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Europe > Netherlands > Amsterdam > Amsterdam > Articles > Off-beat Netherlands

Off-beat Netherlands

by Jasper Winn

Doe maar gewoan, dan doe je gek genoeg, The Dutch like to tell themselves, "Be normal, that's crazy enough"

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"Doe maar gewoan, dan doe je gek genoeg," The Dutch like to tell themselves, "Be normal, that's crazy enough." The paradox of being Dutch amuses the Netherlanders. And it fascinates me. I lived in the Netherlands for three winters, for reasons of love and ice-skating, and found the country growing more 'foreign' the longer I spent there. I'd arrived feeling as if I'd come home, and left wondering just where on earth I'd been.

The Dutch hide their elemental conservatism behind a facade of permissiveness. Look even deeper, though, below that conservatism, and there's a wild and crazy heart. Perhaps the complicated nature of the Dutch has something to do with their country? It could be that if the Netherlands were only bigger and drier, the Dutch would be a simpler, lazier people. But history has given the Netherlanders, all fifteen million of them, a land smaller than Bhutan; a worrying expanse of which is below sea level. That's the same sea which over the centuries the Dutch have beaten back with dikes, and canals and windmill-driven pumps. Holding the waters at bay, though, takes constant work. However much it might be against their true nature, the Dutch are forced to be stolid and reliable. A 'let's not bother' attitude in the Netherlands would mean a quarter of the country turning into sea-bottom in less than a fortnight. So, the Dutch have learnt to take their fun when they can, and some of what they count as fun comes from their hidden crazy heart.

The only escape the Netherlanders have from the constant attention demanded by their ditches, canals, meers and lakes is when those same waters freeze. For as long as there's a hard frost the Dutch are free to party. Maybe that's why the Dutch are skate fanatics. New ice has even the most responsible citizens hauling their skates out of the attic with the truant school boy cry of "Wie willen ijs vrij - we want ice time." For those few short ice days the Dutch become hearty frontiersmen skimming and sliding through a magical black and white wilderness.

The Dutch genius for organising the most absurd of pastimes with clockwork precision reaches its zenith in ice-skating, especially in running the Elfstedentocht, the 200 kilometre 'Eleven towns race.' Run only when there is ice thick enough to support anything up to 17,000 bladers cheered on by perhaps a million spectators, the race's history goes back a century. At the most recent Elfstedentocht, a few winters back, I watched a nation in the grip of obsession. Brass bands led thousand-voiced sing-a-longs. Doctors stood by to minister to frost-bitten appendages, though the experienced skaters had already adverted disaster in temperatures that could reach 20 below, by stuffing sheets of newspaper down the front of their trousers. And every town on the route seemed to produce at least one blubbery streaker, sliding along the ice on his bum, to relieve the waits between passing groups of skaters.

Traditionalists amongst the tochters wore the old, wooden-framed doorlopers, strapped on over no more than a thick pair of socks, for 'a better feel.' Contenders for the fastest time - somewhere around 7 hours for the 200 kilometres in a good year - wore lycra speed suits, and skated in tight, stream-lined trentje - little train - formations. But my most enduring memory from the Elfsteden was not of on-ice heroics and athleticism, but of dazed and exhausted skaters mining their way through a mountain of 34,000 jumbled shoes piled at the tocht's end, in vain attempts to find the footwear they'd abandoned at the start so many hours before.

In my winters in the Netherlands I skated in the local tochts. At anything up to 100 kilometres long, each tour boasted a theme. Some were logical enough; a round of the windmills of Zuid Holland, for example. Others were stranger. The ijsmoppen route from Wateringen to Vlaardingen, perhaps, where one was honour-bound to buy a handful of particular sugar biscuits, and then stuff them down one's socks to be carried back to one's delighted household. Or the Rotterdam to Gouda tour, were it was traditional to tie a long clay pipe to the seat of ones trousers to prove, if it remained unbroken, that one hadn't fallen.

If ice provides only a short-lived opportunity for carnival craziness, the urge to skate remains strong in the Dutch. This year I returned to the Netherlands to travel in search of the offbeat heart of the country. Naturally I started on skates, though being June, they were in-liners, The Dutch, arguably, invented in-line skating as a masochistic training aid for a minority of professional ice-skaters. The idea had to go to California to be redefined as a swinging leisure activity. But then the Dutch enthusiastically re-imported the concept as a fun way of touring their country's network of glass-smooth cycle paths.

Lex Buuren runs 5-day, 300 kilometres roller-blade tours of the Golden Circle, a ring-route made up of the dikes, farmland and ultra-conservative villages which surrounds the inland sea of the IJsselmeer. Lex and I rolled off from Amsterdam's Vondelpark to do the Golden Circle's first leg. In a strange juxtaposition of eras we flashed like science fiction time travellers through landscapes from Brueghel and villages filled with Vermeer characters.

Belying the Netherland's popular image of sex-shows and dope cafes, many of the people of Urk and Vollendam dressed in clothing straight from Van Gogh - clogs, peaked caps and sombre short jackets for the men and lace mob caps and petticoats and aprons for the women. And if we'd continued round to the other side of the IJsselmeer to the villages near Mepple we could have caused considerable upset to pious people who consider riding a bicycle on Sunday blasphemous, and probably have even stronger views on in-line skates and tight lycra shorts.

Instead, Lex and I whirled beneath windmills, surprisingly noisy under full sail, past pungent cheese factories and alongside the great flapping tan canvases of old canal barges, their hulls floating in narrow cuts, seemingly making stately progress across dry land.

Back in Amsterdam I climbed off my skates in the Hotel Filosoof, a haven of practical and comfortable eccentricity. Run by a practicing academic philosopher, Ida Jongsma, and her sister, the rooms were decorated according to different schools of philosophical thought. There was a Zen room, a 'Nietzsche,' a 'De Beauvoir' and representatives of most other Eastern and Western schools of thought. And for me? The beginner's suite with a frieze dedicated to the more obvious Greeks, and a mural of Rodin's 'The Thinker' above the bed.

Amsterdam is not a bad place to go looking for the stranger side of the Netherlands, but perhaps it's just a little too obvious. Transvestite dance clubs, an anarchist party with regular advertised meetings and public gardens populated by ornamental chickens are the norm. For all I know there's a discotheque for anarchist transvestite chickens. Why not? It's Amsterdam, after all. But for real up-lifting odd you have to go back to the north and Friesland. Being a country within a country, Friesland has it's own customs, language and sports.

One, ‘fierljeppen’, translates roughly as 'wide ditch vaulting.' It conjured up an image, to me anyway, of chuckling amateurs with broom poles hopping over streams. I should have known better. The Dutch having come up with something ridiculous in the way of human endeavour will immediately set to work to elevate it into an art form and Olympian standard sport rolled into one. I arrived at a regional fierljeppen contest in Joure to find a carefully proportioned artificial ditch brimming with muddy water. Along its banks was a row of platforms, like middling height diving boards set into a lofty bank. Stuck loosely upright in the bottom of the ditch, opposite to and a good jump from each board, were thin tapering aluminium poles, some eleven metres in length. Team coaches using long forked sticks held the poles upright.

The fierljeppers, dressed in shorts and with strips of bicycle inner tube rubber wrapped round one foot for grip, lined up back from the platforms. Ready to vault, a serious faced youth, paced out his run, backed up again and then sprinted down the launch pad. With a leap he dived out to catch the pole. Then, even as it was falling towards the far shore, he shinned as high up its length as possible. In the last nano second, as the pole hinged ground-ward, he sprang off its end to land well beyond the twelve-metre line in the sandpit on the far bank.

The best of the jumpers were vaulting way beyond 17 metres. But the dynamics of the sport also left plenty of room for slapstick and the elemental delight of watching people plunging into muddy goo. Poles fell in the wrong direction, jumpers leapt at inopportune moments, and frantic climbing was often sabotaged by gravity and lost grip leaving the doughty fierljeppers sliding, like firemen, down into the water. Best of all, was a keen lad who sprinted off the end of the platform with grim determination, missed his pole completely and cartwheeled into the water with legs still pedaling in classic cartoon running-of-a-cliff style. I could, of course, see the attractions for spectators, but still couldn't work out why so many Friesians were keen on actually taking part.

The next day, still in pursuit of the hidden soul of the Netherlands, I took the ferry to Ameland, one of the Wadden Islands. Essentially an archipelago of large sand dunes, the islands support communities of hardened farmers and seafarers, augmented in the summer months by Dutch mainlanders seeking golden beaches and cosy villages and wind swept beauty for their holidays. Ameland has little significant traffic - a few tractors, a couple of minibus taxis, shoals of glittering bicycles, and horse-drawn carriages. Ameland's horses have a particular significance. Over the centuries their power has tilled the land into fertile fields and pastures. And they are the propulsion for the unique paardenreddingsboot, the horse lifeboat.

For more than 160 years the island has supported a lifeboat station, but with no safe anchorage in the fierce tides and shifting sands of the North Sea, the lifeboat had to be pulled from its shed in Hollum village by teams of horses. The horse lifeboat was only decommissioned in 1989, but several times a year the old skills are revived as farmers harness up their horses and drag the 6-tonne trailer and full-sized boat seawards.

On a grey blustery evening I watched the horses - ten big-boned, fiery Amelanders - being trotted into the village in pairs, each pulling a farmer on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle. The pairs were quickly hitched to the front of the trailer, there were cries of "FUTS! FUTS!" - Go On! The lifeboat and its tank track trailer rumbled through the village and towards the beach a kilometer distant. "The fastest launch for a rescue, from the siren going to floating the boat, was eighteen minutes," I was told as I jogged beside the lifeboat men, "Just eighteen minutes for everything. We islanders have saved many lives and boats. Very many."

On the strand the lifeboat was drawn up by the grey, spume topped waves. The horses were unhitched from the front of the trailer and two pairs hitched each side to heavy port and starboard booms. There was the command to futs and the horses threw their weight into their breast collars, rearing and plunging to accelerate the bulk of the lifeboat into the water. With the juggernaut moving faster, the horses high stepped and cantered the boat ever deeper, until with the animal’s chest deep a hook was released and the lifeboat, engine already racing, was catapulted into the sea.

A lifeboat could be what I was going to need the following day. My second reason for coming to Ameland was to get off the island again. But in typically Dutch fashion, using the hardest method that they could come up with. The Netherlanders, being short of mountains and moors to use up their energy on, have turned to the one natural resource they have in quantity to provide a challenge. Mud. Wadlopen - slob walking - is the Dutch equivalent of fell running. Throughout the summer, armies of wadlopers, sometimes hundreds strong, led by local guides, squelch and skid their way back and forth across the Waden Sea at low tide.

It's hard to see what the attraction might be in the eight-kilometre mud march from Ameland to the mainland. Still, a hundred of us climbed off the 'tractor train' that had transported us the length of the island to its highest point, Oerdblinkert, a lofty 23 and a half-metre dune. From its peak we could see the mainland as a distant scrawl beyond a pewter grey expanse of mud, sand and shallows, then we set off into this two dimensional world. Step by step we slipped and trudged - 'sludged,' perhaps - through the thick cloying slime. Far from the island we waded through a waist deep channel of fast flowing ebb tide, then climbed onto a hard bank of rippled sand. For the next two hours we straggled across this damp desert.
The lines of walkers, from a distance, looked like poorly punctuated lines of typeface printed on dirty paper. The smells released by our tramping feet were almost audible. Whispers of compost heap, yelps of rotten fish, and a chorus of ozone.

Then suddenly we were back into trench warfare. With the modern windmills and low houses of the mainland frustratingly close, the sand disintegrated into knee-deep slime and we waded, with the tottering slow-motion steps of drunken deep-sea divers, the last kilometre to hard, three-dimensional ground. A hose sluiced the mud off our half-dressed bodies, as if spraying us with new, pink skin. Abandoned vile-smelling shoes, the evidence of any Dutch outdoor pursuit it would seem, overflowed the car-park litterbin.

After the slog of wadlopen the idea of letting a horse take the strain seemed attractive. I joined Louwe Mulder, who runs the Postwagen stables in Tolbert near Gronigen. His bent for Dutch lateral thought had come up with an obvious conclusion; the realisation that each person who rides tends to have family and friends who don't. To include them all in the 'horse' experience he'd augmented the centre's horses and instruction with mini-golf, restaurants and Western theme events.

"Hen parties and stag nights and weddings are the most popular - we've got western clothing, horses, bullwhips, games, even a camel." He looked momentarily puzzled at where the camel fitted into cowboy lore and then shrugged, "The thing is, we're really good at fun and parties here."

The Postwagen was just as good at horses. With Bianaca, Jenneke and Therese, who worked at the stables, I rode out on 'Action,' an imported Russian hack. Our twenty-mile ride was the proof of an unknown Netherlands, and of the country's hidden charms. Rather than the canal webbed cities, fields ablaze with tulips and endless glittering glasshouses of Holland's postcard industry, we rode through a lesser know Dutch landscape. Narrow tracks through small fields led into huge expanses of dark forest bisected by sandy gallops; it was good riding country. The only thing missing was high ground. The best that the Netherlands could do in the way of mountains was the 321 metre Drielandenpunt way down in the south of the country. Not really vertigo inducing loftiness. Then I thought back to the fierljeppers, ice skaters and wadlopers I'd met. Flat country, sure, but far from flat people.