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along the cobbles, past the hollyhocks
and green-painted front doors. A more
peaceful place would be hard to find, but
Heusden’s strategic position on the river
has meant a chequered past: first the
Spanish invaded, then the French and
then the Nazis.
On a map the town looks like a
cartographer’s doodle. Follow the Meuse
inland and you’ll find wide, estuarial
meanders until you come to a startling
star-shaped blot in the middle of all that
blue water. This is Heusden, constructed
with defence in mind, ringed by moats
and ravelins, trying in vain to keep out
conquering armies.
As we stand on the town walls, gazing
over the moat, my husband says: “If
this place was in Tuscany it would be
mobbed.” He has a point. Heusden is
remarkably beautiful and bafflingly
empty. We take a boat up the Meuse, we
wander the narrow streets, we admire
the creaking sails of the windmill,
we buy cloth mice at the toyshop, we
have pancakes at the café, all the while
encountering barely another tourist.
It’s hard to imagine a more perfect
place than Brabant for a family holiday.
The landscape is straight from a
Breugel painting, with flat fields, dykes,
windmills and grazing cows.
As well as Efteling, there is the
newly opened holiday camp of Beeske
Bergen Safari Park, where you can have
breakfast on a terrace next to herds
of impala and wildebeest, and briefly
pretend you’re in Tanzania. The ranger
who drives us around to see the giraffe
calf and the lemurs, which have an
entertaining penchant for climbing on
anyone wearing a backpack, confirms
that the park hardly gets any visitors
further afield. “I don’t know why,” she
says with a shrug.
Did I mention the joy of family
cycling? If, like us, you have exited the
buggy years, a relaxing stroll around a
historical town centre can be fraught.
Children are not natural flâneurs and
in the face of a city amble tend to stage
early mutinies, citing exhaustion and/
or malnutrition. In the unusually
punctuated town of ’s-Hertogenbosch,
however, we hit on the solution: hire
a cargo bike for the smallest child, a
tandem for the other two, and off we go.
Dutch streets are a cyclist’s dream. You
can hire a bike pretty much anywhere, at
any hour. In the pecking order of traffic,
bicycles come a firm first, followed
by scooters, then electric cars, with
motorcars trailing shamefacedly behind.
There are proper sectioned-off lanes,
designated crossings, special traffic
lights. Everybody, cycles, from newborns
cocooned in slings on their pedalling
parents’ chests, to octogenarians with
their shopping.
My husband and I get our fix of
urban wanderings, albeit at a hugely
accelerated pace. Our youngest child
shrieks into the wind from her cargo
cabin; the other two are zooming ahead
on their tandem; nobody is wearing
a helmet and I try not to watch as my
middle child is steered gleefully close to
the water’s edge by her brother. Canals,
cathedrals, windmills, cottages, cattle
and lock gates whizz past. Nobody
complains about tired legs and nobody
demands a compensatory ice cream, not
even once.
Several circuits of the town later,
we lock up the bikes and take a boat
around ’s-Hertogenbosch’s waterways,
which thread themselves underneath
the streets and buildings. The 14th-
century brick arches house colonies of
slumbering bats and, as the boat slides
along the dank water, flashes of blue sky
appear down drains, plumblines of light
reaching into the dark.
How can it be that, for the most part,
tourists will go to the thronged streets
of Amsterdam, but no farther? That they
are yet to discover what lies only a couple
of hours south of that city? On my return
I am seized with a near-evangelical urge
to grip my friends by the arms and say:
“Go to the Netherlands. Quick, before
everyone else does.”Inspired to travel? To book a trip, call
+971 4 316 6666 or visit dnatatravel.com‘
ON A MAP
THE NOW
PEACEFUL TOWN
OF HEUSDEN
LOOKS LIKE A
CARTOGRAHER'S
DOODLE’
NETHERLANDS
Credit:Maggie O’Farrell/The Times/News LicensingThis page: Soft,
colourful corals around
Lizard Islandworldtravellermagazine.com 47This page: Heusden,
designed with potential
invaders in mind