The Dunes

Previous – Valkenburg

Tharash still had blister band-aids from the last time I was in Europe (my feet are not tough at all) and it worked like magic – today we did a 10k round trip through the coastal dunes to the beach and back.

I’d made a request to come here after he posted a picture of a big fat snail from this area in one of his personal Google photo albums, because these snails are pretty neat: they use calcium from the sand in the dunes to build their shells. Here’s the Wikipedia article, though it doesn’t mention about the calcium.

We took the train up past Haarlem to get here. If you look on the topographical map, it looks really neat. You may notice that the highest point is actually the innermost ridges of sand. That’s because humans figured they needed the dunes to protect them from the ocean, but they didn’t want sand blowing all over their fields, so they planted forests to hold them in place where they wanted them. Sand kept blowing from the sea, though, but it couldn’t really make it through the forest, so it just collected on those inner dunes and made them taller and taller and taller.

I screenshotted a close view from the topography webpage. The urban area is Haarlem, and we walked from the train station of Santpoort-Zuid (just north of Haarlem) to the coast and back.

We saw snails right away, so mission accomplished. But we still went on the walk. We saw a lot of snails. I didn’t take pictures of every single snail, but I took a lot of them.

Photo by MH

I like sowbug/pillbugs/isopods too! Photo by MH

Photo by MH

The terrain changed extremely rapidly, and no two places looked like each other. There were thick woods, and spindly thin woods, and grasslands, and sandy parts, and thick bushes, and the hiking trail went right through the middle of all of them. It runs parallel to the biking trail, but half the time you can’t see the biking trail at all due to trees or bushes. In some places the undergrowth and grasses are so thick it’s like wading waist-deep. And yet there are people who go jogging through it. One of them passed us (not in the wading part, fortunately).

Photo by MH

One of the few places where the hiking trail joined the biking trail.

A sea buckthorn laden with berries. We saw lots of these too, some bushes bearing more than others, and I remembered the jam I tried from Finland – iirc, they’re pretty tart.

Plants are colonizing this dune. It’s not going anywhere fast for the time being.

Mint in the wild!

A little snail

We saw a ton of roe deer tracks. Also giant piles of poop.

Not one of the aforementioned giant piles of poop, this is a little pile of poop and it appears to be full of beetle wings which looked interesting.

More mint

The trail is so overgrown o_O

Sand in the distance

The sand in this area was composed of, or at least filled with, untold tiny snail shells

The roots of the grasses were covered in small snails. Having an orgy, I guess, they seemed really anchored and immobile though. From a distance it looks like dead macaroni. Or zombie macaroni. We saw a ton of clusters like these along the path right up to the last dune.

Photo by MH

Tharash was looking for another rare flower, and we found it about 3/4 of the way to the beach.

The rare flower. Photo by MH

Photo by MH

Here is a pretty good example of vegetation influencing the dunes.

The sand catches on the plants and builds up behind them, while it’s blown away from in between them.

Almost to the shore, but there were some marshy areas with ponds and tons of wildlife, including swans and white herons.

A WWII bunker under that dune.

The last dune before the sea was very tall and had very slidey sand.

Looking north, we saw a number of odd attractions, including lots of kites, and what looked like windpowered dune buggies or something.

The kites were very colourful even from a distance.

Photo by MH

Here we settled down for lunch. And we were almost done, I was eating half of a raisin bun when suddenly something violently yanked on it. I’d been divebombed by a seagull who came in over my left shoulder, between me and Tharash, and yoinked it. I forgot that seagulls 1) live by the sea and 2) steal food, so for a half-second I actually thought that Tharash REALLY wanted my bun for some reason.

And it chomped part of my finger, so I was bleeding a bit. I washed it off with my water, squeezed it a bit to try and bleed any invading bacteria out, and I didn’t have a bandaid but I did have medical tape (for mask purposes) so I used that. Rather exciting. I cursed out the seagull and its brethren who were watching us to see if they’d have a chance of more food. And then we went to look at the ocean and the clouds.

On the other side of the beach dune I ate the other half of my bun. And then we headed back, a bit more directly to try and make it to a facility that might be able to offer us a proper band-aid, though I got super lost at the end.

This tree’s bark (and the one before it) has healed from its damage in a way that looks like it’s full of squiggly tubes. Photo by MH

Photo by MH

There was a café near the entrance to the park, and they gave us a band-aid. And then we bought ice cream from them. I had a watermelon ice cream, and Tharash got a scoop of hazelnut and a scoop of amaretto. He also made me order in Dutch even though I was a bit shaky on ice cream terminology (a cone is ‘hoorntje’, for the record).

Then we headed back home, where I soaked my finger in disinfectant. It was non-alcoholic, so it didn’t sting at all, which I wasn’t expecting – I thought it was going to be like rubbing alcohol. It was already sealing up; it was a pretty clean cut all things considered.

The next day we took another rest. Tharash’s parents went out, so it was even more quiet than usual. We considered playing one of the many boardgames stored in the room that I was staying in, but I didn’t have the energy to actually play anything. So we both did lots of reading lol. Tharash made the cardboard butterfly model that he’d bought at the mosasaur museum, and then cooked a dinner of couscous and falafel.