Day 52

Hello from Den Haag (The Hague)

How’s your week been?

Good?

Good.

Anyhoo…

Doubt anyone will have noticed but ‘The Hague’ wasn’t on my original route. I had always been confused by this country. What bit is actually ‘Holland’? Like Joey, I used to think ‘The Netherlands’ was a make-believe place where Peter Pan and Tinkerbell live…Turns out, it’s simply a collection of territories. Amsterdam is the cultural capital and The Hague is home to their government, which I suppose is a bit like Scotland where the BBC, The National Theatre and all that are all in Glasgow but the parliament is in Edinburgh. While in Brussels, I received a nice email from the British Embassy in The Netherlands inviting me to meet the British Charge De Arms here in The Hague (which was only a day off my route to Amsterdam) It’s been a fun day and a half here, parked at the beach but I’ll start walking north again tonight and should arrive in Amsterdam tomorrow. Back on schedule.

Just been a walky week really. First two days were spent trying to reach the edge of Belgium (as the heat soared up to 31 degrees…) Brussels was productive but we were so glad to get back on the road. I’m sorry to say, that was the worst campsite we’ve stayed in so far. I hadn’t imagine running a clean and friendly campsite was really that difficult…Had we been warned before I prepaid for the whole six days we wouldn’t have stayed there at all. Mojo and I have decided to give them a deeply honest review on tripadvisor.com

I suppose the perpetual cloud mosquitoes wasn’t entirely the managements fault but it was exhausting. They sound like Midgies on wee mopeds and no matter how long Mojo spent battering every surface inside Yvonne with a tea-towel, they always found a way back in. We were beginning to look like we had chicken pox, covered literally head-to-toe in wee red bumps. I discovered that if I get more than three bites within the same square inch of skin the whole area swells up. My left foot and right hand ballooned hot and red like when Micky Mouse hits himself with a hammer. By the time I set off for the Netherlands, I counted twenty-seven wee itchy bumps all over me, to try and see the funny side of…Having said that, I’m getting quite used to being constantly covered in insects. I must brush against trees, bushes and grass all day as I walk, barely reacting now to that wee telling tickle as a spider or ant or furry caterpillar has a wee wander about my skin. There’s nothing venomous here anyway, and I paid £180 to be vaccinated from Encephalitis, so even the tics are no threat. Any that do have a go are doomed to be ripped back out again by the handy wee tic-ripping-out-claw-hammer-tool-thingy that my brother Anton gave me as a parting gift.

So, on I stumble…and thankfully reports that The Netherlands are very flat were not exaggerated. (Belgium was so hilly I was starting to take it personally…) A new country and yet again, an entirely different feel to the place. It’s very calm here, and the Dutch seem like a very clean-living people. I’m liking it but for the first couple of days I was searching my mind to figure out what it was that was so different here. Something felt unusual about this new place but I couldn’t put my finger on it. The police have guns…the houses are all funny shapes…(I can’t imagine it’s had to get planning permission in the Netherlands as there doesn’t seem to be any continuity to the shape of the houses on any one street…) but again that wasn’t it…Eventually, I walked passed a house with a big fence and a massive dog. When he saw me, he stood up and wandered over to say hello. Not barking. That was it, that’s what’s weird…Even the dogs are polite here. Since I left London, I’ve been accompanied pretty much every day by a deafening chorus of woofs and growls. They normally start going mental when I’m only just approaching their village, and don’t stop till I’m far out of sight but here for some bizarre reason, it doesn’t happen. Perhaps great clouds of smoke from all the Hash cafes in Amsterdam have blown south and chilled out every creature in this land…but seriously, there is a kind of nourishing tranquillity in The Netherlands, especially around 10pm when I’m on my last mile of two of the day. The low lying sun hits the land as a kind of purply pink and turns every window of every house bright gold. Even the grass smells sweet here. (The regular grass…) It feels like I’ve found a wee bit of quiet that I hadn’t realised I needed. Plus I love the nights here. Amazing stars. Good place to think.

I’ve been getting up crazy early to cover as many miles as possible before it’s too hot to walk, snoozing through the worst of it then heading back out to walk till dark. I’m almost never alone though. I’d gotten quite used to not seeing a living soul for up to ten miles but in the Netherlands, no road is to far to cycle evidently. Everyone has a bike, and uses it. Until now, if ever I heard some one cycling up behind me, I could guarantee a young trendy person was about to wiz passed, but cycling is not a pastime reserved for the cool kids here. Folk of every age and size zip around on two wheels, which means the whole country has a very comprehensive network of cycle paths. Boom! It feels like this is the first county built on the assumption that one day some one might want to walk across it. I’ve been walking safely on foot paths ever since the Belgian border. Well, except for on the bridges…ooft…

I hadn’t really looked at it until planning the Road to Change but, like the west of Scotland, the Dutch coast is fractured by many great firths, some a few kilometres wide that stretch deep inland. I cross water almost every other mile, mostly on wee bridges (but some not so wee…over a kilometre long) Having to walk extra miles to find a bridge is making progress very slow but I’m not a fan of swimming in a kilt…I decide my route looking first at the most direct way, then consider what is the safest and legal way…If I’m unsure, I look at the roads on ‘Google Street View’ before I set out in the morning, but of course there can always be surprises; accidents, roadworks or closed roads which weren’t there when the google-van-man drove passed. Thursday night I reached a bridge that all my research told me was walkable. As I got closer, I couldn’t see anyone else walking and there didn’t even appear to be a path any more. The bridge was actually the first of two, heading west onto an island then another taking me north onto the mainland of south Holland. The first bridge was about half a kilometer and the second was three times that. A new steal barrier, about a foot wide, had been inserted all along the inside wall of the bridge, which meant if I was to cross it, I’d be walking directly in the line of traffic, with nowhere to jump out the way except down into the sea, sixty foot below. Not good. The next bridge across this water was twelve miles east. That would take me at least four hours to get to and I’d already walked twenty-five miles that day. Unsure how to proceed, I just stood alone at the side of the road staring at the bridge as traffic roared passed, hoping for a wee miracle…then I got one. As if angels had been listening to my thoughts, an alarm sounded and all the traffic stopped (if you’ve ever seen John Landis’ ‘Blues Brothers’ you can imagine what happened next…) The bridge split in half and began to raise up so a huge freight-ship could pass under. This meant all the folk got out their cars and stood around the road chatting. Suddenly, I was not alone. I walked over to the crowd and explained that I was hoping to cross the bridge on foot but it didn’t look safe now that I was here. They all confirmed that it was perfectly safe and legal to proceed (happy daze) so I just handed out a bunch of flyers and we waited. Soon the bridge was flat again, so I waited some more as the backed up traffic cleared, then I set off, never letting go of the barrier as I walked across each bridge. Not a single car passed me as I crossed, which was really spooky as it had been so busy just half an hour before. When I finally reached dry land again, I looked at my hand, that had been clinging to the rail the whole way across. It was all black with suet, right up my arm. I walked down to the beach below and washed in the water, then sat on a jetty till my heart slowed back down. I don’t like heights. I don’t like being over water. At least the Road to Change is helping me do one thing each day that scares me…

It’s not all scary bridges here though, been through some equally long tunnels, which can be freezing inside but that’s actually lovely for escaping the baking sun. I had no idea The Netherlands was so broken up by rivers and canals. Even many miles from the sea, water is a major feature of the landscape. Instead of fences, some fields are outlined by a very carefully dug moat. (I don’t know how the trackers actually get onto the grass…) I’ve seen some magnificent cranes fishing in these moats, but they always take flight as soon as they see me. Still, that’s pretty cool to watch too. As hoped, I’ve passed some beautiful windmills, but the only Clogs I’ve seen were on a key-ring in a Rotterdam gift shop…

I’ve definitely gotten over the fear of being away from home, in a strange land. Maybe that’s because most folk here speak English. The road signs are very different though. Place names are really long but maybe that’s just because don’t bother to separate the words. (Molannakkerstraat) Dutch is the most ‘foreign’ looking language I’m encountered so far. It looks like Elvish. I can’t make out a single word. At least in French and German, I can pick out a similar looking word to English and grasp what the sentence is about but it feels like I’ve truly crossed the boundary into the north. The central belt of Europe, from the Belgian coast across to Luxembourg, is like a battle ground where all the northern and southern voices smashed together. To this day, language is a very political way of identifying yourself in that area. I studied Latin for years, which was pointless as no one speaks it, (apart from an ATM in the Vatican apparently…) but it gave me basic understanding of most southern European Languages (French, Italian, Spanish etc) but Dutch sounds like its the first language I’ve encountered on this walk that descended from the North, the ancient Nordic civilisations. I don’t know if that’s true but that’s how it feels…

Anyhoo…some of you may know of my play ‘To kill a kelpie’ which is now also a film, directed by my brother Edward M Smith. Stop the Silence: Stop Child Sexual, Inc. use the play and the film to raise awareness and host a talk-back with the audience after each performance or screening. Last year, when ‘Kelpie’ was doing a run Off Broadway, Allan Lindsay (the actor who plays my twin brother) and I, were out drinking in New York after the show and met three Dutch guys (Maurits, Jaco and Willem) We told them all about the show and they came along to see it the next night (Then we all went out drinking again…) We stayed in touch (Facebook) and they said: if we ever in Holland we should look them up. So I did. Willem was on a date, but last night I met up with Maurits and Jaco in The Hague. Fun guys but we did a lot of talking about ‘Kelpie’ too, and the reasons I’d now walked to their city. Maurits said it was all alien to him, as he isn’t a survivor and neither is anyone in his family but the play, and the information he gained that night, stayed with him and he’ll certainly be more aware of the realities when he comes to have kids of his own. Jaco was very philosophical and asked some brilliant questions about sexual abuse. Does it happens more among rich people or poor people? Apparently, it does happen less among the rich, which could be a reflection on the greater affects of education, but if you compare the amount of rich people there are in the world to the amount of poor then of course the majority of abuse happens among the poor. The majority of humans are poor. He then asked, if you are in a part of the world were it’s normal to marry young teens, is that abuse? I still think so…I’ve heard (but not seen any real evidence…) that children in the far East, don’t always suffer the same forms of PTSD as survivors of abuse in the west. Perhaps due to the teaching of Karma. (Doing a good dead for others means a good dead will return to you etc.) Children who are brought up with a core understanding of this concept seem to process trauma differently. Even though they might not enjoy the abuse, they recognize that the adult is having a good time, and so they believe that by giving them this ‘good thing’, they will receive a good thing later. I hear this is partly why so many travel to Cambodia to molest children, as apparently they find them to be less resistant. If this is in fact true, the lengths that some go to just to abuse a child with a clear conscience astounds me. Anyhoo, the point is child sexual abuse affects 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys in every level and area of civilisation, every class and every race. It’s something about humanity, not culture or education.

Maurits then told me about a Dutch organisation. (He told me their name but I’m not giving them advertising on my blog…) A group of men who believe it should be legal to have sex with children. They even have a political party here, campaigning for the ‘age of consent’ to be lowered. A similar group exist in the US. I can’t understand how they can be so public about their activities. How can any civilised society tolerate this? Still, not much surprises me any more…

I knew I was walking today, so we only had a few beers but the conversation went on into the wee small hours. We ended up sitting quietly for a few minutes, blown away by the idea that abuse really is ‘just something that happens’ in our world…

They’d seen my play so I was able to remind them of one scene that, for me, sums up this concept. For those who’ve not seen or read ‘To kill a Kelpie’, it’s about twin brothers who were sexually abused by their uncle. He lived in a small cottage by a Loch and he used to tell them that “If they didn’t stay quiet,  he’d feed them to the Kelpie”. (A Kelpie is a mythological water creature in Scottish folklore, said to appear as a charming gentle character so children would approach him but then he’d transform into a monster and drag them into the Loch) The boys are grown up now and the uncle has died. Dubgbhall (pronounced Doogal) has been working in Asia, as an aid-worker since the Tsunami in 2004. He has never spoken about the abuse. Fionnghall (Fingal) has never left Scotland but has been through counselling to talk about all of it. Dubgbhall has just flown home and they haven’t seen each other in years. The play begins when they meet up, in the home where the abuse happened, to deal with their dead uncle’s estate.

Through-out the play, Finn is very emotional and pushy as he believes that talking about it is healthy and they should help each other by letting it out. Doogie is a typical west-coast Scottish male and just keeps shtoom, hoping Finn will just shut up. Eventually, after a bottle or two of malt, and after Finn has really worn him down, Doogie (who never show any emotion) decides to admit something that he doesn’t understand.

Dubgbhall:

“I cried on the plane home last night. I couldn’t help it. Was mad. I was sitting next to this other British guy. A scientist. Got chatting. Said he’d been travelling about studying the after affects of the Tsunami. Turns out, we’d been working in most of the same towns…we were just gossiping about the suffering we’d seen…but then he tells me about this expedition, back to the epicentre. Middle of the ocean. They dived under, ready to study what’s living there now. All expecting a crazy mix of…things…but there was nothing. Nothing. They called it a ‘Dead Zone’…and I start crying. He must have thought I was insane…I guess that thought was too devastating for me. To think that, at the heart of biggest single cause of suffering in our life time…there is nothing. Not a single soul. No one made it happen. No one was being cruel. Just a soulless instant that millions of people will never be able to forget…and they’ll never have anyone to hate for it…”

Individually, if you were sexually abused you do have some one to hate for it but as a race, when you think that there are seven billion of us and around two billion have been sexually violated, who’s to blame? If it’s something that so many humans do, what make it all happen? Who’s fault is it? God? Satan? Humanity? What is it about our race that makes people do this, because it seems to be something that has always happened and continues to happen on a massive scale, every single second of everyday. I began to wonder if there has ever been a society or lost civilisation that didn’t abuse their young. Maybe that’s a question for Jared Diamond…

So with these big heavy questions taking up all the space in my mind, I set off again on the walk…I received some royalty money this week from the kids TV show I’m in, so I’m thinking I’ll try seek out another massage when I reach Amsterdam, it won’t waste funds raised to support the walk. I imagine I’ll have to be very clear that it’s just a ‘Sports’ massage I’m after…

This week is also my wee Mum’s 70th birthday. I’ve been sending her a postcard form the capital city of each country on the walk so far. I usually write it on the morning I leave, then give it Mojo to go off and play a game we like to call ‘What colour is the postbox this time?’ We’ll phone her on Wednesday and the rest of my clan will be with her, so I expect the phone will get passed around, costing my hundreds of Euros, as all my nephews get a shot at telling me how many ways they’ve skint their knees so far this summer…It’ll be nice to hear everyone voice at least…

And on…

Thanks for reading.

Matty x

Jaco, me and Maurits…wee bit pished :)