In New Zealand – people mess about in boats and then they take them out and sail, or row, drive or whatever else one does to move a boat on the waves. And of course it is usually on the ocean waves which makes it not messing about in boats. It might also be in an inner harbour, or up a river or on a large lake. BUT you do have to concentrate in New Zealand – you don’t generally stoodge about. If you stoodge about you are at risk and people die every year because they were just too laid back.

Well, here in the Netherlands one really does stoodge about, or mess about in boats. We have seen it many many times – walking over the many bridges over many canals, and we have experienced it personally as well.

We did do a RIB (rubber inflatable Boat) trip last year – 6 of us in a RIB riding around the canals and up the Spaarne River and it was fun, but it was not just messing about in boats – we had a time frame and people who were leaving to catch planes. Of course it was fun and we will do it again ourselves – which may well qualify as messing about in boats.

And of course we have been on canal tours – but that is also not messing about in boats.

On Saturday we were going to ride our bikes slowly up beside the Spaarne and listen to live jazz at the Cafe Terras in the afternoon at Fort Zuid. It was to be a test to see how we are both doing as this spring has affected us both quite negatively.

But as it happens we changed our plans as we were invited for a ride around the canals in a private boat. Now that was really messing about in a boat. We had lovely food, lovely company and a tour by two wonderful locals who know the canals and all of Haarlem extremely well. The boat was quite large, has sleeping accommodation for up to 5, small bathroom, kitchenette etc. It also has a Coots nest (black and white bird a bit like a pukeko) on the platform by the rudder. An exceptional living arrangement.

This tour was fabulous. We were told all about the buildings lining the canals including one which used to belong to Napoleon, and many other interesting facts. We also passed a small boat – maybe 15 to 20 feet and I will update that figure after confering with Best Beloved.

When these two were very young and very much in love the took a boat of such size and shape – across the English Channel and up the Thames. Wow! it was a very small boat – not designed for ocean travel. It clearly made it because these two are still together and they still mess about in boats. It seems that they were a little nervous in parts of that earlier journey.

We explored to the end of the canals where this boat was too substantial to go under the bridges and continue. I seem to think we have done that before in the RIB – although in the RIB we pressed on regardless – laying flat in it, so that we could negotiate under the bridges. This boat was too big for the little bridges, and we jiggled and jiggled (don’t know that that is a nautical term) around so the boat could turn and go back where from whence it came.

We drank lovely Rose and ate Cheese sticks, nuts and fishy stuff on melba toast and just simply enjoyed a lovely few hours messing about in a boat.

And we saw Haarlem with new eyes – odd for us really because we see most things with new eyes. But from a boat the world is a different place.

I actually enjoyed messing about in this boat with Best Beloved and these lovely locals.

Thank you

Queens Day / Koninginnedag : or is it Orange Crazy Day?

April 30th – Queen’s Day is a national holiday here in the Netherlands. It is a celebration for the birthday of the Queen of the Netherlands (Queen Juliana’s birthday). The date has been retained as Queen Beatrix birthday is in January – not good weather for a party in all the streets of the Netherlands.

Queen’s Day is also world famous (in the Netherlands?) for the Orange Craze.

These pictures are from “About.com” Take a look to see more.

People wear orange clothing, hats, orange boas and other quite interesting creative orange accessories. The Royal household is the House of Orange so there will be orange banners, orange coloured foods & drinks, orange cards, orange everywhere. So if you will be in the Netherlands on April 30th do bring at the very least your orange t-shirt. If you should forget there will many orange offerings for sale on the street from g-strings, to cowboy hats and everything between.

On Queen’s Day there is also a “freemarket” (Dutch: vrijmarkt) all over the country, where everybody is allowed to sell anything they wish in the streets. Last year the streets of Haarlem were lined with stalls and groundsheets and tables laden with everything and anything that you could imagine for sale somewhere. Children selling toys they have outgrown, people baked cakes and sold them, oranges, orange juice, clothing, books, records, videos, cd’s, tapes, car bits, tv’s, kitchen stuff, jewellery, junk – absolutely anything can be sold on this day. There were miles and miles of sellers.

They do not allow garage sales here – so they have this free market day once a year as well as other fleamarkets where you can sell your surplus whatever that might be. Queens Day was great and this year I am really looking forward to it. Last year we didn’t know quite what to expect – even though we had seen people preparing for it for the week before by starting to wear orange items and many shops had wonderful orange displays.

If you come to the Netherlands at the time of any one of their amazing celebrations – check out the shop windows, they make such an effort and the art and design of them is quite incredible. We had been told the Dutch are stoic and do not know how to celebrate – that is a serious lie. I have never seen so much celebration.

Maybe this is just not the right day for a Knit art Graffitti installation on a Ball in Haarlem.

Today is the spring equinox, and the first official day of spring in the Netherlands.

In this lovely Northern land, seasons have so much more meaning than in countries closer to the equator.  You feel each new season with all your senses, in sharp contrast to the last one.  The transition from one to another is so fast it makes you blink with disbelief.

Only three weeks ago, night temperatures (and even some daytime ones) were still below zero.  Ice still covered the drains in the fields and part of the canals, and frost sparkled on the morning pavements and railway tracks.  Rain in the evenings sometimes reverted to snow, which lightly coated the rooftops and bare branches on the trees in our lane.  On the canals and rivers, ducks and coots still flocked together.

But even then, something was happening.  The snow no longer lay for days – it quietly melted away.  The bare branches began to quicken, blushing faint pink as the sap flowed.  Buds formed.  Blackberry bushes lining the pathways had been cut back to ground level in the autumn by council workers – now they sprouted long barbed tendrils.  The browned off grasses began to green, slowly at first and then with a rush.  Bulbs forced their green leaf-spears through the turf.  And the birds’ behaviour began to change.  They had behaved politely, with perfect manners, in the winter freeze.   A colourful mix of great tits, blue tits, sparrows, jays, red robins, tree-creepers and chaffinches had shared the seeds, nuts and fat-balls we put out for them.  A harmonious multi-racial, multi-species society feeding together at the expats bird cafe.  Until three weeks ago, that is, when we saw the first signs of bickering, the odd flash of temper.

Three weeks – that’s all it takes.  Now, daytime temperatures are in double figures (seventeen Celsius on Friday) and the last two nights lows were thirteen degrees.  The buds on the branches are showing leaves.  Rabbits feast on the grasses.  The bulb spears that emerged three weeks ago, like timid green pennants on a battlefield, now wave the multi-coloured flags of their flowers – snowdrops and crocuses are the first, but the daffodils and tulips will not be too far behind them.

The change in the birds is just as abrupt.  Gone are the table manners – gone indeed are any manners other than those of courtship.  There is inter-species total war.  The tits drive the tree-creeper off the insect block, the blue tits scrap with the great tits, and the robin no longer dines with the others.  On the water, the great flocks have dispersed as ducks and coots seek their own little piece of the river.  Against their own kind, all species battle for dominance in the pecking-order, seeking the prizes of the best mate and the best territory.  Winners are already courting, dancing and pairing up.  It’s spring.  It’s the mating season.

Game on!

Nederland has a hell of a lot of rivers, canals and drains.  Right now the rivers, canals and drains are mostly frozen over, and the snow lies on the ice like icing sugar.  In the larger rivers and canals, there are still pools of water here and there – under the bridges, and where the canals join and the water flows more swiftly.

Ice does funny things to wildlife.  Winter is a social time for the water birds.  Normally they are either solitary or in pairs, but now the ducks, geese, swans and coots all gather together in flocks.  They stand around on the ice, but seem to tire of that, so head for the shrinking pools of water to rest.  The coots, looking like hybrid pukekos, walk confidently on the iced-up canals toward the water.  About a foot short of the water, the ice breaks under their weight.  They look very surprised and utterly undignified!  They swim through the thin ice, breaking a little passage until they reach the open water.

The ducks, waddling along the canal with less grace and much less confidence, have a very different approach.  One after the other, about twenty feet short of the water, they suddenly take off, flying low over the ice and landing with dignity and aplomb in the water, where they immediately swim to the left or right, clearing the landing path for the following ducks.  That strategy never seems to occur to the coots, even though they are skilful flyers who usually land elegantly in water.

Neither species likes landing on the ice from the air, so they avoid doing that unless they have no choice.  They slide completely out of control when they land on it, and we see the skid-marks.  So their strategy on leaving the water to return to the ice is to swim toward the edge of the ice and right into it, like feathered ice-breakers.  When the ice no longer yields, they climb on to it – a little clumsily but with much less drama than when landing on it.

But ice does even funnier things to scared rabbits in a hurry. At least, it did funny things to one rabbit that I scared without meaning to do so.  I approached the edge of a frozen canal to get a closer look.  The land around was six inches deep in snow, the frozen vegetation on the edge of the ice dripping with the thick icing.  So I crunkled towards it.  I did not see the rabbit concealed right on the edge of the vegetation, and as my boots fell right beside it, it finally panicked, bolting from beside my feet straight onto the ice, in two bounds.  Normally, rabbits cross frozen water as easily as any other animal.  But a frightened rabbit tries to keep on bounding.  Heh heh – that’s impossible!  The hind legs have no purchase on ice, so instead of bounding, the rabbit slithered, about six inches at a time.

My laughter didn’t help – it just terrified the poor scared rabbit even more.  I think it took twenty slithering bounds to travel ten feet along the canal.  At last, it climbed out onto the bank, and stood panting and exhausted, in full view, until it regained its breath enough to slip under cover.

There is one species to which the ice does even funnier things.  Humans, of course.  It makes all of them insanely happy!

On the weekend we went for a great bike ride, and saw many birds including several sets of nesting Mute Swans. We did manage to take a short video of swans nesting out on the polders east of Haarlem.

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But I got so excited I fell off my bike, scrapped my knee, banged my head, bruised my leg and am generally feeling a bit sensitive.

Best Beloved is laughing now, but didn’t at the time as it apparently looked just a little bit spectacular. I rode off the path (while looking at the swans), tried to correct, fell off and rolled into the mud to the side of the asphalt path, or so he said. I don’t really remember. The swans seemed okay with it all.

When we got home, we both needed a wine or two to aid recovery and then I thought of stuff like – you know, stuff like, old ladies shouldn’t ride bikes, and what am I doing, and why am I so excited by swans and so on. It really shook the bones up somewhat.

I don’t think it is a good idea to fall off a bike at any age but it is a stunner at 61. The bruises will take a little time to mend. Might be off the bike for a week or two – but I didn’t break anything. So there.

BUT we did manage to take a short video of swans nesting out on the polders east of Haarlem.

Mute swans have been cherished as symbols of purity and elegance for centuries and are native to Europe and Asia. They are very large birds, measuring 56-62 inches in length.

Is a place you should visit if you do ever have the opportunity.

We have ridden our bikes here for coffee, or wine and toasties. Once in spring we sat outside near the waters edge, and the mother ducks and ducklings were of course very interested in case there was food. And there was of course. A very short video of the ducks – it does not represent all that is on offer here.

We have visited here on foot, by bus, by rib (rubber inflatable boat), and by bicycle in all weather conditions – ice, wind, snow, rain and fortunately also in sunshine. It is a glorious spot, where they often have live music, and always have interesting people and then there is the art gallery as well. It is always interesting to view the original art.

So go and visit if you can.

Not for the ducks necessarily, but for the food, wine, art, music and a wonderful, wonderful setting, in an interesting building in a natural space which is unequalled.

Fort-Zuid, officially known as Fort Bezuiden Spaarndam, was part of the Defence Line of Amsterdam, which consisted of over 42 fortresses and was built between 1880 and 1920.

JJ was on the morning train to Maastricht and sent this email to Bruce in NZ. It is not quite verbatim.

On this misty morning at 8:07 AM JJ having caught the 6:30 from Haarlem to Amsterdam, then boarded this one – the lizard train at 7:07 bound for Maastricht.

I can see the fields outside, with the disembodied gates standing in isolation in the mist. No fences, no cattle troughs as the wide, deep drains serve both purposes. The water table is about four inches below the surface, yet surprisingly the paddocks are not boggy. There is a high proportion of sand in the earth (which used to be the sea floor), so it’s very free-draining. Just as well – water is everywhere.

We cross huge rivers and canals. They are edged with dikes, with much higher dikes set well back. The Dutch don’t fight the water, they manage it. Their philosophy is “Give the water somewhere to go”. Hence the double-diking – the land between the remote and close dikes is sacrificial. In a land where half of the country is below sea level, flooding is extremely rare. The last flood that caused serious loss of life was in 1953, when the Zuider Zee overflowed, killing 1800 people. The Dutch promptly cut the Zuider Zee off from the North Sea. Now it’s a very big fresh-water lake. A subsequent flood in the sixties created a series of secondary lakes on one edge of it. A bit more work with dikes and drainage stabilised it completely, and now the properties that edge the smaller lakes are worth megabucks. To put all this in perspective, more people are killed every year by floods in Bangladesh and India than the Dutch have lost in the last two centuries.

In the next decade, the Dutch will spend 600 billion Euros (man that’s over a trillion NZ dollars) on strengthening the sea-dike defences. These guys are serious about water management. Kaeo and Kawakawa would be very different places if New Zealand employed Dutch hydrodynamic engineers.

But I digress. The title of this is “The lizard train”. The train to Maastricht is a trap for young (and old) players. Maastricht is about 230 kilometres South-East of Amsterdam, and the train goes nearly all the way there before it makes like a lizard – the tail breaks off and goes somewhere entirely different! I was told about it when I started. Not so a colleague of mine who has been here about two months and wound up in the wrong city last week. He was very pissed off. He finally made it to Maastricht, where they all laughed and said “Oh yes, all the Amsterdam-Maastricht trains do that”. He then worked late to catch up on the time he had lost. At about eleven PM, he boarded the train to Amsterdam and fell asleep. Halfway there, he found that the train had stopped. Then the whistle blew. Funny. The train didn’t move. Alarmed, he got off and asked the guard what was going on. “Oh” said the guard, “for the last two trains of the day, only the front half goes to Amsterdam. The back half goes back to Maastricht”. So he had to wait there for the last train. He got home at 1:00 AM.

Next morning when he arrived red-eyed and worn out, we were all so sympathetic (not!). We laughed like drains.

So now it’s 11:45 AM, and I’m still on the Lizard train. The journey is usually about 2 1/2 hours. But the lines are out for maintenance, and they announced it to all the passengers in Dutch! The others got off while I was typing this, and suddenly the train was going backwards! I got off at the first stop and found out what was happening. They told me that it was all fixed and I should simply take the next train. Bullshit – the lines were still out. This time they made the announcement also in English, so I have had to travel a roundabout route. Teach me to not laugh at David!