Two walks completed
And a very poor opinion of Dutch railways
Let’s get to the Ten Walks that Explain the Netherlands in a moment. First, here’s a George Orwell quote to start you off:
“England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.”
I think ‘intellectuals’ is pushing it a bit, but this seems fair. Whether it’s imagining Dutch or Italian footballers to be somewhat more sophisticated than our own cloggers, or believing that things simply function better across the channel, I’ve come across this a lot. John Kampfner’s perfectly timed book, “Why the Germans do it better”, was a classic of the genre (somebody pass Olaf Scholz a copy). But most recently I came across it relating to the trials and tribulations of the British rail system, which does indeed suck.
Well let me tell you… in Italy, where I live, it’s usually rubbish too. Germany’s railways - like much of its infrastructure (and official airplanes) - are falling apart. And I write this in the lovely Dutch town of Zwolle, where I’ve just been reduced to hiring a car because of being driven to distraction by four days of Dutch rail failures.
I won’t bore you with the details, but at one point today I had to take three snaking local bus routes across Nord Brabant when the train suddenly stopped. Thank god for the hire car. And, more to the point, thank god for walking. All this train rubbish only reinforced my belief that the best transport systems are ones that put you in charge. Nothing does that like getting on your own two feet. And that’s what this week is about.
On Monday I did the 3rd of the ten walks that I’m using to explain this excellent country. I began at Hoek van Holland (just like Patrick Leigh Fermor in 1933), ran along the Maas to a gigantic piece of engineering that keeps 1.5 million pairs of Dutch feet dry, and then turned north across Westland to Delft. The idea was to explain Dutch agriculture, Dutch ingenuity, the tractor protests, and the environmental costs of squeezing the most out of a small country. The walk was fascinating: boats, wind turbines, gigantic feats of engineering, wild flowers, cute little villages, and the heart of the Dutch agricultural industrial complex. All told I knocked off 20 miles, or something like 32km, and took a load of video and other notes.
Yesterday I was in Zeeland, starting off on glorious sandy beaches, across the monumental Delta Works, and off along a run of sand dunes. This one was walk number 2, about the geographical fragility of the Netherlands, the 1953 flood, the engineering solutions to having water in the wrong places, and the political system - polder politics! - that underpins all that terrific engineering. Again, it was a deeply satisfying walk, full of interest and strange forms of beauty. Shame about the two marble-sized blisters on my right foot. Here’s me brushing my teeth on a beach, which was the perfect way to start the walk.
Today wasn’t only about travel frustration. I also visited Klaas Jan, an innovative dairy farmer in the bucolic countryside outside ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and a multitude of happy-looking cows. I saw some beautiful looking freshly-born calves, a few automatic milking machines, and a man who deeply believed that to be a farmer was the best thing in the world - especially if you apply innovation to it. The figures did stagger me though - just about everything he talked about cost the high end of six figure sums, and he admitted that the best way an outsider could get into farming was to marry a farmer’s son or daughter. Tough times, and interesting in the age of tractor protests.
Tomorrow, it’s Urk, with blisters. But at least I’ve only one short bus ride.
One final thought: in a time of rising sea levels and extreme weather events, are the Dutch struggles with public transport infrastructure something more than just a side-issue? After all, if Britain or Italy or China gets things wrong for a few decades, they just get a bit rubbish. If the Netherlands gets things wrong for a few decades, it’s washed away into the North Sea. Hmmm.