Biesbosch

Where would we be in Holland's Biesbosch, with all its water, without a boat.

Well it so happens that we know some kind people who have one, a nice sailing yacht which can take us on a tour of this maze of waterways in safety and comfort. And since the main purpose of us visiting Holland in the first place was to meet these very people, our friends Theo and Anneke... well enough said.

This is a friendship that goes back long before this blog began, back, in fact, to the year 1988; recalling this date involves a consultation between all parties in our Dutch friends' house in Ramsdonksveer before we are finally all agreed. We met back then because our own family, stuffed into a small sailing boat and having sailed across the North Sea from England, closely matched in ages another young family stuffed into a similar boat, this one being called Tara, and our respective children met and played together easily despite not knowing each other's languages, just as children will do everywhere. Then and now we still enjoy each other's company, but this time we get to meet the children of those children who first played together all those years ago.

We now need a bigger boat!

The Biesbosch has just that, bigger boats, correctly known as ships, many of which whilst carrying cargoes from destinations further inland, are also family homes. This can be seen from the presence of the family car parked on deck outside. Well where else would you park it?

To our eyes these vessels have always appeared a little strange, lying so low as they do with very little freeboard, as we are used to seeing much taller sea-going cargo ships. But of course they are like this for a reason. They ply the riverways of Europe, many of which have bridges beneath which they must pass. Height would be an unnecessary impediment.

 

At the other end of the scale there are the Sunday fisherman, ever hopeful of the catch to brag about when they return home.

Many many miles of interconnected channels here with farmland protected by dykes, farmhouses raised up on mounds so the water can flow over onto the land when the rivers can no longer cope and little harm is caused. It is these rivers flowing from across Europe that provide the water which feeds the Biesbosch, and the people who live here will have little control over the volume of water that arrives to pass through their country, which in many ways explains the complex systems for management of the environment here.

Staying as guests with our friends for several days enables us to see their world through different eyes, an opportunity not to be missed. Their town has its own windmill, as you might expect, and beside it now live some deer peaceably alongside a herd of goats, animals placed there by the community for reasons unknown.

 As we walk about the town, stocking up with groceries at the local Lidl, we are again struck by the infrastructure designed primarily for people and their bicycles, cars taking second or third place. Guidance is provided by signage, much of which we find confusing, and being afraid to break the rules our behaviour must appear odd at times. We can only guess at the penalties that might be imposed here. 

Time for wildlife

City life clearly suits many, the majority of humankind perhaps, but our needs are different. Cities do have trees, and in Rotterdam we saw and admired some magnificent specimens, great thick trunks of considerable age beside a road or canal; oaks, willows and even ancient olives which seemed to be grown as status symbols outside the residents' front doors.

Cities also have their share of wild fauna. 

This small selection - mallard, stork and parakeet - seem to have become quite acquainted to the constant traffic noise, passing trains, even the odd helicopter and our duck friend was keen to show her attentive drakes that she could cadge food from campers better than most.

What can be missing from cities is the unmanaged, the unkempt, in short, the wild. Which sort of explains how we ended up in the Biesbosch just south of Rotterdam. Our tour guide having departed, after entertaining us for the evening whilst we fed her in our mobile home, we concluded that without her company our temporary city life should probably come to an end, the thrill quotient having naturally exhausted itself. We decided that Martin should transport us elsewhere.

We are still under the same high pressure system that brought us cloudless skies on our passage through England but the warm sunny days mean cold nights and we are glad to be able to snuggle up inside when the evening chill starts to bite. Fortunately this doesn't matter as we are completely self contained in our campervan and can live completely off grid for several days, longer perhaps should the need arise. All we need is a quiet place to park, some wilderness (this comes in different flavours) and the assurance that we will not be disturbed once we are tucked in for the night.

First impressions of the Biesbosch are not what I was expecting at all, my only reference being the British concept of a national park, rolling hills (often eaten bare of vegetation by grazing sheep) with dense wooded valleys through which flowed rushing streams and boulder strewn rivers. Now we all know that Holland is a flat country, which rules out the hills and valleys, but what really sets this country apart is how it was formed in the first place.

The land around our home in Scotland was formed by ice, earlier still by volcanoes, and the shapes and marks left behind by these natural events are visible everywhere today. One thing we learnt from our Rotterdam visit was that this part of Holland has almost no pre-history, a term generally used to describe pre-Roman or pre-recorded history. This is because the space it now occupies was largely beneath the sea, land emerging only between periodic inundations. In more recent times the land was gradually 'reclaimed' by the efforts of people who would eventually override the efforts of the sea to drown them and this process persists today as it will into the future. Holland, therefore, is entirely man made. It is a managed environment and will always be, through necessity.

Many years ago we travelled to Holland in our own boat, entering the country through a lock. In Britain, entering a sea lock will always take you to a higher body of water, a canal or a lake but in Holland the reverse is true, the sea lock will take you lower, to the level of the country's inland waterways.

Which brings us to the Biesbosch, a vast triangle of shallow water and land, much of it farm land, with pockets of naturalness in the form of trees, mostly willow, where beavers live alongside geese and other wild animals in a place created by human kind and now managed, at least partly, for their benefit. Wilderness here has its own unique flavour.

Rotterdam

We have been to Holland before, a good many years ago, but it has just occurred to us that we have never driven here. Every other visit here was by boat rather than ship and this technical distinction is actually quite important. It is largely about scale but not entirely. It is also about control of one's own destiny.

From the moment we drive on board (via a section of motorway built into the bow) we are entirely in the hands of others, most of whom we would never get to meet, who communicate via loudspeakers set into the ceiling above us or through leaflets in various languages left in our cabin. Navigation, a nautical term generally used to describe the process of getting from a to b without hitting any hard bits (often referred to as 'land') now means finding your way along impossibly long corridors, up and down staircases and riding in lifts. Martin was left alone to fend for himself amongst others of his kind somewhere below the waterline - we weren't allowed near him - while we were stored away up on the 10th floor.

Our allocated cabin was just that, a cabin, with different permutations of beds to try had we the energy left to do so but frankly once we were on board it was past 9pm and after the stress of blagging our way past customs and security (mirror on a stick to look for explosives(?) beneath the van) we wanted only sleep.

So here we are driving into a bustling city dancing with rush hour traffic on the wrong side of the road with the satnav lady telling us which of 12 lanes to follow and how many kilometers to go to our destination; all of which we managed quite successfully actually. This and a certain amount of pre-planning brought us  to a Stadscamping located in an oasis of trees surrounded by motorways and railways and within earshot of the city zoo. Great if you like sealions.

Living and working in Rotterdam is our Dutch daughter, as we like to refer to her, who we first met over 30 years ago and Maartje's offer to take us to her home where she would feed us was the reason we found ourselves walking back through the dark city later that evening. But this was only the start of her plans for us.

Our tour guide arrived early the next day to escort us to the hire shop where we were fitted out with our fiets, the Dutch word for some incredible pieces of machinery. They have two chunky wheels, a wide leather saddle, enormous handlebars and a rear carrier which would easily carry a week's shopping but it is the ride position that makes it so Dutch, leaning slightly backwards, in the least aerodynamic way imaginable, arms held far apart by the width of the bars. And these are heavy machines, needing a good push to get started. Once moving, however, they roll along easily and we are straight out into the street following the car free lanes that make the city, and the whole country, the most cycling friendly place on earth.

Everywhere you look there are people on bikes; the streets are littered with them. We were being taken on an amazing city tour - spectacular older buildings sitting beside modern architectural wonders, the full commentary explaining how the city had grown from the sea on reclaimed land, the wartime destruction and the imaginative new buildings still going up - it was both exhausting and fascinating.

Lunch saw us at a popular vegetarian restaurant (right up our street, a place where you were charged by the weight of the food on your plate, something we had never come across before) then it was off across various bridges to a secret garden full of peace and quiet. At each road junction cyclists have perfect priority, kept separate from the cars, whilst riding on their own smooth tarmac lanes. For a pair of country folk this was mind boggling, total brain overload but somehow at the same time endlessly interesting.

To fully understand our experience of Rotterdam requires a British viewpoint. Imagine a keen cyclist building a city from the ground up. Absolute priority would be given to bikes over any other form of transport so that there is no longer any fear of being flattened by cars, buses or lorries. You'd have your own set of roads, narrower perhaps but quite adequate to accommodate two way cycle traffic and overtaking, and at every junction the crossing points would be marked wth painted shapes on the ground to indicate where you might have to give way... to other cyclists. Cars always have to wait for you; the drivers know this and they respect this rule, without exception, as they have all been brought up to understand this. Children are carried on seats either in front or behind the rider or babies even, in long specialised cargo bikes. You are raised from birth to expect nothing else. This, then, is the city of Rotterdam. No different from any other Dutch city perhaps but sadly so many worlds away from anything the small island of Britain has ever produced.

We're back...and we're off!

Today we are leaving home, going on what for us is an adventure. The ferry to Holland was booked over two years ago when COVID 19 was just entering our vocabulary and when travel restrictions were only a figment of imagination but the kind ferry company allowed us to change the booking, twice in  fact, so it now comes at no extra cost. Many things have changed for us in those two years, not least of which is the vehicle in which we are travelling, but the spirit and the motivation is still there, as strong as ever.

But of course this does not confront the elephant in the room, does it. The previous entry to this blog is dated 28th March 2015, a full seven years ago. I can see the face of Angus the alpaca right now as I sit in front of my keyboard but although I might speculate on where he is now, the elephant who sits beside him will not be moving; we will not be moving him aside to write about what lies beneath his bottom. These ramblings have always been about the present and this is how they will continue. That is not to say, of course, that hints regarding the missing years will not emerge at some point.

There are some new characters in our lives who will be introduced as and when they appear. Ducky now spends her days roaming between Faversham in Kent and the Jura, a mountainous region in France, driven by our longtime friend, Richard and his partner Karen.

So let me start by introducing Martin who, you may notice, has a companion of the waterborne sort. She is called Eun na Mara.

This trip, however, is with Martin alone and the three of us will soon be loading ourselves onto a ferry for a sea passage to Holland to meet up again with our Dutch friends, absent from our lives for far too many years.

Leaving our home in Scotland so far behind us seems a strange thing to do but we are packed and prepared, suitably attired in warm clothes (it is still winter, technically) as we drive off in a blast of sunshine which persists all day, and the next, and the next. The season has suddenly shifted into spring and as we move south the cherry blossom appears along with black crows (in western Scotland they are bigger and have grey bodies, 'hoodies' we call them). It is an alien world we have driven into, and this is even before we have left what we now must refer to as the United Kingdom, 'UK' being the initials we must soon display on Martin's rear end.

For our final night on British soil we are alone in a field, the uncut grass almost up to Martin's bottom. It is quiet, how we like it. There's a pond, with ducks, a small farm shop at which we buy a large sweet potato, and an oak tree still bare of anything approaching a leaf. We had to take covid tests en route and achieved this only by setting off at first light from Penrith and only tomorrow, when we are told the results, will we know whether this particular adventure can start. If either of us tests positive then another adventure will begin. It is a strange uncertain world we now live in.