While the Netherlands might be famous for many things, and rightly so, possession of a dramatic third dimension, height, is not one of them. Its highest point is barely over 300m above sea level. Nonetheless, it makes up for this lack in many other ways. We said goodbye to our Caucasus mountains for two weeks recently to catch up with some old dear friends and discover some of these distinctions.
This country has more bicycles per capita than any other on the world: 1.2-1.3 per person among its population of over 18 million. Its flatness makes it ideal for such locomotion; the cities are far less crowded with cars and bad air; and the people are also much fitter as a result.
But climate change has had one noticeable effect here. A great friend of mine from my St Petersburg days of about 30 years ago, Gert-Jan Roest, used to speed skate regularly on the many canals in winter. The last time he was able to do this was over 10 years ago. You need a week or more of -10 degrees C to give the ice enough solid thickness for this sport. It just hasn’t happened in the last decade.
Gert and his Swiss wife, Sandra, took my wife and me on a canal boat cruise through Amsterdam a few hours after we had arrived and settled in as their guests. This is an ideal way to see the city for an hour, and you certainly notice how ubiquitous are the waterways and the bicycles. Almost every house we saw, too, has a beam jutting out horizontally from its roof with a pulley, because their stairways are often narrow, and moving furniture up from outside is far easier. Houseboats and cruise boats line the canals, and peace reigns.
Then we took trains to our next stop for a few days, to other friends (from Georgia) near Zwolle. Here, we are out in the countryside, where my wife can practice biking on a tandem machine in serene forests on dedicated biking trails. Sheep and deer greet us, amidst heather which will bloom purple in the fall. We bike to the nearest town for its market day, and stand in line with those in the know to buy as much cheese of different varieties, including one three years old, as our luggage will allow. Love this stuff. I’m not so hot on licorice, but the cheese, definitely.
It’s still cold enough here to need multiple layers, and I don’t envy Georgia, where reports of 40 degrees in the east (in APRIL!) are reaching us. What will actual summer bring there?
We have booked tickets to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, best place in the world to see Rembrandt’s work, and the Escher Museum in The Hague. These are both favorites of mine. But Vincent (van Gogh) will have to wait for another visit: Tickets to his place are all gone already. Another outing will be to a famous park for tulips, now in their prime, for a picnic with still other friends, and another with my Dutch-Swiss friends to Texel Island, with its famous World War II Georgian connection. Plenty to see in this small country. More to come next week as we wrap up.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
Blog by Tony Hanmer
