So it’s been a pretty insane & crazy week or so, once again I’ll try & work out whats been going on! Where I left off, We arrived in Dusseldorf & met Lambie’s friend from the Camino De Santiago – The lovely Jasmin & her housemate Chantal! We hung out & had a delicious German dinner of bratwurst, mash & some kind of purple stuff that was really tasty, I think it was some kind of cabbage? Anyways, Jasmine showed us around Dusseldorf & Kolne the next day which was really damn cool! In Kolne I spotted a Gummy-bear shop – mainly because there was a massive beer glass in the window full of amber gummies.
Needless to say, we went in to suss it out & upon enquiring, it seems this gummy shop specialised in pretty much every flavour gummy conceivable – including Beer flavour.
You’d never guess, but beer flavour gummy bears taste disgusting. Shocking revelation!
What didn’t taste disgusting was the half kilo of raspberries I bought & not being able to help myself, I also bought a bag of Chilli Flavour gummy bears. Awesome.
The next morning Lambie had to ride off into the sunset (and by sunset I mean drizzle) as he had a job starting in at the Fringe Festival up in Scotland & needed to road-warrior his way back to the British Isles in a day, which was going to be a long, boring ride.
So we got up early, bade farewell & hit the road – Matt headed south west back to the ferry in Calais, France, whereas I went west from Germany into the Netherlands and up to Amsterdam In Pouring, freezing torrential death rain from hell.
Oh it was shit. To be fair it was the only real rain I’d got the whole trip – which is damn lucky – but that didn’t stop the clouds from making up for it by soaking me to the bone.
Every hour I had to pull over at a servo, strip off my freezing, sodden clothing and wring out my wool jumper, immediately after this I’d jog on the spot while putting on 2 new dry shirts on and trying to warm up my uncontrollably shaking blue hands, wrapping them around a cup of warm bark-chip strainings that truck stops pass off as coffee. (coincidently it’s still better than 99% of coffee in London) It was one of the worse rides of my life & I was a jittery fed-up mess when I arrived in Amsterdam, still soaked, I nursed Alice through the million bicycles and helmetless scooter riders that plague the city & got to my Hostel. It was a complete shithole, but it was WARM. I got out of my soaked clothing for the 4th time that day & thawed out in the shower for a good half an hour. Marvellous.
Amsterdam is an absurd place. It’s breathing proof that “toleration” of drugs is both a blessing and a curse, Blessing in that it did prove the worlds governments wrong & legalising weed hasn’t destroyed or hurt society even in the slightest, infact it’s apparently lowered the national use of soft drugs by some particular statistic that I can’t remember! Impressive I know – but on the other side of the coin, every single group of louts from across Europe…ahem…The British Isles, hold it as their party Mecca and descend upon the pretty canals in large tracksuit wearing plagues of fake Burberry hats and nonsensical words, Innit, with the single goal of getting as fucked up as possible.
I didn’t know how to feel about the place when I first arrived, I felt super guilty just being there, like I was doing something I shouldn’t! Hookers winked at me, men in souvenir shops offered me cocaine, then crack as I was perusing some rubbishy trinkets, Stoned Italians helped themselves to my lunch & The smell of weed smoke was casually wafting out of the ‘coffeeshops’ every few meters, not to mention the people sitting by the canals with big bags of weed, casually rolling up joints as police trotted by on horses.
The next day I went on one of those excellent free walking tours of the city & met some really nice Kiwis and a their german friend. We got on well & hung out most of the afternoon, only to hit up an infamous Amsterdam pub crawl at night. It was a pretty messy one, but good fun nonetheless.
One of my favourite bands once said: “everything in moderation, especially moderation” I really like this quote, and to me it perfectly summed up the Amsterdam experience, as you need places like Vegas and Amsterdam to actually benchmark where the silly end of the moderation scale lies.
Feeling slightly fragile after my pub crawl with the kiwis, I packed up my still slightly damp things, threw them onto Alice and started the short ride to Bruges (its in Belgium)
Bruges (pronounced ‘Broozj’) was a really pretty little medieval town, & the only reason I knew of it was because of the brilliant black comedy, “In Bruges” A lot of people said it was a boring place, but I quite liked it. Lots of canals, old buildings, towers and an interesting church that recons it has some of jesus’s blood.
I went in to the inventively named ‘Basilica of the Holy Blood’ & checked out the impressive architecture as usual, then as I was about to leave, having seen no obvious vials of dried blood – a lady appeared on a dais said something in Flemish that seemed to attract the attention of those around me. There was a murmur and some priests came up to the dais with an ornate box & pulled out a golden cylinder. Some more Flemish from the lady and people started walking up to the dais, placing their hand on the cylinder, having a silent prayer & wandering off – so I joined the que, wandered up & had a closer look. I didn’t see any need to touch it or pray obviously being the heathen scum that I am, & the lady shot me a quizzical look, but I got up close peered in anyway. It contained a piece of cloth with a brown stain. Irrefutable Proof of jeeesars! Actually to be honest the ornate gold cylinder holding it was much more interesting than the brown stain, but I nodded at the lady in thanks & wandered off. Apparently it hasn’t been opened since its arrival in Bruges around the 1200’s and hasn’t been subjected to any authenticity tests which I think is a bit of a shame! Did I mean to type the ‘e’ in shame back there? Probably not.
In my hostel in bruge, I spied another motorbike sparked out front, with NSW license plates! Got chatting to the owner who was another 25 year old bloke from Sydney! He’d shipped his Transalp From Sydney to Malaysia & had ridden all the way across the continent to the coast of the Netherlands. Bloody good effort!!
I’d made the decision to sell Alice as soon as I got back to London, so while I was in Bruges I put an ad up on gumtree, the free website that I found her on in the first place.
Sure enough I rode from bruges to Calais, & was chatting to an old English couple on a massive BMW when my phone rang & someone wanted to see the bike that afternoon. I explained that I was still in France, so arranged to meet the bloke the next day. Sure enough, I rode out to some suburb in the outskirts of central London to a maccas car park, where I met some bloke. He was a decent guy, just wanted a bulletproof commuter bike & bought her on the spot for only 50 pounds less than I bought her for!
So. A few weeks prior, in an awesome blast from the past, I’d got a message from Caroline, Who was an exchange student at my highschool when we were in year 11/12. She’d stayed with a friend at the time & I used to drive her and a few others too and from school. She said if I was ever in Austrai, I was welcome to come and stay on her couch! So with the bike sold in one day, I had a pocket full of pounds and 3 weeks to kill before meeting Gowenlock & Steph in Amsterdam. So I face-mailed (thats an email sent via facebook mum) Caroline & booked a flight to Vienna, Austria.
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