Holland by bike - 6

We have now begun the last week of our month long tour. It has been an amazing experience for us, teaching us about what the world could look like if we thought differently about getting around. Our bikes are holding out well, just needing a bit of chain maintenance every couple of days to remove the tree pollen build-up and also the remains of less fortunate flies who misjudged their flight paths and got stuck there. Our electric motors are always ready but only rarely do we actually use them to assist us. Sometimes on a slope rising up to the top of a dyke or to cross a bridge over a canal we might switch them on and then when the wind is in our faces slowing us down we often need a boost of power. We have been staying most nights in the homes of members of Vrienden op de Fiets, a Dutch organisation comprised of individuals or families willing to offer a room in their home to cyclists or walkers for an agreed set fee. This has enabled us to experience life from a Dutch perspective, to see inside their homes and how they live, eat, sleep, everything. We can also recharge our bike batteries, which we do every few days, and this only takes an hour or so with us using so little power. Strangely, despite the load we are each carrying, riding often seems effortless and should we be lucky enough to have a tailwind then this feels like our electric motors have made their own decision and turned themselves on. Riding on roads without hills is hard to describe when you come from a land that has lots of them, the hills I mean, and the smooth surfaced tarmac or concrete car-free paths we are riding on really makes us realise the damage that motor vehicles do to road surfaces. Bikes are too light to do any sort of damage on their own so we are nearly always riding on tracks with scarcely a bump.

To our eyes, coming from a world where untidy gardens with uncut hedges and randomly cut lawns are the norm, we cannot fail to notice the Dutch obsession with tidiness. We continually ride past beautiful houses with immaculately neat gardens. When we first caught sight of a robot lawn mower in action we were fascinated but we now realise that these things are quite common here; mechanical beings that move silently around the garden making sure the grass does not get to grow more than two centimetres tall and all without any human intervention. They even park themselves away at night for a bit of a recharge.

On a much larger scale the Friesland landscape is fiercely agricultural - vast fields with gigantic tractors rumbling about everywhere pulling behind them enormous pieces of machinery. The landscape appears very dry (due to a lack of rain) but the fields are often separated by water filled ditches which act as a reservoir ready to be pumped up onto the fields when needed then sprayed into the air so the plants can think it is raining. The Ijsselmeer is also notorious for its mayflies, so we discovered after riding through massive swarms of them. After several days of riding through this agricultural world we were missing our woodland glades with their twisty paths so we made our way to Den Helder in the north of Holland where we took a well earned rest to prepare for our forthcoming ride south towards Amsterdam.

Before we set off on this last leg of our journey though I have to share my picture of this rather tame heron standing beside the road waiting for his best friend to take him home. He did not seem interested at all in my close presence. We have often seen herons in flight above us or standing at the edge of a waterway waiting for the opportunity of a meal but this was a first - a street heron.

Den Helder sits on a strip of land pointing north towards the Friesian islands, a line of low lying islands which mark the country's northern border.

Major flooding here some years ago prompted the construction of a system of dykes to protect the low lying coastal land and on the morning of our departure we were delighted to find ourselves riding on the seaward side of one of these massive man-made defences. Standing by the clearly marked cycle lane looking to the north one can see the low lying island of Texel, the first of the Friesian islands.

Without us realising it we had stumbled onto the northern end of the 'Dutch Coastal Route' and as we rode on we soon found ourselves on a smooth fietspad winding through the sand dunes of a long coastal dyke. Better still there was a warm breeze coming from the north east, blowing us on our way all day long. This is a very popular route and we were suddenly in the company of hundreds of other cyclists, many of whom had similarly loaded panniers strapped onto the back. We did feel sorry, however, for those riding towards us facing the headwind that was blowing us along. We stopped for a restaurant meal at one of the many beach side facilities, our seats giving us a view of the beach where the fine weather and the soft sand had brought people out as if it was a summer's day. Swimming in the sea was not popular, however, the water being far too cold.