7 June 2014 Antwerp, Belgium
In a past life aboard illywhacker, travelling to a new country meant a long sea voyage where the motion of the swell slows mind and body to peaceful togetherness. One has time to contemplate the nature of things cultural, environmental and historical and to surmise the differences we are likely to face on our arrival.
Motoring from the Netherlands to Belgium was not like that. In fact we were fully occupied navigating Sirius from the relatively quiet village of Tholen to the second largest port in Europe. Crossing the border involved no immigration or customs just the subtle change in language from Dutch to Flemish, and that went over our heads!
Thank goodness it was a Sunday and there was a minimum of commercial traffic.
Our passage took us across the Oosterschelde which opens to the North Sea. This would have been our first exposure in Sirius to saltwater except the shipping lanes are enclosed by a large dyke and we were effectively in a wide canal which brought us to the Kreekrassluizen, the largest set of locks we have seen to date. Designed for seagoing monsters each one was 100's of metres long. the lock-keeper told us to wait until 5 large commercial barges entered then signalled us in at the back end.
Our route continued down a the Schelde Rijnkan, a long canal which soon became busier and busier with container ports, dry docks, grain silos, cement handlers and so on. We travelled at 12 km/h for several hours before we reached the 2 locks that took us into Willemdock, right in the centre of Antwerp. Willemdock was used by Napoleon and that was to be just the start of our history lesson here.
There were boats tied up from all over Europe and we were surrounded by a city old and new, it was a real buzz just to be there. We spent our days in Antwerp admiring the 17th century architecture as well as enjoying the newly opened MAS museum next to Willemdock.
One of the displays in the ultra modern MAS museum beside our dock
We were fortunate to slip inside St Pauls Church to see paintings by Ruebens, the city's favourite son along with a Van Dyck above the original 14th century carvings lining the walls. You can also see the Carravagio above the altar, well a copy actually as the original was purloined by greedy royalty.
The main railway station is a magnificently restored building under which 5 levels of platforms were constructed in order to leave such history intact. "We'll never finish paying for it" observed one gloomy resident we spoke to.
Yes, this is the inside of the Antwerp Centrum railway station
The railway service pleased us too by providing us with Seniors tickets to anywhere in Belgium for 6 Euros. We travelled for an hour and a half to visit Dave and Penny on Anja - the couple that got us started wandering the canals of Europe.