On the way to the ferry terminal, we drove about 30 km along the world’s longest dike. It was created to stop the sea from flooding the lowlands to the east on a regular basis. Being Dutch, they call the enclosed ocean to the right a ‘lake.’ It goes over the horizon. To the left is the fearsome North Sea. I recall learning in spy thrillers of the freezing North Sea. Fall off an oil rig and you die in 3 mins, I’ve read. The North Pole’s out there somewhere, I thought, as a chill of fear run down my spine … I couldn’t believe we were driving right out into it.
Terschelling is one of several islands that form a chain off the coast extending across several national borders. They are covered in campgrounds – Dutch holiday islands. Oddly, no windswept, rainy sandbars yet ...?
Lots of Dutch people seem to live on boats.
Six hours later this massive beach was entirely drowned beneath the high tide.
Entirely square and very tall, this was the oddest lighthouse I’ve ever seen.
This one’s for you Mum. You lied to me about The Netherlands being always freezing, sunless and rainy!
The island chain forms the largest nature reserve in Western Europe. Migratory birds in the many thousands stopover in transit between places like Siberia, the arctic, and Africa. Most of Terschelling is, in fact, a giant nature reserve. We cycled for hours out into the heathland one day, and had a tour with a lone ranger, who told us all about the types of plants and bird species.
My life is never dull, and, oddly, the day after we were out there, some of the heathland caught fire, making the front page of the Dutch newspapers (no it wasn’t us!!! It was probably a tourist cigarette butt.) We found out about it late at night. It’s slightly alarming to be trapped on an island that’s on fire, but it was a large island and the fire was 15 km away. We wanted to go volunteer but they weren’t letting people through. It went for about a day, and was eventually put out with water-dropping helicopters due to vehicular inaccessibility. Although kms of heathland were burnt, fortunately it was a small proportion of the total preserve.
Way out in the wilderness of the island, many kms from ‘civilization,’ the beach is littered with the washed-up debris of humanity. Poor ocean creatures!!! We took out as much as we could carry. It’s great to always carry a couple of garbage bags into places like that; filling them makes you feel incredibly good, and more than justifies the impact you may have by being there.
We took a seal-watching tour way out into the middle of the North sea, where we came across a sand-bar covered in a couple of hundred seals. I knew there was a sandbar somewhere!!!
Each boat (there were a few) was limited to 10 mins drifting past the beach per day, to help limit the impact on the seals. They didn’t seem to mind us, but could not have been completely unaware.
