Big Adventures, Little World

We started the morning with a leisurely Bike Tour through the city of Amsterdam with a local guide. It was so much fun riding through the city as a big group and we got to see a lot of the city. Some of it is really beautiful, especially riding through a big park that they have. Bicycles own the road in Amsterdam, so you can even hit the pedestrians if they are on the bike lanes and that’s ok, because they were in the wrong. It was so much fun. I think I could have spent the entire day just riding around on the bike.

We wandered around after the bike tour and ended up in Dam square where there were groups of football fans singing and chanting and generally making a lot of noise. We also noticed that there was a free walking tour starting from there so Lucy and I joined onto that and went around for about an hour with the tour guide taking in the sights of Amsterdam. After spending about an hour on the walking tour though, we went back to the camp ground and chilled out for a while and so we could catch the bus into the restaurant where we would be having dinner that night as a group.

Dinner was at a Chinese restaurant called Sea Palace and we had a few big tables and had big plates of all kinds of Chinese dishes in the middle of each table and just helped ourselves to whatever we wanted. The food was quite good, but the service there was terrible. It didn’t stop us from having fun though. We sat around eating and chatting, all together for one last time before we would be leaving the next day. This was also the last time we would be spending with our trip leader Hottie, as he was catching the train early the next morning to start his next tour, and wouldn’t get to travel back with us to London which was unfortunate. So we all ate our food and then off we went for our canal cruise through Amsterdam. As we all were getting onto the boat, we said our goodbyes and gave hugs to Hottie and then waved goodbye from as we sailed off.

We didn’t really see too much on the canal cruise as we mostly just chatted and drank the free beer and wine. But it was a lot of fun, the funniest being when a few of the guys went through a tunnel and when we came out the other side they had all stripped down to their underwear and saying ‘mi scuzzi’ a la a scene from the movie ‘Eurotrip’. No one had any idea what was going on, especially the host and bartender of the cruise. No doubt it was hilarious though. After an hour or so we were done and then it was off into the city for the final time before heading back to camp.

As we were walking through the city there seemed to be a lot of noise and people around, as the football was on that night, and at one point we heard what we thought sounded like fireworks but turned out to be two shotgun shots. We also ran into another Topdeck tour group and their leader who also said that there was a fire in the city and that we should avoid that part of town. As we were walking through, our cook Mark who was with us told us to stay together and not do anything stupid, and we walked past a restaurant where the gunshots had been, and the windows had been shot out and the place was deserted and chairs and tables were everywhere and drinks smashed all over the ground. It was pretty full on. These football hooligans are crazy!

Back at the campsite we all sat around in the rain, huddling under and bit shade or trees we could find as we talked and told stories and reminisced about the tour. It was kind of a sad night, knowing that we were all going to be leaving each other the next day so we tried to prolong the night as long as we could before crawling into our tents for the last time and getting some sleep.