Corfu, In the Footsteps of Lawrence and Gerald Durrell

Corfu: ”this brilliant little speck of an island in the Ionian”                            Lawrence Durrell – ‘Prospero’s Cell’

It had been almost thirty years since my first visit to Corfu so I convinced myself that a return was long overdue.  This time I chose to stay at the village of Kalami, north of Corfu Town and where the English author Lawrence Durrell once lived so I thought it appropriate preparation for the holiday to read some of his work and also that of his brother Gerald ( ‘My Family and Other Animals’) and also Henry Miller who wrote about his stay on the island in 1939 in ‘The Colossus of Maroussi’.

Well, the arrival on the island was no different at all and the plane flew in over the resort of Perama, where I had stayed previously and dad had sat for hours watching the planes come in, over Pontikonisi Island.  This is the home of the monastery of Pantokrator whose white staircase resembles (from afar) a mouse’s tail and is the reason the island has acquired its popular name of Mouse Island.

Then over the ‘chessboard fields’ of the Venetian salt marshes before landing on the freshly ploughed runway which gave everyone on board a rough welcome to the island and through the window I could see the same hopelessly inadequate buff coloured and tired airport terminal as the plane came to a gentle stop as the engines slowed from a high pitched whine to a gentle hum.

It was good to be in Greece again, especially so because the unpredictable English Summer had this year so far been entirely predictable with the wettest April on record, the wettest May on record, the wettest June on record and so on and so on and it was wonderful therefore to step out of the aircraft and cast off the gloom of the lost English summer and walk out onto tarmac that was hot and breathless with heat rising from the concrete like shimmering waves and after a dreadful start to the year I immediately wanted to reach down and scoop some up to keep for later.

Passport control was as casual as it ever is in Greece and the police showed customary disinterest in our documents so after passing through the arrivals hall we were soon on board our coach for transfer to our hotel.  At first the driver made slow progress through the growling traffic of the outskirts of the busy city with boxcrete apartment blocks with peeling facades, sagging washing lines and precarious balconies all decorated with satellite dishes and television aerials but eventually he nudged his way through the traffic and we were on the scenic coastal road that took us through Gouvia, Dassia and Ipsos and towards the mountainous north of the island where the road climbed in extravagant sweeping hairpin bends up one side of the coastal mountains and then down the other side.

The forty-kilometre journey took much longer than I imagined it would but eventually we arrived at Kalami and after a transfer to a hotel mini-bus for the final leg of the journey we were soon at our accommodation, the Asonitis and Adonis Apartments where we waited for a while in a lift shaft and I began to get that feeling of ‘have I made a mistake here?’

I shouldn’t have worried because eventually we were shown to our rooms and although they were basic in the way that I have come to expect in Greece this was more than compensated for by the magnificent view from the balcony which overlooked the crescent shaped bay like a Saracen’s sword, pine fringed with limestone layer cake rocks, boats lolling in the languid water and the White House ‘set like a dice on a rock already venerable with the scars of wind and water’ of Lawrence Durrell.

At this moment if someone had tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to pay a bit extra for this view I would gladly have done so because laid out in front of me was the silvery blush of olive trees, a cornflower blue sea, the smoky lifeless hills of Albania set against a chorus of cicadas chattering in the twisted branches of the black olive trees and the cracking of seed pods in the midday heat of the sun.  It was breathtaking, it was wonderful, I was glad to be here!

It had been a long time  but it was almost exactly as I remembered it but a lot more like Croatia than I knew before and quite unlike the Cyclades with which I have become familiar – red and ochre tiled roofs like the colour of the soil, soaring ragged cypress trees, stony white pebbled beaches and the same soft blue of the Adriatic Sea and the sky and I concluded that I could appreciate it all the more for what I know now that I didn’t thirty years before.

Would the Durrell’s recognise this even after eighty years or so? Yes I think they would, even though it is a holiday resort it is nicely understated, no commercialism, no silly beach attractions, good traditional tavernas and views of ravishing beauty.  Lawrence himself might even recognise the White House although it has been restored of course because during the Second-World-War the Germans saw fit to bomb it for some pointless reason.

After we had settled into our rooms with the sun on our shoulders for what seemed the first time this year we took the steps down to the sea to set about establishing a routine for the week ahead…

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Related articles:

In the Footsteps of Henry Miller

The Greek Islands

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Tulips to Amsterdam, A Walking Tour of the Canals

It was ten o’clock by the time we had finished our leisurely breakfast and checked out of the hotel and stepped out into the sunny but chilly streets for a second day in Amsterdam.  We followed Prins Hendrikkade but with the Maritime Museum in site and those among us who do not like museums beginning to tremble we turned right back towards the centre and more or less followed the route of the canal boat ride of yesterday but this time on foot.

Dodging bicycles and walking on the sunny side of the street we wandered along one of the main canals until we reached the city hall and concert hall and a busy flea market before reaching the river Amstel where we crossed to the other site over a large bridge called Blauwbrug (Blue Bridge) as the near empty canal tour boats slipped casually below us.

So far our stroll had been fairly aimless but we were looking for something specific now because the canal tour had taken us to a spot for a photograph opportunity which the commentary claimed was the prettiest canal in the city and with an architectural feature called the seven bridges.  This was the Reguliersgracht canal and although we knew that we were somewhere close my map reading skills seemed to temporarily desert me as pressure was brought to bear by others to find somewhere to stop for a coffee so I was forced to temporarily abandon my quest and to fall in with the wishes of the majority.

So we walked for a while along the busy street of Rokin and then into Spui where we came across a pleasant square next to a canal that was declared to be a suitable café for our first stop of the day.  While we sat and drank our coffee next to a humpbacked bridge over shimmering green water I consulted the guide book again and hatched a cunning plan to plot a route back to the Reguliersgracht without sharing this information with the others lest they declared it too far to walk and objected.

After we had finished our drinks I resumed control of the route and started to walk towards the Rijksmuseum on the Singelgracht crossing a number of canals on the way and threading our way through narrow streets of interesting shops and coffee houses.  We came across a bakery and delicatessen and remembering a blog post that I had read, ‘A moment with the “stroopwafel” man’, I went inside to buy some.

Stroopwafel were first made in Gouda in the Netherlands, in 1784 and is a waffle made from two thin layers of stiff baked batter with a caramel-like syrup filling in the middle gluing them together and they are now popular as street snacks all over Amsterdam and beyond.  I had never had one before but they were delicious and so after I had finished one I had a second and I was certain then that I had taken in enough calories to give me enough energy for the next part of the walk.

I led people on along Stadhouderskade before crossing through a small public park and into Weteringschans and around the next corner was my objective.  As we turned in the others all sympathised with me that we hadn’t found the Reguliersgracht and what a shame this was but, quite by chance, this was perfect timing because here was my opportunity to say ‘Da Da!’ and throw open my arms in theatrical style to introduce them to the prettiest canal in Amsterdam!

So we walked along the narrow street cocooned in the shade of the towering gabled houses with their brightly coloured shutters folded back like butterfly wings and crossed the seven bridges one by one in a sort of zig-zag fashion as we made our way along its length and back towards the Old Town area.

Everyone declared it time for another drink so we sat in the sun in Rembrandtplein and then with the afternoon slipping away walked past the large statue of the artist at the beginning of our walk back to the hotel.  No one wanted to visit the Rembrandt house museum but that didn’t matter to me because I had been before so we contented ourselves with a walk through the University Quarter and the Nieuw-Markt where we purchased some cheese from a market stall and then through the Red Light District again where the Bohemian ambiance was perfectly accompanied by a man in gaily coloured rowing boat going around in random circles on the canal as he played a melodious and soulful tune on a French horn while collecting coins from the onlookers in appreciation of his talents.

Back at the hotel we collected our bags and waited for the bus which arrived shortly afterwards and transported us on another highly congested motorway journey from Amsterdam back to Europoort in Rotterdam where we joined the check-in queues and were allocated our cabins for the return journey – and this caused a little bit of a problem!  Along with the boarding card which had the room number on it was a card key for the cabin which for obvious reasons didn’t.

Well, the room numbers and the card keys didn’t correspond with the room allocations as we wanted them – I didn’t want to share with Micky and Sue and Christine didn’t want to be separated so we had to try and fathom out which key went with the correct boarding card and this we got hopelessly mixed up.

Kim and I were fine but there were problems with the other two and the normally sanguine Micky became unusually irritated when he couldn’t get in his room, became unnecessarily agitated and blamed Kim for the mix-up.  Although the sea was calm it looked as though we might be heading for stormy waters so while we waited for him to join us we played ‘pass the parcel’ with the responsibility for the confusion but after half an hour or so he calmed down, saw the funny side of it and we spent a pleasant evening in the all you can eat buffet restaurant and enjoyed a couple of beers before finally returning to our correct cabins with keys that worked!

We remembered not to order the all you can eat breakfast this time and after the collective alarm call woke us up we made do with a cup of tea and a croissant in the over-priced on-board Costa Coffee as we watched the ferry nudge its way back down the Humber Estuary before docking exactly on time in the King George Dock.  It had been a good few days, we had enjoyed the experience of the ferry crossing and we all agreed that we would happily do it again!

Tulips to Amsterdam, Heritage Visits and Museums

Early next morning I was woken by the rumble of a passing freight train seven floors below which in my half sleep sounded like my next door neighbour putting the wheelie bin at the roadside ready for collection and for a moment I was transported back home and had forgotten to put the refuse out and in an unnecessary panic this woke me completely.

I lay for a while reflecting on the first day in Amsterdam and planning the second and I began to regret that we hadn’t booked a third night in the city because we didn’t have enough time to do all of the things that we would have liked to.

One of these might have been a trip out of the city to see the countryside and I recalled a previous visit to Amsterdam thirty years ago when I had done just that.

As on this occasion that trip was also by ferry crossing but out of Felixstowe in Suffolk rather than Hull in Yorkshire and it was on an organised coach tour paid for by exchanging Persil washing powder vouchers and I can only imagine now that I must have done an awful lot of washing to get enough vouchers for two people to go to Amsterdam for a weekend.

We didn’t go very far into the countryside, just fifteen miles  or so to the attractive village of Volendam to the north of the city, on the shore of the Zuiderzee.

Volendam is a popular tourist attraction in the Netherlands, well-known for its fleet of old fishing boats, pretty gabled wooden houses and the traditional clothing still worn by some of the older residents. The women’s costume of Volendam, with its high pointed bonnet, is one of the most recognizable of the Dutch traditional costumes, and is the one most often featured on tourist postcards and calendars.

I remember my sister having a collection of dolls in national costume and this was one of them. As everywhere else as time passes however fewer and fewer young people continue the custom of wearing traditional clothes and I suspect that this is something that is going to be difficult to keep going for very much longer.

We certainly saw some people in traditional clothing on this visit because as we arrived at the Heritage Museum they were waiting for us as the coach pulled into the car park of a clog making factory for a demonstration of how they are made.

Wooden shoes have been popular in the Netherlands for about seven hundred years or so and along with windmills, Edam cheese and tulips provide the perfect tourist images of the country.

The Dutch have been wearing wooden clogs or ‘Klompen’ since medieval times.  Originally, they were made with a wooden sole of alder, willow and poplar and a leather top or strap tacked to the wood but eventually, the shoes began to be made entirely from wood to protect the whole foot.   Painting the shoes is an old custom and carved, painted clogs are traditionally given by grooms their brides and that’s clever because that’s a lot cheaper than a diamond ring and a lot more practical as well.

I seem to remember now that clogs were quite fashionable for a short time in the 1970s (although many will dispute that there was any fashion in the 1970s) and I had a pair of black open back clogs which my boss told me I couldn’t wear to work and were terribly difficult to drive in so I wasn’t going to be tempted to buy another pair here.

Close by to Volendam is the village of Edam, where the cheese comes from and there was an inevitable visit to a dairy to try again to see if we could be parted from some of our spending money.  Edam has never been a favourite of mine but I do remember that we left with a bag of cheesy comestibles with a variety of different additional ingredients including one with herbs and another with black pepper corns.

Thirty- five years later or so in 2004 I returned to Amsterdam with my son Jonathan on my very first Ryanair flight and on this occasion we visited a cheese shop and some museums that we certainly wouldn’t be seeing today because we wouldn’t have time, the weather was too good to go inside and museums are not that popular with everyone in our group.

The first of these was the Scheepvaartmuseum or Maritime Museum which was a short walk from our hotel, the Amsterdam, on Damrak and told the story of the Dutch association with the sea through an interesting collection of maps, atlases, charts, paintings and scale models but best of all a full sized replica of the three masted ‘Amsterdam’, a ship of the Dutch East India Company, which in its maiden voyage sank in a storm in the English Channel in winter of 1749.

To sink on a maiden voyage always seems rather wasteful and sad to me, ships like Henry VIII’s Mary Rose, the German battleship Bismarck and most famous of all the passenger liner RMS Titanic; all that money, blood and sweat just for the ship to go to the bottom of the sea in a shorter space of time than it took to build it.

Admission to the museum included entry to the ship and we wandered around the decks and cabins completely alone because this was an early morning in February and the temperature was some considerable way below zero.

In the old town we warmed up when we visited the Rembrandt house museum and visited the reconstructed rooms and historically correct restoration based on the artists own sketches and drawings.  In the afternoon we walked to the Van Gogh museum which is the most visited museum in the Netherlands and contains the largest collection of paintings by Vincent van Gogh in the World.

Together with those of Pablo Picasso, Van Gogh’s works are among the world’s most expensive paintings ever sold and some of the most valuable ever.  Actually, I found the museum rather disappointing because there were lots of gaps where paintings were on loan to other galleries around the World and some of his best known works that I would like to have seen are tucked away in private collections and vaults.

I like Van Gogh paintings and the museum shop was full of prints and reproductions but I am not an art critic and have to confess that alongside those I find brilliant I find some that quite frankly are not so good (shock, horror). The sort of things that my children used to bring home from school, I’d say well done and give them words of patronising encouragement and then after they had gone to bed I’d tape it up on a kitchen cupboard.  Inside a kitchen cupboard!

While I reminisced about these previous visits the clock ticked on and soon it was time for an Ibis hotel buffet breakfast, which turned out to be very good, to set us up for a second day of sightseeing and walking the canals of Amsterdam.

Amsterdam, The Red Light District and an Argentinean Steak Restaurant

The weather just kept on improving and when we left the Anne Frank house there was a clear sky and bright sunshine so we continued our ponderous stroll along the canals working our way south and east as we followed the canal ring and looped around the southern end of the old town.

Eventually the girls declared that they had seen enough water and barges for one day and they might like to see some shops instead so reluctantly (I’m not much of a shopper myself) I plotted a route back towards Dam Square through a busy shopping area.

In the late afternoon the streets were busy and for pedestrians in a strange place we had to keep our wits about us because there are three things to watch out for in Amsterdam – road traffic, trams and bicycles.

We are used to dealing with cars but trams are different because you really don’t want to be smeared out by a twenty-tonne Combino flexi-tram at top speed because that would really spoil the day.

What makes crossing the road confusing is that even at the same pedestrian crossing all of these different forms of transport seem to have their own separate traffic light system and there are multiple sets of lights so you have to pay close attention to avoid the sort of accident that I nearly had when I saw a green light and started to cross but hadn’t noticed a red light in the tram lane and if Kim hadn’t been alert and stopped me I nearly put a red streak across the front of the blue and white GVB as it rattled past right in front of me rather belatedly I thought sounding its distinctive klaxon horn.

Bikes can be hazardous too because most of them seem to go as fast as the trams.

Everywhere there is the melodious sound of tinkling bells to alert pedestrians because it is all too easy to stray absent-mindedly into a bike lane and this can be dangerous because as far as I could see a lot of bikes didn’t have brakes!

It is estimated that there are almost half a million bicycles and four hundred kilometres of bike paths in Amsterdam.  That is roughly one bike for every two people and how the cyclists must curse the visitors who are unfamiliar with the sort of bike culture that exists in the Netherlands and are forever getting in the way.

Just when I thought I had got this Holland/Netherlands thing sorted…

The shopping streets were busy and we crossed them to arrive in Damstraat, a busy road with tourist shops and restaurants which was lucky because our thoughts were turning to evening meal and we were looking for a restaurant to return to later.

We spent some time in a shop selling all the things we didn’t need and had no intention of buying,  clogs and wooden tulips, Delft pottery and miscellaneous tourist mementos and then I thought I recognised a restaurant that I had used before in 2004 when I visited Amsterdam with my son Jonathan and after satisfying ourselves that the menu suited our budget the others agreed to go with this rather flimsy eight year old recommendation.

It was cool now in the shade of the tall buildings so we found the sunny side of Damrak and returned to the hotel Ibis and had a late afternoon drink in the bar as the sun dipped low in the sky and finally disappeared behind the Fietenstalling (bike storage garage) opposite and we returned to our rooms to change because our plan now was to walk to the infamous red light district.

The Amsterdam Red Light District covers a large area of the oldest part of the city where the buildings are tall, narrow and crowded together with a distinctive glow of fluorescent red lights above the red-fringed window parlours from behind which the scantily clad ladies of the night invite customers with a rattle on the glass and a come to me pout and provocative pose.

All rather like I imagine Satan’s front room to look like!

The area dates back to the fourteenth century when randy sex-starved, testosterone fuelled sailors arrived home after a few weeks at sea and has evolved into an area of sex shops, brothels, gay bars, cinemas, dodgy hotels and alternative kinds of museums. Each year, millions of visitors come to see this vibrant and exciting part of Amsterdam.

Scattered liberally amongst the sex shops and brothels there were the famous coffee houses where soft drugs were openly on sale and being enjoyed by locals and tourists alike and as we walked through an area of undressed ladies of various shapes and sizes and with the hint of dope hanging in the air I thought I was beginning to understand why Amsterdam and the Netherlands is that happiest place in Europe!

We left the red light district and returned to the street with the Argentinean steak restaurant that we had picked out earlier and once inside I was now certain that this was the place I had eaten in 2004.

There are a lot of Argentinean steak restaurants in Amsterdam and the waiter told us that this was because the Dutch people like Argentinean steak but I don’t know if that is true or not.  What I can say however is that the food was excellent and the meat cooked to perfection and just as I remembered it and had described it to my travelling companions.

After we had finished I congratulated the staff and told the waiter how I had eaten there before but before I had finished he told me this was not possible because the restaurant had only opened in 2006 and as the others mocked me my face went as red as a brothel lamp – I had been so certain!

Tulips to Amsterdam, Canal Cruise and the Anne Frank House

“Amsterdam was a great surprise to me. I had always thought of Venice as the city of canals; it had never entered my mind that I should find similar conditions in a Dutch town.” – James Weldon Johnson

The coach driver ran through a well rehearsed list of do’s and don’ts peppered with little quips – my favourite being an instruction not to stand up in the on-board toilet when taking a pee as this results in a waterlogged cubicle and then he settled down for the two hour drive to Amsterdam.

When we arrived he ran through some useful information and he had plenty of time for this because there was a huge traffic jam all along the main roads of Rokin and Damrak and progress was slow to our drop off point at the central railway station.  Before we got off the bus he reminded us that traffic drives on the right hand side of the road in the Netherlands and to be careful getting off or else instead of sightseeing in Amsterdam we would be in hospital instead.

Luckily the Hotel Ibis was close by and next to a multi-level bike park with thousands of rusting old bikes seemingly abandoned and parked randomly along the side of the street and we checked in and after some misunderstanding and confusion about the elevators found our room on the seventh floor with a good view over the North Sea Canal which splits the city in two and links the North Sea to the Zuider Zee to the east.  It was also quite close to the railway line and we worried about a noisy night ahead but we didn’t stay around long enough for this to bother us right now and within fifteen minutes we were back outside and making our way to the historic city centre.

It was midday so time for a coffee break so while we debated what to do first we found a pavement bar on Damrak and ordered drinks.  They turned out to be rather expensive and this was a bit of a shock but prices reflect the standard of living in the Netherlands, which is high because it is now one of the most prosperous countries in the World and according to the latest United Nations index on Human Development (2011) has moved up four places into third position just behind Norway and Australia and according to the IMF it is the ninth wealthiest country in the World.

Money creates happiness (in my opinion) and despite the fact that 20% of the population live below sea level, which would worry me, it is ranked as the happiest country in Europe in the Happy Planet Index; it has won the Eurovision Song Contest four times (1957, 1959, 1969 and 1975) but has a less enviable record in the football World Cup where they have been beaten finalists three times (1974, 1978 and 2010).  More importantly to me however is that the Netherlands has the tenth highest visitor numbers to my blog!

It was sunny and warm and on account of this we decided to spend the afternoon exploring the canals and we thought that the best way to begin this was by taking a water taxi trip in one of the boats at the quayside opposite so after our drinks we selected the cheapest and took our seats on board for a one hour cruise on the water.

Amsterdam has been called the ‘Venice of the North’ but this isn’t a title that it holds uniquely because it has also been applied to Saint Petersburg, Bruges, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Manchester, Edinburgh and even Birmingham amongst others.  It has more than one hundred kilometres of canals, about ninety islands and one thousand five hundred bridges. The three main canals, Herengracht, Prinsengracht, and Keizersgracht were dug in the seventeenth century during the Dutch Golden Age and form concentric belts around the city with many smaller ones linking them together and the whole canal ring area is included on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The cruise took about an hour and took us through the canals to the east of the city, along the River Amstel for a short distance and then the west of the city, the North Sea Canal before returning to Damrak where we returned to the streets.

It was a warm afternoon so we walked to Dam Square where people were earning money for doing nothing but standing still and posing as statues so we quickly hurried past these and the Royal Palace and the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) but we didn’t go inside because Micky is allergic to churches so in consideration of this we continued west crossing the canals Singel, Herengracht, Prinsengracht, and Keizersgracht where we stayed for a while at a pavement cafe and enjoyed a beer and the sunshine.

We were close to the Anne Frank House now on Prinsengracht and as this was on our ‘to do list’ we thought we might check the queue situation which the guide book warned could be quite lengthy at peak times.  Although it was mid afternoon there was no queue at all so we decided that this was an opportunity not to be missed so we paid our entrance fee and went inside.

The house was built in 1635. The canal-side frontage dates from a renovation of 1740 when the rear annex was demolished and the taller one which is rather the point of the visit now stands in its place was built. The Frank family left Germany as the Nazis established power and Otto set up his spice and pickling business in the premises.  Later Nazi persecution spread to the Netherlands and over one hundred thousand Jews were deported so the Frank family went into hiding inside the house in an annex at the rear.

The Secret Annex, as it was called in the English version of Anne Frank’s ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ enjoyed a secluded position which made it an ideal hiding place the family and four other Jewish people seeking refuge from the authorities. They remained hidden here for two years and one month until they were anonymously betrayed to the Nazi’s, arrested, and deported to their deaths in concentration camps. Of the hidden group, only Otto Frank survived the war.

After those in hiding were arrested, the hiding place was cleared by order of the arresting officers and all the remaining contents of the Frank family and their friends were seized as Government property. Before the building was cleared two friends who had helped hide the families, returned to the hiding place and rescued some personal effects. Amongst the items they retrieved was ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’.

It was an interesting experience to go through the hidden door behind the bookcase and to climb the steep steps into the rooms where they lived and hidden, the little guide book calls it a ‘Museum with a Story’ and this sets it out against other museums that do not have the same emotional connection.  It is only small of course so the visit doesn’t take too long before finishing in the inevitable book shop at the end.

I read the diary after a previous visit to Amsterdam but the problem with it of course is that even before you start to read it you know the tragic and heartbreaking end and it is also worth remembering that the Franks weren’t unique in Nazi occupied Amsterdam and across the Netherlands it is estimated that twenty thousand people sheltered Jews at considerable risk to themselves.

Tulips to Amsterdam, Holland or the Netherlands?

Pay attention to this post because it has a lot of facts, some more questions and there will be a test later!

I slept well for most of the crossing but woke early with a digestive system groaning under the weight of the unexpected quantity of food that I had forced into it at the eat all you can buffet and then I remembered that at the time of purchase that we had got carried away and had also paid up for an all you can eat breakfast as well and that was something I didn’t really need right now less than eight hours after the previous feast.  At six o’clock there was a collective early morning alarm call over the ship’s public address system that announced that the restaurant was open and that the ferry would dock in two hours time.

The ship was approaching Europoort which is an area of the Port of Rotterdam, the second largest city in the country, conveniently situated at the mouth of the rivers Rhine and Meuse and a confusing lattice work of delta channels.  With a hinterland consisting of the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and part of France, Europoort is, by certain measurements, the World’s busiest port and its strategic location on the North Sea and at the heart of a massive rail, road, air and inland waterway distribution system extending throughout Europe is the reason that Rotterdam is often called the ‘Gateway to Europe’.

After the unnecessary breakfast that was tasty but only added to the heavy burden in my stomach there was an undignified charge to be among the first to disembark and negotiate passport control and customs before emerging into a car park and a line of coaches waiting to transfer us to Amsterdam.

Now we were in Holland, or were we? because for an outsider it seems that there is some confusion about the name of the country and although we tend to call it by the ‘H’ word it is in fact correctly known as the Netherlands.  Holland is a region in the western part of the Netherlands and although the term is frequently used to refer to the whole of the country this is only accepted reluctantly by many Dutch people in the other parts of the state who resent the mistake.  To make it even more confusing for a visitor, Holland is divided into two, North and South and are actually only two of the country’s twelve provinces. Oh, and North Holland isn’t generally called North Holland anymore – just Holland!

It seems that this is a bit of a touchy issue for many people both outside and inside the historic Holland.  For some people it doesn’t make sense to use an unofficial name for a country, while for others it’s completely insulting.

The Netherlands is an artificially created country mainly as a consequence of its geographical position on the major European political fault line that more or less follows the Rhine and separates France from Germany.  It includes the independent states of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland which are collectively a legacy of the old independent European state of Burgundy which ultimately failed to survive beyond the Middle Ages because of its vulnerable position lying as it did between the more powerful states of France and Germany (although not existing as we know it today until 1871) which from the fourteenth century onwards were always grinding horribly against each other.  It has been created out of several provinces with little more in common than more or less related languages.

The Netherlands has always constituted different native cultures, many of which proudly exist today despite centuries of occupation and repression. Several of these cultures cover areas that extend well over the national borders.  Many people have a lot more in common with their neighbours in Germany or Belgium than they do with their compatriots in other parts of their country.  This is a very varied country, and for many people the word Holland is an insult when used in the wrong context.  I made a mental note to be careful about this but considered it excusable if I slipped up because after all we were in both the Netherlands and in Holland.

In consideration of all this it is interesting that the Netherlands Tourist information website is called www.holland.com.

So we were in the Netherlands but also in Holland or more precisely South Holland, which to add to the confusion was where some of us had come from less than twenty-four hours previously in the UK!

Between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, Holland proper was a unified political region and by the seventeenth century had risen to become a maritime and economic power, dominating the other provinces of the Dutch Republic.  The province of South Holland as it is today has its origins in the period of French rule from 1795 to 1813 at a time of swift and bewildering changes to the Dutch system of provinces which has more or less, with a few later tinkerings shaped the modern Netherlands that we know.

The coach left the car park and entered a confusing motorway system and soon ran into heavy Monday morning traffic and this shouldn’t have surprised us because the Europoort area is very heavily industrialised with petrochemical refineries and storage tanks, bulk iron ore and coal handling facilities as well as container and new motor vehicle terminals and we crawled past the industrial landscape and the forest of wind turbines at an agonisingly slow pace.

Unlike South Holland in the UK which is only very sparsely populated, South Holland in the Netherlands is one of the most densely populated and industrialised areas in the world.  With a population of over three and a half million and an area of only three and a half square kilometres the province has the highest population density in the Netherlands, which itself (except for tiny Malta, which seems to have an awful lot of people living on it) has the highest population density in the European Union.  As a consequence traffic congestion is common and the busiest Dutch motorway just happens to be the A16 in Rotterdam so we just had to grin and bear it as the coach made slow progress towards our destination across unremarkable landscape of low lying fields criss-crossed by a network of drainage dykes and just a few infrequent sightings of the windmills that we incorrectly but romantically continue to associate with the country.

Questions (Google for the answers if you don’t know):

What is the official language of the Netherlands?

What is the official colour of the Netherlands?

What is the capital of South Holland?

In which County is South Holland in the United Kingdom?

Which Dutch Prince became King of England in 1688?

Tulips to Amsterdam, P&O Mini Cruise and the Humber Estuary

For just over ten years between 2000 and 2011 I worked for South Holland District Council and if ever I went away to a meeting or a conference and introduced myself I almost always had to explain to at least one person that this was in Lincolnshire in the UK and not in the Netherlands.  It seemed appropriate therefore that a year after leaving employment there that I and my regular travelling companions (also all ex-South Holland) should visit the country after which our region was named and whose symbol is the tulip.

Normally we take a low cost airline flight to our chosen destination but now that I live in Grimsby near to the passenger port of Hull this time we decided to take our chances on the high seas and take a P&O mini-cruise.  The P&O website makes everything sound rather grand and markets the North Sea crossing like this:

‘Mini cruises to Amsterdam include a 2-night stay, travelling in style in one of our ensuite cabins and taking advantage of a host of facilities onboard. You will find a fantastic range of dining experiences with the famous West End Langan’s Brasserie and our Four Seasons buffet restaurant. After your meal why not relax in one of our stylish bars, take in a film at the cinema or even join the high-rollers in the casino? There is also live entertainment for the whole family, plus hundreds of great deals can be found in our onboard shop’.

I have never been cruising so this all sounded rather seductive until Micky pointed out that this wasn’t really a cruise at all but just a simple ferry crossing and more of a sow’s ear than a silk purse and that I wouldn’t need my dinner jacket because there was no chance of being invited to the captain’s table because he would be too busy negotiating the ship through the busy shipping lanes of the North Sea regions of Humber and Thames.

It was a Sunday evening crossing and so in the late afternoon we crossed from Lincolnshire to Yorkshire over the 2,220 metre Humber Suspension Bridge which is the fifth largest of its type in the World.  This statistic used to be even more impressive because when it was first opened in 1981 it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the World for the next sixteen years and the  distance by road between Hull and Grimsby was reduced by nearly eighty kilometres as a consequence of the construction.

Two sad facts associated with the bridge now are firstly that at £3 a crossing, each way, it is the most expensive toll bridge in the UK (now reduced to £1.50 by-the-way) and secondly it is a favourite jumping place for people committing or attempting suicide. More than two hundred incidents of people jumping or falling from the bridge have taken place since it was opened and only five have survived so it is a fairly reliable way of doing yourself in!  As a result, plans were announced in December 2009 to construct a suicide barrier along the walkways of the bridge but this was never implemented with design constraints being cited as the reason but it probably had something to do with cost and now there is talk of installing a Samaritan’s Hot line on the bridge instead.

After we arrived at the King George Dock and eventually found the correct terminal after first trying to go to Zeebrugge we went through the ticketing process where we were allocated our cabins and then the security checks where I was singled out for a body search presumably because I looked the most likely to be the one to be attempting to carry alcohol on board, which is not allowed – not because P&O have anything against alcohol rather that they would prefer you to buy it on board at one of their bars rather than from a supermarket in Hull.

Once on board we wandered around the maze of narrow corridors on deck ten searching among five hundred and forty-six identical looking cabins until we finally found our inner berth shoebox and after Kim and I had negotiated sleeping arrangements in a fair and democratic way I did as I was told and prepared the top bunk for myself for later.

Without any smuggled on beer or wine there wasn’t a great deal to hang around for in the cabin so we made our way to the Sky lounge and the Sunset bar at the very top of the ship to see the sunset that was dipping down over the River Humber to the west.  Actually, the Humber isn’t really a river at all because for its entire length of only sixty kilometres or so  after it originates at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Trent it is technically an estuary but this didn’t matter to us as we watched a flaming red sun make its grand exit for the day as it slipped slowly below the skyline somewhere over the English Midlands.

“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.”  John Steinbeck, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’

There was now two hours or so before departure so we sat and caught up on gossip while we waited for the captain to finally announce that we were leaving and the 8,850 tonne, 215 metre long ship finally moved effortlessly away from the quayside at the beginning of its two hundred nautical mile overnight journey across the North Sea to the Rotterdam Europort to the south-east.

First it had to leave the Humber estuary and it glided past the port of Immingham to the south which handles the largest quantity of goods by weight in the UK and by day is an untidy, grimy place dominated by ugly petro-chemical works and soulless grey industrial buildings but by night is transformed into a glittering Manhattan skyline of tall buildings and bright lights and occasional dancing plumes of flames burning off excess gases which actually makes it all look rather attractive.

The ferry has a passenger capacity of 1,360 but tonight there were barely five hundred people on board so it felt spacious and relaxing as we enjoyed our drinks, visited the duty-free shops, had an excellent all you can eat buffet (and for someone who doesn’t really like all you can eat buffets, I really do mean excellent) and then finished the evening in the Sunset Show Lounge where a live band was knocking out disco classics and the stag and hen parties were getting more and more boisterous and noisy.  I don’t know what time it closed however because some time around midnight we called an end to the proceedings and retired to our rooms.

After negotiating the narrow aluminum ladder the top bunk was surprisingly comfortable and it didn’t take many minutes until the low rhythmic heartbeat of the engine somewhere in the belly of the ship nudged me into a deep sleep.

Sicily, Segesta and Castellammare del Golfo

Segesta was the political center of the Elymians who were indigenous people from the west of Sicily who built the city in an alliance with Ionian Greeks.  It flourished for over five hundred years until gradually it was abandoned as the inhabitants moved away from the mountains and down to the coastal areas for trading purposes.

On this site is a fifth century unfinished Doric temple which remains one of the best preserved of its type principally because no one ever found it convenient to dismantle it to provide materials for alternative construction projects.  Its thirty six columns soared imperiously into a deep blue sky and we were lucky to find the place tranquil and calming.  The reason it was never finished is that the Elymians were continuously distracted by war with the nearby city of Selinus as they squabbled for commercial supremacy of this part of Sicily.

The other main site at Segesta is a Greek theatre about two kilometres away and with two options for getting there, walk or bus, it looked a tough walk and it was very hot so we chose the bus and waited for the departure time in a shady outside terrace.

Here we witnessed an interesting disagreement between an elderly American couple that bickered over the drinks order and how much of their budget they could spare for refreshments.  She wanted a beer but that would not have left enough change from a €5 note to allow him to have his choice of a coca-cola.  They both accused each other of being selfish and they taunted each other in those raised whispered voices that people use when they would prefer to shout but don’t want to draw attention to themselves.

  “Shall we have a drink?” (inviting)                                                                                             “I want a large beer” (demanding)                                                                                       “but if you have a large beer I can’t afford a coca-cola” (spiteful)                       “you are so damned selfish” (reproachful)                                                                      “OK you take the money and get yourself a beer” (resigned)                                  “No, you have your coca-cola, I’m not thirsty now’ (martyrdom)                         “Ok I’ll just go back to the car and get my own money” (concessionary)     “You’ll do no such thing, we can’t afford it” (authoritarian)

I had begun to lose track who was being the most difficult or selfish and I think they spotted us sniggering and came to a sensible compromise.  She snatched the note from his fingers and went inside and came back with a small beer and a coca-cola.  They both drank and avoided eye contact in that sulky silence that follows a minor disagreement between people.

Then the bus arrived and took us the short drive up the winding track to the site of the Greek theatre.  And it was well worth the wait and the trip.  The theatre is in a beautiful place, at the top of a mountain and from which there is a vast and scenic panorama to the north over the Tyrrhenian Sea.  The theatre itself takes in this magnificent view which must have formed a spectacular backdrop to the Greek drama that was performed there.  I could have stayed there much longer but the return bus shuttle timetable didn’t allow it and reluctantly we had to return to the visitor centre.  This had been a most unexpected find, I had no idea that there were so many ancient places to see in Sicily.

It was very hot now and we returned to the car to drive to the seaside town of Castellammare del Golfo. This was a long and confusing drive not helped at all by the Sicilian joke of first under estimating distances between towns and then over compensating later to make the correction.  First it was five kilometres, and then twelve, then seven, somebody with a sense of humour erected these sign and distance posts.

Once we arrived there we wished immediately that we hadn’t.  It was packed and the beachfront resembled Blackpool or Skegness on one of its less cultured days.  It was cheap and tacky with a long sea front full of beach shops and scruffy bars with loud music and hardly any available space on the congested sand.  And there was a terrifying traffic queue that went on for ages with cars emerging from all directions and not one of the drivers having any regard to the fact that I was driving a brand new car only recently out of the factory and as yet with none of the dents and scratches that are a feature of Italian and Sicilian motor cars.

I was seriously concerned about the car (lucky I had fully comprehensive insurance).  So far this had been a comfortable little drive but now I had my first encounter with the testosterone fuelled Italian drivers with absolutely zero patience or regard of the basic rules of road courtesy.  They drove towards us in the middle of the road which inevitably forced me slow down which only further infuriated the homicidal maniac behind who was trying to join us in the back seat of our pristine new car by attempting vehicle copulation by driving his twenty year old Fiat (full of dents and scratches) a metre or so from our rear bumper.

It was a mistake to come here, we didn’t like it at all, I had had it in mind to discover a nice beach side restaurant for a final Sicilian meal but when we finally found somewhere to park we had to make do with an inadequate pizza in an Italian Rah kiddies bar.  We moved on quickly, complete with pizza indigestion and drove back along the attractive coast road and back to the airport where we returned the car a little early but gratefully fully intact.  A company man greeted us and inspected it for damage and being genuinely surprised to find that it was in the same perfect condition as when we drove it away, signed the paperwork to confirm it and released us from our contract.

Car Hire in Sicily, a rash decision in a moment of madness!

Woke early in a sweat!  OMG!  I am going to drive a car in Sicily! I must be insane; whatever possessed me to dream up an idea like that!

After breakfast we walked for a last time down the Via Roma and noticed that it was quieter today, perhaps because last nights revellers were still in bed nursing hangovers.  The streets were already impressively clean so the local council had obviously been working hard throughout the night.  We arrived at the Piazza Giulio Cesare and missed the bus to the airport by just ten minutes.  That gave me further thirty minutes worrying time while we waited for the next one in the railway station bar (nowhere else was open).

Once on the bus we slipped out of Palermo as it was beginning to wake up, first through the faded elegance of the city centre and then through the middle class suburbs with streets and streets of unattractive apartments which looked as though they had been put up in a hurry at a time when neither style or good design was considered especially important.

A short distance out of the City was the town of Mondello, which was busy preparing for Sicily’s untidiest town contest.  (A bit like Britain in Bloom, but without the flowers and without the clear up).  I was so pleased that we didn’t go there yesterday.  The streets were grimy and strewn with litter discharged from overflowing rubbish bins and the fly-tipping was appalling, especially in one natural gorge which the residents clearly use as an open landfill site for all manner of old scrap including cars and redundant kitchen white goods.  What a mess!  This place clearly stands a very good chance of winning the competition.

There was little improvement outside of the town and on the beach that was adjacent to the road. It was scruffy and crowded and the scrubby sand was lined with tatty beach houses.  It was filling up quickly though and I noted with consternation that the road was very busy indeed with Palermitani flooding out of the city for a day at the seaside.

Hiring the car was straight forward enough except I wasn’t sure whether to be delighted or delirious when the clerk allocated us a brand new Mitsubishi hatchback with only six kilometres on the clock.  Usually when hiring a car I robustly decline the invitation to buy the additional insurance packages but on this occasion I decided that it was probably a sensible option and I gleefully signed up for maximum comprehensive cover.

We collected the car and drove out of the airport and onto A29 heading west, first of all clinging to the coast and then swinging inland and south towards the interior of the island.  I immediately adopted my Mary Poppins driving style, which I save for motoring in Europe, and settled down in the inside lane and well within the maximum speed limit for the road.  Once again we were trying the driving in an unfamiliar place without an adequate plan routine and we were relying on an A4 photocopied map of the entire island so this made navigation somewhat difficult due to the total absence of any helpful detail.

Predictably under Kim’s instructions we took the wrong option for our intended destination at a motorway intersection and found ourselves travelling further south than we should have been.

The countryside was much more attractive than I had imagined it would be with sweeping green fields full of ripening crops, wooded hillsides and tall majestic cypress trees standing proud and defying the intense midday heat.

Just off of the motorway was the town of Salemi, which was where Garibaldi proclaimed himself ruler of Sicily in 1860, and which the guidebook assured us was worth a visit.  Sometimes, let’s face it, guidebooks exaggerate and this was one of those occasions because after a long climb up a steep hill the place was closed and there was nothing especially attractive or appealing about it so we returned down the steep hill and by chance picked up directions along a minor road to where we really wanted to go, the ancient Greek ruins at Segesta.

Along the way we took a detour to an elevated war memorial with excellent views over the pastoral Sicilian countryside and we stayed for a while enjoying this peaceful moment.  This was in complete contrast to the hectic and noisy city and it was good.

Sicily, Palermo, The Cathedral and a Carnival

Beyond this poor area of the city was the busy port where there were urgent preparations being finalised before tonight’s big parade.  Today was the culmination of a six-day festival in honour of the City’s patron saint, Saint Rosalia, who, according to legend, saved the City from a terrible plague in the seventeenth century.

In the middle class Piazza Marina district there was an interesting park with large ficus trees with aerial roots hanging from the branches and reaching out to the ground below to strike down into the earth and add to the tree’s fortress like appearance.   The park was peaceful and sedate and surrounded by impressive iron railings outside of which an impromptu boot sale was beginning to take shape.

A quick look around confirmed that there was nothing worth purchasing and we went back to the Via Roma to complete our walk to the central station stopping briefly on the way for quick refreshment in a bar with pavement tables next to the busy thoroughfare.  It was even more hectic now and we were amused by a cyclist on a suicide mission weaving and wobbling through the traffic with all of his attention diverted towards the huge ice cream bun that he was enjoying whilst being completely unaware of the great peril that he was putting himself in.

If yesterday was confusing at the bus terminal I am not sure why we imagined that it would be any easier today, and of course it wasn’t.  As it turned out there was no direct bus service to Mondello and it all seemed a bit of a palaver so we abandoned the idea and I revealed my alternative plan.  Tomorrow we could hire a car and drive out into the countryside and see some more of Sicily.  Kim agreed that this was an excellent suggestion and then I looked back across the Via Roma and the traffic turmoil and wondered what on earth must I be thinking!

Just outside the station was the Arab quarter where the traffic mayhem increased and everywhere quite frankly was a bit of a shambles so we left this manic part of the city as soon as we could and made our way back to the centre and discovered the Cathedral standing proudly next to the Piazza Dei Sette Angeli where there were more preparations for the festival parade.

I was beginning to understand that this was going to be a very big event indeed.  Next to the Cathedral was a quiet little street where we discovered a charming little trattoria and Kim overcame the language barrier by performing an impressive range of animal and fish impressions in a bid to establish the exact content of the dishes on the menu.  The staff were kind and indulged her but I noticed that they kept the small children a safe distance from her after that!

After a very pleasant pasta lunch we continued our tour of the city by circumnavigating the very impressive cathedral and then walking along Via Vittorio Emanuele towards the city gate, the Porta Nuova, where we saw the large and visually striking floats being prepared for tonight and then through another street market area with dangerously low standards of hygiene with produce laid out on impromptu stalls of old wooden crates before we emerged out of the maze of streets at the Teatro Massimo, which is one of the iconic images of Palermo.  It was completed in 1897 and is one of the largest opera houses in Europe.

I am not a fan of opera but what attracted me to this building was the fact that this was the setting for the penultimate scene of the Godfather trilogy of films where Michael Corleone’s daughter takes the assassins bullet that was intended for him.  This is one of my favourite movies so I was quite thrilled to see this location.

We walked back to the Cathedral and the starting point of the parade and we secured a good position to see the concert but when it started we were disappointed not to recognise any of the pieces of music and without the liveliness of Vivaldi or Mozart and feeling a little conspicuous in what was a very local affair we left the Cathedral piazza and returned to the restaurant that we had found at lunch time and enjoyed another excellent meal.  After that we returned to the piazza and as we had only just missed the parade of floats we followed it down the road until it was impossible to make good progress because of the swarms of people and we broke off from the crowds and returned to our hotel.  It was a very good parade and there were thousands of people on the streets and we wondered who was going to clear up all of the mess?