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13th August - 20th August
We arrived in Hirtshalls in Denmark late that evening, and therefore had booked a Youth Hostel in advance. This was only the second YHA we had used on this trip, as they tend to be very over priced.
But 70 euros got us a room with four beds and free WiFi.
The next morning we headed off north to Skagen, at the very northernmost tip of Denmark, where the Baltic and the North sea meet on a long sand spit , and where the waves crash in from both directions.
very dangerous for swimming, but very popular with the tourists.
From here it was south to Aalborg, where Liam and I had a great time in the Military museum, climbing in and out of tanks and planes. The Danish, have a long history of peacekeeping, and some very advanced military vehicles, much to Liam’s enjoyment.
We then carried on south to a place on the east coast called Horsens, where we camped for a couple of days to catch up on our washing and take in the local sights.
From Denmark, we had a long days driving down into Germany, where we fluked a great camp late in the day, which was cheap, had cold beer and free WiFi, not to mention a huge horse complex next door much to Vanessa’s enjoyment.
But we couldn’t stay long as we had been in touch with a Dutch couple that we had met in Italy and had booked to be there in three days, and therefore had to get to Amsterdam that night.
We drove through the area called Holstein, and saw huge dairy farm steadings with elaborate houses attached, and a lot of amazing maize crops grown. As we moved down into Holland and the Dutch province of Friesland the dairy farms were even more grand, and for the first time in Europe we started to see numbers of sheep outside in the paddocks, mostly Texels.
Late in the day we managed to navigate our way into a very central campground, which was very crowded, but you could walk to the free ferry that takes you across the main canal to the centre of Amsterdam. We went into the central city after dinner and had a wander round the town. We were absolutely amazed by the number of bikes everywhere and after a while a little annoyed about them as some of them seem to think they rule the road and the pavement and have no respect for pedestrians at all! The city was very lively with a lot of tourists but quite dirty compared to other big cities we’ve been in in Europe.
The next morning Vanessa and Liam went to the Science Museum and d*** and I intended to go to the Van Gogh Museum but time got away on us so we just enjoyed the bus ride and walk round the canals.
In the afternoon we found our Dutch friend’s house in Alphen den Rhin and were made to feel right at home. They and their families were originally from Indonesia , but were expelled from their homeland after Indonesian independence in the 1950’s so they had an interesting background and we learnt a lot about Holland from them. They couldn’t do enough for us. They especially took me shopping for gluten free bread and they took us to a couple of very interesting tourist sites.
The first was a place called Kinderdijke which is a UNESCO World Heritage site with 19 windmills built in 1738 and 1740. We were able to go in one that is still in perfect working order however no wind that day meant it wasn’t in action unfortunately. They were used to help drain an area formerly a peat bog.
The next site they took us to was called Maduradom which is a place covering about 2 hectares of 1/25th scale models of important Dutch sites. It was brilliantly done and the scale models were superb. We spent about 2 1/2 hours looking round it. To end the day they took us to their favourite Indonesian restaurant in The Hague. We were so lucky to be able to spend these couple of days with them as you learn so much more about a country and their people when you can spend time with them. Hopefully we will keep in touch and we might get to return the hospitality.
We left their place and travelled south to Zeeland along with what seemed like half of the Dutch population heading to the beach for the day as the temperature reached 34 degrees. We stopped on an artificial island in the middle of the Oestershcielde which is the storm barrier built to protect Holland from floods after the devastating floods in the 1950’s when 2000 people drowned. We had hoped to learn a bit more about how they worked but it was going to cost a fortune to go into the information centre so we had a swim instead.
From here we drove straight through Belgium and across the French border to a little town called Le Quesnoy. This town has a very important NZ connection as it was NZ soldiers that liberated the town from the Germans in WW1 a week before the war finished. They have a memorial to the brave NZ soldiers and have named streets after NZers - Rue All Blacks and even Helen Clarke for goodness sake !! It made us quite proud to be NZers and it must have been amazing for the village to be freed by people from the other side of the world.
Our WW1 theme carried on the next day as we visited the Carriere Wellington in Arras, which is an old underground quarry which was used to house 24000 troops for 8 days prior to the Battle of Arras in 1916. NZ tunnellers spent weeks tunnelling underground prior to this linking up a series of old quarries in preparation for the battle. We lunched at Vimy ridge near the massive Canadian memorial to the thousands of Canadian soldiers that perished taking this ridge. it is the Canadian equivalent of our Gallipoli, where they first fought under their own flag.
From here we travelled back into Belgium to Ypres where we visited the Flanders Field Museum and received a rather graphic education of life in the trenches in WW1.
Unbelievably, In the four battles of Ypres, a town the size of Ashburton, 4000 soldiers were killed every day for 3 months .
To finish the day we went to the massive Tyne Cot cemetery at Passchendaele , where 400000 soldiers were killed or wounded over 100 days of battle to gain 8km of territory. It was very sobering to see the large number of New Zealand graves in this , the largest commonwealth cemetery, of all.
It is a very beautiful cemetery, exceptionally well maintained as they all are. It was just so sad to see such a waste of life and they were all so young and so many of the graves had no names.
With our earlier visit to Verdun (where there were over 700000 mainly French and German casualties in a battle lasting 300 days), and now Ypres (over 500000 killed), and the Somme(60000 casualties on the first day), it is almost incomprehensible the senseless loss of life that occurred in this small corner of Europe.
To cheer us up from all this war stuff we treated ourselves to some Belgian chocolates yum yum!!!! then we drove on to Dunkirk to camp for the night and catch the ferry back to the UK the next day.
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