Our journey back in time!

Jeroen and I went on a little day trip "up" to the city of Lelystad yesterday. Jeroen lived there with his Mum for about 5 years when he was still only a little tacker. He hadn't been back for almost 25 years, so the whole day was a trip down memory lane for him.

We started by driving exactly the same route he would take with his Mum or Dad, travelling between their houses on vacations/weekends. We drove through the Veluwe on the way, the biggest nature reserve here in NL, and also very scenic with lovely forests and heath lands. We even had the opportunity to stop at the halfway point at Barneveld to visit "Het Ei" (The Egg), the roadside cafe Jeroen used to stop with his Dad to eat fried chicken legs. We have since decided it is the biggest egg in the world and are sending off the details to the Guiness Book of Records as I type ;-) We also passed through Drie Dorp (Three Village), a tiny little village that actually used to consist of only three houses! Around every corner Jeroen was remembering more funny details of the journey he did hundreds of times as a kid. Once we were actually in Lelystad we drove to both his old houses and his two old primary schools - funny!!

The unusual thing about Lelystad is that it is a totally "artificial" city. It has only existed since 1967 after the completion of a huge undertaking known as the Zuiderzee Project. As you all probably know, alot of NL lies below sea level (including Schiphol Airport!!) and the province of Flevoland, where Lelystad is situated, is no exception. Basically the whole area exists thanks to the vision of one man, Cornelis Lely. The Dutch have literally closed off what was once open sea (the Zuiderzee) and created a closed lake (the Ijsselmeer) with a massive 30km long dyke, the Afsluitdijke, completed back in 1932. Gotta admire that determination and stubborness to hold back the actual sea! Not only that, they also created a further network of dams (dykes) in the area, drained off the water enclosed by the dykes to create lovely muddy, swampy areas (polders) and then rehabilitated this land to become one of the most fertile agricultural areas of the Netherlands. So it was very surreal walking around in Lelystad yesterday thinking that the whole area was once a sea!! Absolutely everything, from the grass, the trees, the houses, the shopping centres etc were not even there 60 years ago, they are all below sea level and are only there thanks to an ingenious system of dams keeping all the water back!!! We visited a really interesting musuem explaining all this stuff so I have all the technical statistics etc still in my head :-)

We also visited Batavia Stad. From a distance I thought it was going to be some kind of open air museum - it looked like a recreation of an old fishing village. It is actually a massive factory outlet centre (!!) designed to look like a village. Every outlet is in it's own little house and they are all coloured in different pastel shades......mmmmmm Situated on the waterfront of Batavia Stad is Batavia Werf, a fully operational shipyard. Here they build authentic replicas of the massive wooden ships that used to sail for the Dutch East India Company (VOC) back in the 1600-1700s They have completed "The Batavia", and are in the process of building "The 7 Provincien".

The strange thing is, "The Batavia" was wrecked on her maiden voyage in 1629 off the coast of Western Australia, and part of the wreck is on display in a museum in Fremantle! Most of the crew survived and made it to shore, sparking the theory that the Dutch were actually the first white settlers in Australia way before the British! There are also myths of a "white tribe" living somewhere in central Australia and who were "discovered" in 1832 by a British explorer speaking a bizarre form of old Dutch, living in small huts, and cultivating basic crops! The reconstructed Batavia can be seen in the photos below and it seems it was in Sydney during the 2000 Olympics. As a further link to bring the whole Batavia, Dutch/Australia connection full circle, the massive trees used to form the masts and the decks have been cut from the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) in the very area we were camping back in June. Freaky huh!!??

Anyway, you are all probably totally bored of my ranting by now. Until next time.

Alli xxx