The middle part of my walk across Flevoland didn’t promise much. In essence it involved leaving behind the new town of Emmeloord and tramping in fairly straight lines across a landscape that was reclaimed from the sea and unnervingly flat. So, not much prospect of joy then.
But there was - well, if not joy, then at least interest. Here’s the latest of my videos from this first walk that explains the Netherlands, and this one is about the joyful fascinating Dutch landscape.
If you’re a fan of Piet Mondrian (like my father) this is a stunning landscape: all angles, blocks of colour and texture, and straight lines cutting this way and that. There are vivid, fiery fields of yellow and pink tulips, geometrically ploughed fields and rectangles of grass, wheat and potatoes, all cut up by lines of trees and roads.
Granted, it’s not the Dolomites or the rocky Ligurian coast, but there was far more to the walk than I’d imagined. On top of the geometry it was also an almost entirely artificial landscape, wrenched from what had been the sea and turned into fertile farmland. It was also simply pleasant. I was walking in sunshine through an area I’d never seen before, and getting somewhere. Never underestimate how good that feels, even if it includes blisters.
The overriding reason for this particular walk from Emmerloord to Urk was to shine a light on part of the Netherlands that’s often overlooked. The first video in the series was about how the international stereotype of the Dutch (Brand Orange: tolerant, fun-loving, liberal etc) didn’t quite fit large swathes of the country. The next one after this will be about land reclamation and the Dutch propensity to change their physical landscape. The fourth and final one from this Flevoland walk will be about Urk itself, a place that other Dutch people tend to discuss in hushed tones.
All of this is of course in book form, and I’m delighted to say that the first deliveries of ‘Orange Sky, Rising Water’ seem to have taken place across Britain and the Netherlands, despite the launch date being set at September 11th. In other words it’s now available for that late August citibreak to Amsterdam, so what are you waiting for? Details here.
