Europe @ 2.4 km/h (18 page)

529-532 km

Apenheul Primate Park has them all: squirrel monkeys, lemurs of the red-bellied, red-furred and ring-tailed varieties, bonobos, coatis, chimpanzees, marmosets, lion-tailed macaques, woolly monkeys, tamarins, yellow-breasted capuchins, sakis, and everyone’s favourite — lowland gorillas. Spokesman Bert Smit is used to fielding questions about the park, founded in 1971, which has become one of the Netherlands’ leading tourist attractions, with 500,000 visitors a year, but still draws flak from those who see it as nothing more than a glorified zoo. Striking a tone of reason, Smit ticks off the pluses. ‘Some people say if you really want to have zoos this is the way to do it. The animals have all the space they need. There is a lot of safety for them. They have places to hide. We always keep them in social groups. They have the best of veterinary care.’ Apenheul’s breeding groups supply monkeys of several species to other zoos, and not only in Europe, Smit tells me. ‘Some of the gorillas went to Taronga Zoo in Sydney.’

And then it’s off to see the park on my own. I read that howler monkeys ‘have developed a very energy-efficient
lifestyle.
They move slowly and carefully and spend much of the day resting.’ Yes, I know people like that, too — but with them it’s pure laziness.

533-534 km

In Australia we are used to bizarre royal antics, but I hadn’t expected to find that sort of thing among the sensible Dutch. Near the stables at Het Loo, the Summer Palace here in Apeldoorn, there’s a wonderful 1890s photo of Queen Wilhelmina in her carriage. The photo is signed with her name — along with that of her favourite steed, Kordaaz. That’s one extremely talented equine…

539 km

You know when you’ve reached the Take One bar in Maastricht. The wooden floorboards are littered with peanut shells. A taller-than-average man with what would pass for a Marine crewcut on someone 50 years younger is seated on a bar stool. He appears to be waiting for service. The rest of the establishment is dead quiet, just like him.

From the pavement into the bar is one step, of 25 cm — too high for me to negotiate unaided. ‘Can you help me get up, please,’ I call out. His stare is so even I don’t know if he sees me only through an alcoholic haze. He speaks like a fish drawing breath, ‘No’. And with that turns back to his drink. I’m miffed but try not to show it. ‘OK, I’ll just wait.’ Thirty seconds later I stop a passer-by who gives me the assistance required. Now the man at the bar stands up, does a passable approximation of a smile, and greets me, ‘Welcome, victim’.

So this is the famous surly bar manager, Piet, himself, I see, as he moves behind the bar lined with wall-to-wall coasters. Suddenly animated, he offers me an obscure beer and a pack of peanuts. ‘Go on,’ he exhorts, ‘throw the shells on the floor.’ For once, I do as I’m told. ‘It feels good, doesn’t it?’ Although I feel far more liberated than Iraq, I wouldn’t have said this was one of life’s greatest thrills. But Piet is not a man to be crossed. ‘Yeah, it feels great,’ I say obediently, and indeed tossing stuff heedlessly onto the floor does feel like a devil-may-care act, now I think of it. ‘Now you are
you
,’ says Piet, rising to make his point. ‘If you do what everyone wants you to do, you are nobody.’

A simple philosophy — and a perfect introduction to a very non-Dutch part of the Netherlands. The man’s reputation precedes him. He is said to be rude (I would have chosen ‘abrupt’), provocative, abusive, witty in four languages, and popular with customers — many of whom return for more humiliation. Not only does Piet not give a rodent’s fundament, he revels in the attention. ‘I’m an arsehole, a bastard, an evil person,’ he proclaims, pausing for maximum effect before delivering his coda — ‘and so are you. But you know the difference between us?’ I give an involuntary shake of the head. ‘I know who I am — and I can handle it.’

One of the regulars — they file in over the next hour or so — tells me that the other amazing thing about this publican is his encyclopaedic knowledge of beers. While handing me a foaming Erdinger wheat beer from Bavaria, he admits to knowing ‘7000 or 8000’ — and by knowing he means that, once he has tasted a beer, he can identify it on any subsequent occasion, almost as if a photographic memory has been transferred from brain to palate.

A Dutchwoman in the bar tells me that the locals consider Maastricht ‘not so Dutch’. A receptionist back at the hostel will later confirm this, contrasting the mellowness of southern speech (known as ‘ordinary civilised Dutch’) with what she deplores as the guttural hawking noises of the north. Other dichotomies exist: the south is more Catholic, enjoying the life of the vine and a well provisioned table — ‘the Burgundian lifestyle’ — whereas the north is Calvinistic, more austere.

542-545 km

Today is the only one of the entire trip — undertaken in what is turning into Northern Europe’s ‘wettest summer’ — when the temperature exceeds 30 ºC. Here in Maastricht it peaks at 33º.

At 2 pm, by prearrangement, I meet old friends from my 2002 visit to Istanbul — Emilie and Hans Binnerts, a Dutch couple who have spent the past few weeks at their holiday house in the south of Spain, and driven across France on
Samedi Noir
— the end of the French summer vacation notorious for kamikaze drivers on the
autoroutes
— to be here before we go our separate ways (they back to Eindhoven, I on to Belgium). We have promised ourselves a river cruise on the Maas and board the
Skiphout
just before 3 pm. (They insist on paying for all of us.) The recorded cruise commentary informs us that waste from the ENCI cement company is deposited on a slagheap in the suburb of Pietersberg that, at 168 metres above ground level, is ‘the fourth highest mountain in the Netherlands’. You can’t help liking these people.

Today I leave this country whose bespectacled prime minister looks jaded beyond his years and who is despised by a significant swath of public opinion, largely — though not solely — because he sent troops to Iraq in defiance of popular opinion. No, I haven’t flown home to Australia, I’m still in the Netherlands of Jan Pieter Balkenende, also known by the nickname ‘Harry Potter’. What’s the difference between Balkenende and the
real
Harry Potter, a Dutchman asks me. I shake my head. ‘Harry Potter can work magic.’

Before crossing the border it’s time to check on what the Dutch think of their southern neighbours. Already a young Dutchman from Arnhem had volunteered, ‘We (the Dutch) think Belgians are too rich’ (meaning ‘pretentious’) ‘and they think we are cheap’ (meaning ‘cheap’).

And what did Jurjen, the national youth orchestra’s tour director, think of them? ‘Belgium is a very strange country,’ he replied, weighing each word, ‘very old, industrial, corrupt and depressing.’ Corrupt?

‘The impression they make is that they are a little shy.’ He conceded, ‘They are more polite and more proper than the Dutch.

‘We make jokes about the Belgians.’ You don’t say …

FLANDERS and WALLONIA

Time spent: 13 days

Distance covered: 930 km

Distance pushed: 90.2 km

Average speed: 2.655 km/h

Journey distance to date: 13,125 km

Why is there a Belgium? This question began as a margin note scribbled in my travel diary — one I initially posed to myself and later proceeded to put to the Belgians (thinking they might know). Now they have taken to asking it of themselves. You’ll be among the first to know if they come up with an answer. A government will have been formed that considers breaking up the homeland an unpardonable offence rather than a serviceable weapon in an endless war of words — or the country will have split in two.
¹⁴

For 45 years the East-West focus of the Cold War obscured the Continent’s fundamental division between North and South. It was a Dutchman in Rotterdam who told me, ‘The map of Europe folds at Belgium — and so does the character of Europe’.

Southerners are supposed to be warm and exuberant, northerners their polar opposite — cold and rational. But reality rarely matches the ideal. Amsterdam and Berlin have hedonists aplenty, and science was not exactly moribund in Renaissance Italy. Belgium’s location at the ‘European Equator’ has always been a strength. Historically, merchants met there (in the diamond trade, centred on Antwerp, they still do). But it is a cultural fault line that is weakening the mini-state and may yet tear it apart.

So how different really are these supposedly incompatible cultures? Over here are the Flemish (
Vlaamisch
in their own language), cousins to the Dutch, who in medieval times had their own independent state, Flanders. Many of these burghers, lovers of the good life, regard themselves as a cut above the snobbish francophones. Over there — in the south — are the Walloons, cousins to the French, who have Napoleon to thank for their capital city not being Paris. Many of those sophisticates, lovers of the good life, regard themselves as a cut above the ‘provincial’
Vlamencs
. Each claims a monopoly on the ‘Burgundian lifestyle’ — and both, as it happens, share a Catholic faith — giving them more in common than many in either camp like to admit.

In the election of 10 June 2007, Christian Democrats (the main Flemish-dominated party) gained a slender advantage over the eight-year-old Socialist-Liberal coalition. The usual post-election jostling soon degenerated into farce and then severe international embarrassment. ‘Leaders’ on all sides now huffed and puffed,
Why
is there a Belgium?
(with the subtext
when there could be Flanders
and Wallonia?
). Many wondered if this time they would blow the house down. Another election, in 2010, would leave a Flemish independence party with more seats than any of its opponents, but another indefinite period of uncertainty lay ahead as other parties planned to put together a blocking coalition.

Within the past 200 years the fertile soil of this land has witnessed three military campaigns that shaped Europe. One lasted less than a day; one was all over in four weeks; one rumbled on for four years. Soldiers from many lands spilt blood to preserve the House of Belgium: the French (three times), the Dutch (twice), Prussians, Australians, New Zealanders, the British, Canadians and Americans. Foreign armies no longer fight over Belgium. The Flemish and Walloons are perfectly capable of doing that themselves. Eight months after the poll, Belgium still had no government. Mass marches failed to loosen the grip of populist politicians on the nation’s windpipe.

Would it be such a shame if Walloon and Flanders went separate ways? After all, each could probably survive on its own. It would only mean the death of an ideal: that it is possible and better to reach across divides than to put up walls or erect more frontiers; possible and better to cherish all cultures — Flemish, Walloon, and German in the east — within a single welcoming state.

Many supporters of European unity hold that same ideal dear. Until now the tepid Belgians — not flashy look-at-me types — have enjoyed the good life quietly, content for their land which is half Tasmania’s size to be just one of the Low Countries. After 180 years of nationhood they cannot go much lower now before it disappears altogether.