To the North, Part II

Other than seeing the Wadden Sea, the primary mission of my self-directed northern adventure was to visit the rest of the Netherlands' World Heritage sites.  All five (including the Wadden Sea) are variations on the same theme: how the Dutch fought the Sea.  The five sites were, collectively, rather anti-climatic.  (Spoiler alert: the Dutch won.)

But in the right order, they do tell the arch of the defining Dutch story.  It goes something like this:

In the beginning, there was land, and there was Sea.  And then the Sea breached the land, and the land was flooded.  This was understandably frustrating to the people who thought they lived there.  (The Wadden Sea will remain permanently stuck in this stage of the story, now that it is protected as a World Heritage site.  But no one really wants to live that far north anyway.)

At first the people tried to fight the Sea by building their houses and churches on terps (mounds of earth) and constructing sea walls and sand bars.   This was not very successful. Eventually the ingenuous Dutch realized they could use windmills to pump water up and out of low-lying land.

Thus the polders were born: land drained and kept dry by orderly systems of dikes and windmills.  The very first, Beemster Polder, was drained in 1612 (!!!), and was designated a World Heritage site a mere 387 years later.  But it is a particularly difficult site to visit because - other than the pretty lines of trees and tidy grid of roads and canals - there's not really any there there.  It's like the Greenwich, CT of Amsterdam.  (This stage in the battle between the Dutch and the Sea is much better represented by Kinderdijk.)

Although great for postcards and Dutch branding, the windmills alone were not enough. Terrible floods racked the lower Delta region of the country, while the large bay of the Zuiderzee (the "Southern Sea" that in fact lay north of Amsterdam) stubbornly ate away at the interior of the country.  In the mid-1800s, the government forced the evacuation of one large island in the Zuiderzee, Schokland, having grown tired of funding the fight for such a lost cause.

Inside Pamplona

Jeff and his Spanish brother
in old Pamplona

There's no better way to see a city than in the company of a local.  Hence our perfect day in Pamplona, spent with Jeff's childhood friend, his wife, their children, and his parents - three generations of Pamplon-ites, so warm and welcoming that I forgot at times they were speaking in Spanish (which, I should point out, I do not understand).

I'm not sure, outside the San Fermin festival (aka, the running of the bulls), that there's that much to "see" in Pamplona - Bilbao and San Sebastian are much more interesting places to spend time as a tourist.  But after walking us around the old town, our friend/inside guide shared with us three favorite spots that are worthy of note:

36 Hours in Maastricht

Saturday, 9:30 a.m. 10:30 a.m.: Introducing Maastricht

Arrive an hour late to Maastricht, the southernmost city in the Netherlands, thanks to track works that required a detour through Utrecht. Located in an isthmus of Dutch land that stretches narrowly between Germany and Belgium (like Maryland west of Cumberland), Maastricht is almost more Bavarian than Dutch, more cobblestone streets than cute canals. And most un-Dutch-like of all, it has hills. The central city, however, is flat, and your walk from the station over the St. Servaas bridge and into the heart of the old city is brief, if wet.

11:30 a.m.: St. Pietersberg Caves

The tourist activity in Maastricht is to visit the caves of St. Pietersberg, where stone marl has been mined since Roman times and more than 100 miles of tunnels stretch all the way to Belgium. The most "fun" way to reach the caves would be by boat, but in January little is discernible out of the rain-streaked and steamed-up windows. And after a 20-minute boat ride and a hike up St. Pietersberg hill, you find you have to wait for another 30 minutes in the cold drizzle for the tour to begin. You curse the marketing person who decided this gap in timing would force people to buy overpriced drinks and snacks at the adjacent cafe.

Close to 1, the friendly tour guide shows up with kerosene lanterns he hands out to the men in the group most likely to have been scouts as children. You follow him through muddy fields until he descends into a rocky crevice where there is a padlocked iron grill over a cave entrance. You huddle with the others in the dark tunnel as he padlocks the gate behind you, and as you follow him down into a labyrinth of dark and dank tunnels, your mind starts racing through horror movie plots: the satanic tour guide leads naive tourists to human sacrificial rites like lambs to the slaughter; a sudden rock slide maims the leader and leads to a cross between Alive and Lord of the Flies, culminating in blood-streaked walls and savage sacrifices; the community of rabid bat creatures that has evolved in the bowels of the caves slowly picks the tour group off one by one, turning their victims into blood sucking zombies. You are not amused when the tour guide pauses to show you a sleeping bat above your head.

But the reality of a Dutch-only tour full of eager academic types quickly stifles your cinematographic inspirations. You shift uncomfortably from foot to foot as the rest of the tour group discusses the intricacies of sawing the soft marl into blocks in olden times. As the all-Dutch discussion stretches past 15 minutes, you try to imagine what a first-rate travel writer would be noting for a future article. You decide a first-rate travel writer would not have gone on a Dutch-only tour. Your shifting increases as you try to keep the feeling in your toes.

Eventually the tour guide moves on, pausing periodically to provide more arcane details to his highly appreciative Dutch audience. You pass rows of long dark tunnels and cavernous side rooms; your attention is drawn to intricate charcoal drawings on the walls, from the fantastical to a full series of the stations of the cross leading up to a little chapel, complete with altar (perfect, you think, for dark satanic rites). You understand vaguely that locals sheltered in the caves during WWII and try to imagine entire communities bedded down in the darkness. You curse your travelling in the off-season for its lack of English-language tours. Finally you re-emerge above ground to find that it is still raining.

UNESCO World Heritage, check

I have (another) somewhat arbitrary life goal of visiting all 900+ sites on UNESCO's World Heritage list. Luxembourg has a grand total of one.

Last Saturday may have been cold, it may have been rainy, the wind may have been so strong that no umbrella could stay right side out for long, but we were not deterred: we walked every cobblestone street and every stony rampart of "The City of Luxembourg: its old quarters and fortifications".

This was no easy task: Luxembourg City was what it was (the "Gibraltar of the North") because it sits on top of a rocky promontory, surrounded on three sides by a deep river valley (we're talking a straight drop). Up, down, up, down - this is not a walking tour for the faint of heart.

Looking for a short cut.

Jeff dwarfed by one of many old gates.

But I love scrambling over rocky ruins, especially those of fortresses that are labyrinthine and terraced. We climbed up watch towers, snaked across old sentry walks, took pictures from every redoubt (don't worry, I'll spare you).

If you ever find yourself in Luxembourg, most hotels and tourist places will have brochures for two self-guided walks: The City Promenade (for the city center) and the Wenzel Walk (for the ruins of the fortress). I would more strongly recommend the latter, though the former is a nice addition (and would be even more lovely on a non-tempestuous day).


UNESCO World Heritage cite, check. Next up: watching the villagers storm the castle...