Previous – Zuid Limburg

So I woke up with a blister from all the hours of walking I’d done the previous day, but it wasn’t so bad yet (eventually it took over most of my left middle toe lol). We picked up things for breakfast and lunch at a convenience store, and ate breakfast on benches outside the train station. We missed the bus, but we were still a bit early, so we took the train instead. This was the first time in the Netherlands that I took a train that wasn’t NS – apparently in an attempt to cut costs, NS divested itself of a bunch of minor lines a while ago, so this one is run for instance by Arriva. You can still use the same transit card, but you have to boop the Arriva card machine instead of the NS card machine. And if you are arriving by NS and then taking an Arriva train (or vice versa, of course), you have to sign out of the NS machine and then back in to the Arriva machine to continue on your journey.

Which really wasn’t a big deal since at this point, we were only taking Arriva. Valkenburg is a nice little town, though to cross the main car street (Geneindestraat) that lies between the train station and the historic city took a LONG time even with the fancy timed crosswalks. The historic city is pretty nice, and the Klein Geul river runs through it, which eventually ends up in the Maas just north of Maastricht.

The castle on the hilltop is very romantic, overshadowing the town. It’s necessary to go through at least one city gate to reach the museum entrance. We didn’t go to the main entrance, we went to the secret cave entrance, to the Fluweelengrot (Velvet Cave). There was a collectible coin machine there, so I got one.

This cave tour was again all in Dutch. I can hear numbers pretty well, but then I try to guess what the rest of the sentence is based on the numbers and what I already know about Dutch/geologic history and… I’m usually way off, haha. The guide explained that we all needed to stay close for safety; there are 200+km of tunnels under the landscape here, and 12 exits, and not every part is safe. Near the end of the tour, he told us a story about two teenagers who went to explore some other caves and weren’t discovered for a month – they were within 200m of the cave entrance when their bodies were found, but when it’s pitch black and you’re dying of dehydration a hundred metres could be ten thousand for all the good it does you. But even at the beginning when he was just going through the safety procedures, some people decided they’d rather not do the tour after all. Somehow, my own fears about underground spaces were not triggered on this tour.

The guide was a great storyteller, I could tell that without being able to understand any of it! He was very animated and told a bunch of jokes. In the first area, he explained how the caves were excavated – stone blocks were chiselled out of the wall for construction, using long metal bars. It must have been exhausting work, and it left interesting diagonal lines grooved across every surface. You could see where each individual block had been. Apparently if you dry the sandstone out (it’s not completely dry in its natural environment) then it becomes waterproof afterwards.

He told of a siege that once took place around this town in the middle ages, but the secret tunnels meant that food was still coming in and so the siege failed. Also we weren’t supposed to take pictures of the murals, but he said he wouldn’t tell anyone if we didn’t. 🤫

There were a couple sculptures by local stonemasons just fooling around and carving dragons into the raw stone, even painting them in bright colours. A bit goofy-looking. I don’t have pictures of those.

In WWII, these tunnels were of course a Dutch Resistance hiding place. Apparently 4000 people went into hiding here… and 4005 people came out because of all the babies that were born.

There was once a secret Catholic chapel here, from the time when Catholics weren’t accepted openly. The art here was pretty amazing given the limited resources.

In one place near the end, he turned out his lantern so that we could experience 95% darkness. Apparently there was still 5% light coming from exhibition lights elsewhere in the cave, but for us it may as well have been 100%, since we’d had light up until that point and our eyes were not completely adjusted.

To exit the cave, we had to climb a whole lot of stairs, which brought us out right on top of the hill at the foot of the castle ruins, at the foot of what is known as the Wolf Tower – not because of wolves, but because it had an octagonal vault, vault being ‘gewolf’ in (old?) Dutch (Google says vault is ‘gewelf’). First, we had lunch under a tree, which was nice until we started getting swarmed by wasps. We packed up and started to move on… some other people began to unpack their lunch in the same place, so we warned them about the wasps too.

Valkenburg Castle is an amazing place. Some parts have been stabilized with fresh sandstone blocks, but a huge part of it is still in the same condition that it was when the Dutch blew it up in 1672, when they destroyed it rather than let the French capture it and use it. It must have taken an immense amount of gunpowder… reminds me of another building I’ve seen that was blown up with gunpowder.

While I loved the Great Hall, that used to be two stories, the main feature of the castle was the central donjon. There have been three over the centuries; a square one, which probably did not have a stone outer wall, it was just a tower on a hill. Then there was a big sixteen-sided tower, but eventually it was replaced by a smaller ten-sided tower. You can see the foundations for all of them. There were a ton of great signs all over the site, numbered, with information about each feature’s history and even some cgi renders of what it might have looked like when complete.

Then we went down into the town again, and strolled along the shopping street. I bought a postcard of the aerial view of the castle, but I got tripped up in speaking Dutch when the lady asked me if I wanted a stamp (postzegel) as well, as that’s not a word I’d learned yet. There was a candy shop with gigantic cone-shaped bags of marshmallow candy on racks, so I got one. The marshmallows tasted lightly flavoured, not sure of what (kinda citrusy?), and they had a little bit of sugar on the outside. There was a whole shop filled with knock-off Barbies? There was a shop full of gemstones and crystals and fossils, probably for the New Age crowd. The fossils were cool, but they weren’t local fossils so I decided not to get any. We walked to two of the other city gates that still stand, and around a church, where the conversation volume drops like a lead weight when you go into the non-tourist street. Then we headed back to the train.

We could have spent a little more time in Maastricht, maybe going inside St. Servatius instead of just walking around outside, but I was a bit tired (and blistered) so we just got some snacks at the train station and then went to go on our train. I was like “what kind of trashy candy do you have that you haven’t seen in North America?” so I got a Mergpijp, which is kind of like a cylinder-shaped Wagon Wheel; it’s got that artificial taste to it. And I also got a matcha cookie, which was quite bright green, and it was quite fresh – soft and almost gooey on the inside, tiny bit crunchy on the outside. Felt like it had come out of an oven less than an hour ago.

The next day was a rest day which I wrote nothing about. XD

Next – The Dunes