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After spending a few days in the Netherlands and being offered hash at a few train stations I feel I’m now suitably “in the know” to provide some insights into the Dutch way a life.

Food
It seems that what they say about the Dutch food groups is true, there are only 5. Meat, bread, potatoes, cheese and beer

Bikes
Okay with all that beer you think there would be a load of beer guts, ah but it seems everyone in the country owns a bike. In fact often roads have two completely separate bike lane and only one lane that both streams of cars must share. It’s my kind of country.

Platuea toliets
Different countries have many different lavatory systems. However this is one place where Dutch ingenuity is lacking and more than Dutch courage is required. I’m not sure what benefits there are in the idea of a toilet where your deposits sit there exposed to the elements before you flush but it’s certainly not the fragrant aroma. Hmm maybe living in a country with no bike lanes is fine after all.

Tuesday we arrived at Rotterdam but bus. It’s full of all sorts of weird and whacky buildings. Apart from the buildings there wasn’t anything particularly captivating in Rotterdam. It is particularly close to Kinderdijk where a system of dykes and water catchments areas have been maintained for the last few centuries by 19 windmills. These days the water levels are maintained by a number of pumps.

It was still pretty amazing to see all the windmills although even if only one was still in use. The Dutch government requires all windmill operators to be highly trained apparently you need to be a skillful as a yatch skipper to run a windmill.

Last night we arrived in Maastricht which is a town only just within the Netherlands (it’s squezed in between Belgium and Germany). We found a great place for stew (Stoofpot) and a few more Belgium beers. Maastricht feels like a wantabe Millan. The streets are lined with major fashion stores and restaurants. It’s very beautiful though and while walking around we were lucky enough to sweet talk the lady in one of the churches to let us climb the tower to get a view of the town.

After shoving down some bakery products for breakfast, we somehow found room for some wok takeaway and then scootered to the train station to head to Luxemborg.

We consolidated (crammed) all our necessary stuff into day packs and headed to the bike rental this morning. We rented to newish bikes but the interesting thing about both Belgium and the Netherlands is that style seems to have changed very little since the 1920’s. Still the were sturdy and it aided the atmosphere while singing songs from “The Sound of Music” while biking along. You could have been forgiven for thinking Susan’s whole plan was to see windmills, mainly due to the extensive amount of photo’s she was taking of the one we saw in Veere. But I soon managed to get her on her bike again and we were off.

Delta Project
After having a casual wonder through the small port town our butt’s were still feeling fine so we set our eyes on the Delta project. In fact this sea wall was the main reason we had decided to bike around this part of the Netherlands. It all came about one night because Susan and I were watching a show called Mega structures. On this particular week the show highlighted “The Worlds Greatest Sea facing defence system” or something like that. The project was to essential protect Dutch farms (many of which are below sea level) from major flooding like they experienced in 1953. You really get an idea how impressive an engineering feat this must have been after riding across around 2km of moveable concrete barriers. The dutch are pretty smart dudes.

Ofcourse getting there meant our butts where starting to let us know we weren’t going to get away with riding almost 40 km in a day especially since we both haven’t rode bikes for years. We rode into Domburg and the hostel that we were staying in that was converted from a 12th century castle.

Unfortunately we arrived a little late to order dinner so ended up riding into the town for a fantastic tea with 5 veggie options for Suse. The sight negative being riding back in the dark and rain but we did get to use our dynamo powered bike lights and give our bikes a clean.

Waking up in Burges we high tailed (or at least waddled along with our packs) to the train station. We narrowly caught the train to Antwerp but ended up there well before lunch. After wondering around the town squares and checking out what must be Belgium’s largest church. We decided to leg it was also relatively easy to avoid the flashy designer stores at 4pm on a Sunday. Anyway we felt we had seen all Antwerp had to offer and keen to begin the dutch leg of our journey.

We made good time into Zeeland. (The area of the Netherlands from which New Zealand inherits it’s name). Going via Roosendaal to Middleburg a sleepy city in the heart of Zeeland. We stayed the night in a B&B attached to a Jazz bar. Regrettably Miles Davis was not blurting out any tunes leaving us with very few restaurants in the centre of town:
a) open and
b) serving vegetarian.
We found a place called Cheerz but were a little surprised to find the going rate for a side plate for bread is €2.50 and Mayo is €1.50. Seems that the letting Poland join the European Economy has hit the Dutch hard.