CANADA
44 worldtravellermagazine.com
shuttle you upside down and round
about; a ghost train; a haunted house...
Just watching makes me feel dizzy, but
my teenage son seizes his day pass and
disappears, delighted.
Much more my pace — and that of my
six-year-old — is the little steam train
that circles the perimeter of the park.
We like it so much that we go twice,
sitting behind the driver, a silver-haired
woman, possibly in her sixties, who
hefts coal into the furnace. The woman
next to me has her grandson on her
knee. She tells me that she lives near by
and has been coming here all her life.
“My parents took me,” she says, “then we
took our children, and now I bring my
grandchildren.”
Efteling was originally, she says,
the idea of a local priest who, after the
war, wanted to establish a place where
children could play. So the mayor
designated an area of forest for a football
pitch and a playground. “And then,” she
continues, “in the Fifties they started
making the fairytale scenes.”
These scenes are the reason I’m here.
Efteling’s Sprookjesbos (Fairytale
Forest) sprang from the imagination
of Anton Pieck. Even if the name
means nothing to you, you will almost
certainly be familiar with his work: his
illustrations shape the way we think
about folk tales. All those crowded,
cross-beamed houses and luscious,
toadstool-studded forests. There were
several of his pictures on the walls of
my nursery school and I also owned
a copy of Arabian Nights that was
illustrated by him.
So I have come to walk through his
Sprookjesbos with my children (except
the eldest, who mystifyingly opts
for further torture by rollercoaster).
What happens is this: you walk along a
winding path, through a thick fleece of
oak trees and, just when you least expect
it, you will come upon a scene. The
house of the seven kids (young goats)
with a becloaked wolf knocking at the
door; Rapunzel in her tower, watching
a mechanised witch ascend her plait;
Geppetto’s shop, with dancing mice and
leaping chisels; a donkey that excretes
silver coins at the press of a button.
It is, of course, utterly magical, butwith that slightly sinister Pieck edge.
The wolves have teeth, the dragon roars,
the giant fish smells appropriately
piscine. The installations are life-sized,
so children can walk through Sleeping
Beauty’s somnolent palace and gaze up
at a sugary but lethal gingerbread house
that just might swallow them up.
What baffles me most about Efteling
is that the people in our neighbouring
forest lodges, at the buffet, on the steam
carousel, are largely Dutch, with a light
sprinkling of Belgians. How come more
nationalities don’t visit?
It is a question that returns again
and again as we venture farther into
Brabant, the low-lying, southernmost
region of the Netherlands and the
birthplace of Hieronymus Bosch and
Vincent van Gogh.
A day or so later we are in the middle
of Heusden, a small, walled town on
the River Meuse. “In order to stop
cannonballs in their tracks,” our guide is
saying, “all the streets were built with a
slight curve in them.” We look and, sure
enough, the long, narrow street has a
slight kink at the end. Our guide points
up to a high gable, where a cannonball
remains embedded, a black pustule in
the brick work.
Heusden, once the locus of fierce
and bloody battles, is today filled with
autumn sunshine: dogs are slumbering
in doorways and people are sitting in
coffee houses. A few bicycles swish‘
THE
INSTALLATIONS
ARE LIFE-SIZED,
SO CHILDREN
CAN WALK
THROUGH
SLEEPING
BEAUTY'S
SOMNOLENT
PALACE’
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