May 26, 2025
Looking for a botter life
WHAT A DAY of delightful surprise. First, the wind was still behind us. Second, it was stronger even than yesterday. Third, the Zuiderzee route on to which we have turned is promising to be still better, more rural, more varied, than what has gone before. And fourth, after just seven kilometres, we reached the lovely town of Spakenburg.
Distinctive old fishing boats lined the road and still more waited in the harbour beyond it. To a cyclist there is an extra attraction because Spakenburg means “spokes town”.
The boats that make the town’s reputation are botters. There were almost 3,000 before the Zuyderzee was walled off, reduced and turned into a lake. Until then, they sailed from all along the coast to spend their day at sea, albeit a shallow if dangerous sea. And perhaps because it was shallow, botters have a flat hull with a rounded top. They have compartments in which to store fish, the compartments fed constantly by water fed through small holes in the bow.
So far as we can work out, there are only 70 of these boats left and most of are them in Spakenburg. There they are maintained in better condition than when they were working. The search for fish may have gone but there is work still to be done, taking visitors out to sea. We watched as a school group played by the bridge before crouching low in two of the boats. There were maybe 40 in the group, probably no older than 14, all of them on bikes.
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From and to where the kids were going, I don’t know. We drank coffee and watched as, their hi-jinks called to order, they walked in a miasma of excitement to where the boatmen were waiting.
They can’t have been on the water for long. Maybe they just sat in the boats for a talk about how life had been a century before they were born. In any event, we had just finished looking at the miscellany of boats in the main harbour when they came pouring past with the speed and confidence born of seeing nothing odd about going everywhere on a bike.
We followed them along a dike path, we and they happy to ride at the same speed, they maybe 300 metres before us. And then they stopped for another educational visit. We passed them, one of them dickering with his back wheel, and we were envious that they were learning their country’s history not from dry maps and textbooks but by breathing that history outside the classroom. On bikes.
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Nothing is perfect, of course, and we spent the middle third of our day in suburbia. But even suburbia is well done in Holland. Bike paths are universal, wide and maintained, generally shorter than the car route and almost always with priority over other roads.
This is where Dutch people come on holiday and once again we passed one chalet site after another, many of them owned by big chains, with names like Cap Fun.
And then, suddenly, they were behind us and we were back in the unembarrassed openness of the countryside. Tonight we are at a campsite at the end of those fields and on the edge of Elburg. They tell us the town is beautiful; we shall see tomorrow.
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