Europe > Netherlands > other areas of the Netherlands > Wadden Islands > Articles > Mud-Walking in the Netherlands

With no mountains but plenty of mud, the Dutch have made wadlopen - literally 'mud walking' - their equivalent of fell-running. Every year thousands of Netherlanders pay good money to be led on route marches, anything up to 16 kilometers in distance, across the bottom of the Wadden Sea during its few hours of low tide. Separating the mainland from a string of off-shore islands - Texel, Vlieland, Terschelling, Ameland and Schiermonnikoog - the retreating waters of the sea leave a treacherous maze of swift flowing channels, mud wallows, sand banks and shallow pools.

Guides are essential in this ever changing landscape, where mud, sand, water and sky leach back and forth into each other in a confusion of perspective distorting greys. In the thirty years since wadlopen first became a popular sport, some five million people have been led by the professional guides, these Dutch Moseses, across the parted waters. Maps, radios, and GPSs are the tools of the wadlopen leader's trade...those and the years of knowledge gained by walking the mudflats in every season, charting the constantly shifting contours.

I was wadlopen from Ameland, third biggest of the Wadden islands, as one of a group of 104 wadlopers. Our 10 kms yomp back to the mainland was led by Ypke Bouma, his two sons, and three volunteers. The six of them had crossed over the wad to the island in the dark the previous night, "for fun," and now were reviewing us, their disciples, as we gathered at the Klok Bar in the village of Buren. Legions of brand new high-top laced sneakers, the recommended footwear for the cloying mud to come, paced and shuffled below the essential shorts, weather-proof outer-layers and day-sacks laden with food, drink and spare clothing worn by the walkers. Last coffees and beers were downed, and we trekked off.

We started from Ameland's highest point, the vertigo inducing 23.5 meters of Oerdblinkert, a particularly lofty dune on the eastern end of the island. Before us stretched the featureless expanse of the dried out Wadden Sea, running south until on the very horizon it became the tight little scribble of windmills and church spires that marked the mainland. To a soundtrack of curlews and terns, we marched down to the shore behind our stick carrying guides. We crossed a frontier of salt grass, sea pinks and samphire, and then stepped into the surreally soft world of mud. Feet disappeared into the 'ground'; a few inches mostly, but sometimes knee deep. And the air was filled with the belches, farts, and gushing sighs of the gloop as it endeavoured to pull the high-top sneakers off 208 feet.

We trampsed over the wad, crossed a deep channel and found ourselves on a hard, rippled sand bank. Able, here, to walk properly, we swiftly pulled away from land, seeming to lose a dimension in the process. People looking around this flat world, faced with 360 degrees of nothingness, seemed to be getting in touch with their inner agoraphobic. There was a tendency for people to clump together into tight masses whenever we stopped, and couples, families, even strangers had taken to holding hands for support.

For Sietse Bouma, Ypke's son and a marine biologist, the mud flats were a bustling cosmos. Plunging his hands into the gunge at his feet, he drew up fistfuls of cockles and razor shells. A quick grab in a muddy pool produced a crab. But even Sieste felt the emptiness, though he liked it; "...it’s what brings me here every weekend." He dismissed the dangers, and talked up the joys, even of winter walking when ice hardened the wad and freezing fogs swept in from the sea. "We know this land in all it's changes, we never get lost." He prodded the mud with his guide-pole, "There's only one real danger - thunderstorms." On the flats, wadlopers made natural lightening conductors, and even the slightest chance of a storm was reason enough to cancel a walk or hasten back to shore if caught out in one.

We crossed another water channel, that ran hip high for the shorter walkers, and found ourselves floundering through mud again, but deeper and more pungent mud. Here a skating, toe-pointing, skipping run might, just might, keep one gliding and skating across the surface - until exhaustion set in and one sank down into the mud as if into slushy, grey snow. Most lopers, though, adopted a knee-deep, slow motion trudge through something which had all the weight and pull of setting concrete. And the smell of anchovies, Gorgonzola and silage.

Dramas were being played out in this swamp. Some people had sunk up to their hips, one woman to her waist, and they waited, like bogged cattle, to be hauled out by more buoyant walkers. A group of schoolboys had taken to tobogganing on their bellies across the slicks, rolling and squirming in the mud. The fit were linking arms with the unfit, supporting them and dragging them through the slob. The walk had turned into an exercise in survival.

Three hours later, we staggered from the mud, climbed up a breakwater and landed in the car park at the Holwerd ferry terminal. It was if as if we had compressed the whole of human evolution - from primeval soup inhabiting amoeba through to motorised modern man - into the space of an afternoon. Was that the attraction of wadlopen? Or was the greatest reward in the trough of clean water that sloughed grey mud off us and revealed pink bodies underneath. Who knows? It's a Dutch thing this water, sky and mud lark.

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