Earlier on this 2022 Island Princess European cruise we’d paid a visit to Hamburg – our first such visit to the city and country – and been absolutely mesmerised by the tourist attraction that was Miniatur Wunderland. It spoke to some love I have for dolls houses in a way that’s hard to explain. I’m not fixated by them, I don’t own any, and my only memories of them growing up were occasionally seeing them at the houses of family friends who had daughters of about my age. But if we’re out and about and we see them in a museum or country home then I love to look at all the little details of some concept of life miniaturised. It’s fantastic to see the arrangement of furniture, the wall decorations, the people positioned inside, the activities underway.
Kind of a weird thing to lead with in an article apparently about cruising along the Nieuwe Maas canal out of Rotterdam, isn’t it?
Well, maybe. But I am known for being a little wordy in my cruise travelogues and sometimes I like to go off on a little tangent. In this case I’m trying to prepare the scene for the sort of feeling I got when Island Princess started to sail away from the Dutch city after sunset and we started to pass an awful lot of businesses and apartments with lights and an apparent aversion to curtains.
So, definitely not some kind of perverted Peeping Tom thing going on, then?
Absolutely not. Wink.
So, for the most part there’s not a lot else to say here. These photos of Rotterdam were taken from our cabin balcony on Island Princess as we made our way quietly along the canal that leads to the North Sea. It was fairly cold now that not even any radiation from the sun could find its way through the clouds to warm our bones, and our ship’s speed was understandably slow because locals don’t like huge bow waves washing against their buildings and moored boats, etc. As a result I kept popping out, shooting off a few pictures, then returning to the room to warm up again, only venturing back outside when some new arrangement of lights in buildings seemed interesting enough to warrant it.
A dome sat atop pillars caught our attention. With the Euromast behind it we could tell that the area behind and to the right was where we’d walked around earlier in the day, Het Park, so our initial thought was that this was something related to the park. Instead it’s one of the ventilation towers at the northern end of the Maastunnel, the oldest tunnel in the Netherlands. It was opened in 1942 to alleviate increasing traffic problems on bridges over the canal areas with the decision to build a tunnel rather than bridge because of the height needed to accommodate increasingly large ships that sailed down and made the seaport so profitable.
This part of the Dutch landscape we were now passing was technically Schiedam, a city just to the west of Rotterdam. In the photos below you should be able to see a distillery and a large windmill. That is the Nolet Mill, and at forty two and a half metres in height (fifty five if you get to the top of the sails) it is the tallest mill in the world. However, despite its appearance and resemblance to other historic mills in this part of the Netherlands traditionally used for grinding ingredients for distillery processes, Nolet Mill is a modern construction dating to just 2005 and designed as a show piece for visitors to the nearby distillery as well as being used to generate electricity.
Another building reaching forty two and half metres in height and also partly just to show off was the eye-catching De Bolder tower. This was built for a company called Mammoet who specialise in heavy lifting, so the entire two and a half thousand tons building was constructed elsewhere, transported by boat over the course of three days to this position, then lifted into place and connected up.
We eventually ran out of bits of the Netherlands to see as we reached the end of the Nieuwe Maas canal.
To finish off this post, some photos of dinner in the evening aboard the cruise ship. I assure you that there would have been drinking too but sometimes I just forget to take photos of them.
There’s just one more port of call to cover from this Island Princess cruise travelogue series and that will be fairly familiar to regular cruisers out of Southampton as an awful lot of cruises hit Zeebrugge, Belgium at some point or another. Most people will venture into some of the historic canal cities inland of Bruges or Ghent – and we’ve done that before too – but there’s also a city just along the coastline which we’d never visited before, so this time we decided to do just that and explore Blankenberge.