European tour

In 1982 me, Harry and Johnny Ash went to Europe for a week. I was still an inexperienced foreign traveller. I'd still spent very little time outside Britain, except for a couple of visits to Jamaica and a few weekends in Belgium.


Amsterdam
We didn't have much in the way of a fixed plan. About the only thing that was certain was that we would begin and end in Amsterdam. We had return tickets on the train and ferry. It was my first time in Holland. I can remember thinking how modern it looked staring out of the train window on the way from Hoek van Holland to Amsterdam.

We arrived in the city early in the morning. After finding a bed in some fairly grotty hostel, we went straight to the pub. Not a particularly good pub. On Dam Straat. It only sold Heineken. We spent the next couple of hours there, drank several pints of Heineken, then moved on. We didn't get very far, just 20 metres or so further along Dam Straat. Another pub pretty similar to the first. More pints of Heineken were consumed.

That's all we really did that first day. Work our way slowly along Dam Straat drinking Heineken. I didn't know any better. The next day we looked around a little more. Either on or just off Martelaarsgracht we found a pub selling Duvel. We drank several each, before its strength caught up with us.


Deventer
After a couple of days in Amsterdam, it was time to move on. After consulting the railway map in the station, we decided to go to Apeldoorn. As the train pulled into Apeldoorn station, we realised we'd made a mistake. The town was dully modern. Oh dear. We opted for the simplest solution. We stayed on the train. "Let's see what the next stop's like". The next stop was Deventer. It look far more appealing, so we got off.

Even before we'd left the station, 20 people had told us Deventer was where "A Bridge too Far" had been filmed. We stopped on a campsite on the other bank of the river. There was a little ferry that took us almost directly there. We had a two-man tent and two sleeping bags. For three of us. Naturally the one sleeping outside got one of the sleeping bags. I was the lucky one, getting to both be inside the tent and have a sleeping bag.

We found a supermarket and loaded up with bottles of Grolsch. That's all we bought. I remember the girl on the checkout giving us a funny look. The reputation of the English as irredeemable pissheads hadn't yet penetrated that far into Holland's interior. I knew from Michael Jackson that Grolsch was a superior Pils and unpasteurised (sadly, no longer true). Sure enough, it was a big improvement on Heineken. I had the World Guide to Beer with me. Despite its size and supposedly travelling light. It proved later to be a good decision to have taken it along.

That evening I had my first encounter with a pocketless billiard table in a Grolsch pub somewhere around the main square. Deventer isn't a huge town (far smaller than Apeldoorn) but has a lively and compact centre. We played some billiards rather badly (I'd only start getting the hang of this billiards lark when I was living in Rotterdam), drank some Grolsch and ate some fried things out of the wall at a Febo. That was living.

I can't remember how long we stayed in Deventer. Maybe two nights. When we did move on, we decided to head off on foot. We were aiming for Enschede. Looking back, deciding to travel on foot seems an odd decision. I was much younger then, which could explain some of my blind optimism. I'd been doing some walking with Harry in the hills north and west of Leeds. That probably contributed.


Enschede
We set off early. By midday we'd had enough and caught a bus to the next town. From there we took the train to Enschede. Once again we stopped at a campsite, this time rather more crowded and commercial than the one in Deventer. This was filled with Dutch and German families, mostly in caravans. Our little tent looked quite forlorn amongst much grander tents and campervans.

It was boiling hot, somewhere around 30º C. Luckily the campsite had an air-conditioned bar. I camped out in there while Harry and Johnny Ash went swimming in the pool. I'd had several Grolsches before they joined me. I remember a rather long and quite rowdy drinking session that continued into the small hours. And Johnny Ash naming one particular young lady "chapel hat pegs". I can't think why. Once again, I was Mr. Lucky, inside both the tent and a sleeping bag.


Wolfenbüttel
One of our vague plans had been to visit Johnny Ash's uncle. He was in the army and stationed in Germany. In Wolfenbüttel, just east of Braunschweig. We got the train there the next day. The uncle's family were very friendly, happily putting up all three of us and passing around the apfel schnapps.

The next day we went for a look around Wolfenbüttel. It's a very pretty town of black and white half-timbered houses. The houses were all pretty sinmilar, the whole town having been rebuilt in the 17th century. I think it was destroyed in the Thirty Years War, a conflict which devastated and depopulated large areas of North Germany. Deathly quiet reigned. It was just after midday on Saturday and, of course, all the shops were closed. There was no-one about and I can't remember us even finding a pub open. I did see a Bitburger sign and recalling that it was a beer Michael Jackson had written positively about.

I had a Thomas Cook's Continental Railway Timetable with me. It listed the main train routes in Europe. In the pre-internet days, it was essential when wandering about by rail. We used it to plan the next section of our trip. After consulting my World Guide to Beer, I managed to persuade the other two that our next two stops should be Düsseldorf and Halle, just outside Brussels. Nowadays I would either have printouts with me or drop into an internet café. So much simpler than lugging books around with you.


Hannover
The timing was slightly odd. First we had to change trains at Hannover. We were due to arrive in Düsseldorf around 9 P.M. There was a train to Brussels at around 4 A.M that we could take. Basically, we would just have the evening in Düsseldorf.

We had a while to wait in Hannover, about an hour. It's a huge station, with a dozen platforms of more. Ensconced in a little bar on one of them, Johnny Ash noticed there was a similar bar on most of the island platforms. He had found a mission: drinking a beer in each bar before our connecting train arrived. Johnny Ash liked a challenge. He'd been trying for years to do the 50. That's drinking 50 pints in a weekend visit to Leeds. 50 pints in 5 sessions. That's tough. He did eventually manage it. What a hero.

Harry and I remained in the first little bar. Every few minutes we'd see Johnny Ash run up onto another platform and dash into its bar. It was a crazy thing to do. We had a heavy evening ahead of us in Düsseldorf. He must have had 5 or 6 40 cl glasses before we even got on the train.


Düsseldorf
Outside Düsseldorf Hauptbahhof, we asked for directions to the Altstadt. We were advised to take a tram, which in those days still ran overground from the square in front of the station. Before very long we were sitting in Zum Uerige. I was impressed. Very impressed. At both the atmosphere and the beer. We continued on to Schlüssel, which was OK, but not as good as Uerige. Then on to Füchschen, which we liked almost as much as Uerige. We didn''t get long in the homebrew pubs, as they closed relatively early. So we continued around random Altstadt bars. I can remember we were in Der Spiegel. It was wild. Harry danced on the bar. At one point everyone started singing The International. After that, it gets a bit blurry.

Back at the station, with us rather the worse for wear, our train came in. It was all sleeper carriages and you needed a reservation to board. I did try getting on, but slipped on the step. I gave my left shin a nasty knock. To this day there's still a dent in my shin. I can show you, if you want. We had to doss around the station another couple of hours for the first normal train of the day to Brussels. There we got a connection to Halle.

Halle
Why had I chosen Halle? Because it's in the Payottenland, simple as that. I was hoping to trap some proper lambic. At the time, the town still had a small brewery, Vander Linden. Their flagship beer was Duivel's Bier (not to be confused with Duvel). It was a mix of a dark, top-fermented beer and lambic. Quite tart, but tasty and not too strong. (The beer has been revived, at least in name, by Boon. Though the new version is much stronger and quite different in flavour.) Quite a few places in town had it on draught.

For some reason just me and Johnny Ash were together when I tracked down proper lambic. It was in a slightly more upmarket place, more a restaurant/bar than a pub. I asked for a Gueuze. The waitress returned from the cellar with what I recognised as the real deal - a bottle without a label, just marked with a stripe of white paint. Don't ask me which brewery it came from. Probably one of the small blenders, as even then the practice of paint-marking bottles was becoming rare. The beer was, as you would expect, uncompromisingly sour.


Antwerp
We were now on the return leg of our journey. I'd planned a few hours in Antwerp on the way up to Amsterdam. It was another Michael Jackson tip: a pub in Jeruzalemstraat selling 1,000 beers or something silly. I'd spent hours before leaving searching for the street on an unindexed map of Antwerp in a road atlas. It hadn't been easy. The pub disappeared many years ago.

Not knowing a great deal about Belgian beer, knowing what to choose was tricky. I tried asking for beers with sediment, but the barmaid didn't understand what I meant. Harry and Johnny Ash just stuck to Duvel. That might have been a better idea for me, too. I somehow managed to keep picking cherry beers. Not things that would ever have been my first choice, not then, not now. Adventure has its price.


Amsterdam
Our last stop was Amsterdam again. This is when I did one of the stupidest things ever. It could have turned out really, really badly. At the time, I wasn't aware of the enormity of my stupidity. I didn't realise that until I moved to Holland. What was my act of idiocy? I wandered along the Zeedijk totally pissed, at night, alone. I was lucky I only had my bank card nicked. Which wasn't any use to anyone without the pin code. At the time the Zeedijk was well dodgy, lined with junkies and smack dealers even during the day. At night, no-one respectable went down there. In the state I was in, I could easily have got myself badly hurt.

And that was it. Back to England by train, ferry, train. Another two countries under my belt and considerably wiser.