The call to adventure (V)
Chapter 5: While living in Berlin, I visited Amsterdam. It changed everything.
[Missed Chapter 4? Read it.]
When I decided to leave America, with the confidence of a fat wallet from unexpected crypto winnings, I got rid of everything I owned and hopped on a plane to poor-but-sexy Berlin. I didn’t have a grand plan or an ultimate destination. I just wanted to get away and try to realise a future outside of America.
While in Berlin, I plotted feverishly to convince someone to give me a job that came with a work visa, but I also wanted to see a bit more than Germany, if possible. I plotted a quick trip to Amsterdam.
To be completely frank, I didn’t know much about Amsterdam before I visited. I knew it was an important historical place, the most important port in the world at one time. I knew they had canals, that Holland was the place of flowers and cheese, and that Amsterdam was a place of political progressiveness and prostitutes and weed, but I didn’t have any idea about how beautiful it would be. And not just the city, but all of the surrounding area.
The road from Haarlem
I didn’t actually stay in Amsterdam. While looking for a hotel, I recalled a travel magazine article I had read years before about a cute little city near Amsterdam named Haarlem. I looked it up on the map. It was about 20 km away from Amsterdam, not that far from the North Sea. That sounded even better. The main thing I wanted to do was rent a bike and ride around, as much as possible for as long as possible. How could I pass up a ride to the North Sea? Staying in Haarlem meant I would also find out what lies between the two cities.
Haarlem is actually older than Amsterdam, which is a mere 749 years old. The namesake of New York’s Harlem neighbourhood, Haarlem is the capital of the province of Noord-Holland. It’s often described as a smaller, more adorable, less touristy version of Amsterdam. That was my impression, too, but the first thing I noticed about Haarlem is probably the same prosaic detail that other Americans notice the first time they visit the Netherlands.
It’s quiet. You can hear people living their lives. High-definition quiet. Time seems to slow down when you remove the hustle and bustle of cars. Perhaps needless to say, this lack of cars appealed to me immediately. Sometimes, it’s so peaceful you can pick out the thin whisper of tire tread on sandy asphalt and know exactly how far away the bike you’re hearing is located, from which direction it’s coming, and whence it’s headed.
Which is not to say there isn’t noise. Rattling bicycles. A squeaky wheel playing violin. Snarling snorfietsen (scooters) take over the soundscape every once in a while, but the sound of a city in the Netherlands, beyond the backdrop of bicycle sounds, is the murmur of friendly conversation and clinks of glasses. On a sunny day, every cafe terrais next to a canal is packed, with waitresses dangerously, yet effortlessly, crossing busy fietspad traffic while carrying platters of biertjes and bitterballen from the cafe to the water. It was immediately clear to me that the Dutch were very laid back people. Nobody seemed to be in a rush to do anything. Especially the waitresses.
And oh my lord in heaven, the flowers. Whether tulips placed by the city, daffodils and geraniums in giant planters, or yellow and purple wildflowers naturally popping up along the edges of paths, this land gave me an appreciation of flowers that I previously, unfortunately, had been severely lacking. I asked a Dutch lady I met at my hotel, “Who takes care of all of these flowers?” She said that, of course, some were placed there by the city, but everything else was grown by everyday people. In fact, citizens are encouraged to adopt a space around a tree near their home – a boomspiegel (tree mirror). I found out there is even an organisation of Guerrilla Gardeners, radical naturists who recruit eco-warriors to help beautify the world. They sounded like my kind of people, except for the part about knowing how to grow flowers.
What lies between
I covered a lot of ground during those three days and took lots of photos, essentially from sun-up to sun-down. Between Haarlem and Amsterdam lies, among many other things, a forest, two golf courses, an indoor ski facility, cows, sheep, farms, iron sculptures, towering wind turbines, factories, ancient windmills, and countless bridges that span countless bodies of water. And birds - lots of crows. The cycle paths take you along the borders of polders with foraging geese and ducks and herons and storks and dear god is that a pair of swans in the water trailed by their pack of adorable baby cygnets?
As a foreigner in a strange land who has a notoriously poor sense of direction, I struggled to decode puzzling Dutch traffic signs with lots of letters that didn’t normally go together in English. I kept wondering: Can I go this way? Is this allowed? The answer is almost always yes. If there is a path but no gate, you can go that way. There is some private land in the Netherlands, but not that much. There aren’t a lot of “no trespassing” style signs, and there aren’t many fences. The canals serve that purpose.
Around 20% of the Netherlands is reclaimed from the water, and over half of the country is farmland. This is, of course, privé terrein, but much of that farmland also has cycle paths going around and sometimes even through it. The Dutch attitude to private vs public land seems to be: if it doesn’t belong to everybody, it should at least be accessible to everybody. This means that you might live way out in the countryside, but somehow a cycle path might still be right outside your window.
Which direction to go was a constant struggle because the paths branch off in nearly every direction, providing endless choices. If I ended up going “the wrong way”, the distance lost wouldn’t be much to cry about. There are junctions everywhere labeled with sign posts, sometimes even with a primitive bench and a trash can. Simple but civilised.
I wasn’t the only one out there. I had plenty of examples to follow when trying to determine which paths were meant for bikes and which weren’t. Everyone cycles on these paths, from sportfietsers in spandex on fancy bicycles to elderly omas on their omafiets, slowly carrying home groceries. It became clear to me that while my mind was being blown by this countryside, this was all normal to them. Just pedalling along on a sunny day.
Feeling so safe and free and protected on a bicycle felt revolutionary. Maybe I was still suffering from American traumas. Cycling the dangerous San Francisco streets had prepared me to be on high alert at all times for cars that could easily crush me if they wandered over a line of faded white paint. I had been hit a few times, and those were painful experiences. Out here, I could relax. Really relax. It turned out the answer to, “Which paths are bikes allowed on?” is “Almost all of them.” Even if isn’t allowed, people ride on them anyway. And everyone survives.
Bowled over by infrastructure
What amazed me the most wasn’t just the fietspads but the thoughtfulness and expansiveness of the entirety of the infrastructure. The single big freeway connecting the two cities is a sunken highway at points, existing below ground to cut down on noise. In areas where it’s elevated, noise barriers are installed, which makes an extraordinary difference. These kinds of barriers are practically nonexistent in America, where everyone seems to just accept the blaring noise of cars as the expected soundtrack to life. Other than the one big freeway, the land between the two cities is mostly back roads, bike paths, and nature.
The train also goes through this area. It has its own dedicated lane, practically never crossing other roads or paths. When a bike path needs to cross a train track, the Dutch don’t put up a railway signal. They build a bike tunnel underneath the train so everyone can keep moving. When a fietspad needs to cross a freeway, they engineer a surprisingly beautiful bicycle bridge that spans super-wide lanes and curlicues around in circles at outlets on either side.
It’s not all countryside. Plenty of people live out there, in tiny villages or in an almost off-the-grid way alongside canals, or in houseboats around larger bodies of water. There are lots of hiking paths, the one place where bicycles aren’t welcome. It all works together to make it easy for anyone without a car to get virtually anywhere. Of course, if you’re in a car, you take the freeway and never see any of it.
Which one would you rather experience?
It’s a dam pretty city
Since the land is so flat, unless you’re on top of a dike there are few vistas where you can see a skyline of Amsterdam approaching from the distance, but you can tell you’re getting close when you start to see wind turbines and airplanes and warehouses. While the polders and villages in the countryside are obviously beautiful, I really connected with the industrial and shipping areas, which had the smoothest cycle paths of them all. And so many enormous boats.
In America, industrial wastelands can be dirty and messy and are often littered with oily, broken-down cars and discarded machines. They feel unhealthy and unsafe to be around. But even the chemical plants and loading docks outside of Amsterdam looked clean and tidy, even a bit sterile. I knew the Dutch were good with infrastructure and logistics, but I had to see it for myself to understand how carefully planned and well-run the entire country is – with zero security guards and hardly any police presence. Heck, you can cycle up to a giant wind turbine and sit on the stairs that lead up to the turbine service door and smoke a spliff, listening to the blades turn overhead and enjoying the sunset, if you really want to.
If you’ve ever looked at a map, you know that this city is built like no other, organised in a half-circle of cascading rows of canals, but not in a neat and clean way. The building heights rarely outstrip four stories, except for the many exceptionally well-preserved churches, which dominate the view when you’re up close and look like miniature fairytale towers when seen from afar. There are so many curving alleys and tunnels and bridges that at some point you have to let go of navigation and let intuition be your guide. Amsterdam is made for wandering.
And wander I did. Every day I cycled merrily from Haarlem to Amsterdam and throughout the city, taking my hotel bicycle on ferries whenever possible. Every day I felt it a little bit stronger, that same deep-down-in-the-gut feeling that struck me when I first rolled into San Francisco 25 years earlier, a penniless university graduate with no job and few prospects, but a whole lot of potential and goodwill – plus a dash of starry-eyed naivete.
Could I live in this fairytale paradise? Is that too much to ask?
Next time… My deadline to find a job looms. If I can’t stay in Germany, where should I go? What happens then?
Love your water and infrastructure anecdotes and observations.