The mighty mouth of the Maas

On Thursday we journeyed down to Hoek van Holland to visit Syl's Auntie Erna, the middle sister. The rail trip takes about an hour - first to Rotterdam and a change for Hoek van Holland. We seem to have powerful train karma - we rarely wait more than a few minutes, the trains are always on time and we ride more than our fair share of Sneltreins (fast) versus Stoptreins (slow).

Hoek is where the mighty River Maas meets the sea - and it is Pitt Street for ships. All of the sea traffic for Rotterdam, one of the busiest ports in the world, passes through here. As does every boat that will work its way up to Germany.  It is a shock to an Australian to see a river carrying so much big ship traffic. Hoek is also where the Stena ferries from England dock - and a handful of them went to and fro while we walked the riverside, noshing on excellent fritte. I have loosened my belt.

The kids were in high spirits, enjoying the blustery weather, the fritte and the walk. They danced and ran and joked and played silly buggers with the umbrellas.

Its not just busy on the Maas, it is highly industrialized - the riverside to the south cluttered with container wharves, refineries and factories. And massive wind turbines everywhere. On the cold, grey day we walked around, wind blowing, factories billowing, ships steaming, it was a striking, intimidating landscape. The  grey sky is exactly as the Dutch masters captured it in sea and landscapes - no top or bottom, just deep, swirling grey. Australians don't see these skies at home.

Surprising then, to see lots of birds - the massive atlantic gulls living hang-gliders, magpies, swans, waders, robins and jackdaws. And to see that a man fishing on the breakwater had caught three superb seabass in the wash of the ships. The inter-tidal area was full of life too - crabs, fish and razor clams.

Some 40% of the Netherlands is below sea-level, kept dry by dykes and sea-walls. Spooky. And risky. In February 1953, the dykes failed and the sea rushed over Holland, causing catastrophic flooding. More than 1800 drowned. Syl's Uncle Gerard, the baby of the family, was born upstairs in Dordrecht during those catastrophic floods, while the furniture floated around in the lounge-room. Erna remembers this fondly because the schools were closed.

The Netherlands have since constructed a complex array of sea-walls to stop that happening again. We visited de Maeslantkering, basically a mobile wall that can be hauled across the Maas during flooding tides. The scale of this thing beggars belief and the photos don't do justice. Sea-level rise due to climate change takes on new significance when you live below sea-level.