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In Which I Give Belgium Short Shrift
August 5, 2007 by Mike
Dunkerque, France
Route: Domburg - Westerschelde tunnel - Retranchement (all Holland) - Knokke - Oostende - De Panne (all Belgium) - Dunkerque (France)
OK, let's get this out of the way because I've already got it in the neck from my quasi-Belgian chum Geoff, who lived in the country (and represented it internationally at cricket, I'll have you know) several decades ago.
I rode through Belgium without stopping - except for traffic lights and something of a traffic jam. All the months I spent in Norway, the weeks I was in Finland.. it was all made bearable by the fact that I was going to ride straight through Belgium. When the hammock was rocked by the lightning in Sweden, when I was stuck in border control hell in eastern Poland, even as I left the lead singer of Smokie sitting sozzled in a bar in Tromsø, the thing that kept me going, kept me chortling long into the night, was the fact that I was going to ride straight through Belgium.
And if this trip ever morphs into a book, don't thing I'll let the publishers get to me. "Please Mike, just pop over to cuddly little Belgium and stay a couple of nights. Say something nice about the place. Pwetty pwease? We sell lots of books there?"
Uh-uh. Nope. Sorry. I rode through Belgium without stopping, and if it hadn't been the hottest day of the year -- and a Sunday at that -- meaning that half the population had driven to the sea, and was parked perilously (and surely illegally?) along the coast road, the N34, I'd have made it all the way across without having even to put my feet down. As it was, the road was so crowded with badly-parked cars it was as if every school-run in Britain had magically arrived on the coast on this one day. I was obliged to pause, on occasion. *Pause*, but not actually stop.
Still, there can't be too much wrong with a country that takes you from the town of Knokke at one end of the coast to a themepark called Plopsaland at the other.
There you go, publishers. There's a challenge. Get someone to write a book called "From Knokke to Plopsaland". But not me.
Belgium's final indignity: there was a tortuous traffic-jam in the final miles leading towards France. A queue of people, not just me, desperate to get out.
--
All of which serves to obscure the fact that I've also left Holland behind, seven months after I arrived. (Yes, yes, but six-and-a-half of those were spent in sunny Norwich.)
So: Holland, what do I make of yr bike-riding, blonde-haired, multilingual ways? Lots in retrospect, though I went through the place feeling slightly unsure.
I was captivated by the amount of water everywhere - channelled into service on farms, restrained by those dykes and dunes, maintained for leisure or ecology, diverted into canals and used in the manufacture of too much Amstel beer. If there is an underlying theme to this trip (to find me somewhere to live, close to water) I could do a lot worse than Holland. Yet at the same time I never felt this was a country where I belonged, or could belong.
On the other hand, at least it isn't Belgium.
Comments
By Mike With | August 10, 2007 8:26 PM
Nice to see you're paying attention, Phil. I toyed with a plug for "Tall Man.." but it wouldn't have fitted with my opinion, so I pretended it didn't exist. I could make a politician yet, eh?
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By phil | August 10, 2007 2:45 PM
despite all that the Best Travel Book Ever is about Belgium. A Tall Man in a Low Land by Harry Pearson (a REAL sports journalist).
If your book publishers need stuff on Belgium, just steal the odd chapter from that. They won't notice, apart from wondering how you suddenly became funny.