We're sinking!

The old prison at Roermond

We’re Sinking............... Into depression.

Actually, it is bloody old England that has the depression.

A mighty great low pressure weather system that is swishing cold polar air from the north over the atlantic and slam dunking it onto the north sea coast of Holland and France. And it picks up plenty of moisture on it’s travels looking for a boat yard with a Kiwi trying to get paint to stick, before it dumps it’s entire load from the leaden sky. (pun intended)

Every freaking day we leap out full of enthusiasm and the joys of European spring and get the paint and brushes and rags ready until one of us looks to the heavens and says, “was that the first drop of rain I just felt”.

The whole boatyard is fizzing and sparking from the collective frustration of not being able to paint.

Some guys lose the plot and in a fit of risky rebellion, leap out between the showers and slap the paint onto their freshly rusting hulls, but before they have finished, the heavens open up and down comes enough rain to activate pairs of animals to start their march towards any thing that looks like a boat.

The chap working four boats down from us who grinds well into the early hours of the morning has a hull so polished that it looks like stainless steel. He has everything covered with tarpaulins but still has to re- sand every inch of the steel, every day because he cannot get the paint on. He has a humidity meter hanging alongside his boat to tell him if it is dry enough to paint and so far it has not dropped below 90 percent.

He is ready to shoot himself.

Tonight he said, “I am a happily married man with four children and a beautiful house and I see myself down here under my boat every night and wonder if I am going crazy.”

He’s not going crazy because we are all feeling the same thing.

I told him that I have saved up two years of holiday pay to take this time in Holland to paint our boat and go cruising, and so far we have just scraped and sanded and run from the rain.

He didn’t feel too bad about his situation after that.

But, to be honest, we don’t feel bad about our situation here.

Yes, it would be great to have five days of good weather to get this boat painted, but we have also taken the opportunity to go and explore the area around Rotterdam and further afield.

Yesterday, it was raining cats and dogs, or as they say in France, “like a cow pissing”, so we got into our car and drove south down to Maastricht. 

Anna in the main square at Maastricht

That is a beautiful city, like the Paris of the north, set around a large river with a charming old medieval town centre.

It was a holiday weekend and the whole city was buzzing with people out on the streets having a good time.

We arrived around 5pm and tried to find a hotel room for the night, but just couldn’t find a damn thing.

Every hotel was fully booked and we finally found someone who could tell us where to look for a room on the other side of the river, near the railway station.

We were very tired and quite desperate so we grabbed the first room we found in a scruffy little hotel just a stones throw from the station.

It was terrible. All night long there was noise. Not just human noise, but for a long time there was the sound of someone dragging or pushing a camel along the corridor outside our room.

I didn’t want to open the door and be a witness to some gruesome ceremony so I stayed with the pillow over my head until morning.

When we finally ventured out to visit the toilet down the hall, the whole place stank as though a human, or perhaps a camel had used the hallway for their number two’s.

I have no idea what went on in that hallway overnight, but that was definitely one of the worst nights sleep we have ever had and we paid 65 Euro for the pleasure.

This did not really put a damper on the visit to Maastricht. It is a beautiful city which has a feel unlike any other Dutch city. One person here summed it up when he said that, “people down there like to relax at the end of the day, unlike the rest of us”. We certainly got that feeling. 

OK, so this is not exactly typical, but........

It felt almost like Bayonne in the south of France or even like Saint Sebastian in Spain, where all the residents come down from their apartments at the end of the day and gather around the bars and cafes and talk, eat and drink.

 It had a very happy feel to the place and we wanted to be a part of it but the hotel we had was really on the wrong side of town so we just had to make our own fun, which basically entailed skyping friends and family back home with the free wifi and hiding from imaginary ceremonial killers.

We had a lovely French breakfast at a cafe around the town square and then drove the two and a half hours back across Holland to our boat, where, the very second we started preparing for painting, it rained.

You can’t beat it, so we just have to accept it.

Meanwhile we find our neighbour, Hans, lying in his main salon of his boat in a terrible amount of pain.

Hans in his directors chair complete with broken foot,
but undaunted.

He had been out dancing last night and had broken a bone in his foot.

Yes he has been to a doctor, who has given him pain medication which he hasn’t taken, and he hasn’t slept all night because of the pain.

“This is nothing”, he tells us, “last year I broke my leg while transporting my nine month pregnant girlfriend, (it was not his baby) on the carrier of my bike to the doctor in Brielle. 
I hit a patch of gravel and the bike went one way and we went the other way and she came down on my leg and it broke above the ankle.”

He didn’t mention it to the doctor, but had to go back a week later when it had swollen up so badly he could not walk.

“Yes”, said the doctor, “it is broken badly but has started to heal, so you must go into hospital to have it broken again and re-set in the correct place.” 

“Like hell”, said Hans, “I’m not going to let them break my leg again”.

So he lifts up the leg of his jeans and shows the rakish angle that his left leg has above the ankle.

Later on today when the sun is finally going down and we have finished scraping paint from the rub strip around our boat, Hans comes past on a bike, with his bad leg held high in the air pushing himself along with his good leg like a child on a scooter.

“Where on earth are you going?” we shout and he waves his walking stick at us like Merlin the magician and shouts back, “I’m off to help a friend whose partner was killed in a tragic accident”.

Good thing we gave him a hot meal and a glass of wine before he went, because, I don’t know if he will make it and that may well be his last supper.

Tomorrow, will hopefully bring a short lived change to the weather and the whole boatyard will be alive with the sound of people painting boats. 

Either that, or we may hear the sound of shotguns going off.

Quick update............ All is well with the world.

The day dawned bright and blue and there are smiles everywhere and the sound of paintbrushes swishing and someone nearby singing Italian opera while he paints.

After weeks of grinding steel, our neighbour
is finally happy to be painting.

All is forgiven.

We managed a full undercoat today on our hull, so the boat now looks like a NZ Navy launch from WW2, Navy grey! There are some ironies in this life.

Hans

Let me try and describe our neighbour in this Dutch boatyard.

To start with, his name is Hans and he was born in a little grey brick house beside the canal in the nearby village of Breille. He pointed it out to us as we were walking beside the canal, him wearing slippers and carrying half a dozen of the finest artists paint brushes in his hands.

He knows every inch of the surrounding countryside, covering much of it daily on his pushbike and also knows most if not all of the people who live and work here. They certainly all know him.

He’s a painter by trade and has painted many of the houses in Brielle and the handful of other villages within cycling distance, but he’s also an artist and a sign writer.

His speciality is creating reproduction wood or marble panelling on any surface you can imagine, apparently this is a tradition in Holland, and it’s very convincing.

We stayed in a little hotel in Brielle for ten days and it took me quite a while to discover that the beautiful bur walnut and mahogany panelling that gave the place it’s rich ancient atmosphere, was all done by paint.

His sign writing and restoration work can be seen all around the district, he is prolific in his work.

He can, and often does work 48 hours non stop, eating fifteen sandwiches a day to keep him going. 

He’s as thin as a rake, wiry and fit and at 58 years old can still leap high into the air and land neatly in a cross legged squat.

With his long grey hair and his Van Gogh beard, he talks constantly, or sings while he’s working and has half a dozen languages to voice opinions in.

He really could have stepped straight out of the 18th century, taking a break from painting one of those classic Dutch master paintings this landscape inspires.

He’s well informed about most things in life but you get feeling that he left school at an early age and his education has come from life.

His father was a painter before him, and he recently discovered a couple of his landscapes for sale in an art shop, so he bought them on the spot. 

Money seems to mean very little to him, sometimes he has none at all, and other times when the work is good he can earn large amounts in a short time but his reputation for generosity ensures it doesn’t last long.

Hans is one of those people that the universe seems to look after and that old saying, “what comes around goes around”, really should apply.

He does not count the cost in friendships and as a result is probably taken advantage of most of the time, like the people in the boatyard who just want to borrow some tools for five minutes and two months later after he has been out and bought replacements, they still have them.

He remains undaunted though and is always positive and full of energy and excitement for what ever he is doing.

He is a great inspiration for really living life fully and using your God given talents to the maximum. 

You can find him easily by just asking anyone in this part of Holland, “Where’s Hans, the painter”. 

If he’s not frantically painting reproduction wood panelling or restoring 400 year old boards in the local cathedral, then he’s in his boat living down in the canal just along from the house he was born in.

Like Gandalf the magician, Hans and Anna.

To Antwerpen, in the rain.

Let’s go to Belgium for lunch.

How often do you get to say that?

We got up this morning and were simply too stuffed to do any more sanding, scraping and painting, so we went to Belgium for lunch.

The square in the Grote Markt, Antwerpen. 

Antwerpen to be precise. To the Grote Markt which surrounds the 1352 gothic cathedral and contains the 16th century Stadhuis (town hall) and a pretty impressive central square surrounded by restaurants and sidewalk cafes.

Unfortunately, as it does often in this country, it rained, which put a damper on the sidewalk cafes, but the restaurants were still doing a roaring trade.

We dined in one facing the statue and fountain of the Roman soldier Silvius Brabo throwing the hand of a giant into the nearby river Scheldt. Whatever blows your hair back!

The procession of people outside in the square was bizarre and hilarious. 

There was a human train of old people following their guide who was holding up a sign with number 17 written on it while giving a non stop commentary in four different languages, and the Germans in funny helmets who looked like they had just been climbing the Matterhorn but were actually part of a guided tour on segway  wierdo electric mono cycles.

The tomato soup followed by steak and chips for 9.50 Euro each was just perfect and sitting looking out on this ancient town square watching the tourists take endless photos of themselves in slightly different geographical locations made us think about being tourists.

They are people with no status in life, other than to be milked of as much money as possible with the minimum of commitment possible.

We were tourists today and we did not really enjoy that feeling.

Back in Holland, we are an accepted part of a community. People know us by name, they greet us with genuine smiles and want to know how our progress is. We share a common interest and a have developed a bond that exists between friends. We share coffee and food with people with no thought of a bill at the end.

Tourists just pass through a place  contributing nothing but their foreign currency buying the overpriced trinkets. And yes we bough some of those overpriced trinkets too. It’s hard not to when you are a tourist.

Antwerpen has a very pretty town centre and it was a lovely place to be, even in the rain, but we decided not to check into a hotel for the night and instead drove back over the fields of Flanders to Holland and our boat.

Nice to have been there, but we definitely prefer Holland to Belgium. They are just not neat enough over there. The bar has been lifted!

Walk in the forest

Utrecht, actually Bilthoven where Anita lives.

The weather was crap, we were feeling really tired and it seemed like a good idea to take a drive north across Holland to the little town of Bilthoven near Utrecht and pay a visit to our old friend (who is actually not all that old) Anita Gude.

Anita plays viola for the Dutch ballet orchestra and we originally met her when we enrolled our two girls in the Wellington saturday music school, so that they could become future virtuoso musicians just like the hundred or so other eight year olds who were there escorted by their doting parents.

Anita did her best to teach violin to Sarah, the friendship blossomed, unlike the music and we have managed to keep in touch for all these years.

Anita lives in a huge apartment building set in the middle of a forest. It is actually a converted old peoples home in it’s own beautifully kept grounds and she has an attic apartment on the fifth floor with a view of the squirrels in the surrounding trees. (Our first sighting of a squirrel).

This whole area is absolutely stunning with unbelievably beautiful houses complete with thatched roofs dotted around amongst the mature forest.

The Dutch royal family live in this region and one of the Royal residence is just down the road.

We walked through deciduous forests with the blush of spring green airbrushed through their winter branches and saw our second squirrel, known to the Dutch as an “acorn”.

We had lunch in a restaurant that was once a railway station for the Royal family, (yes I asked the same question, “why did the royal family have to catch trains?”) and spent the night at Anita’s apartment.

Organic farm we visited

She really is one of this worlds truly sweet people and anyone who can get to Amsterdam during May to see her perform for the ballet “Giselle” would be in for a real treat. Go there people!

The hills of Holland

“Look at those black lambs on that hillside,” said Anna as we were driving from our hotel to the boat today.

“I think you are making a mountain out of a mole hill,” says I, as we pass by a stop bank, or perhaps a Dyke, but whatever it is, it is the only raised piece of land visible in this 360 degree horizon of flat landscape. 

The sky is huge and we can see the paintings of the dutch masters in it. 

The clouds are always changing and the light is theatrical. It’s as if God is doing the lighting and he’s having fun with it. (As if?) (And He?) 

Anyway, Anna realised the absurdity of her observation almost immediately. 

“There are no hills in Holland,” she said.

Dead right. The place is as flat as........ well flat! 

There is no other word to describe it.

If you were an ant in the middle of a bowling green, you would think you had been teleported to Holland.

Today was all work, no play. 

That is bottom grinding, not quite as romantic as it sounds!

Is this a holiday?

No.

Not today.

This is what you do when you have an old boat out on the hard, anywhere in the world.

You just have to get on with it.

There are no easy options.

A few more days of hard grinding should see us nearing the end.

Anna just wants to be painting water colour landscapes, but for now, she is painting the bottom of the boat and the toilet room. 

That paintbrush is what they all use over here.
It resembles a shaving brush.
Weird?     Yes.

Not quite what she had in mind.

Here are a few more images of the mess that is our boat.

Chief fire officer, Poppa with bucket of water and extinguisher in hand during welding.
The boat was filling up with smoke and had pretty little fires burning in the bilges.

Anna with the flu, resting between jobs.
Note the very attractive blanket!

De-construction before re-construction.
This is what the inside of boats look like while you are working on them.

One of our neighbours, a Coot. A very cute coot.
Made it's nest on the boarding platform of a flash launch.

Beautiful Brielle

Poor Anna.

She has the flu. Fevers, headache, full on ear nose and throat congestion, and body aches. Probably caught it on the flight over here.

Yesterday wasn’t conducive to boat work, it was cold and raining so we just did a lot of sorting out and throwing away, then went to a great shopping complex in Spijkenisse, a town quite close to our boat and bought some of the essentials to make our boat home.

A beautiful spring afternoon in Brielle

The people over here could not be more friendly or helpful, they really are fantastic. 

Nearly everyone speaks at least three or four languages fluently and they all seem so confident and easy in their culture, however it did take me quite a while to log on to the hotel wifi when the concierge told me the password was “Phyllis”.  

It was actually “Village”, so there is sometimes a little lost in translation.

The village we are staying in, Brielle, is a medieval village that first gained it’s city rights in 1306.

It is very quaint, completely surrounded by canals and has narrow cobbled streets and old brick buildings. 

On the first of April they have a huge festival with an authentic re-enactment of the battle of 1572 when the inhabitants were joined by Dutch pirates to overthrow the Spanish invaders and re-claim their town.

The hotel concierge is very proud of his role in the battle, he plays a Spaniard.

Have a look on google maps at Brielle and you will see that it is a fortified town surrounded by canals.

Street scene in Brielle

We are loving it here, especially now the Tamiflu has kicked in and Anna is on the recovery.

And the welding has been done today on our boat so we have to pull finger tomorrow and start working on the bottom (of the boat)

We are enjoying the start of spring and have seen the flowers unfolding before our eyes. 

Today was a real taste of things to come and we should be starting to feel the warmth of the sun  in the next few days.

I love the architecture of these houses.

On the edge of the North Sea, Anna in the grass.

We are here!

In Holland. In a little village called Brielle, which if you google map it, looks like an island.

It is very cute looking out of our hotel window with paved narrow streets and Dutch brick buildings. Funny that, being surprised to find Dutch brick buildings in Holland, but they are so different from the brick buildings in New Zealand. I know it’s corny, but here is the picture outside our hotel room.

The main street of Brielle taken from our hotel room. 
Very pretty and very Dutch.

We picked up a brand new Peugeot 308  from Europcar at Schiphol airport and managed to slip back into driving on the wrong side of the road,  fortunately because we had an hours driving through fast busy traffic to get south of Amsterdam down to Rotterdam and out to this pretty little village.

We are both pretty exhausted after the two back to back 12 hour flights and take my advice, you don’t want to visit Shanghai, unless you really want to see why we need to hang on in desperation to the much maligned Resource Management Act that so many Kiwi developers bad mouth at every opportunity. 

China should be a compulsory case study for anyone in business in New Zealand. It has the appearance of unbridled exploitation with the evidence of environmental destruction stretching to the horizon in every direction.

The airport feels exactly like that of a country that has lurched from the peasant era into the 21st century where, despite the presence of technology, everything had to be done by hand over and over again by so many people, all dressed in suits from the 1970’s.

It really was a relief to be taking off in a KLM 747 and experiencing food that put Air NZ to shame. They really need to step up to the plate (pun intended) and stop trying to save cents in areas that really matter to the customers.

We were charged an extra US$100 by the Chinese baggage handlers, a fee we had already paid in Auckland to cover the whole flight, but it is no use trying to argue, so we coughed up and were just glad to get out of there.

Schiphol airport is wonderfully efficient, friendly and urbane, and we probably stood out as travelers from the back blocks but what the heck, we will scrub up later and blend in with this well dressed crowd. Might need a shopping trip to the local C&A’s though.

We are both keen to get out and drive to the marina down the road near Oostvoorne and see our boat, which for Anna will be the first time.

How exciting.