Maastricht

---

We left Amsterdam on the train as we had been warned about the diffeculty of hitchiking in the Netherlands and arrived in Maastricht at 2pm. After a lot of searching we managed to find a relatively cheap hostel on a boat called - the Botelboot. The cheapest accomodation in Maastricht (still not that cheap) it serves as a place of residence for waifes and strays. We got talking to one who then followed us on our walk around the town which is very pretty and quite similar to Durham. He came up with some mad stories about how one of his friends had two backpackers staying with him and they turned out to be KGB agents who killed his friends with his own TV and vaccum cleaner. Also how Holland didn't exist and how he had spent the last week in hospital due to a dodgy heart and the hospital had tried to poison him with arsenic. Absolutely loopy! After a while of listening to this sheer madness, we decided the best policy would be to hide out in our room for the rest of the evening.

In the morning we packed up and headed for the highway to start hitchiking. Unfortunately, standing on the wrong side of the road for over an hour didn´t help our cause and we bit the bullet, boarding a bus for Aachen in Germany from where we got another train heading for Cologne.

---