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Published: August 29th 2016
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Day 13
20160829
Rotterdam
A rest from the bike day today, although not from spending the best part of five hours on my feet wandering around Dordrecht and Rotterdam!
I’m on the 6th floor of the Ibis Hotel, and it’s decent. The hotel is brand new so everything is sparkly clean, everything works and it’s ultra modern in it’s technology. The key cards are contactless, (a first for me). You hold your card in front of a scanner inside the lift to make it go up, but not to go down: I guess it assumes what goes up must come down. You hold the card by the scanner adjacent to the room door to gain access, no messing about with have I got it the right way round, do I have to leave it there for five seconds? And finally you drop it into the holder in the room, any way round you want, to turn the electrics on. Simples.
What might be a concern to some, but doesn’t particularly bother me, is that right outside the hotel is a small harbour area for medium sized barges and yachts. A lift bridge, one of
many hereabouts, is being replaced. This necessitates a pretty big Hitachi tractor unit, with assorted hydraulic attachments, starting work at 08.00, sharp.
It’s probably a bloke thing, but I happily listened in, and periodically stuck my head out of the window to see how work was progressing; particularly when there was an impressively loud sound of screeching metal on metal, which meant the steel lift mechanism was being uprooted from where it had probably stood for a hundred years. The ease with which the bridge was dismantled was impressive to behold. Also, the bloke driving the unit was incredibly tidy. Everything he ripped up was placed neatly on the road behind him, in straight lines that only a true OCD believer could appreciate. I could do that!
It reminded me of when I worked in an orange juice factory, in Kidlington, during University holidays. One of my many jobs was to shrink wrap the palleted cartons of juice under a large piece of polythene; with a gas powered hair dryer contraption, what fun! I saw at as a work of art challenge to get that polythene wrapped so tightly that every angle would measure a dead straight line,
with no air filed bubbles of dissonance. Must have been a chore unwrapping them at the other end!
Mid-morning I set off for the jetty by the Erasmusbrug to get the Waterbus to Dordrecht. The ‘bus’ runs every thirty minutes and takes 50 minutes to reach Dordrecht with about five stops enroute. The boat is pretty big and can carry 200 passengers, plus the obligatory and well used bike racks. I was expecting a gentle meander upriver casually watching the world go by, but not bit of it. This was a giant speed-boat. As soon as we got mid-channel ‘drive’ hit the pedal, twisted the throttle or used whatever bit of his anatomy to accelerate the boat and we were off. I reckon we were doing about 30 mph between stops, it was brilliant. I was standing up at the open stern of the boat and I really had to hold on as the huge Freeman diesels kicked in. It was a real surprise, I just love going fast!
Dordrecht was pretty much as the name makes it sound. It looks like it’s been left behind, but that might be nice if you like living there. It was
very pretty, in a run down kind of way, and there were plenty of unused shop units, and boarded up buildings. Ever been to Burnham? I wandered around for an hour and the best thing I found was a shop called ‘Pandora’s’ which was of a kind I haven’t seen in England for a long time. It was a complete maze of competing bric-a-brac; from cheap jewellery, 1930’s LP’s, long forgotten novels, and chipped china. I’m sure I saw a gorilla suit in a corner somewhere. I felt quite ashamed that there was nothing I wanted to buy.
Back on the boat to Rotterdam. Pretty much the same experience as before but not so much, now I knew what to expect. A bit like flying. The most impressive thing was seeing this huge ship on the River Maas, with a preposterously high mechanism on it, for doing god know’s what. I googled it but am none the wiser. After mooring I mooched into town to search out some things uniquely Dutch to take home as a souvenirs. Unfortunately I soon found out that you could transplant the centre of Rotterdam to the centre of Bristol, and be none the
wiser. It’s everything you’d expect. Holister, River Island, Jack Jones, Nike, Adidas, Feyenoord shop, etc, etc.
At least you know what what you don’t want to buy!
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