Le Flâneur

Le Flaneur goes from Amsterdam to the Mediterranean and back over the course of a year.

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Cows in the Amsterdam Forest

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Amsterdam, in the autumn sun

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Moving the boat in the dark, a short photo series

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Someone needed to cut a hole in the boat (for a change), so Mum and I exiled ourselves to Amsterdam for the day. The Amsterdam Museum is being renovated for, allegedly, six years, and so has taken up lodgings in the Hermitage for the time being.

Its exhibitions are now quite politically self-aware, a significant change from the last time I was in Amsterdam, where the historical glory of Amsterdam, and thus Dutch colonial prowess, was largely espoused uncritically. Unfortunately, the renovations mean that the museum is quite a bit smaller, and we were done with it by lunchtime.

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Weesp also contains a museum, which can be accessed for the princely sum of €5, allowing you to see such wonders as all the ads for van Houten chocolate and a bunch of prints alongside actual artwork. It was a more interesting building than museum - the former town hall before Amsterdam annexed the place - which is reflected in my photographs. The dungeon was at least worth a couple of jokes.

Also, as with much of the Netherlands, half the town felt like it was under construction, which made me nostalgic for Melbourne.

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Here's Weesp at night, a sickeningly pretty Dutch town with all of the expected cliches.

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...is this thing on?

Good morning from a boat in the Netherlands. It is not currently raining which is, I feel, important to note. The year is 2023, and it is time, I regret, to revisit the boat blog.

I'm in Europe for a couple of months, annoying my parents, playing at being competent crew, and then, on occasion, actually travelling. Crucially and against all odds, I am still taking photos, which is mostly what this blog is for.

We begin in the small Dutch town of Culemborg, two trains from Schiphol Airport and perfectly quaint, if eternally under construction. An airport pickup at 6:15am on a Wednesday is out of the question, but a bicycle pickup (very Dutch) is not.

You take a fold up bike, attach it to a trailer, take your second fold up bike and put it in the trailer. Then you find the person you're meeting (difficult without internet; the train arrives on one side and the bicycle is on the other), unfold the bike and replace it with the relevant luggage. Piece of cake. 30kg of stuff is no bother when it's flat, I promise.

The next day we're off, no time to lose, the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal and, hopefully, the Vecht, await. We stash the bikes on board, I try and remember how to use a boat hook and we're on our way.

We're moored under a tree in autumn, so part of preparing for sailing is de-leafing. It's a highly technical process.

A couple of locks later we're onto the Netherlands' finest boat freeway, the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal, where barges are simultaneously overtaking, undertaking and blue-boarding (on the wrong side of the river). Le Flaneur is the unfortunate combination of small but not very fast and not very manoeuvrable, so our only course of action is to get out of the way and hope for the best.

Despite the masses of shipping, we've still had to negotiate low bridges with our masts down and everyone breathing in. It also means taking the top of the chimney off.

We arrived that evening in Maarsen, having run out of bridges that would let us through. Dutch rules out of season are straightforward but difficult to follow: you have to call 24 hours ahead of time so that they can send a bridge operator out. What number and for which bridge and indeed what the name of the bridge is are constant challenges.

Anyhow, as is traditional in the Netherlands, Maarsen was very pretty and then it rained. We sheltered in a convenient Brasserie and pootled slowly home.

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Isolation, Amsterdam style.

23rd July to 6th August

Le Flâneur: Before…

The mighty bow thruster before anti fouling.

Le Flâneur: After

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my kingdom for the after shots of the bow and the bowthruster 

(looks very shiny though!)

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I spent nearly almost as long struggling with a title as actually making this video. It is still a not very good title.

Anyhow. This is the very general summary look at a year on a boat in Europe (the secret is in the thumbnail). Locks! Bridges! Snow! Incredibly cold follow by significant heat followed by a wonderful stretch of autumn! I originally intended to make a compilation of the prettiest shots that I took but threw it out in favour of narrative. So that might be a separate video. 

I should also apologise, because looking through the footage I took this year, I realised that there is a remarkable dearth of shots of guests. What little I have I shoehorned in at the end after the Helen Smith binocular supercut. 

This was an immensely enjoyable film to edit, simply because I got to go through the entire trip all over again. Most of the drama simply isn’t there because I had to put down the camera in order to deal with it (with a couple of curious exceptions). I focused entirely on things that happened on the boat and even then sacrifices had to be made. Nevertheless, it feels like an absurdly full, eventful year, as it was. 

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So we made it back to Amsterdam. 

From Strand Horst, we headed to Muiden and then from Muiden we went through yet another surely superfluous Dutch lock (if you’re not above sea level when you start and you’re not above sea level when you finish what is the point), onto the Ij, dodged a couple of ferries, and tried, tried to head into Oosterdok. At some point Dad handed me the helm which, on the freeway that is the Ij, is great for the blood pressure. There’s nothing quite like tourist boats with their non-existent air draft suddenly popping out at you. 

Navigating Amsterdam south of the Ij is a nightmare of lifting bridges that won’t lift and swing bridges that won’t swing. The first bridge we encountered was the latter which required a phone call and the entering of some numbers and then, shock horror, a beloved red green light. The second bridge, inevitably, was hellish. 

First it wouldn’t open between 12 and 1 because yes we miss France. Then the phone code wouldn’t work and we had to call in actual people to help us. Eventually, the bridge lifted, but once it was up, to our knowledge, it would not come down. An integral part of sailing the inland waterways is pissing off people on land. But this is Amsterdam, so there was a perfectly good bridge five hundred metres away.

This would have been a lovely conclusion to a trip that has so often been thrown into chaos by bridges (Grau-du-Roi still wins, mind) but then, once neatly tied up and offered the wifi code, we discovered that the marina we were in could not slip us for the summer. In the exchanged emails, mistakes had been made, questions hadn’t been asked and now we were to return to our beloved Twellegea. Once we got through the bridges, crossed the Ij, avoided the ferries and dodged the barges. It will come as no surprise that we broke the lifting bridge, again.

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We stopped in a jachthaven near Elburg which immediately preceded a lock. We would head through it the next day, but not without incident. The water dropped a foot overnight which wasn’t too significant a problem except that we’d forgotten how to read a bifurcation buoy (a buoy with two colours that marks the division of a channel). I accidentally ran us aground in the gentlest possible way, in that it took me a moment to notice. It didn’t help matters that you had to give the lock keeper 24 hours notice because who on earth goes about plaisanciering in winter. 

Noah, Mum and I stood up at the bow and Dad managed to float us again by, bizarrely, driving forwards. The lock keeper showed up for a barge and let us through and we headed towards our favourite middle of nowhere port, Strand Horst.

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We left Zwolle and headed out to sea! Or, at least, the Ketelmeer, a lovely body of water that can get a little choppy with the wind. Being the Netherlands (and in close proximity to my father), there was plenty of it about.

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In Zwolle, we also met up with Sabine, with whom we had planned to go cruising, before discovering that the weather was not looking at us kindly. Instead, we settled for going on lengthy walks about town, which I believe is code for “staring obviously and uncomfortably through the windows of empty houses”. 

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From Doesberg to Zutphen (where I took no photos) to Zwolle, a town an hour on the train from Amsterdam, or about three days on a boat. Zwolle is very much like Amsterdam in its architecture, selection of canals and the constant presence of boats, but it is quite unlike Amsterdam in its tourist intake. Which is to say, we felt like we were the only visitors there. 

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After Arnhem, Doesberg, which is confusingly pronounced the same as Duisburg. It contains the oldest working restaurant in the Netherlands and not all that much else.

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I made a very long video about three separate normal boaty things: fire, water and blueboarding down the Rhine

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Arnhem is famous for its role in Operation Market Garden, in which a couple of allied paratroopers showed up and tried to take some major bridges leading up to the Rhine. They were fairly successful until they got to the Arnhem, where the whole thing fell apart in a blaze of poor preparation and German tanks. Naturally, we decided to meet Noah here so that we could engage in some classic militant tourism (though perhaps that is not the best way to phrase it). The first photo is the rebuilt bridge, which was blown up because of its tactical value and named after the British Lieutenant-Colonel who couldn’t quite hold onto it, hence John Frostbrug.