Pt3 - 7: 

BELGIUM

15^th July – 18^th July

 

The three hundred kilometres to Brugge took exactly three hours. We pulled into the carpark of the Hotel Lodewijk van Male at 1:30 with just over six thousand clicks on the bullet’s odometer. Concentrating on the little details was one way of managing my mental state, of imposing order on my mind. We’d driven almost the whole way in silence. Tess spent much of the time staring out the window at the dreary, built-up landscape with its endless forest of high-tension towers marching off into the distance. I was quietly angry; angry with myself for allowing us to get into such a compromising position in a public place, angry with the punks for jumping us, angry with the people who ignored us afterwards…I had trouble keeping hold of the positives; that we’d escaped serious physical harm, that our valuables were safe, that we’d travelled for one hundred and forty five days through eleven countries from Egypt to Amsterdam without mishap, that we were able to pack ourselves in the car and get out of Amsterdam without all the fuss of having to organise public transport, that we could book into a comfortable hotel to gather ourselves before crossing to England. There was actually much to be grateful for, though it just didn’t feel like it at the moment.

We holed up in room 23 for the rest of the day.

*

Tess wants to stay in bed but I can’t sit around. It feels to me like letting the punks win, I need to do something. I can’t persuade her to do a day trip back to Amsterdam to visit the Van Gogh Museum, so we agree I go solo. I think we can both use some time alone. I’m in the car at 10:15. I follow the E roads straight up to Amsterdam and arrive at a bus terminal in the southern suburbs at 1:15. By 2 I’m in the Vincent Museum. The exhibition is quite intimate and you can get up close and personal to some of the artist’s most well-known work. I love the heavy textures of his brush, especially on some of the pieces he completed while in the asylum at St Remy like Irises and Starry Night. The paint is applied with such energy and in such volume you can almost inhale it as though it were fresh. The Sunflower series is delicious and the light in the Arles canvases is seductive.

I take the long way back to Brugge; via Zandvoort, where the sea air smells like perfume after so long away from the coast; and the Hague, with all its modernist glass architecture, and Rotterdam with its bustling port and jigsaw skyline of container cranes. I pause briefly in Antwerp; it is beautiful by Belgian standards, but that’s a low bar. Brugge, on the other hand, is beautiful by any standards.

It’s last light when I pull into the carpark of the Lodo at 9:50pm.

Tess says she feels much better.

*

The old walled town of Brugge is mostly 14^th century. The narrow cobbled streets are lined with classy shops, upmarket chocolatiers and bakeries. An urban decoration we’ve enjoyed since France, colourful window boxes in full bloom, are prolific here. It is a compact town of canals, of low arched brick bridges and stone, ivy-clad buildings rising up out of the narrow waterways. A miniature, more homely Amsterdam.

We hire a horse and carriage and tour the streets for twenty minutes. The driver, a young guy in a green t-shirt with a neckerchief and a straw boater on his head, reels off a sing-song spiel as we go but we’re only half listening. I’m happiest when he’s quiet so I can enjoy the rhythmic clopping of the horse’s hooves echoing loudly off the buildings as we pass. I drift off thinking about how a medieval peasant would react if they arrived in today’s world. The speed of travel for starters – we commute at a hundred plus kilometres an hour, and that’s just to the supermarket. Mr Medieval couldn’t even conceive of such velocity. And what would he make of the zig-zag of contrails stitching up European skies? The scale and population and din of a modern city? Surely there’s a movie? I come out of my little trance just as the tour ends in the central square.

Later we take a leisurely canal cruise which enhances all the charming impressions; here is a place altogether more intimate and digestible than Amsterdam, a gem in the otherwise undistinguished Belgian crown.

After lunch we take another tour, this time to the Strasse Hendrick Brewery. This is our third tour for the day, two more than we’ve taken since the Golan Heights. We are in a zone where we don’t want to think, just follow the leader. The brewery is fun, the lady running the show very entertaining and an impressively full bottle on Australian beers. There’s even a collection of beer cans from around the world, including an Australian shelf featuring Toohey’s Old. The beer’s not bad either.

We dine in the Lodo’s restaurant and call it a day. Tomorrow we rationalise and reorganise, repack the bullet, book Le Shuttle for Folkestone, sample a few brews at the Ma Rikka Rokk Tavern and prepare to leave the continent for England.

Next week: London calling...