FLOWERS, FLOWERS & MORE FLOWERS

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I mentioned in the previous blog that we are in the middle of the flower growing area but we didn’t realise what a big business it is. From Braasemeer we went to the next, and even bigger, meer, Westeinder Plassen, an amazing area of water along the West side of which is the river that is the mast up route to Amsterdam, and then, looking at the chart there is an unfathomable area of straight lines of land separated by water and through which a route to 10’s of jachthavens lie. When you sail in it becomes clear that the straight lines are intensively cultivated plots, with lots of little hidey holes for boats – it is absolutely delightful. Anyway we stayed at a JH near to Allsmeer and rode our bikes to see the historical gardens – where the flower auctions used to be held a couple of centuries ago. In this garden were roses that were 300 years old!

This was in preparation for the following day when the alarm was set for 0700 (what? we are on holiday!) and we pedalled to the new Auction centre- which is the biggest flower auction in the world. It is as big as 220 football pitches, it sells 34.5m flowers per day including 10m roses and 5m tulips. Most of the flowers are grown in Holland but they also import from Ethiopia, Kenya, Germany and Israel. It was an amazing place. Basically the tourists walk round a gallery overlooking all the flowers that are on trolleys that are constantly moving either by themselves or in long trains being pulled by what seemed like hundreds of mini tractors; it looked as though they were doing a dance. The auctions themselves were in what looked like lecture theatres with all the dealers tapping buttons on computers, reacting to a large electronic screen on the wall which showed all the details of the products, and the enormous clock (in Euros) that recorded the auctioneer’s original starting price and then rapidly counts down; the first dealer to press a button gets the batch at the price the clock gave when he hit the button. It is very fast from €0.99 to 0 takes no more than 10 seconds. If nobody bids the clock goes round again - it is a Dutch auction would you believe.

It was well worth getting up early to see. We then set sail to turn round to begin the journey back to Drimmelen – we go home on Tuesday. When Paul had the good idea of phoning another Vlet who we had passed unexpectedly like ships in the….day….the previous day. This resulted in another about turn to have a lunchtime drink and a welcome catch up on all things Holland and Vlet connected. Off we set again and ended up at Boskoop – a tiny little harbour not unlike Upper Thames – it’s run by a club but unlike UT they have 1000 visitors a year which at €1 per metre must give a tidy little income. Koop in Dutch means to sell and Bos is a tree – so this place is “Trees for sale”. From Isabela we can look out over fields of….you guessed it….flowers and young trees!



Tomorrow continuing South we are hoping to go to Kinderdijk where there are 16 windmills all of which work on a Saturday – it is a World Heritage site.

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