The Sunday Times - UK (2021-12-19)

The Sunday Times December 19, 2021 3

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travelletters

have come from any time in the past five
millennia, with women beating clothes on

stones. The evening visits to magnificent
sites were spectacular. Good luck to Egypt
in reviving its tourist industry in 2022.
Heather Honour, Surrey

I lived in Egypt for many years, so I am
slightly biased, but the trip between
Aswan and Luxor is simply phenomenal,

although four days isn’t enough. Once
you’ve done that I’d highly recommend
turning left out of the Old Cataract Hotel

and cruising down Lake Nasser to Abu
Simbel — there are plenty of sites along the
route but with virtually no other tourists,
plus no shortage of Nile crocodiles.

Frank McLeod, via thetimes.co.uk

WOODLAND WALKS
I love the Forest of Bowland (“If you

go down to the woods... ”, last week).

The Tolkien trail has some mystical

woodland, and there are also quaint

villages, lovely pubs and top-quality

restaurants — and, best of all, it seems to

be much quieter than a lot of the listed

destinations.

MisterEd, via thetimes.co.uk

NO SCREENS FOR TEENS

We do a digital detox with the

children every year when we go to

a cottage in Quebec (“Silence is golden”,

last week) — no wi-fi, no TV. The kids go

to bed and get up early, spend all day

swimming, talking and observing

things, and help with cooking, learn

to build bonfires and play board games.

The internet is a great thing, but for

teenagers it can be a dark place that

erodes their time and manipulates their

mood and thoughts.

HoldTheFrontpage, via thetimes.co.uk

Thanks to lockdown, restaurants have to shut by 5pm

and couriers are having a field day, says Mark Smith

Residents

have taken

to pelting

speeding

couriers

with eggs

I

t was a single packet of Marlboro

Lights that made me realise we’d

crossed the Rubicon. Drinking

outside one of Amsterdam’s

brown cafés in October — before

the Netherlands became the first country

in western Europe to announce a

post-summer return to partial lockdown

— my able-bodied twentysomething

Dutch mate had the cigarettes delivered

to our table by a cycle courier, rather

than walk the three metres to the

vending machine in the pub.

My friend said that he didn’t have

change for the machine and had

a promotional code that cancelled

out the £1.50 delivery fee, but still

I marvelled as the courier sped

away into the night — the utter

decadence of it. Within the decade

or so that I’ve called Amsterdam

home, it has morphed from a city

where you had to cultivate underworld

contacts just to score bread on a Sunday

to one where discretionary items fly

through the historic streets on demand,

like a cross between Blade Runner and

Are You Being Served?

I exaggerate, of course, but it’s hard

to overstate the extent to which the rise

of four rival players in the grocery-on-

demand sector — Gorillas, Getir, Flink

and Zapp, each with its own app, fleet

of bikes, high-vis tabards and aggressive

advertising campaign — have changed

the life of the city in a few short months.

What started a year ago with the

thrilling novelty of being able to summon

a forgotten recipe ingredient or a six-pack

of Heineken without diverting attention

from the box set or the baby monitor has

— aided by a perfect flush of lockdown

measures, including the first curfew since

Nazi occupation — turned Amsterdam

into a sort of open-air Amazon fulfilment

centre, with the same pervasive sense of

joyless urgency. The turf war has only

been expedited by the present lockdown

measures, which involve all non-essential

bricks-and-mortar trade (including

restaurants) being curtailed at 5pm and

supermarkets shuttered at 8pm (to get

into cafés and museums we must show

proof of vaccination or recovery from

Covid, or a negative test result).

Beholden to the promise of

a ten-minute delivery, riders are in

a perpetual hurry. They mostly go about

their business on electric bicycles —

COVER PH0TOGRAPH: DUNCAN SHAW/GETTY IMAGES

GABRIEL PEREZ/GETTY IMAGES

AMSTERDAM

POSTCARD FROM...

which sounds great but makes them much

faster than the pootling pedallers with

whom they share the city’s network of

narrow bike paths. What’s more, like the

electric mopeds that campaigners have

only just succeeded in ousting from the

cycle lanes, these bikes are silent as they

whizz up behind to overtake. The result,

according to the Dutch cyclists’ union, is

a drastic rise in the number of accidents.

I can only imagine the scenes when the

tourists return.

Supplying the couriers are the

dark shops that have popped up

all over town, typically ground-

floor units in densely populated

residential areas. The Dutch

famously eschew curtains — this

is the nation that gave window

prostitution and the Big Brother

format to the world, after all —

but they’ve been going up in the

residences that neighbour these

depots, with their throngs of couriers

and reversing restock trucks.

Last week the number of coronavirus

deaths across the Netherlands since the

start of the pandemic exceeded 20,000.

The unvaccinated occupy the majority of

ICU beds, and the country languishes at

the bottom of the EU league table in terms

of booster rollout. The 271-day wait for the

formation of a new coalition government,

which ended last week, has added to the

sense of stasis and cynicism. Lockdown

measures are scheduled to remain in

place until at least January 14.

I hope that when we emerge from our

hibernatory fug we can resolve to haul

ourselves to the local shop occasionally.

Convenience stores act as an anchor for

Amsterdam’s array of independent

traders because you’ll only happen

across that new coffee shop if you pop

out for a packet of biscuits once in a while.

What’s more, the city’s shopkeepers,

with their non-deferential approach

to customer service, are an echo of its

egalitarian founding ethos — the idea that

we’re peers, whether buying or selling.

The city may have been spared

the wave of lockdown-related riots (the

Rotterdam mayor lamented the “orgy of

violence” that unfurled on the streets of

his city last month), but the Amsterdam-

based Het Parool has carried reports of

unrest in the De Pijp neighbourhood,

where residents have taken to pelting

speeding couriers with eggs.

Amsterdam,

where, above,

restaurants are

shutting early

under the city’s

Covid measures