Avontuur

Gisteren heb ik gegaan met seven andere Amerikaners op de Rijn…. no, sorry to my Dutcreaders, but though I may have started my language lessons again but I don’t think Im quite up to blogging in Dutch any time soon!

Yesterday I went with several other Americans for a cruise on the Rhine. These are guys who are here for a couple of months for training or two build a machine that will then be installed back home at a customer site. One is a trainer who’s been coming here for extended periods for years, and he and his Dutch friend Jerry (Geri?) like to arrange this excursion a couple of times per summer. We met early in the morning in Eindhoven and drove to Koblenz, where we parked by the river nad then walked across town to the train station. We got our train tickets (with a group discount); the guys bought beer and I got soft pretzels. (Paula’s travel rule #137: When in Germany, buy soft pretzels.)

We took the train to Bingen on the Rhine, where I tried unsuccessfully to figure out why that town name had such a familiar ring. (Google helped later: I’m fairly sure that it was due to this old poem.) Normally they get on the boat at Rudesheim, but there was some work being done on the tracks. When we got off at Bingen, we had a bit of a hike from the station to the boat dock, but then there was still some time to kill, so we repaired to a nearby biergarten for beer and wine (the guys had already gone through the beer they’d bought, on the train ride). This all took a lot longer to do than to tell; we caught the boat around two, having left EIndhoven around 7:30AM.

The train ride was scenic, but I didn’t bother taking any pictures through the dirty windows. From the boat we had a much better view, castle after castle as the Rhine rolled under us. It’s a World Heritage site: Koblenz is 2000 years old, first built by the Romans, while Bingen is even older. The castles we saw date back as far as the 1200s. Some still look lived in, or have been turned into hotels. You can see how things worked, just looking at them from the river: there will be a town lining the bank, with a castle looming high above, with fortified walls, arrow slits and crenellated look-out towers. The lords of the castle collects tolls from all commerce passing down the river – I’d guess the message was something like “pay our toll and we’ll let you through – and we’ll make sure no one else attacks you along this part.” The towns are not all that far apart; while riding on the train, we saw very distinct towns, separated by fields, close enough that you could walk from one to another in an hour or two. Along the river, I’m sure it was easier to go by boat.

I elected to come back that night, because I’d had a busy week and expect to have another, and there’s a lot I need to do. Most of the rest of the group stayed in Koblenz and were going to go walk around the old town of Kochem, on the Moselle River, this morning. I’ll definitely do this again when Ted is here; maybe we’ll stay over that time.

Click images to make them bigger.

There are lots of very happy people in Eindhoven right now – I think the Dutch didn’t really expect to beat Brazil today. And they did! I ran into an American I know and we agreed you wouldn’t see something like this in the US; Philadelphians get pretty passionate about our teams (on the rare occasions when we win in a playoff) but most US cities don’t have such a defined center, one single place where everyone goes for public celebrations.

Interesting, though. It’s a happy crowd and a loud one – I haven’t heard so much singing at a sporting event since the last time I went to a Penn football game. But it’s not a universally drunk crowd, like they have on Queen’s Day. (Of course, it is a Friday evening – that will likely come later.)

Next game’s on Tuesday, against either Uruguay or Ghana. If they win that, it’s on to the finals!

Not even close. Have you ever walked through the middle of an American city and seen something like this?

I wasn’t that surprised at the giant corporate-sponsored screen right in one of the main shopping squares; what surprised me was the number of people plopped down on the ground in front of the screen just watching football (and ads, of course). I should mention this wasn’t even a Dutch game; the Dutch team’s first game is on Monday against the Danish, at 13:30 our time.

Speaking of that, since the game is during work hours, my company is going to shut down the company cafeteria half an hour early Monday, so they can bring giant screens into the two dining areas to show the game. And for those stuck in the fab area, they’re live-streaming it to the computers. There was a message telling people who want to use that system to test it out on Friday. Presumably the thought is that they’ll lose less productivity that way than if half the company takes the afternoon off. They may not lose a whole lot less since people will probably spend the rest of the afternoon discussing the game, but at least they won’t have some people taking the whole day off or leaving an hour before the game to allow time to get home.

(If you need to be told, I’m talking about World Cup soccer.)

April is a very good time to move to the Netherlands. Not only is spring beautiful here, but you’re in time for all of the April and May holidays. (Easter, Queen’s Day, Ascension Day and Pentecost / WhitMonday are all legal holidays.) Today is Queen’s Day, Koninginnedag, in the Netherlands, the official celebration though not the actual day of Queen Beatrix’s birthday. (I think it was actually the birthday of her grandmother Wilhelmina.) In Eindhoven, it is a day of music, flea marketing, and above all a sea of retina-burning orange. There are stages all over the Centrum playing a variety of music; we can hear it in the apartment with the windows closed. All along the WIllemstraat, Wilhelminaplein and the Bergen are stands selling second-hand goods – it’s the only day of the year you can set up a stall without a special license. And as for the orange – well, look for yourself.

On our last day, we finally got to see something we’d been hoping for: adult male lions We’d seen a couple of adolescents, but they didn’t have manes yet. This pride had two females and a bunch of cubs, with two males that spent time with both them and another nearby pride. We also spotted a black rhino, which is much rarer than the white rhinos we’d been seeing. (They’re nearly the same color – one ranger told us that the “white” in white rhinos is a corruption of “wide” – they were originally called “weidt mond” or “wide mouth” rhinos (I have no idea how the Afrikaans is spelled).

The other thing we saw a lot in Madikwe was the wild dog pack; there are two there, two of the biggest in South Africa.

Note: All photos copyright 2010 by Ted and Paula. All of the photos in this slideshow have been posted as taken, with no photo-editing except to resize them appropriately for this page.

We enjoyed talking to our pilot over dinner, but we didn’t actually get to fly with him the next day – there were some low clouds in the area and his plane wasn’t IFR-equipped. Too bad, because we’d been looking forward to flying in a small plane from the local airstrip. We did get to see his plane, though, and so did the local animals. Instead, we were driven to the Kruger Mpumalanga airport, about 3 hours away. From there we flew to Johannesberg, then transferred to a Cessna Caravan to fly out to Madikwe. We arrived just as another storm was beginning – thunderstorms turn back on our game drives that evening and the next afternoon, so I’ve combined the photos from February 14 and 15. The indoor photos are of the main lodge and of our bathrooms – the baths in our rooms at all three of our lodges were nicer than in any house I’ve lived in!

Note: All photos copyright 2010 by Ted and Paula. All of the photos in this slideshow have been posted as taken, with no photo-editing except to resize them appropriately for this page.

February 12 was probably our best day of leopard sightings. The weather started getting very hot, and on Feb. 13 I skipped the afternoon drive – too hot for me! (They later told us it got up to 43C – that’s nearly 110 F.) But a thunderstorm came in that night and broke the heat, and we had cool weather and rain for the rest of our trip. The night of Feb 13, dinner was in the boma (a round enclosure open to the sky) so we got to talk more to the other guests who had arrived, and to the pilot who’d come in to fly us out the next day.

Feb 12:

Feb 13:

I’ll post more entries tomorrow with the photos from our time in Madikwe Game reserve. It takes a long time to sort through all of these!

Note: All photos copyright 2010 by Ted and Paula. All of the photos in this slideshow have been posted as taken, with no photo-editing except to resize them appropriately for this page.

Our first full day. Those 5AM wakeup calls were rough, since dinner didn’t finish until 9:30 or so – we definitely needed those afternoon naps. There were a couple others along on the morning drive on February 11, but after that we had Matt and Doc to ourselves for a few days.

Feb 11:

Note: All photos copyright 2010 by Ted and Paula. All of the photos in this slideshow have been posted as taken, with no photo-editing except to resize them appropriately for this page.

We weren’t actually at Kruger, but in the adjoining Sabi Sands Game Reserve. The private lodges have concessions in the reserve, and they have a lo more freedom to go off-road and get closer to the animals than in the National Park. (Check out the Feb 13 entry to see how close; there’s a picture of Doc, the tracker in front of our Land Rover, with an elephant behind him.)

When we arrived at Simbambili, we were introduced to our ‘butler’, Reinas, and our ranger and tracker, Matt and Doctor. We had lunch, time to rest, then went on the evening game drive – each day after that we were woken up at 5AM for the morning drive, had breakfast, then hung out in our room, resting, using our private (!) plunge pool or reading until lunch at 2 and the evening game drive at 4. Dinner was at about 8, and the food was amazing.

Feb 10:

Note: All photos copyright 2010 by Ted and Paula. All of the photos in this slideshow have been posted as taken, with no photo-editing except to resize them appropriately for this page.