8
Having touched on some of the issues that come with tourism – when there’s both too much of it and too little – I’m determined to put some of my new knowledge about how to travel more responsibly to the test. Where better to do it than Amsterdam: both the undisputed poster child of overtourism’s dark side, and the undisputed king of cycle culture, where the greenest way to get around is also the easiest?
Until the pandemic hit, Amsterdam was the cautionary tale – the scary bedtime story held up to frighten the bejesus out of other European cities about the dangers of attracting ‘too many’ tourists. In 2019, it had a record-breaking 9 million visitors,1 more than a third of whom came from the UK, US and Germany alone (the single-biggest international market was Brits, totalling 1.43 million).2 The number of guests who stayed overnight had risen 9 per cent year-on-year. To put this in context, there are only around 1.16 million residents in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area (and more like 820,000 in Amsterdam proper). Just imagine living there – every weekend your hometown buckles under an influx of tourists that almost matches the number of residents. You feel outnumbered in your own city; you feel surrounded and outcast.
The City of Amsterdam thought things had gone far enough too. In 2017, it boldly revealed that not a single euro was being spent on advertising or marketing. ‘Cities are dying from tourism,’ said Frans van der Avert, Amsterdam Marketing’s chief executive at the time. ‘No one will be living in the historic centres anymore. A lot of smaller historic cities in Europe are getting destroyed by visitors.’
He went so far as to declare that Amsterdam didn’t ‘want to have more people’. He highlighted visitors ‘with no respect for the character of the city’, and pointed the finger squarely at travellers on low-cost airlines, funnily enough, claiming that the ones who flew with Ryanair were ‘the loudest’.
The city had reached the point where the job was no longer to attract visitors, but to manage them, pointing them in the direction of different, lesser-known spots. ‘We want to increase the quality of visitors – we want people who are interested in the city, not who want it as a backdrop for a party,’ said van der Avert.
Amsterdam’s problem was that a fair percentage of those millions of annual visitors who descended were very much the ‘wrong’ kind: stag parties. Big groups whose main aim was to get drunk, stoned and ogle sex workers in the Red Light District. Essentially, people who would never leave the city’s medieval centre, particularly the seedier few streets within striking distance of the central station, lined with fast-food joints and weed-touting coffee shops.
Fast-forward to 2021, and the opposite problem to the Dutch capital’s previous overtourism woes had occurred. Amsterdam’s statistical analysis service, the OIS, said in April 2021 that, at best, it expected 45 per cent fewer visitors to turn up that year. In the worst-case scenario, visitor numbers could drop by more than two-thirds.3
In response, the City of Amsterdam asked amsterdam&partners, a not-for-profit in the public-private sector ‘dedicated to making Amsterdam an even better place to live, work and visit’, to issue a recommendation on the future of the visitor economy. The advice was drawn up in collaboration with more than a hundred stakeholders, with the focus being on how a sustainable visitor economy could be created as the city built back after the pandemic.
‘We aim to create a visitor economy that adds value and does not cause disturbance or disruption by 2025,’ the report reads, detailing ‘seven pillars’ to help create a more balanced approach that values the needs of those who live and work in the city on a par with those who visit.4 They include getting the community involved, redesigning public spaces, rewarding good business practices, making the city centre liveable and ‘managing the night’ – this last achieved partly through ‘tackling disturbance and disruption in a targeted manner’.
Some people have the impression that the city no longer wants tourists, but that was never the case. What they want is a more curious kind of traveller: one who’ll try new things and visit new places, spreading their money far and wide on cultural experiences, museums, galleries, restaurants and bars. And that’s exactly what I intend to do.
When I head off to Amsterdam, it is after a week I can only describe as a bag of shite. My deputy editor was ill for half the week (not in any way her fault, but always a recipe for extra stress); the bathroom ceiling in my shared flat had sprung a leak, which swiftly escalated into the entire ceiling collapsing, causing a small flood; and the house purchase I’d spent months waiting for so I could finally live my best life by the seaside had fallen through with barely an explanation. It is in a state of high anxiety and bitterness, therefore, that I set off for London Liverpool Street station after work, from where I’ll catch the train to Harwich International.
I’d never travelled to the Netherlands this way, taking the Stena ferry service to the Hook of Holland, but the ease of the entire process goes some way to soothing my barbed-wire nerves. I finish the workday as normal; by 7.30 p.m. I’m on the train; by 8.45 p.m. I’m at Harwich; and by 9 p.m. I’m in my cabin on board the good ship Stena Hollandica. Honestly, the whole thing is a masterclass in how to provide smooth-as-a-Galaxy Caramel, end-to-end travel. Harwich International station is inside the ferry port, for goodness’ sake! Getting through security, even with the added pandemic paperwork, takes all of ten minutes. And then I’m on board, in a modern little wood-panelled cabin that feels exactly like a travelling hotel room. I vaguely consider getting out to ‘explore’ the ship, and then my eyes fall on the freshly made bed; my half-finished book; and – the clincher – my can of M&S raspberry mojito cocktail. I think not.
I experience the sleep of the dead, spurred on by the sexy growl of the ship’s engine, and only awake when an unnecessarily upbeat jingle is played through the tannoy as a mandatory, ship-wide wake-up call at 6.30 a.m. And … that’s it. We’re in the bloody Netherlands! It is a feat that consistently holds no small portion of magic for me, just as it does on a train – any form of transport, in fact, in which you fall asleep and wake up in a different country. I blearily order a coffee and croissant and head out on deck with the chain-smoking truckers as we chug our way into port, watching the sun rise and flush the sky blusher-pink.
Out the other side, and the process continues in its easy, breezy, traveller-friendly fashion: down the gangway, through passport control and round a corner for the metro to Schiedam Centrum. From there, it’s a handy seventy-minute fast train to Amsterdam. By 10.30 a.m., I’m checked into my hotel, the extremely vibey Kimpton DeWitt, which seems to have implemented some sort of policy that requires all guests to meet a fairly high minimum attractiveness threshold (I do not include myself in this; all I can say is, thank goodness for face masks).
Much like the sleeper trains to Scotland and Cornwall, this method of flight-free travel enables you to spend the entire weekend somewhere new without missing a single hour of work. I don’t need to catch a train back into port until 6.30 p.m. tomorrow evening; I’ll arrive back at my desk in London by 9 a.m. on Monday. One of the things I often hear from people of my generation is that they’d struggle to give up or cut down on flying because of the city-break element – they’re time-poor but have disposable income they’d like to spend on weekends away. Putting aside the fact that it might be preferable to rethink this model in general – as we’ve seen, one of the key tenets of the responsible travel movement is encouraging people to spend more time in places, to engage with them more meaningfully and contribute more economically – this trip shows me that you don’t have to give up international city breaks when you give up flying. I am about to spend a rich, full weekend abroad, all without taking a moment of annual leave.
It becomes clear to me after ten minutes of cycling along the Amstel River that in my six or so previous trips to the Dutch capital, I’d barely scratched the surface. In fact, a wave of toe-curling embarrassment hits me that I had ever presumed to think I ‘knew’ Amsterdam in any real capacity. What I meant was that I ‘sort of’ knew the canal ring, or Grachtengordel – the seventeenth-century district surrounding the Old Centre of Amsterdam encircled by four major waterways. The gall of me!
As I cycle along the river that gave the beer its name, I realise that Amsterdam’s overtourism problem disappears the second you get clear of this inner sanctum: the pathway is crowd-free, populated by cheerful locals. Within twenty minutes, the cyclists have thinned out even more. And within half an hour, I seem to have found myself slap-bang in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by fields, cows and epic Dutch mansions, in which I can only assume Amsterdam’s wealthiest folk must dwell (I see more than one hedge maze, if that helps clarify the extent of the fanciness). Old men fish from the riverbanks; there seems to be some kind of genteel boat race happening. I stop every so often to take a picture – the requisite selfie with a seventeenth-century windmill at De Riekermolen, a photo of the Rembrandt Hoeve cheese farm, famed for its traditional Dutch Gouda – but mainly I just enjoy meandering along under the weak October sunshine.
When I reach a deep curve in the river, I notice there is an enticing-looking selection of riverside restaurants and decide there could not be a finer place to stop off for lunch. By chance I stumble into what turns out to be a superior purveyor of refined Indonesian fare – the Netherlands does a great line in this cuisine, complete with its own Indo-Dutch speciality, rijsttafel (translation: rice table, a resplendent selection of little dishes), thanks to an influx of Indonesian immigrants who flocked to the city after the Second World War. I mull over a rijsttafel for one, before sadly concluding that I can in no way handle that amount of food without a substantial nap afterwards. Instead, I fill up on rice crackers and creamy satay sauce, nasi goreng rice and a rich, warm jackfruit rendang curry. It’s still too much food, of course, but there’s no time for napping. I’m on a mission.
The cycle route I’ve picked up from the tourist board – one of a number of ‘cycleseeing’ tours, designed to get travellers into new parts of town – would have me head down the river one way, cross over, and then come back the other side. Instead, I decide to take the opportunity to explore another neighbourhood I’ve never been within striking distance of before – Zuidoost. This multi-cultural urban hub is a world away from the quaint canal-and-windmill paint-by-numbers Amsterdam I’ve always visited. It’s like going to a different city – two for the price of one. I’m hit straight away by the wave of colour: buildings painted in rainbow slices that sing even through the gloom, as the day turns a more overcast shade of autumnal and a persistent drizzle sets in for the long haul.
I’ve never minded cycling in the rain. Instead, come shower or shine, I’m a big believer in the wrong gear being the only barrier to a jolly nice time on two wheels. And so it is that I pause the pedalling and swiftly don my waterproof trousers and rain mac (I’m already wearing my incredibly childish red wellingtons with bows on the front). Dressed like this, I could go for hours. And I do.
I head first to the Heesterveld Creative Community, where the buildings are daubed in diagonal stripes of orange, yellow, blue, green, pink, like one big colour wheel, and any spare walls are canvases for elaborate street-art pieces. Taking a brief pause from the enduring precipitation, I duck in for a coffee alongside a bevy of trendy types at Oma Ietje, housed in an old shipping container.
From there I head further east to the green expanse of Gaasperpark, which is dominated by a large, man-made lake. It is pindrop quiet as I cycle around empty paths through the trees, the canopy providing a brief shelter, and make a circuit of the water. The peace is perhaps the antithesis of the vision we so often have of pre-pandemic Amsterdam – streets spilling over with crowds, rowdy groups behaving badly, the city bursting at the seams.
In my search for the final stop on the Zuidoost tour, I end up seeing a lot more of the area, thanks to my own sub-par sense of direction. I’m seeking World of Food, a cool-sounding food hall that gathers together stalls of various international cuisines under one roof, reflecting the diversity of the neighbourhood’s residents. I push off down a path, check my map, and realise I’ve gone the wrong way. Again. This happens regardless of the direction I head in, until I wonder if there’s some sort of gremlin hidden deep in the recesses of my phone whose sole aim is to prevent me from eating something else delicious today.
But no matter; it turns out to be the ultimate way to appreciate the wonder of Amsterdam’s cycling infrastructure. If you’re the sort of person who would never countenance cycling in London or any other UK city because you don’t feel safe, you’re not alone. In 2020, the National Travel Attitudes Survey found that 66 per cent of Brits over the age of 18 agreed that ‘it is too dangerous for me to cycle on the roads’ (and this figure was even higher for women, at 71 per cent).5 I am a regular cyclist in London and, despite having been hit by a car before (not my fault, I’d just like to make clear) and having had several, let’s call them ‘hairy’, incidents, I always convince myself that there’s nothing to fear. But getting lost in this outer district in Amsterdam – one dominated by busy roads and junctions – I finally experience what safe cycling really feels like. I am never, ever on those busy roads with all those cars. I am always off to one side, totally separate, wheels flying on a well-maintained path just for me that’s as smooth as the baby’s proverbial backside. There’s a constant anxiety when cycling in the UK, for me, that I will lose my way (inevitable with the aforementioned lack of sense of direction) and end up somewhere terrifying. A busy junction. A four-lane roundabout. A dual carriageway. And then it will be like that scene in Clueless where they accidentally drive onto the freeway and everyone starts hyperventilating and screaming. Because there is rarely a defined separation of church and state, cars and bikes; we’re supposed to rub along together like one, big, happy (read: dysfunctional and wildly dangerous) family.
There is a tendency to think that the fabulous cycling infrastructure in Amsterdam – and the Netherlands more generally – is in some way inevitable. To assume that they’re all so bike-mad, it was always going to happen. In contrast to this assumption, Gerrit Faber of the Fietsersbond (Cyclists’ Union) says that ‘it’s not what we have because of our genes. We built it – and other cities can, too.’ Investment in the city’s cycling infrastructure properly began in the 1970s in response to high death rates for cyclists (in 1971, more than 3,000 people, 450 of whom were children, were killed by cars). ‘At that moment, people decided we don’t want it and we built what we have today,’ says Faber.
The result? Some 400km of bike paths, 881,000 bikes and an estimated half of all journeys in Amsterdam taking place on two wheels. Not bad.
It makes for a glorious environment to get lost in, where there is nothing to fear, other than arriving too late at World of Food to eat more things. Which is pretty scary to contemplate, truth be told. Eventually, after cycling down what feels like every street in the entire district, I stumble upon it, more due to the laws of entropy than by design. Inside an old car park converted into a multi-cultural food court, I find crowds sheltering from the rain while chowing down on Dominican sancocho (seven-meat stew), Indian thali and Caribbean johnnycake. I am still groaning from my ridiculously decadent lunch, and so I limit myself to buying a giant pastry from a Surinamese bakery, humbled by my own restraint.
By now time is ticking on – I feel pleasantly far from the thick of things, while being painfully aware that I have to find my way back into town with less than 5 per cent battery left on my phone. But this time, following my nose couldn’t be easier; it somehow feels instinctive, which I suspect I can attribute more to the splendid cycle path infrastructure cutting a clear line back to the city centre than my miraculously improved inner satnav. The best part is that, once again, I’m alone on the roads. Perhaps because of the rain (yes, it’s still going), I find myself going for long stretches without seeing a soul. I reach an underpass, a road running high overhead transporting the cars at one remove (of course), and I pause to try out a line from a favourite song. The echo is magnificent, and so I stay and bellow the whole thing into the void, before pushing off once more, a goofy smile plastered on my face for the rest of the journey.
I come to the Amstel River again, a trusty old friend by this point, and let it lead me all the way home, like a watery breadcrumb trail. But as I make my way further in towards the city’s unerring centre of gravity, I find myself getting annoyed for the first time all day. There are so many damn people! Not only do I not have the streets to myself, but pedestrians are spilling over from the pavement and into the bike lane – my bike lane – and I have to stop and tut and ring my bell. It hits me like a freight train – the reason locals became so resentful of tourists (coming over here, blocking our bike paths) and why the city is so keen to create a different kind of tourism model. I’d never really noticed it before, but after a crowd-free day of purest joy, returning to the swarm suddenly seems utterly unendurable. I escape my rising disgust for humanity inside the warm cocoon of my hotel, where a dinner of smoked butter and asparagus alongside a frosty cucumber margarita marginally smooths down my ruffled feathers.
Another day, another district. While Saturday’s explorations took me a good 10km out of the medieval centre, Sunday’s adventuring isn’t transporting me far at all – a mere ten minutes is all it takes – but the thinning-crowds effect is similarly striking. Amsterdam-Noord is, despite the name, pretty darn central – within spitting distance of Amsterdam Centraal station, in fact – but it’s separated from its tourist-laden counterpart by the IJ waterway. This has always been enough to keep it at arm’s length from the rest of the city and, until fairly recently, it was seen by many as the poor relation. Whether a long hangover from when it was used as a gallows field, where the corpses of convicts were hung after executions up until 1795, or because it was the victim of Amsterdam’s heaviest bombardment during the Second World War due to its industrial focus and numerous factories, it garnered something of a rough-and-ready rep. But a surge of cultural regeneration has helped change that over the last decade, spurred on by the opening of the Eye Filmmuseum in 2012 and the tourist board who, let me tell you, are clamouring for visitors to hop aboard one of the frequent free ferries that make the crossing in under five minutes. But, even with such inbuilt convenience, it’s an uphill struggle to get visitors to leave that blasted canal ring. I’d roll my eyes at the collective unimaginativeness of tourists were it not for the fact that I, too, had never once thought to head across the river.
Rolling my bike off the boat, I eschew Noord’s big tourist attractions – as well as the Eye, the A’DAM Tower, which gives a 360° view of the city from 100m, plays a major part in enticing people over the water – in favour of pootling around on largely empty streets. I make my way to Vliegenbos, a century-old forest of elms and ashes, and am slack-jawed in wonder to find myself, fifteen minutes after leaving my hotel for the day, riding through a canopy of lush trees, the only sound the putt-putt-putt of raindrops on leaves. Attempting to follow another ‘cyclesee map’, I head out along Nieuwendammerdijk to eyeball the quaint cobbled streets and wooden gabled houses painted in pastel shades – a far cry from Noord’s formerly gritty, industrial image.
As you may already have gleaned from previous chapters, I plan entire days when travelling around opportunities to eat and drink, and so I’ve already sussed out my hot-chocolate stop – De Ceuvel, a workspace for creative, sustainable and socially minded entrepreneurs housed in a former boatyard, which also happens to have a banging café. There are all manner of delightful workshops set in old houseboats, plants for sale and, most satisfying of all, a fluffball of a pale-grey cat who makes the rounds, strutting, purring and wrapping himself around ankles with the unerring confidence of one who finds nothing but unadulterated adoration at every turn.
Not far from here is one of the area’s hippest draws, NDSM. This former shipyard is now the cool post-industrial setting for a gargantuan flea market (one of Europe’s biggest), events spaces, festivals, restaurants, bars and the recently opened STRAAT, the museum of street art, based in a former shipbuilding warehouse. Here, we ask the graffiti equivalent of the ancient ‘does a tree falling in the woods make a sound if there’s no one to hear it?’ question: can street art really be street art when it’s not, well, on the street? Why yes, yes it can! The industrial setting and 8,000m2 space matches perfectly with the 150+ large-scale artworks, allowing them room to breathe. There is so much colour, so much raw talent on display, that I find myself losing hours amid their splendour. I’ve done the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum and the Hermitage, just like everyone else, but I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed myself quite so freely as I do wandering between giant abstract canvases and portraits, some cartoonish, some blisteringly realistic. (I particularly admire the sheer chutzpah of the artist whose temporary installation, housed in a separate room, seems to have been designed purely to flog copies of his own book. A stack of several hundred of them have been piled high, graffitied with a giant version of his tag along their spines, and accompanied by the display caption: ‘The artist invites you to interact with this installation by purchasing a book from it. The piece will then slowly disappear, just like in the streets. Please pay for your unique book in the giftshop, €30.’ Entrepreneurialism at its finest, that.)
From there it’s the merest skip to Pllek, a restaurant in a shipping container that claims to be ‘the largest green restaurant in Amsterdam’. There’s a big focus on local produce, with fish from the North Sea, vegetables grown and harvested in the city and suppliers who ‘contribute to a slightly better world with a minimal food footprint’. On these grounds alone it would seem rude not to order a generous portion of sourdough loaded with aubergine, goat feta, dukkah and pomegranate, and so I grudgingly oblige. Not all heroes wear capes.
There’s a handy ferry stop up this end of Noord too, so I hop on board and enjoy the wind in my hair on our ten-minute sailing back to Centraal station. It’s finally time for me to visit the attraction my inner child has been dreaming about all weekend.
I know Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory isn’t a real place, but, if it was, it would arguably be the Tony’s Chocolonely store in Amsterdam (albeit on a smaller scale). Tucked away down some stairs on a side street off the central Damrak road lies a hidden cavern of chocolate. There is an entire wall of bars with wrappers in every colour of the rainbow, and levers you can pull to release samples and try different ones. There are limited-edition flavours never before seen, experimental combinations of fillings and chocolate types. There are various multipacks and miniature versions to load up on as gifts. And then there is the pièce de résistance – machines that allow you to create your own personalised bar, selecting your chocolate and up to three fillings before designing your very own wrapper (I go for milk chocolate with pretzel, caramel and cinnamon sugar, in case you’re wondering).
Aside from picking your preferred wrapper colour, you also get to write a tagline on either end of the bar. I um and ah but, as I am still deep in the journey of writing this book, I bashfully type out ‘Zero Altitude’ at one end and ‘Flight-free 4eva’ at the other, a bit like when I graffitied the name of the boy I fancied in secondary school, and tell myself I won’t eat it until I’ve filed my entire first draft. Like a vastly less glamorous version of laying down a celebratory bottle of wine, you might say.
I get so overexcited that I end up spending more than £20 on chocolate and gushing about how wonderful the shop is to the nonplussed staff behind the counter, stuffing the company’s annual report into my bag for good measure as I go. Why am I telling you so much about my regression into kidulthood in a Dutch chocolate emporium? Because Tony’s is a modern-day success story of a company that started with sustainability and social justice at its core and flourished on a phenomenal scale. Founded by Dutch journalist Teun van de Keuken, the brand was brought into being to address the modern-day slavery that still exists within the cocoa-farming industry and global chocolate trade. The aim is to end child labour in the industry worldwide, and Tony’s pays farmers 25 per cent more than the standard price they receive for their cocoa on top of paying a Fairtrade premium. Plus the beans and cocoa butter are fully traceable throughout the entire supply chain, going all the way back to farmers the company actually knows. It is one of those tales that helps bring back a little bit of my faith in the world; the only reason the company has thrived is because people cared enough to pay more for their chocolate in return for knowing the workers weren’t being exploited. And that is a very heartening thing indeed.
At this juncture, with just ninety minutes left until I need to head for the station for the return journey to the Hook of Holland, the only real question is: should I get stoned by myself in the city best known for its chilled-out drug laws? Emboldened by all the weekend’s new experiences, I decide that, yes, that’s exactly what a real maverick would do, and wheel myself off to Dampkring, one of the city’s highest-rated coffee shops. The air is thick and heavy with smoke, the music loud, and there is a long and slow-moving queue for the counter. There is nowhere readily available to sit, and a large group of guys wearing matching Amsterdam beanies seem to be taking up every available space, all looking vaguely sick and fatigued. I spend five minutes waiting in line before I have a moment of purest clarity. What in God’s name am I doing here? Wasting my precious final hour indoors in the midst of this fug, surrounded by men whose acquaintance I would go to great lengths to avoid under normal circumstances?
I make a swift exit and, as a reward, finally allow myself the indulgence of cycling around the canals, the prettiest canals in the whole world to my mind (apols, Venice). As if on cue, it finally stops raining and the sun comes out, washing the gabled buildings with hazy, yellow, autumnal light against a scuffed pewter sky that promises more rain later. But not yet. That magical glow turns everything into an Old Masters painting come to life, and I feel overwhelmed by my love of this oft-blighted city as I hurtle along, stopping on every single bridge for a photo like the basic bitch tourist I am deep in my heart. But even here, in peak quaint-Amsterdam territory, I am struck by the dearth of people – the overtourism problem truly does seem starkly confined to those few streets right in the centre. How strange, I think, to come to such a beautiful place and never get further than its least attractive bits. Humans, eh? Still, it’s nice to be able to cycle freely again without transforming into a grumpy old woman, raging and spitting at the ‘youth’ blocking her path.
As I bid farewell to my bike and make my way back to the ferry port via Schiedam, I reflect on how much I’ve been able to see and do in such a short space of time. And all of it new and fresh; none of it feeling like it contributed to the overburdening of the city. I genuinely feel good about the places I’ve spent my money. I genuinely feel like my visit might have had a net-positive impact, were it possible to measure it. What’s more, challenging myself to get out of the familiar bits was, y’know, exciting! I felt adventurous, and exhilarated, and pioneering (and yes, I do know how ridiculous that must sound to people who are actually all those things – we’re hardly talking off-the-beaten-track territory here). But the point is this: rethinking where you go and what you see doesn’t just benefit the destination in some worthy, holier-than-thou, what-a-martyr-I-am sense. Just as Pura Aventura’s Tom Power had pointed out to me already, it directly benefits you, the traveller, too.
When I post bits from my trip on social media, someone shares a tweet and calls me ‘cool, imaginative travel editor Helen Coffey’. I don’t think anyone has ever used the word ‘cool’ to describe me in my entire life. It turns out that, if nothing else, getting far from the madding crowd could just improve your street cred.
Carbon comparison
190kg of CO2e for a return flight London Gatwick–Amsterdam Schiphol6
11.4kg of CO2e for a return train Liverpool Street–Harwich;7
66.3kg of CO2e for a return ferry Harwich–Hook of Holland8
= 77.7kg of CO2e
Carbon emissions saved: 112.3kg of CO2e