Amsterdam & Keukenhof

Last weekend Linda and I did a somewhat last-minute job of organising a trip to the Netherlands to see the Tulips that we missed out on seeing last year, having arrived about a week after the end of the season.

This time we made sure to visit a good couple of weeks before the end of the season but managed a different oversight this time - we would be arriving in the evening of Queens Day; one of the major events on the Amsterdam calendar.

This meant we arrived on the tail end of some pretty chaotic scenes on the public transport and on the streets for our walk to the apartment where we would be staying. Fortunately the apartment (which Linda found after much searching) was excellent, with a canal view and an excellent coffee shop just around the corner.

The next morning also felt somewhat as though the whole city was suffering from a hangover.

Since we'd been to Amsterdam before we didn't feel much pressure to see everything, and the weather on Saturday was nice and sunny for the most part, so we happily wandered around the city visiting museums and shops and generally just enjoying the town.

The next day we headed out to the Keukenhof gardens, the largest bulb flower park in the world.

This didn't get off to a great start because we thought renting a car would simplify things by letting us keep our bags in the car while we explored (instead of finding a baggage locker at the airport, which is what caused us problems in Sweden). However the car rental was a bit of a mess and we spent what seemed like an age arguing with the rental company at the airport before we were finally able to get on with our day.

After this it was all fine, except for the weather which was rainy.

We drove around the country-side taking photos of the fields of tulips and hoping that the rain would clear a bit before entering the park itself.

An interesting fact about the tulips - it's not the flowers that earn the money for the farmers, but the bulbs. They wait for the flowers to bloom only because this puts the bulbs in the right condition to be sold.

After a while we gave up on the weather and just went ahead into the park.

It really is an incredible place to visit, with miles of winding paths through plots of flowers of many varieties. I liked to imagine that the rain and overcast conditions simply meant that the light was good for photographing the flowers (although in reality I was frightened of ruining my camera and our lenses kept getting covered in raindrops).

We spent our time walking in the park and ducking into shops and indoor displays to dry off.

After some hours in the gardens, we felt like we'd really seen everything we had aimed to see by coming back to the Netherlands. Which is not to say we wouldn't like to come back again, since it's a country we really enjoy visiting and I still have "riding a bike in holland" on my list of things to do!

Netherlands - Amsterdam

We saved Amsterdam for the last leg of our trip through the Netherlands, and I have to say it was a bit of a rude shock to come back to a 'big city' after the freshly-painted, neatly-trimmed feel of the small towns and countryside around.

There are the canals of course, which are bigger in Amsterdam than the other towns we'd been to, and the shear number and variety of bikes was quite amazing, but it's all just a bit shabbier than the rest of the Netherlands and has a definite seedy edge to it.

Which is not to say Amsterdam is not a beautiful and interesting city to visit, it's just a contrast to the places we had been previously. In fact the history of the city and the museums and sites make it a fascinating place to stay.

We did all the usual sorts of things you expect of Amsterdam, such as visiting the Anne Frank museum, taking a canal tour, renting a canal bike, visiting the flower markets, etc.. We may also have excluded some of the other things Amsterdam is famous for.

And, despite the generally bad reputation the Netherlands has for food, we managed to keep ourselves well fed on pancakes, indonesian food, cheese, proffertjes, bitterballen, and other goodies.

By the end of our trip we were feeling very satisfied with our stay in the Netherlands - it is a really relaxing and interesting place to visit and we really felt like we would love to come back and see it again, if only to cross off two things from our 'must do in the netherlands' list: riding a bike through the countryside; and seeing the tulips growing in the fields.

Netherlands - Edam

Even though there is a town in the Netherlands called Edam, and a cheese that originates from the Netherlands called Edam, apparently no-one actually eats Edam in the Netherlands any more. The red-wax covered cheeses are almost entirely exported, and often actually made in Germany.

This didn't prevent the town of Edam from being a very pleasant stop for a night, with the usual assortment of canals, bridges, churches and a lovely hotel with an enormous and delicious breakfast (Linda's fine work once again to find the hotel).

We spent our time there wandering the streets and dropping into food and gadget shops. The weather was really nice and it was great just to be outside in it.

Netherlands - Zaanse Schans

Zaanse Schans is a small town in the Netherlands made up of historical houses and windmills relocated into a new site. It sounds quite terrible, but actually it is a genuine town with people living there, and it is amazingly well preserved and the windmills actually still do work (whether they do productive work is another question).

In fact after arriving in Zaanse Schans we wondered if we had wasted our time going to Kinderdjik, since it is actually more picturesque and interesting than Kinderdjik.

We spent most of our time wandering in and out of the shops there, the highlight being the clog shop where they had a demonstration of clog making, and where I spent a long time wondering if I really needed my own clogs. In the end I decided I could do without the clogs, since wearing them felt like I had two small boats installed on my feet.

We also went inside one of the windmills, which was used to make dyes for paints. I even made a little movie to show what it is like inside.

Outside of Zaanse Schans we also saw the few Tulips that we would see in the Netherlands: a few sad examples left behind while their neighbours had been lopped off for sale at the markets. Unusually for us we had not done our research - we figured that, while we were at the tail end of the Tulip season, there would surely still be some in the fields. How wrong we were! The season is apparently very precise and we had missed it by some 2 weeks. There were no longer any Tulips in the Netherlands and we resolved we would have to come back and see them next season.

Netherlands - Alkmaar

Next stop on our travels was to Alkmaar, where we wanted to see the cheese markets that were on in the morning. The cheese is Gouda, but although there is actually a town called Gouda in the Netherlands, after which the cheese is named, the markets in Alkmaar are meant to be more interesting.

Coming from Switzerland we're quite used to idea of cheese being a staple food, but the Netherlands have wrapped it up in a fair amount of tourist-friendly ceremony, and the markets were certainly fun to watch.

It was very entertaining seeing the cheese being sampled, carried to the weighing machines and to the carts by the 'strong men' with the silly hats, and ultimately rolled into a truck for transport.

After watching the markets for a while, we tasted a fair bit of the stuff and bought a few slices that kept us well fed (perhaps a little too well fed!) for the remainder of the trip.

Netherlands - Haarlem

We were on a tight schedule in the Netherlands - we were only there for 5 days over the long weekend of Ascension holidays - and as a result only had one night in Haarlem.

Like Delft, Haarlem was a very attractive mix of canals, market squares, people on bikes, and had the added attraction of people floating down the more sizeable canals on their canal boats.

We also had our first delicious taste of Indonesian Rijsttafel (Indonesia being a past Dutch colony). In fact we stuffed ourselves silly on Indonesian food on a couple of occasions in the Netherlands!

Netherlands - Kinderdjik

After our morning in Delft we drove out into the countryside to Kinderdjik, which is one of those places with windmills on canals that you see on postcards of the Netherlands.

Windmills are of course one of the icons of the Netherlands, along with Canals, Cheese, Tulips and Bikes, and we were keen get started on ticking each of those boxes!

It was pretty exciting to see windmills in action - although you do see a surprising number of them strewn about the country-side, not many of them are operational. I can't say that I'd thought about it much, but I didn't realise before that the windmills were mostly built to drain the water from the low-lying countryside, a job that has been passed on to steam and then diesel power.

It was quite interesting to climb around inside the windmills and see them up close, but we'd taken longer than expected to get to Kinderdjik and we didn't want to hang around too much - we had more windmills later in our itinerary!

Netherlands - Delft

Some countries take some time to warm to, but when we arrived in Netherlands we were almost immediately in love with it. The airport was clean and organised, and the people at the car rental place were prepared and friendly and we even got upgraded to a bigger car! Linda even found some delicious Vlaamse frites (chips and mayonnaise) [okay officially that's Belgian, but like lots of things in the Netherlands, like the Belgian beers, the Indonesian food, and the amazing language skills, you won't end up caring too much where it originates].

Then we arrived in Delft, a very pretty town with canals and market squares and bars with happy drinkers in them and people on bikes chatting to each other as they rode side by side. Linda had organised an excellent hotel right in the town and we found a car park right outside; pretty much the perfect start!

The next morning we spent some time wandering around the town, although since it was Ascension public holiday it was quite quiet.

We climbed the church tower to see the view and checked out the Delftware in the tourist shops.

There was also an antiques market where we saw some cool old clogs and ice skates, and had our first try of broodje haring (raw herring sandwich), which we decided we didn't need to finish.