Hi from the Ardenne

Blog 28.8.14

Hi from the Ardenne

What’s happening with NZ Politics? We go away from the country and miss an intriguing election campaign. We find we are going into Stuff, Radio NZ and the Herald websites whenever we are connected and even reading the piece in the Guardian. It will be a good test to see how much NZers value political integrity.

We have just had a few days with Sarah in Brussels and are heading South to Heidelberg to meet up with Dave and Irena, friends from Plimmerton. 

The Ardenne is a really beautiful part of Belgium with lots of pretty villages, hills and lovely river valleys.  We camped beside a river last night. Today we went on a tour of some limestone caves at Rochefort, descending 75 meters (626 steps)and with one of the caverns having a ceiling over 35 meters. Heady stuff.

We seemed to have timed our visit to this area in the same month as the 100 anniversary of the German invasion in WWI and many of the towns have displays showing what the area looked like after the fighting. One of these villages is Dinant where we caught the cable car up to the citadel where they had a well presented display. Loved the views from the top.

We had a week in Germany before traveling to Brussels. We wanted to go back to the Mosel Valley where we had camped in 1970’s falling in love with the white wines of the area. 

On our way to the Mosel we stopped and saw the formal gardens of the Summer Palace at Herrenhausen at Hanover. These were the first extensive formal gardens we have seen and found it fascinating how all the separate garden rooms were created.

We stopped for a night at Lemgo which is an ancient town with lots of the buildings with carved wooden frontages. This is the only campground we have stayed at where the people did not speak English so we had a hilarious time miming the info we needed. Although the caretaker introduced himself the next morning “hi there I’m Mike from Norfolk (with a very strong Norfolk accent), lived here for 39 years and teach line dancing……best way to meet my third wife, to be”!!

Cologne was our next stop and we camped by the Rhine for a couple of nights watching the varied river traffic. The barges are huge and often in more than one part. Our day in the city was great with a walk around the famous cathedral, a boat tour and a visit to the Museum of Chocolate! The latter had a café where we indulged in decadent cakes and rich hot chocolates. The city was extensively bombed during the war and is and interesting mix of modern and traditional. How the bombs spared the cathedral is hard to imagine.

Bergen is a little place on the Mosel river where we again camped by the river and relaxed for a couple of days. We hiked in the hills walking through orchards where the trees are covered in apples, nuts, plums and pears.  In this valley the vines grow on the steep slopes on any land available. The town had a couple of wineries and was not as touristy as some further up river. We would love to come back (soon!) and do a bike trip down this valley.

In Brussels we mostly did non touristy things like going to the movies (these are not dubbed as in the rest of Europe), going clothes shopping and stopping for coffee. And of course hanging out with Sarah. We did visit the Museum of Musical Instruments where they have a great roof café overlooking the city. In the museum each of the instruments on display is played through headphones so we now know what some of the old instruments mentioned in books etc sound like. As it is the bicentenary of the birth of Adolphe Sax there was an extensive exabition of the history of the saxophone. Later when we visited Dinant (where Adolphe was born) the whole town was covered with displays of stylized Saxes. Apparently the sax was conceived in Brussels and developed in Paris. Also there was saw the evidence of terrible war atrocities from WWI

Because our language skills are almost non existent we have likened being in Europe as similar to being in a large cryptic crossword. Especially when we are trying to buy things like gluten free food. Google translate is a saviour. We have slightly more vocabulary in French so we are less confused in Belgium except where we run across Flemish. When we were trying to find Sarah’s flat our GPS was giving the street names in Flemish where we were looking for Avenue etc. All part of the great travel experience.