(Netherlands)…Realising the road had run out and that I had no choice but to put my car on a ferry filled me with more joy that it should have done. I could see that I had just missed it as well, but the river was not so wide, and it was due back in 15 minutes. When it returned, the captain threw down a small ramp, and after two cars drove off, three cars and two bikes got on. I sat on a balcony (no more than five steps leading to a thin walkway) and saw the hamlet of Kop van t’ Land get smaller behind me and the marsh of Die Biesbosch loom larger ahead, leaving the province of Zuid-Holland and arriving in Noord-Barbant. The river was the Nieuwe Merwede, and I was in the Netherlands. I had traveled to the Netherlands (to be precise, to Rotterdam) from Southampton, England, aboard the new MV Eurodam, the newest ship in the Holland America Line. This was my first real experience on a cruise liner, and it was an enjoyable one. Some people I spoke to on board where cruise ship-groupies, and I enjoyed their enthusiasm, although not fully sharing in it myself. My posts might suggest that I am someone who would not want to be restricted in a cabin. 
The Die Biesbosch marsh is a wonder, and immediately I was rewarded by seeing my first ever Common spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia), a bird that is not at all common in the United Kingdom. I spoke to one Dutch birder who told me that he had heard that morning a Golden oriole (Oriolus oriolus) and seen a White-spotted bluethroat (Luscinia svecica cyanecula). Intoxicating were the long, thin, straight Dutch roads through avenues of poplars and the subtle but invigorating rolling of the countryside that is broken once in a while by a windmill. I was reading Cees Nooteboom’s so-so novel In the Dutch Mountains, and the irony of that title (although I have not been to Maastricht in the Netherlands’ south, and they do say there are at least some hills there; plus the title of the novel was an invention for the English translation, for the original version goes by In Nederland) was apparent. 
I soon reached the town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which is famous for its small system of canals, neat houses and restaurants, impressive Sint-Janskathedraal (St. John’s) Cathedral and being the birthplace and workshop of that Medieval portrayer of the woes of Purgatory, Hieronymus Bosch, who in 1463 witnessed a devastating fire in Den Bosch (as it is known) that destroyed it and might have led to his choice of artistic subject matter. It is a pleasant place, and for lunch I ate the traditional raw herring, holding the salted fish by the tail and eating it from the head down with a spoonful of diced onion. My next stop was to the enclave of Baarle-Hertog. This is a piece of Belgium completely surrounded by the Netherlands.
I adore visiting these geographical oddities. It is small, but two or three bars with outdoor seating border a busy junction, and it is enjoyable to sit there. Much is made of the strange nature of this place, and a broken line goes right through the middle of one restaurant, so that it is possible to have your coffee in the Netherlands and your croissants in Belgium (or would that be better, gastronomically, the other way around?). Actually, to say that this Belgian village is completely surrounded is not true. Within the main section of this Belgian enclave are six pieces of the Netherlands, while its other main chunk has one Dutch piece in it; then again, there are 14 minute pieces of Belgium also dotted amid the Dutch soil, which collectively is called Baarle-Nassau. Residents pay taxes dependent on where their front door is, so the position of doors constantly is changing from town to town without actually changing house.
This all came about following years of regional warfare and the 1843 Treaty of Maastricht, which attempted to resolve all that and that secured the boundaries of the Netherlands and Belgium following Belgian independence from its neighbour in 1831. That obviously did not work absolutely everywhere. A further attempt was made in 1875 to settle the issue of this fractional enclave, but the governments of the two countries refused to recognise any findings; in 1996, one more attempt was made, but by then everyone realised that it was better to let the tourists revel in the historical oddity. One more wonderful find—back in the Netherlands, but very close to Belgium—I made was the small town of Wouw, which I stopped at solely because I like the look of its name on a road sign. I am so glad I did. It has a neat central, grassy square with a white restaurant at one end and a huge church that appears much larger if viewed from a cobbled entry lane of trees.
A local spoke to me—he said they got few visitors—of the German bombing it received at the end of World War II. “That building went, as did that one, and that one over there. Also that one, too,” he said, as though everyone in town knew of every atrocity dumped on it. In turn, I told him of how my infant mother went for a walk with her parents and sisters in the early 1940s in southeast England, only to hear the sirens warning of German attack and hide in a bomb shelter. When they returned, their house in Barnehurst had been destroyed, resulting in them moving to the house in Crayford that I knew when I was born and which my grandmother lived in the rest of her life.
I particularly liked a frieze of Noah’s Arc atop one house. One building in Wouw rebuilt since those dark days used to be a brewery, and today a sculpture of a swan holding in its beak a gold star (the former brewery’s symbol) graced the roof and a line of old bottles found on site had been plastered into a wall.