NORTH SEA SUMMER

After sampling the local beer the night before I felt I should visit the home of the brewery, Jever. It was a hot morning and the route wound though flat, green farmland crisscrossed by wide drainage ditches. East Frisian landscape It was very like any flat, fenny landscape on the east coast of Britain, except for the German farmhouses. I guess their similarity to each other has something to do with them all being built on reclaimed land - it was the same in Denmark. I only needed to photograph one, because they all looked like this one, more or less. Jever had plenty of shops and cafes -a pleasant small rural town. By the time I left it was very hot, and when I reached the coast again at Harleseil I realised it was too hot to cycle further. I didn't even have the energy to visit the dyke museum, but instead cycled a few kilometres along the coast to Neuharlingenseil where I put my tent up on another vast campsite and sat under my umbrella trying to stay cool. I ga...

Somewhere in Frisland someone told me I'd find the farming very different in Holland. They were right. I left Bad Nieuwschens and at once I was in a landscape of vast fields of wheat, barley and sugar beet. There were dykes and polders and sluices, and long rows of trees silhouetted black against the sky. And in the distance were the towers and chimneys of Delfzijl. Approaching Delfzijl I didn't much enjoy cycling past the chemical factories. The industrial part of the town seemed to go on for a long time and I think I must have lost the cycle route at some point. North of the town was more farmland and I stopped for lunch in a field where a friendly farmer found me as he hoed the sugar beet. I was hoping to get to Vierhuisen where I was going to meet Kate and spend a week exploring Groningen, but the wind was strong and against me, so I spent the night in a campsite at Pieterburen which is famous for its seal sanctuary and for Wad-loping, which means frolicking in th...