Our trip to Flanders last year took us south from Ypres to the Somme. This year we are joined by N of Dieppe to Paris fame for a trip to the Ypres Salient and sites around the Menin road. We’ll then head up to Zeeland to return via the North Sea Coast Cycle Route along the Flanders sea front. This is a three-day event that starts ridiculously early on a Sunday and gets us back into London at midnight the following Tuesday thus maximising the time spent on the job.
Travel
N has a motorcar and after careful consideration of all the two options we decided to go in the car to Dunkerque on DFDS Norfolk Line. Instead of £60 for the three of us with bikes we pay £40. A bargain. The plan is to leave the car in some discreet spot, preferably not a doggy-do covered housing estate.
Weather
Nine days to go and the adventurous likes of MSN, Accuweather and Weather Underground predict sunshine. The BBC's effective long term forecasts have been been reduced to just one minute ahead.At six days, rain and winds are moving in. Four to go and Hurricane Katia is on the move and headed this way and so a gale force tailwind is on the cards. Cloudy with a chance of rain and some intermittent sun accompanied by strong winds was the last word.
Today's weather picture is by...
Kit
Nothing new to add apart from knee warmers purchased by N.Sunday
I got up before I went to bed, waking up at three-nineteen to what sounded like an audience clapping in a very large stadium. In fact it was torrential rain. My light-well echoed with the sound of heavy, watery dollops. I gritted my teeth and continued with getting ready for the six-mile ride to Balham and the rendezvous.Miraculously the rain petered out by the time I’d left the lights at Marble Arch to lose myself in the wide expanses of Park Lane at 4am. I’d been concerned about ruffians roughing me up me in Hyde Park and Clapham Common but the earlier rain had seen them off. I arrived 30 seconds before N in his car. And before you could say Jack Robinson 20,000 times we were away, arriving in Dover in plenty of time for the 8am across the bouncy English Channel. We sat down to eat breakfast during which N advised that we get to the toilets early as they'd be covered in half-digested breakfasts before you know it. D was a little green by Dunkerque while I successfully held onto my sausage, eggs and beans.
We found a side street and parked up in Loon Plage, a mile from the ferry port, itself a bleak six miles west of Dunkerque centre ville, before zooming off south to get the D11 towards Ieper. A grey sky hung mercifully above us while we were pushed along by a 20mph wind.
Belgium is a feast for the crop lover. Tourist coaches crawl along as crop lovers from all over the world salivate at the sight of fields bulging with Brussels sprouts, corn, other green things, cabbage, and curly kale. And, for variety, they can drool over a freshly turned turnip field, the moist brown soil turned up to the sky. All this, while enjoying the sweet aroma of silage wafting about and penetrating even the most miserly nostrils. Both N and D are keen croppers and burbled away excitedly about yields and varieties.
D remarked on the simple beauty of the farmhouses and villages. The red brick and white mortar is certainly easy on the eye and, despite being a tiny speck of a country, houses managed to keep a dignified distance from each other.
As we approached Ieper the fields took on another, more chilling aspect as we passed a BWGC cemetery set back amongst the corn in the corner of a Flanders field.
We arrived at the Jeugdstadion campsite, a five-minute ride east of the Menin Gate and checked into to our well appointed Hiker’s Hut that had been delivered by Argos that very day, perhaps. At 37 evros this was a bargain as we were also able to stay just the one night whereas other wooden accommodations tend to be for two or more nights. The idea of the hut was to allow us time to zip of to the neighbouring WW1 sites instead of grappling with tents in the evening and the following morning.
Hill 62 and Sanctuary Wood.
Apparently the oldest of its sort in the region, Hill 62 museum will cost you a steep 10 evros for what is seemingly a badly put together collection of unindexed bits and pieces that had simply been dug up or retrieved from this strategic hill top and its trenches.
However, the first exhibits were the dozen or so stereoscopic viewers and the grisly photos chillingly presented within them in 3-D due to the offset viewing lenses. The horrors of those images were in contrast to some of the more bizarre exhibits found in the newer building behind the cafe such as the female mannequin dressed up as a German soldier with her male beard drawn on in felt tip marker pen. There were, however, some good British enlistment posters that suggested, as is the case with most WW1 sites, the majority of visitors are from the UK. But, the main event and USP was behind the museum: the trenches.
While D and N thought it looked bogus, with the apparently freshly re-dug shell holes, I asked what they were expecting as trenches were not a design for living, so to speak. In spite of the tawdry atmosphere of the peculiar museum, the trench was grim, as were the starkly casual piles of spent shell cases.
Hill 60
This was a cratered hill top with the remains of a bunker built with reinforced concrete – a cutting-edge building material at the time. Further on, on Caterpillar Hill was another crater, this time with a quiet pool in its centre. This crater, about 75 yards in diameter, was caused by one of the nineteen mines detonated in tunnels beneath German positions on the Messine Ridge on 7th June 1917, killing ten thousand soldiers in total.
Menin Gate
At 8pm every night since 11th November 1929, except when the ceremony relocated to a cemetery in Surrey during WW2, the Last Post has been played by buglers beneath the arch of the Menin gate. The massive gate, with its walls inscribed with the names of soldiers whose remains were never found – albeit in order of rank, attracts a fair crowd who, in sombre contemplation wait silently, for the nightly event.After a few beers of the local ale we returned to the hut for a few canned beers and shared a few spicy tales, as you do.
Monday
The wind was so strong that our hut had been carried by a gust into the adjacent field.We left the campsite and crossed the Menin Road and were immediately in the Ypres Salient. The Menin Road was flanked by cemeteries full of soldiers who’d been buried where they fell while fighting to gain control of the road. Given the notorious mud of Belgium, the road was vital.
Tyne Cot
Containing almost 12,000 remains, Tyne Cot, built around two German bunkers, is the largest BWGC cemetery in the world though not the largest of all cemeteries. A German site visited last year contained 45,000.
The cemetery was established in 1917 and expanded in the 1920s and for whatever reason survived the German Occupation of WW2.
Unlike the somewhat shambolic Hill 62, the museum at Tyne Cot, is neat and tidy, housing plenty of emotive relics. The names of those who died repeat over the the site,s audio system.
Passendale
The name is so evocative and eerie – largely, I presume, as the name includes what could be read as ‘passion’ – an emotion apposite to the horrors of war. At the apex of the Salient, the town was fought over and destroyed. The 3rd battle of Ypres is commonly referred to as Passendale. Lots of memorials everywhere.The Wind
We nipped along at 18mph but had to be wary of going too far to get back on Tuesday in what would be a very difficult headwind. So, the new target became Cadzand, just over the border in Zeeland. Navigation got more complex as we zig-zagged our way around Bruges.
The weather eventually brightened up and by the time we got to Cadzand were into a nice sunny evening. There was an eerie end-of-summer feel about the Wulpen campsite but it had spotless facilities and the pitch was 20.25 euros + 50c each for good showers. Cadzand itself had nothing to offer except a windmill so we cycled north to Cadzand Bad, the seaside wing of Cadzand. We found a bowling bar with pool tables and one man and his dog. N proved to be the hotshot, D the flukey number two and myself, the unfortunate one.
Tuesday
We had 70 miles to do by 6pm in a blustery but unrelenting headwind. N had emailed his workplace on Monday afternoon for a forecast that said it would be sunny and that the wind would lessen. It was certainly sunny but the clouds flew across the sky as if watching a time lapse film, the wind still at it as we headed west-sou-west to the border on the Nord Zee coast route. This cycle route is not signposted at all though it does use cycle paths. Of the three countries, Belgium had the best cycle paths. They were often separated from the road or clearly marked. Belgian drivers would always stop to let cyclists cross at roundabouts. The French cycle paths were a bit half-hearted and inconsistent, while we were not in Holland enough to form a fair opinion on theirs.
Low countries biking style. The standard bike for the region seems to have the regular frame and seat of a town bike but the handlebars are set very high and shaped to allow the cyclist to lean onto them, arms folded, as if leaning on a bar. Crap for going up a hill but ideal for the long flat rides in this particular ‘hood.
Knokke Hiest was the first of the many resort towns that perched on the lip of the dunes all the way down to Dunkerque. The sea front was a solid fascia of multi-storey hotels and apartment blocks while Knokke’s high street was home to a Gucci and other fancy dan boutique stores. D’d bought some nice buns but we couldn’t find a cafe open in the rapidly emptying holiday resort. A brief jaunt along the exposed promenade in the howling gale was ominously difficult. The Route took in the traffic-free front but it was like cycling uphill. In the soft focus of the sea-sprayed distance there was the somewhat awesome sight of Zeebrugge docks with its gigantic container cranes and even gigantic-er wind turbines on the man-made peninsula. The latter was hardly a picture postcard sight and the grey sea dappled by sand churned-up by ships and swells and that probably contained lumps of ice was hardly the azure blue of the Riviera or even the south coast of the UK.
On the route behind the dunes we often followed tramlines and these became useful in the towns. However despite plenty of warnings we followed the tram lines until the road petered out and we had to carry the loaded bikes across two sets of rails - sunk into deep gravel - and then a dual carriageway to return to civilisation.
There are some tasty looking buildings here and there – the Casino Kursaal in Ostende in particular - but for most part the journey back to Dunkerque was an all-absorbing fight with the wind, distracting attention away from any attractions. The path took us onto the front after Ostende: shuttered shops rattled in the full force of the gale while sand was already encroaching onto the promenade that perhaps just the week before was being swept clean by the happy feet of thousands of holiday makers. Mini-dunes stalled our bikes. We had to revert to a road behind the dunes to Niewpoort and beyond to the border.
Late afternoon and we entered the business end of the day. We had to get to the car by 6.30 in time to pack the bikes and get to the ferry and check in. We were all struggling with the wind and could only manage 10 or 11mph, but we maintained the rhythm and found the car at 6.25.
171 miles
