A day in the park: Hoge Veluwe on white bikes

May 4, 2012

WEATHER: cloudy all day, no rain

Breakfast at the hotel featured the fanciest coffee machine yet, and we took full advantage of it before heading off on foot to the Hoge Veluwe Park entrance. We paid the 8 euro admission fee and walked another 100 metres to the 'white bike' parking lot, where we picked up two of the very basic bicycles. They feature coaster brakes and no gears, and most of them have a kiddy seat on the back. Al carefully picked out a smaller one for Eva and adjusted the seat heights to fit us, and off we went on a paved bike path for the five km ride to the Kroller-Muller art museum. There are 43 kilometres of bike paths in the park.

Al doesn't look like he's entirely convinced that this apparatus will function as advertised.

The bikes do in fact function, but they are definitely at their best when you dismount. We did, however, manage to cover about 30 kilometers of bicycle paths during the day.

Hoge Veluwe was established as a private estate in 1909 by the businessman Anton Muller and his wife Helene Kroller-Muller. She was an avid art collector and had begun work on an art museum at the estate. The family ran out of funds during the Depression, and in 1935 both the estate and the art collection were donated to the State of the Netherlands, which created the national park and continued to build the Kroller-Muller museum.

It houses a very large Van Gogh collection, and allows photographs to be taken (unlike the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam). We scooted into the Van Gogh area just ahead of a busload of Japanese tourists and were able to view the paintings before it got crowded. Besides the Van Goghs, there are works by other famous painters including Seurat, Picasso and Mondrian, as well as modern artists. A large outdoor sculpture garden surrounds the building. It's a very impressive museum to be found in the middle of a park, and once again, our museumkaart covered the admission price.

In one of the many rooms of the Kroller-Muller museum, where a number of the Van Gogh paintings were interspersed throughout the collection, based on particular themes.

There were several Van Gogh paintings that we had never seen reproduced before, including one with a book as a major element which obviously juxtaposes the essence of culture-as-literature with the essence of Nature, as symbolized by, of course...Onions!

After a couple of hours of art viewing we returned to the bike parking lot to pick up our white bikes. We'd parked them a bit apart so that we'd be sure to find the same ones again, but to no avail. Eva's smaller bike had been taken, so we had to find another one that fit her. We pedalled to the park visitor centre where there was a nice cafeteria and enjoyed a good cheese plate and salad for lunch.

The central plaza in the park, with the nature centre on the left and a busy bike repair facility on the right, and a large cafeteria at the opposite end.

The visitor centre was very worthwhile with informative displays about the effects of human activities on the natural history of the area. Wikipedia describes the park landscape: '...approximately 55 square kilometers in area, consisting of heathlands, sand dunes, and woodlands. It is situated in the Veluwe, the area of the largest terminal moraine in the Netherlands. Most of the landscape of the park and the Veluwe was created during the last Ice Age. ...The park forms one of the largest continuous nature reserves in the Netherlands.'

We learned that originally the Veluwe heathlands were overgrazed so thoroughly by sheep that the underlying sand began to blow and form dunes. Sometime after this, the inhabitants decided to plant trees in order to stabilize and re-vegetate what had become a 'barren' area. Woodlot production expanded over the years to the point where very relatively little bare and blowing sand was left. People seemed to miss the sand, because efforts are now underway to cut back the trees and expand what's left of the sand dunes. We saw all of this as we continued our ride around the park. We stopped at the over-the-top Jachthuis Sint Hubertus, the elaborate brick hunting lodge built for Mr. Muller, and ended up cycling a good 30 kilometres on the rather uncomfortable white bikes.

On the narrow paved bike paths traffic goes in both directions, and in the afternoon they began to get crowded with other riders, many of whom cycled two abreast while chatting, so we would have to squeeze by them as they came towards us. There were also school groups often taking up the whole path and completely oblivious to oncoming riders. Apparently in the high season all 1700 bikes are sometimes in use, and it's difficult to imagine how that many people could possibly use the paths without collisions and injuries.

Some of the few remaining sand dunes in the park.

The park wasn't entirely tame -- we were periodically confronted by wild roosters.

We assumed that this elaborate hunting lodge was constructed as an efficient means of outfoxing the wild roosters.

By late afternoon, we had explored most of the park and were happy to dismount and walk back to our hotel. Since we were quite a distance from the centre of Hoenderloo and other restaurants, we decided to eat dinner at the hotel again. It was another good meal--pork filet with mushrooms and the same accompaniments as yesterday. The waiter very kindly brought us a double helping of rhubarb compote.

Today's ride: 30 km (19 miles)
Total: 619 km (384 miles)

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