The wind in your hair and the world in your panniers — taking a bike on holiday has a lot going for it, provided it doesn’t rain and you don’t mind funny looks pedalling into the airport terminal. It’s always rewarding to watch a country unfold before your eyes and there’s a smug satisfaction in doing so under your own steam. And where better — once you’ve checked the weather forecast — than the Netherlands, where the landscape lies flat on its back to welcome you, and the bike is king.
For cyclists, the party starts right outside Schiphol Arrivals. As my fellow passengers bustled fretfully around in the taxi queues, I was riding smoothly away towards Amsterdam on a clearly signposted and pleasantly suburban cycle path. It got better when I freewheeled up to my first junction and watched in awe as cars approaching from every side stopped to grant me free passage. Very soon I was enjoying lapses in concentration that would have earned me an instant mouthful of kerb back in England: taking in my surroundings, exchanging smiles with fellow cyclists, trying to remember Mungo Jerry’s other number one hit. I quickly decided that it was worth taking a bike to the Netherlands purely to savour the godlike status bestowed upon the cyclist: the more wholesome and responsible equivalent of supercar owners driving all the way to Germany just so they can go much too fast on a motorway.
In the city centre, as the traffic intensified, I found it increasingly difficult to cast off the reflex paranoia acquired through a lifetime’s cycling in London’s literal school of hard knocks. The first time I came to a roundabout marked out to grant cyclists priority over cars, I squeaked to a halt by the give-way lines, tentative and suspicious, like a schoolboy assessing a bully’s proffered hand of friendship. At that stage I didn’t think I’d ever get used to all the respect and affection being showered upon me by an unbegrudging four-wheeled community. But of course I did, only to find myself instantly infused with a sense of immortal omnipotence — not ideal when there are trams in the urban mix.
It was a glorious day, blue-skied but fresh. I followed the signs out through Amsterdam and east to the sparkling shores of the IJsselmeer, an inland sea bordered by huge tracts of reclaimed land. The necessary damming and dyking occupied the Netherlands’ aquatic engineers for most of the 20th century, but a well-developed plan to drain the IJsselmeer’s entire southern half, some 700km2 of water, was mothballed on economic and ecological grounds just 20 years ago. How glad I was that it had been. They might now be home to well-heeled weekenders, but the cheerily gabled fisherman’s cottages clustered along every village promenade would still have looked a bit silly gazing out across a sea of oilseed rape and sugar beet. No sun-shingled waters for me to aim a lazy smile at, no sailboats and windsurfers. As I filled my water bottles from an impossibly charming old hand pump, I wondered at the fresh-faced, fresh-aired glory of it all, and my own self-sufficient, self-powered role in helping to make it so.
Payback came with the banal realisation that even in a country where the only hills are bridges, cycling a long way can be rather hard work. I’m what you might call an electric-car cyclist: fine about town, but a bit of a liability outside it. Approaching Edam, I hit the limit of my daily range and my batteries went horribly flat. An elderly couple I’d overtaken an hour before eased back past, merrily dinging their bells. Right on cue a steady headwind picked up, bending back the bulrushes and shoving me in the chest.
An exhilarating and rather smug sense of liberated independence had propelled me into and out of Amsterdam, but it now lay exposed as a cruel illusion. There was no free-and-easy schedule to go with the free-and-easy mood: I’d committed myself to an overnight stop at the village of Andijk, and with 50km under my wheels so far I was barely halfway there.
Food is never more obviously fuel than when you’re cycling all day. It’s all about quantity, not quality: quick and dirty calories. I wanted — needed — chips and Coca-Cola. The deep-fried Mars bar had previously occupied me only in appalled ponderings on those troubled Scottish souls who devised it. Now I fantasised about fumbling the first of many into my pale and quivering cakehole.
But it didn’t have to be that way in rural Netherlands, and on a bank holiday it certainly wasn’t: anywhere that might have supplied digestible energy, and by this stage that included garden centres and pet-supply superstores, was shuttered up. My bottles were soon drained and the sun was getting hotter. Could I really knock on a stranger’s door and rasp for water? The shop-window reflection of my blank-eyed, white-lipped death mask advised against it. The carefree backdrop of well-tended front gardens and sunny orchards made the whole ordeal worse.
The relentlessly flat landscape that had seemed such a blessing was now a curse. A church spire would assert itself from prodigious distance, then taunt me: two hours of agonising toil were required to reel in the town beneath it.
I’d felt a bit silly taking a satnav on a cycling holiday, particularly after discovering that for reasons best known to my children, it had been reprogrammed with the voice of C-3PO, the camp gold robot from Star Wars. But when I started missing turns I wedged it into my back pocket, crammed the earpiece in a sweaty head hole and did as I was told. Finally, with progress down to a weaving crawl and my senses beginning to shut down, a prissy android announced that I had reached my destination. I looked up and eventually focused on the cowshed before me, and the six little chalets lined up neatly alongside.
