternoon.
Our stay in Goldsborough in Yorkshire is planned to be a quiet wind-down to ready us for the transition home, with a bit of pottering around nearby North Yorkshire areas, and so it is. But we do have one event when our hostess throws a "Welcome the Aussies" party in the middle of our stay. Her lovely garden is decorated with Aussie flags and bunting, and an assortment of small stuffed marsupials. The guests have been asked to dress up and there are a plethora of hats with corks, one with stelvin seals instead, the odd boomerang, a whingeing pom hat, a Ned Kelly outfit with "Winner of the Gold Medal for Shooting, 1880" stuck on the back of his "helmet", an inverted gold paper shopping bag with appropriately placed slits. They are a great crowd and have put much effort into the outfits. Much wine is drunk and a good time had by all. And so we finish a wonderful three month trip with a host of memories.

La Baule

La Baule is what Surfers Paradise might look like if it had been developed 50 years earlier by people with taste and discernment. A very wide, very long, south-facing beach curves between two headlands. Two hundred years ago, there was just a line of sand dunes separating the Atlantic and a salt swamp, just like Queensland, except that the swampy bit, the Marais Salant, has been turned into salt pans and farmed for salt for centuries. Early in the nineteenth century, the unstable dunes finally buried most of the tiny fishing village of Escoublac, and a forest of pines was then planted to stabilise the dunes. In 1879 a train line was built. The journey from Paris took just 7 hours - enterprising developers decided this was the place for a resort. The first built dozens of villas with their own particular style, part traditional Breton, part mock medieval, with an overlay of Art Deco. As with much French architecture, the consistency of style makes the whole development singularly attractive. The second developer added grand hotels and a Casino in the 1920s and had the railway moved from the beach to the back of the town. Some time in the 1940s or 1950s La Baule became so popular that a string of apartment buildings was built all along the beach front. It sounds appalling, but because there is a height limit of about 5 stories and the architecture is again consistent, it is actually OK, although I bet the owners of the villas who lost their view of the beach were upset at the time.
The quality of the cars driving around in La Baule indicates that this is still predominantly a playground for the wealthy, but most people living there don't drive at all. Streets were laid out before the advent of the automobile, so they are narrow and now part of a complex one-way system. As it is fairly flat, everyone walks or rides bikes. Our host, whom I met a year ago in Melbourne, inherited an old villa from his parents, but his normal residence is an apartment in the heart of Paris. He doesn't own a car, comes to La Baule by train (now a three hour journey), and then uses the bikes he keeps in his garage, and which we now use to go places that are too far to walk. His villa Colibri is near the Avenue President Charles de Gaulle, the main shopping and restaurant strip set at right angles to the road that runs along the beachfront, and is also within easy walking distance of the market, so most of our exploring is done on foot. The market is wonderful, and open every day, so we alternate between eating out and eating at the villa. Our host comes for the weekend to get us set up and show us the way to the market and favourite shops, then returns to Paris, leaving us to the care of his friends who live in one of the beachfront apartment buildings. They provide advice on where to go, so we bicycle to the Breton fishing villages of Le Pouliguen and Batz-sur-Mer, looking at the Marais Salant en route, drive to more villages: Le Croisic and La Turballe, and to the mediaeval walled town of Guerande. We also pursue our canal exploration and research, driving to Redon where a canal intersects a river via a couple of locks, then to Messac to look at second-hand boats.
For the first time on our holiday, the weather is less than perfect. After looking as though it was improving for the first two days, it deteriorates into cool and showery, with one day of non-stop rain. With no beach weather, even I am not tempted to swim, and nor are the rest of the La Baule inhabitants, although there are plenty of people sailing and windsurfing on the bay. We are very pleased that our new found friends invite us to their apartment on the night of Bastille Day, as we can watch the absolutely splendid display of fireworks, let off from barges moored off-shore, without having to freeze sitting on the beach. At least it doesn't rain during the evening, and there is a big crowd on the beach despite the weather.
On the less clement days, we do a bit of gardening and maintenance on the house (which is a bit neglected as our host has a very demanding job and can only rarely find time to visit). After a week we feel quite part of the community of La Baule, especially as we have been so well looked after and made so welcome by his friends. It is high on the list of places to come back to next time, maybe when we have fulfilled our canal barge dream and are travelling the rivers and canals of Brittany.