Marken, Volendam, & Edam

Today we took another trip north to visit the three former fishing villages of Marken, Volendam, and Edam. We walked to Centraal Station—that’s getting to be a habit—and caught the regional bus. A € 10 ticket let us ride all day through the area known as Waterland. We first went to Marken. Marken used to be an island, but now there is a dike/causeway connecting it to the mainland. Early in is history monks built dikes and windmills to pump water off to create polders that allowed the local people to farm, but the king drove the monks off, and the dikes deteriorated and Marken turned into a fishing village. It’s now a picturesque little tourist town of about 1,800 people.  

We got there pretty early and had a coffee while sitting by the little harbor. We then walked around the town. There were little canals behind all the homes. The protestant church had interesting furnishings—model ships were hanging from the ceiling.

Vicki:  Marken was certainly a pretty little place.  There is a harbor/marina where maybe 100 boats were docked.  We arrived just after 9:00 and watched several of the pleasure craft take off.  I think the town is fairly safe from flooding because of the big dike that formed the Ijsolmeer Lake.  We went through a small museum which had an extensive exhibit of the great flood of 1916.  It devastated the little village.  The museum also showed what a typical house would have looked like in around the turn of the century.  Since it was an island for so long, the people on Marken were fairly isolated.  They had their own costumes and dialect.  Of course, many of the little towns we’ve visited have their own traditional costumes.  The girls and women used to wear the lace hats with the wings on the side that became so associated with “little Dutch girls”.

After a couple of hours in Marken we boarded the Marken-Volendam ferry to head back to the mainland. Volendam was something of a shock. We pulled up into the harbor and the streets were filled with people who’d decided that Volendam was a great for a Saturday outing. This wasn’t what we were looking for, so we wound our way through the crowds until we found the bus stop to take us out of Volendam and on to Edam.

Edam was just a couple of miles north of Volendam, but it was a welcome change. The tiny town was calm and very scenic. Like the others, it lost its identity as a fishing village when the Zuiderzee was cut off from the North Sea. We walked the streets and canals and had lunch at a little café before getting on the bus and heading back for Amsterdam.

Vicki:  We boarded the ferry from Marken to Vollendam and were seated with about 6 or 7 other people.  We were thinking that it was going to be a pretty empty boat when suddenly a large tour group showed up and pretty much finished filling the boat.  As George said, Vollendam appeared to be running over with tourists and tour groups.  It was like being in Branson so we just kept walking past the tourist area to the bus stop to go to Edam.  I figured that Edam might be as crowded.  However, when we arrived, we found a quiet little town that the big groups seemed to be skipping.  It was great to sit at a little place recommended by Rick Steves for a quiet lunch.  Their cheese market will open in July so they will probably have larger crowds later this summer.  The walk around the canals in the older part of town was very pleasant.  People keep flowers in their yards.  The “garden” areas near each house are generally very small, but typically filled with flowers in every nook and cranny.  In fact hollyhocks grow from cracks in the sidewalks around here, and they look very healthy and happy growing from the cracks.  Flowers are everywhere. 

George said that we did 13,800 steps today.