Bori goes to Holland

During the long Easter weekend I went to see the dunes of the Texel island, which is the biggest and southest one from the bunch of islands North from the mainland of Holland, as you can see on this little map with the help of my lovely assistant, Mr. Arrow.

I was hoping to get a taste of a proper vacation, but april doet wat hij wil as the Dutch say (April does what he wants, equivalent of the German April, April, der macht was er will), and bitchy April decided we shouldn't see the sun at all during our stay. It was cloudy, windy and rainy.

Thus, the program was a bit limited, but we did manage to march around those amazing dunes which provided a sight I have never really experienced before. It pretty much consists of 3 things: heather, pine-trees and sand.

The pines only survive on the more 'inner' side from the dunes, by which I mean more far away from the seashore, this way they are more sheltered from the extreme wind.

Then if you walk towards the shore it will suddenly end like this:

Then you keep on going towards the seashore and it turns into this science-fiction Mars-like endless realm of heaps of sand and heather:

Although Texel is said to have more four-legged inhabitants in the form of sheep than humans, in these areas there is not a big chance to meet any animal with any number of legs - the only companions are birds struggling against the wind. We did cross a fence where it said that some farmers keep their animals freely on these fields, so we might encounter horses and such. And indeed, a giant bull crossed our path, which was pretty scary, given the fact the you could only notice it from 5-10 meters because of the small humps all around which make it impossible to see more than 50 meters ahead into any direction.

The other encounter that made this trip even more bizarre was a concrete fort, which hosted probably a few men which had to shoot all the brave warriors who swam all across the sea during the war to storm the country. Peek-a-boo, there's the porthole!

I found this disturbing: standing close there but not being able to look inside, I felt like anything, even human skeletons could be inside there. And if you think about it, how the hell did they build it? Did they bring huge tractors and other equipment through all these slippery sandy dunes? I don't know, it's just scary. Probably the fact that it is surrounded by nothing but nature gives even more emphasis to it, making it kind of ironic.

Anyway, this was Texel. Don't go there in windy weather, as travelling will be hard by bike. Busses are not too frequent. More on islands, their weather and their public transport to be discovered in my next post, which will cover my trip to Malta! Yaay! :)