Impressions from Amsterdam

Our first impression was really amazing. City was vibrant, beautiful, noisy, and with channels and opening bridges everywhere. Also, we could apparently leave the boat just anywhere, even close to the train station. Exactly outside the train station it was a bit chaotic as there were constantly three ferries crossing the channel. It went fine every time except for the last time, even when we went in the darkness and my middle son first found great fun in playing with a strong flashlight and repeatedly blinding me with it, then turning off all the navigation lights after I shouted for the last time that he should "turn off the light!". However, next day, when I went out of the channels of Amsterdam with the dhingy and my son commented that there were problems with my makeshift flag solution, I completely forgot to look around for the ferry traffic - we didn't get driven down, but the captain of one of the ferries even got out of the steering house to curse on us. Embarrassing.

Here is a building that looks a bit like the Oslo Opera:

Here is the train station ... sorry the lousy quality, it's already quite dark:

Here we've moored up just outside the train station, to grab some food:

Second impression ... not that good. We decided to moore up in the City Marina as it was central and right nearby. It was "just" a small pedestrian bridge to pass, how hard could that be. However, there were nobody answering on the phone number provided on the outside of the marina, and apparently no self-service system for opening the bridge. At least we saved money on staying right at the outside of the marina instead of inside - though we where worried throughout the night that someone would come knocking on our boat requesting us to leave IMMEDIATELY. We got a phone call in the late morning the next day, our boat was in the way for the bigger boats wanting to leave the city marina. Me and my wife had already gone out to go shopping food, look a bit around, and get a quick breakfast at that point. Here is the boat, outside the city marina. Big fenders were needed, as every now and then there would be bigger boats going up the channel behind us, creating big waves.

Palace of Justice behind.

After being told to leave, we went out searching for another place where we could leave the boat for some few hours. First attempt - a marina at the other side of the big channel, but it was some signs there which I understood as "forbidden to enter before 12:00". Possibly I guessed wrong, but I didn't want to enter that crowded, small, full marina anyway. Next we tried to ask some permanent residents if we could use the neighbour spot which was clearly private but still free ... but we were told that the resident would return there within half an hour. Then we tried to more up directly on the big channel, nearby some residental houses, where we could see no explicit signage forbidding us to moore up. No luck, a big harbour watch boat was dispatched, he was very friendly but told us politely that we could stay nowhere in Amsterdam except in the dedicated yacht harbours. Unfortunately I had the phone in the wrong place, so I got a photo only after the boat had left

We tried the next yacht harbour, the harbour master were very friendly, but when we told that we only wanted to stay for some few hours he told us to leave. It was perfectly OK to stay there for the night, but we were not allowed to stay only for the day, as the place were reserved!? That doesn't make sense. I guess we could have stayed for some few hours if we would have paid the harbour fee for the night, but anyway we decided to go to the next marina.

Just nearby this marina, there was this place we could have utilized if we had been visiting the café there ... but maybe a bit too small for our boat ...

Almost same story in the next marina, the harbour masters were very friendly, but when we told we only wanted to stay for some few hours they ... at least gave us the option for paying for the night, which we did (he turned out less friendly when we were "overusing" the water, ref my previous post).

So, our conclusion ... it's impossible to pass Amsterdam with a big boat and doing a day visit there, despite there being plenty of free capacity for short-time moorings! That's really bad - and we spent half of our day finding out!

Next, for leaving even a very small dhingy along the channel even just for some few hours, we learned that there is a 20 EUR fee. However, we never figured out where to pay for it ... and that's good, because there were almost nowhere to leave the dhingy ("no parking"-signs everywhere) and when we found a place we left the dhingy behind for less than an hour, to eat some food only.

I was expecting that we could just spot a table anywhere from the dhingy, moore up right nearby and eat. No, not so - or maybe we were looking at the wrong places. When we finally found a table nearby a place were we could leave the dhingy, for one thing the table was taken by someone else before we got completely out of the dhingy, and the menu was without any food at all as we were coming too late for lunch and too early for dinner ... and the few food items they had at the menu looked very boring anyway. Furthermore, my wife pointed out that we were actually in the red-light district ... not sure about that, but there were lots of mariuana seed shops and other shops with mariuana-themed souvenirs, some sex-shops to be found (shops selling sex-related toys, clothing and items, I didn't see any brothels).

Amsterdam is pretty dense, with lots of shipping traffic, lots of bike traffic, lots of ferries, lots of sightseeing boats lots of ... traffic and people, everywhere. I've already covered the ferry traffic outside the train station, and I've taken some photos of the shipping traffic in my previous post. Here are some bikes:

... and sightseeing boats ...

Quite many private (and some hired) boats as well

Some of the channels were without sidewalks, passing right by the buildings at one or both hands of the street. Here are some more photos from the channels of Amsterdam:

Amsterdam is also a quite big party place. When we arrived at a Thursday evening, it was lots of open boats with pretty loud music in the main channel (on the city channels there were signs that open boats with music was not allowed). Friday in the daytime, the smell of marihuana s moke was pretty dense many places along the channel.

Bottomline: we spent all the morning and some of the afternoon searching for a place to leave the mother ship, then we spent some hours travelling randomly around in the channels of Amsterdam.

In the late afternoon we met up with some relatives from Ukraine that has moved here to the Netherlands. Katja wanted to do some more channel sightseeing together with them, but the dhingy got a bit too heavily loaded, so we decided to head over to the mothership. We spent quite some time there, finally we left around 23 in the evening, heading for Almere where they were living. I'll probably make another post on Almere later.

Selected photos available in original quality on IPFS QmXNsxkY5e3pUnoyuvyommFm91a4JsX6f1XFJAptR4fW1R. All photos taken available in original quality on IPFS QmXvHeujoRaEfWYpaBJS8Q3g3m95Cmj5NenaQagn3PLdSa. License: CC BY-SA 4.0