The Netherlands beyond Amsterdam: what travelling there is like

Why the whole country is a day trip

The Netherlands covers 42,201 square kilometres and nowhere in it is far from anywhere else. The rail network reaches almost every town of any size at a frequency that makes a timetable unnecessary on the main corridors, and the four largest cities sit within an hour of each other. A visitor can be based in one place for a fortnight and see the country from it.

That compactness sets the shape of a Dutch trip. The distances that would be a day's driving elsewhere are an afternoon here, and the practical constraint becomes how many stops fit into a day rather than how far apart they are. It also means the choice of base matters less than it usually does, and a smaller city costs nothing in reach.

The second thing to understand is the bicycle. Cycling carries 27% of all journeys made in the country, the separated network is continuous, and bicycles are rented everywhere including at station forecourts. For a visitor this is transport rather than recreation: it is how a Dutch town is designed to be crossed, and using it is the difference between seeing a place and passing through it.

What Amsterdam concentrates and what it does not

Amsterdam takes a share of foreign visitors far out of proportion to its size, and the pressure that follows has been the central question of Dutch tourism policy for a decade. The national tourism organisation has moved from promoting the country to managing where and when people arrive, publishing work on spreading visitors across the map and across the calendar rather than on attracting more of them.

The city's own draw is a seventeenth-century canal ring, the museums holding the painting of the same period, and a compactness that lets all of it be walked. What follows from that concentration is queues, and a visitor who books nothing in advance will spend the day in them.

The argument for going elsewhere is that the same century built the other cities too. The canal houses, the civic architecture and the collections exist in Haarlem, Leiden, Delft, Utrecht and Dordrecht at a quarter of the density of people, and the trains between them run all day.

Where the emptiest part of the country is

The Wadden Sea runs along the northern coast behind a chain of barrier islands, and it is the largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats in the world. The World Heritage property covers 1,143,403 hectares across the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, and the Dutch conservation area is one part of it.

The reason to go is the scale of the bird migration. Between ten and twelve million birds pass through the Wadden Sea in an average year and as many as 6.1 million can be present at one time, which makes it a principal staging area on the East Atlantic flyway. The salt marshes carry around 2,300 species of plants and animals and the marine and brackish zones a further 2,700.

The islands are reached by ferry and are largely closed to cars, which is what keeps them quiet. The characteristic activity is walking out onto the flats at low tide with a guide, across ground that is under water twice a day, and the tide rather than the clock sets when it can be done.

Why the storm barriers are worth seeing

The Dutch defences against the sea are open to the public and they are among the most remarkable things to see in the country.

The Afsluitdijk, completed in 1932, runs 32 kilometres across the mouth of what had been an inland sea, converting it to fresh water and shortening the coastline the country has to defend. It has been carrying road traffic for around ninety years and has been under renovation to meet the standards now required of it.

In Zeeland, the Eastern Scheldt barrier answers a different problem. After the flood of 1953 the plan was to close the estuary entirely; opposition from fishermen and from conservationists produced a barrier nine kilometres long that stands open and closes only when a surge is forecast, so the tide continues to run behind it. It took about ten years to build from 1976 and is designed against a flood of a severity expected once in four thousand years.

The Maeslant barrier, in service since 1997 and tested annually, is the newest of the three: two floating arms the length of the Eiffel Tower that swing shut across the waterway into Rotterdam and are operated by a computer without human intervention. The visitor centres at each explain the arithmetic of a country where a large share of the population lives below sea level.

Which cities repay a day each

The seventeenth-century wealth was spread across a dozen towns rather than gathered in one, and each of them kept something different.

Haarlem has the earliest of the great civic collections and a cathedral-scale church at the centre of a market square. Leiden is a university town whose canals carry a fraction of the traffic Amsterdam's do, and whose museums hold the archaeology and the natural history. Delft supplied the Republic with its princes and its pottery and produced the painter whose interiors are the most reproduced images the country has. Utrecht sits at the road junction of the whole country and has a canal system built on two levels, with wharves below the street. Dordrecht is the oldest of the Holland towns and the least visited of the six.

Rotterdam is the exception and the argument for it is the opposite one. The centre was destroyed by bombing in 1940 and rebuilt without any attempt to restore what had stood there, so it is the one Dutch city that looks forward rather than back, and the architecture of the past forty years is the reason to go.

The Hague holds the seat of government, the international courts and the country's second great painting collection, and it is the only one of these cities with a beach at the end of a tram line.

How the trains and the bicycles fit together

Dutch public transport is designed as one system rather than as competing operators, and a visitor benefits from that more than a resident does.

The rail network reaches almost every town of consequence, the main corridors run at a frequency that makes consulting a timetable unnecessary, and a single contactless payment method covers trains, trams, buses and metros across the whole country. The consequence is that a day can be assembled while it is happening.

The bicycle closes the last stretch. Stations carry large secure parking structures on the assumption that most passengers arrived on two wheels, and rental is available at the station itself in most towns. A visitor who takes a train to a town and a bicycle from the station has the same mobility a resident has, and the separated network means the ride requires no particular confidence in traffic.

Two habits are worth knowing. A cycle path is a carriageway and a pedestrian standing in one is standing in the road, which is the most common way a visitor causes trouble. And the network is signposted for cycling as a numbered node system rather than by destination, so a route is planned as a sequence of numbers rather than as a set of place names.

When to come and what the weather does

The Netherlands has a maritime climate with a small annual range and rain distributed across the year, so the seasons here are about daylight and crowding rather than about temperature.

Late spring is the peak of the reason most people give for coming. The bulb fields flower between roughly late March and mid-May depending on the year and the variety, and the display gardens open for that window only. It is also when Amsterdam is fullest.

Summer is warm rather than hot, and it is when the coast and the islands work. Autumn is wet and the light is what the seventeenth-century landscape painters were looking at. Winter is dark, damp and rarely cold enough to freeze the canals, which is why skating on natural ice has become a rare event rather than an annual one, and it is the emptiest time to see the museums.

The practical consequence of a maritime climate is that the weather changes within a day rather than within a season, and that wind matters more than temperature. A visitor cycling in an open polder in a westerly discovers that the flatness offers nothing to shelter behind, which is the one respect in which the terrain is harder work than hills would be.

What the country is actually for

A trip to the Netherlands rewards a particular kind of attention. Almost the entire western half of the country is made ground: drained lakes, reclaimed seabed, land held below the water by pumps that have not stopped since they were built. The polders, the dykes, the windmill fields and the barriers are one continuous piece of work, and reading the landscape as engineering rather than as scenery is what makes the flatness interesting instead of empty.

The other half of the case is the painting. The collections of the seventeenth century are held mostly in the cities that commissioned them, and looking at a landscape by an artist who stood in the same flat light is what the country supplies and the painters recorded.

Everything else follows from the size. A country that can be crossed in three hours by train, with a separated cycle network in every town and a rail service that does not require planning, is unusually forgiving of visitors who make no plans at all.

Eating is the part most often reported as a disappointment, and it is a matter of knowing where the cooking actually is. The traditional Dutch table is plain by design, built on dairy, bread and vegetables, and the restaurant tradition that grew from it belongs to the southern provinces, where the cooking borders on Flanders and draws on French practice. What the cities offer instead is the food of empire and of labour migration: Indonesian cooking so long domesticated that it counts as ordinary here, Surinamese food that arrived with independence in 1975, and Turkish and Moroccan cooking that followed the guest-worker migration of the 1960s. In Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague those are the everyday cuisines rather than the alternative ones.

Language is the part most often reported as easier than expected. English is spoken at a level that makes it a working second language in the cities and in the tourism trade, and signage on the transport network is bilingual. In Fryslân the second language on the signs is Frisian rather than English, which is the clearest reminder a visitor gets that the country has more than one.