A tour of the Netherlands

Let me say first that I had already been to the Netherlands twice; the first time I had seen Eindhoven and Amsterdam, the second I had spent an evening in Eindhoven. I made the tour as an integral part of a wider journey that included Belgium, and Northern and Eastern Germany. Having entered the Netherlands with my Fiat Tempra from the Vaals border crossing near German Aachen, the first stop, after an overnight stay, was Giethoorn, a village of characteristic houses intersected by canals crossed by romantic wooden bridges. Having crossed the young Flevoland polder and passed over the long bridge that spans the Markermeer, I reached Enkhuizen in North Holland. A stop in the modern little town of Hoorn, in the characteristic Volendam and on the island of Marken, places that lead to a vision of a more classic Holland.

An evening in Amsterdam (a city I had been to years before) with a tour of the great Dam Square, the Red Light District, the Anne Frank House, the numerous canals and bridges. The capital of the Netherlands is very youthful and in the streets there are more bicycles than cars, also because many roads are dedicated to them. A little further away, the next day, I visited the windmills of Zaandam, where you can also go inside to uncover their secrets. Having left the urban sprawl of Amsterdam to reach the sea at Scheveningen, an important seaside resort with a big beach and a Liberty-style rotunda. A few kilometres more and I reached 's-Gravenhage, commonly known as The Hague, which although not nominally the capital of the country is so in practice, since all the institutions and the King reside here.

Having visited the historic centre with its sober Royal Palace, I then moved on to Rotterdam, a large, hyper-modern port city. After sleeping along the road, the next day I crossed the Zeeland polders, leaving the Netherlands and entering Belgium near Antwerp. This country offers interesting landscapes even just driving its roads; often the journey is interrupted because a drawbridge is raised to let boats pass on the canals. The scenery alternates very green land with waterways, pastures and villages with modern cities. For these characteristics the Netherlands deserve a visit. After this journey I returned to the Netherlands four more times, the first two as a stopover at Amsterdam Airport for a KLM flight to Cancún, Mexico, on the occasion of a trip to Central America. I was with a friend and we had set off from Rome (where we returned).

The last two times I stopped over at Amsterdam Airport to fly to South America. I was with two friends and we had set off from Rome. On the way out we stopped to sleep one night at a friend's place; she came to pick us up at the airport in her own car and the next morning we visited the school where she taught. Then, taking the ferry and the metro, we reached the airport to board a KLM flight bound for Lima, Peru. On the way back, on a flight from Guayaquil in Ecuador, we simply stopped over and then continued to Florence.