Monthly Archives: May 2006

We hike to and past the glacier of Morteratsch. It retracts with alarming speed and is almost a kilometre shorter than 150 years ago, before the industrial revolution.

One of the mountains in the back is the Piz Palu. I once tried to climb that mountain when, higher up on a glacier, one of my rope partners jumped in instead of over a 1 metre wide and 40 meter deep crevasse. She almost fell to the bottom while dragging me and my girlfriend at the time with her. Fortunately we just managed to stop her fall, but at that time we were both dragged through the snow to just 2 metres shy of the edge of the crevasse. Fortunately there were a lot of other climbers nearby that helped us to pull her out. My ex-girlfriend burned her hands severely from the friction of the rope that even melted her gloves. No more climbing for her that year.

But enough of these bad memories, we’re on a holiday now, and enjoying the nice scenery.

After a night in a brand new camp site (very ecological with waterless urinals and solar panels on the roof of the sanitary building) we stop at the top of the Fl¸ela pass and enjoy being in the snow. When I was still living in the Netherlands it was very special for me to see so much snow, but now I’m used to have it 4 months a year it certainly has lost some of its attraction. There was a lot of it, even though it was late May. They did have very late spring in Switzerland.

We make a big hike in the only National Park of Switzerland, near Zernez. There is still a lot of snow so we have to cross a couple of steep snow fields. That is treacherous terrain, because if you slip you slide over the snow and can gain so much speed that when the snow stops you will crash onto the rocks. Yes, being a climber makes one think all these things. So I give Alison instructions on how to act and nothing happens. We see a lot of mountain crows, a chamois (very distant) and also a few mountain marmots, just out of hibernation. We encounter also a snow hare, which was full of spots because it had just changed its coat from winter colours (white) to summer (brown and grey).

Arriving in Switzerland (new country number three!) Alison looks around from the car and utters a lot of oh’s and ah’s. Because I drive I can’t look and can only glance here and there, when the road isn’t too curvy and we aren’t in a tunnel. So we leave the car at a service station to walk to the Wahlensee (a big natural lake located between very raid mountain slopes) and then she hears bells and her voice raises three octaves of excitement. “Oh, the stories are true. They do have cow bells!”.
Unfortunately I have to temper her Heidi-erlebnis because they are in fact sheep bells, but she is still impressed.

After spending a couple of days (according Alison a couple is ‘two’, but I think it’s more ‘between two and four’. What do you think?) touring the Netherlands we rent a car and escape the horrible weather (cold and rainy) to drive South.

We only have a week and we (actually I, because Alison doesn’t have a driver’s license) don’t want to drive 15 hours a day so we probably won’t make it very far South. But since Alison hasn’t seen much of Europe so far, every bit is new and exiting. We manage to get to a campsite in the Palatinate (Pfalz) in Germany which adds already two new countries (we drove over Luxembourg) to her list of visited countries.

We made a short hike just outside the campground and not only found rocks where I used to climb, but also this, very well preserved castle, with parts originating from the 14th century. We find out that the Palatinate really is dotted with castles, almost as many as there are windmills in the Netherlands. On every hill top there seems to be a castle. Some in ruins, but other’s are still inhabited. Unfortunately we don’t have time to visit other castles, we have to go on, for our ‘Europe in one week’-tour.

I didn’t sleep very well, camping mattresses and my shoulder don’t go well together…

My friend Wim, who’s a photographer, has made a large slide show for another Rotterdam Museum with stereoscopic slides showing old and new Rotterdam. I had missed the show in the museum but today there was a special show with live music played by an amateur orchestra. Here you see the members of the orchestra posing with 3D glasses. Wim’s slides where very nice (much better than this picture; it was very dark) but unfortunately the orchestra didn’t play very well in tune… It proved that playing classical music is not as easy as it often seems.

After seeing my mother we rushed to Rotterdam (140 km by bus, train and tram) to attend the opening of the European Bureau for Improbable Research in Rotterdam’s Museum of Natural History.
Marc Abrahams, the editor in chief of the Annals of Improbable Research, hosted a very entertaining evening about a variety of research topics, all of them rewarded with the alternative Nobel prize, the IgNobel prize. We both hugely enjoyed the evening, especially because all the lectures where very short and even Alison, fresh out of Canada, had no trouble to stay awake. Afterwards though, when we just chatted a little with each-other, I missed Alison and found her fast asleep next to a stuffed orangutang.

If you want to get an impression of the (very funny) evening, you can find a 60 minute video registration on a Dutch science weblog.

After I picked up Alison from Schiphol airport, I immediately transported her to see my mother in Nijmegen (120 km by three trains and one very expensive taxi).

My mother was glad to see her again, the last time they saw each-other was almost a year and a half ago at my mother’s 80th birthday. My mother is feeling much better now she gets morphine for the pain in her paralysed leg. The only downside is that she’s a bit distant and our conversations aren’t very lively anymore.

Alison made her a nice scarf and she was very happy with it. I don’t think she’ll wear it very often since it’s quite hot in her room, with big windows towards the South West and there is not enough personnel in the nursing home to lower the sun blinds when it gets too hot…

I lived almost 40 years in the Netherlands and managed to avoid the windmills. But now that I’m basically a tourist I can finally surrender.

I went to Kinderdijk with the Fast Ferry, a boat that goes between Rotterdam and Dordrecht, mainly to avoid the traffic jams for commuters. In the rush hour it is faster to go by boat than by car, even over twenty kilometre. We, my friend Peter and his daughter Madelief, went after the rush hour so we had the boat almost to ourselves. We had our bikes with us (you can take them with you for free) and after we got of at Kinderdijk we rode towards the windmills. There are 19 of them, very close together and originally used to pump the water from the lower ‘polder’ to the canal that’s about 5 meters higher. And even the canal is just marginally above sea level. We made a rather long bike ride, especially because the first 10 kilometres was along with the wind and after that we had to go 10 km against the wind to return. And there was a lot of wind. But all in all a very nice day, too bad that Alison isn’t in the Netherlands yet, but still in Canada. She’ll arrive coming Friday, but I had bought my ticket last year already and couldn’t change the date. Ah well, it’s a good way for me to have my jetlag in private, without bothering her with my bad temper and overall grumpiness.

There are a lot of people in the Netherlands. I had almost forgotten that fact.