The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

In the two and a half years or so that I have been living in Amsterdam, I have naturally collected quite a lot of things. It’s strange to think that I came here with only the things I could carry all that time ago.

With going travelling, the problem of what to do with it, and Astrid’s stuff too, has of course arisen. The most sensible thing seemed to be to put everything in storage somewhere, and after some searching I was able to find a company with fairly reasonable prices, and who would better yet pick up our stuff for free.

The condition attached to this offer was that everything needed to be packed up and sitting on the pavement at 8.30 this morning, and needed to be in the van in half an hour. Also, they were not willing to make two stops, so we first had to get everything together in one place at my studio.

This was where things went a bit wrong. The idea was that Astrid would hire a bakfiets yesterday and move everything to mine while I packed up my own stuff, but she fell ill yesterday morning. The storage company were not willing to shift the appointment, and so I had to move all Astrid’s things. This left no time to pack my own, meaning that I spent all night doing it instead and consequently got only an hour and a half sleep. Not the best start to a day of moving.

Daniëlle kindly came to help us with th moving, which turned into quite a dangerous business of dodging bikes, trams, and cars on the Kinkerstraat whilst lugging heavy boxes and suchlike at a frantic pace. Finally though it was all in the van, on time, and we were able to set off for ’s-Graveland, the middle-of-nowhere location of the storage company.

Getting everything into the space available was actually a bit easier than expected, and in fact we were able to hire a smaller (and thus cheaper) space than we had planned. So, the first thing about this trip which has cost less than expected.

By this time I was about ready to fall asleep on the floor, but that was not to be just yet. The woman in the office filling out our contract was new in the job and got just about everything wrong, making the whole process seem to drag on forever. But eventually it was done, and our stuff is safe until we return.

In the evening we made a trip to a travel bookshop on the Overtoom. Here we bought maps for (almost) the whole route to Hong Kong; another larger outlay of money, of course. Also, I can imagine things getting a bit trickier later on, since the quality of maps for Kazakhstan |eaves a bit to be desired. Time to learn the Russian alphabet, perhaps.

After ten days of waiting, I was able to pick up our passports today, which have been away getting visas for Russia. There was a bit of uncertainty about whether it would all work out OK, since we are applying much earlier than is usually allowed. This was because we wanted to have it sorted before leaving the Netherlands (Russia is the first country for which we will need visas).

Sigh of relief, it was нет проблем – here it is.

It has been a very busy time for me lately, with preparations for the trip but also with other things besides. This busyness has prevented me from writing much about these things here, and so I will first have to do some explaining.

I was invited recently by occasional DAI guest tutor and organiser Alite Thijsen to participate in an exhibition in March in “het Glazen Huis” in the Amstelpark. It’s a gallery space located in a glass box in the middle of the park, and the theme of the show was to be the park itself.

To this end I have been busy working on some new works which I would like to show. The first is a video shot hand-held while walking through the park, accompanied by a forest soundscape: the idea is that you don’t notice immediately that the two do not belong together.

Secondly, I am making a series of small models of the various structures in the park, which will be presented in one or more “kijkdozen” – something like the shoebox constructions which children make with a wee hole in the end to see inside.

We, myself and the other participants, had made a collective funding application to the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, an organisation which sponsors artistic projects in the city. This involved each artist submitting a written proposal, as well as an application form, which was filled in by Alite and Anna. The last stage of the process was attendance at a meeting at the offices of the Fonds, certainly a scary experience for me at least.

When we had spent a half hour or so explaining ourselves, the pair interviewing us thanked us and said that we would hear their decision the following day and… we got it! Yes, that’s right, real money. I must also say that as far as I am concerned, it means a lot more than just the cash: it is about getting a certain sort of recognition that what you are doing is up to scratch, that someone in a position of power thinks it’s worth supporting. I am much more sensitive than I should be to the approval or disapproval of others, and this sort of thing helps my self-confidence a lot. Of course, there are four other artists involved, so well done to them too. Others worked much harder than I did.

Back to the big journey, and some complications. We have finally got round to dealing with visas for Russia and Kazakhstan, a process which is none too simple. It is only possible to get a one-month visa for both countries. This should not be a problem for Russia because we are crossing a relatively short section of the country, but we had hoped to spend three months crossing Kazakhstan. I’ve managed to make contact with a tour operator in the country itself who should be able to send us an official “invitation” so as to be able to obtain a three-month business visa, but of course this will cost money and seems a bit dodgy to me. I mean, we are not going to look very businesslike on our bikes. But there seems no other option, so we’ll have to give it a go.

One very annoying thing about the Russian visa is that, since I live here but have a British passport, I needed to get a “uittreksel” from the municipality to confirm that I live here. Normally this would mean a quick trip down the road, but myself and Astrid have just changed our addresses so that we officially live in her sister’s house. This is because we will obviously have no address in Amsterdam while we are away, and many beaurocratic things  become very difficult in the Netherlands if you do not live somewhere.

The problem with this is that to get the uittreksel, I needed to go to the offices of the municipality where we now “live”. This meant a four-hour return journey this morning for an A4 sheet of paper, which incidentally also cost almost €10. Just the sort of waste of time and money I could do without right now.

Things started out pretty badly on Tuesday morning, I must first of all admit. Having only picked up the brand-new bikes yesterday, we had spent the rest of the day getting everything ready, and had only got to bed at about 1.30am. The train that was supposed to take us to Cologne and the start of our three-day test cycle trip left at 7 o’clock this morning, meaning that to be on time we had just four hours sleep.

I had booked the train tickets in a hurry a few weeks ago so as to be able to get them cheaper, and for some reason had forgot to check if it was possible to take bikes on the train. Well, it wasn’t – such was the blunt answer I received from the woman at the international reservations desk at Amsterdam Centraal. Not only that, but because I had bought discount tickets, it was impossible to change the the booking. So, €95 down the drain then. I am sorry to admit that I flew into quite a rage at this (or to be more honest, with my own stupidity) and smashed the little bicycle light that happened to be in my hand down into pieces on the floor of the ticket hall – it wasn’t its fault – and stormed out.

When I had calmed down a bit we made a new plan. Instead of buying new and expensive tickets to Cologne, we would instead go only as far as Nijmegen and cycle from there. This would make the trip almost three times as long, but it least it would give us a proper test before the big departure next month. Also, we would be starting in the Netherlands and crossing the border into Germany, which would make it a real foreign adventure.

It was still only 7.30am and you cannae travel on Dutch trains with a bike before 9am, so we took the time to get a coffee and something to eat in a little café on the Spuistraat. This did wonders for restoring some calmness. Must visit this little place more often.

With this delay, others besides, and the journey to Nijmegen, it was about 12.30 before we were finally in the saddle. The new bikes, each fully loaded with no less than five large waterproof panniers and various other things strapped on top, took a bit of getting used to. The actual cycling goes pretty easily, but steering is a bit like trying to move a shopping trolley – it takes quite a shove and the effect is not instant. By the time we had covered the last few kilometres of the Netherlands and crossed into Germany, I had sort of got the hang of it thankfully.

It turned into a pure manky day – snow, rain, wind, and hale. Really a chucking-in at the deep end. The flat, dull monotony of the landscape in this part of Germany is really not my cup of tea either – it’s nothing but enormous crop fields, motorways, wind farms, and featureless villages. This at least gives the motivation to cycle as quickly as possible so as to get away from it.

We decided to call it a day and set up the tent before it got dark, having managed only 60km. In fact, our inexperience and the strange way in which places seem to be signposted here meant that we were only about 30km from Nijmegen. This along with the fact that my hands and feet were so wet and cold I could hardly feel them did nothing to lighten the depressing mood.

The spot we chose to camp was at the edge of a windswept field, leading to quite a struggle to get the tent firmly fixed to the ground – aforementioned fingers like frozen coo’s tits not helping of course. As we struggled with this, a man pulled up in a huge Range Rover. Thankfully it was not the angry farmer telling us to fuck off, but a curious Dutchman who happened to live in the area. Naturally he had to stick his nose in and tell us that we should be putting up the tent in a different manner (all the time sitting cosily in his 4×4 beast). I thanked him as politely as I could manage for his helpful advice and turned back to the task at hand.

It was a freezing cold first night in the tent, and definitely one which pushed the capabilities of our new sleeping bags a bit further than they (or we) seemed able to deal with. I can only hope that it will have warmed up a bit before we depart in March.

The lack of sleep from the previous night, the stress at the railway station, the wind, the cold, and all that cycling without getting very far was beginning to take its toll. We fell asleep without even managing to cook dinner, and got up about 14 hours later on Wednesday morning.

Properly rested, with some hot food in the belly, and with clearer skies, things looked a little better. The lack of progress the day before meant that about 250km would need to covered in the oncoming two days, which is about twice the daily distance that I had reckoned upon for the big journey. And of course, we’ve not been in training.

Setting yourself unrealistic goals has the downside that you will rarely reach them, but it does also push you that bit harder than you would really think possible. We managed 105km that day, and with much fewer wrong turnings than on Tuesday; this meant that when we were finally wrapped up warm having set up the tent in pitch darkness (no pun intended), the idea of reaching Höhr-Grenzhausen (the town near Koblenz in which Dagmar and Helge live) seemed to be not so impossible after all – except that the last day would mean covering no less than 130km. At least there would be a warm bed at the end.

Firstly, a little about day two. We set a good pace in the morning before stopping in the town of Kempen for delicious cake and coffee, that day’s installment of the daily indulgence that we had promised ourselves. Later we continued south into the industrial heartland of Germany, steering a course between the cities of Mönchengladbach, Krefeld, and Düsseldorf before finally stopping near Rommerskirchen on the outskirts of Cologne (where we had planned to arrive almost two days earlier…). As mentioned, it was almost completely dark at this point. However, the night sky to west was lit up with a fiery orange glow from the cooling towers of an enormous power station. Very dramatic. It turned out later that the seemingly quiet spot we had found to camp was right next to the railway line supplying coal for the same, as we were shaken out of our wits by the thundering clatter of a freight train shortly after. Thankfully this did not continue all night.

Starting out at 8.30am on Thursday, much earlier than the previous two days, we attempted to make the best of the good German roads and the clear, crisp weather. At this point the landscape started to become very slightly less flat than during the earlier days, but not enough to cause much trouble.

Four hours and endless kilometres of dull industrial landscape later, we arrived in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany and the only large city directly on our root. I can’t say I was immediately charmed by the place, but then you have to feel sorry for a city which has had such an honour stripped away from it. We had delicious coffee and cake once again, though – although I suspect that anything tastes good after so long cycling in the cold.

Almost immediately upon leaving Bonn, we reached the west bank of the Rhine, along which we could cycle as far as Weißenthurm, just before Koblenz. All at once the landscape became much bonnier, with fields of wine grapes on the slopes rising up from the opposite bank, here and there a castle or two, and kitschy villages with Gothic-styled inns. The cycle path along the river free of traffic lights, trucks, and other such obstacles meant that the kilometres were soon flying by.

Then something quite strange happened. The weather, which had been alternating between clear and light show showers all day, suddenly changed from bright sunshine into a heavy hale storm and then snow, quickly covering the whole landscape in a thick layer of white. We were wrapped up warm enough that it was still fine to cycle through, but quite unexpected all the same.

After getting lost a bit in search of the only bridge over the Rhine in the area, we stopped to cook some dinner in a bus shelter. No-one seemed to pay any attention to me, kneeled on the ground attempting to light our petrol-burning stove. But then people here do seem in general to be a bit less prone to interfering with other people’s business. For example, aside from the Dutchman in the Range Rover, no-one bothered us at all while camping (contrast with the experience of several months ago in Soest).

Energised a bit, we set off across the enormous suspension bridge over the Rhine. This was quite a terrifying experience in the dark and driving snow, especially since we had somehow failed to find the cycle path and had instead ended up on the main road with huge trucks thundering past and with no way to turn back. Made it to the other side and the town of Neuwied in one piece, though.

Höhr-Grenzhausen seemed so close on the map, but we were not there yet. By this time both my knees were killing me, we had been about 11 hours on the road, and there was a bit more getting lost to be done before finally seeing the first sign which read “Höhr-Grenzhausen, 8km”. At this I let up a pent-up cry of joy – we were nearly there.

Unfortunately, those were eight very long kilometres, since we had to climb in the lowest gear almost all the way. My big, sturdy touring bike loaded with stuff had not felt all that heavy before now, but this new obstacle was really tortuous. All the time I kept telling myself that this is all fantastic good practice for the future, but it’s hard to take any comfort from that at the time.

Finally we reached Höhr-Grenzhausen, and after getting off and pushing the last few hundred metres (the last hill was just too steep) we finally reached Dagmar and Helge’s cosy house at 10pm – thirteen and a half hours and 135km from where we had set off in the morning. I am not ashamed to admit that I was quite proud about all this.

So, mission accomplished, and a big test before the great journey passed. Not only that, but the trip served its purpose of giving us a good idea of what extra thing we will need, and what was in fact unnecessary. And to test all our new stuff – for example, it turns out my new Gore-Tex shoes are not really waterproof at all. Just a month to go and we’re off for real!

My digital camera is knackered and I do not yet have a new one, hence the lack of pretty pictures.

They have finally arrived!

Today we went to pick up our brand new bicycles from the Vakantiefietser. At last, we could get a proper look at what about €1700 gets you in the way of a bicycle. Yes, it’s an enormous amount of money, and in fact probably more than I have ever spent on anything, but it should be worth every cent once on the road to China. Eric, the owner of the shop, was careful to take the time to explain everything about keeping the bikes in good shape. Needless to say though, al I wanted to do was get on the saddle and get going. Tomorrow we set off for Germany for a little test journey, which will see to that.

Since we will be shortly heading off into the wilds of eastern Europe and Asia, it is necessary that we get innoculated against a range of terrifying diseases. To this end we had an appointment this morning at the LUMC in Leiden, which is apparently well known among cyclists as the place to go for this sort of thing.

The doctor who we spoke to began by asking where exactly we were going, and this is when things became a wee bit complicated. Because we will travel through so many countries and climates, there ends up being quite a lot of things that we could fall victim to. What makes the whole thing irritating as much as frightening is that it is of course not possible to do it all in one visit, or even in a couple; we need to be injected a total of four times over the course of a month and a half to receive adequate protection. Here is what is on the menu:

• Typhoid fever
• Tetanus
• Polio
• Diptheria
• Rabies – unfortunately the vaccine doesn’t actually prevent this but gives you a bit more time to get to the hospital if attacked by a mad dog, etc.
• Hepatitis A
• Hepatitis B
• Frühsommer-Meningoenzephalitis (FSME) – Never heard of this one before, but it’s a horrible virus that you can get from ticks and which will cause your brain to swell up and possibly kill you.

So after all that I guess you are as good as invincible. Of course, it’s important to put things into perspective – you can get innoculated against everything under the sun, but it won’t help much if you break your leg or get run over by a car. Life is full of risks, whether at home inside or on the road in the middle of China.

After yesterday’s unpleasant end to the afternoon at the Vakantiefietser, I returned today with a clearer head about the bicycle that I wanted, and also to talk things over with the guy in the shop. I didn’t want to get in any kind of argument with him, but rather just make it clear that I was not happy with how things went yesterday. It seemed that this was preferable to just letting it fester. In any case, he will lose a lot of sales if he keeps going this way.

I am really not very good at this sort of difficult situation, but it turned out fairly amicably. I explained that I was quite upset, he apologised, and hopefully that will be the end of the matter. And in about six weeks time, I should have my new bike!

After our visit to check out bikes at the Vakantiefietser last week, the time had come to finally take the plunge and order some bikes. This is it now – money is being spent, and the trip has taken a step closer to reality.

The first thing to do was to go for a test ride on a variety of different bikes. I must say that it was really enjoyable to have a shot on a decent bike, being so used as I am to crappy bikes thrown together from parts of other ones which were beyond repair. Well, I should hope so, seeing that there’s not too much change out of €2000 for each of these beasts!

As I cycled round the roads and tracks near the Westergasfabriek, I really felt that I could keep going for ever on one of these, it was such a pleasure to be on. Whether I will still feel like that after ten months on the road is a different story.

Later, back at the shop, we got measured up and began discussing options and so on – it seems that every part of a bicycle in available in at least three different types. It was about this point that I felt myself beginning to suffer from information overload, and also that things went a bit sour.

I explained to the guy that was helping us that although I was definitely going to order a bicycle, I would quite like to think everything over for a bit, sleep on it, and come back tomorrow with my final decision. Upon hearing this, he got a bit upset and started acting, in my opinion, quite childishly.

He started making this over-dramatic show of making sure that I could not see my frame measurements (lest I go elsewhere and buy a bike, presumably), and basically just making me feel very uncomfortable indeed. I of course felt myself getting quite angry about this, and thus in even less of a position to make decisions about what to buy. Goddamit, I’m spending a fuck of a lot of money, and I need to be sure that I am doing it right!

The whole thing left quite a bad taste in my mouth, when I should have been super-happy about ordering my brand new bike. I will need to go back tomorrow and try to sort things out.

The plan to cycle to China is getting a bit more real these days, and so certain unavoidable things need to be addressed – amongst which is that we will need to get some shit-hot bikes.

There is a shop in Amsterdam especially for this type of thing, The Vakantiefietser, to which we made a visit this morning. They were very friendly and seemed bursting with information about what was available, affordable, and suitable for our journey.

Next week, we will hopefully come back and order some bikes!

I can’t remember if I have mentioned it here before, but in any case I will do so again now. Myself and Astrid have been discussing a gigantic plan – no, we’re not getting married, but instead something far more exciting. It was her idea originally, but the more I have thought about it, the more it appeals to me too.

The plan is to go cycling next year. I am not talking about a day trip here, or even a week away, but something much more ambitious. The plan is to set off from Holland, travel through Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and China, perhaps finishing in Hong Kong or if possible in Taiwan.

There is a lot of things still to be sorted before we can be certain about this trip. First of all money, then visas, various other preparations, vaccinations, and things we haven’t even thought of yet. As I know more, I will write it here.

Astrid has been doing most of the research up until now, and via a string of communication had made contact with a couple living in Utrecht, who are experienced “world cyclists” and who were happy to talk to us and pass on their knowledge. Therefore, we made an appointment to go and see them yesterday evening.

They were very friendly and helpful and seemed extremely eager to share their knowledge and experiences, which as well and being interesting and useful also served the purpose of making the whole thing a lot more concrete in my head. To hear from people who have cycled through Iran, Kyrgyzstan, various other “stans” and who have come back to tell the tale makes it seem so much more doable and realistic, and thus easier to get enthusiastic about.

So, a very enjoyable and productive evening. The only downside was that having not really kept an eye on the time, I ended up missing the last train back to Lelylaan and got stuck at Sloterdijk, meaning a long walk in the wind through the rather desolate far west of Amsterdam in the middle of the night. This did however give the opportunity of seeing some interesting werkzaamheden going on on the tram tracks near my house – there was a bunch of guys grinding down the rails, producing a spectacular mini-fireworks display in the process as can be seen.

Well, obviously it looked a lot more impressive in real life than in this shitty mobile phone photo, but that can’t be helped.