Giethoorn (கீத்தோர்ன்)

Giethoorn: Where the World Came to a Village

“I want to go somewhere where no one exists.
And even there, I should not exist.”
– Abdul Rahman

There was a time when travel was something I knew only through other people’s stories.

Until a few years ago, I had never crossed the borders of Tamil Nadu. While children in my extended family were growing up with airport photographs and boarding passes, I had never even stood close enough to an aeroplane to hear its engines properly. We belonged to a generation that had inherited little except the determination to move forward. We were among the first generations born after independence, children of families that had learned to rise slowly, often by holding on to whatever hands were available.

For people like us, travel was not a way of life. It was a privilege.

When something seems permanently beyond your reach, you eventually stop yearning for it.

Or at least, you learn to pretend that you have.

Perhaps that is why the idea of travel has always fascinated me.

Because in India, travel rarely means simply going somewhere.

It usually has a purpose.

We travel to work. We travel to visit relatives. We travel for weddings and funerals. We travel to see temples, often with an itinerary carefully planned around three famous ones and two unexpected ones discovered on the way.

We travel because we have somewhere to be.

Very rarely do we travel simply because we want to disappear for a while.

I have always liked the idea that a journey can strip a person of everything he thinks he is.

S. Ramakrishnan once wrote about this beautifully: when you board a bus or train and begin travelling, you are no longer somebody’s son, somebody’s father, a graduate, a writer or a person with a particular status. You are simply a passenger.

I think that is one of the most beautiful things about travelling.

For a few hours, nobody knows who you are.

And when the familiar labels that define us begin to fall away, we are given the rare chance to meet the person underneath them.

A foreign country does this even more intensely. The language is unfamiliar. The streets have different names. Nobody knows your history. Nobody cares what you do for a living.

You arrive stripped of identity.

And perhaps it is only when we are no longer surrounded by the people and places that constantly remind us who we are that we begin to discover what else there is inside us.

That was the feeling with which I set out for the Netherlands.

I woke before sunrise on a Saturday.

I had thought about visiting the Netherlands many times. Like many things we genuinely want to do, it had remained on the list for far too long.

That morning, however, I was finally going.

The journey had been organised by an Indian travel company called See-Eu(https://see-eu.info/), operating in Belgium. Their idea was simple and slightly amusing: to experience Europe without entirely leaving India behind.

The moment I stepped onto the bus, I knew exactly what they meant.

Hindi conversations.

Indian snacks.

Masala tea.

Indian food.

And, naturally, an argument over which Bollywood film we should watch.

Europe, for a moment, smelled like home.

The bus picked up passengers in Mechelen and Antwerp before turning towards the Netherlands. I had woken up far too early and was still carrying the weight of sleep in my eyes.

Eventually, I surrendered.

For most of the journey, I was asleep, waking only now and then to the movement of the bus and the occasional conversations around me.

The last thing I remember was Aamir Khan’s PK wandering around Earth trying to understand human beings.

When he finally returned to his spaceship, we had arrived in Giethoorn.

Giethoorn did not look like a place that belonged to the modern world.

It looked as though someone had taken an old European painting, removed the roads and replaced them with water.

Our guide led us towards a boat waiting at the edge of the village.

An elderly Dutchman greeted us.

His name was Alex.

He had a smile that suggested he had told this story hundreds of times and still enjoyed telling it.

Once everyone had boarded, the boat slipped quietly into the canal.

Then Alex began speaking.

His voice was enormous.

He paused every few minutes, not because he had forgotten what to say, but to make sure that even those sitting at the back could hear him.

Then he began telling us how Giethoorn came to be.

The village had been shaped by necessity.

Centuries ago, settlers arrived in this marshy landscape and began cutting peat, the accumulated remains of dead vegetation beneath the wetlands, which they dried and used as fuel.

But extracting peat changed the landscape.

The digging created pits.

Water filled them.

The pits became channels.

The channels gradually became a network of waterways.

What began as a way to survive eventually created the very landscape for which Giethoorn is now famous.

There is something deeply human about that.

We often imagine that people shape the world around them.

But sometimes survival works in the opposite direction.

The world shapes us.

The people of Giethoorn could not make their land into something it was not. So they adapted themselves to it.

They built small wooden bridges over the canals where other places would have built roads.

They learned to live with water rather than fight it.

Their geography became their culture.

Their limitation became their identity.

Their difficulty became their beauty.

Alex’s stories reminded me of something that had happened years earlier in Tamil Nadu.

I was travelling with my father and my elder brother Ramu when we passed through the salt pans of Vedaranyam.

Ramu looked at the endless white landscape and asked, with genuine curiosity, what people could possibly do with all that salt.

When I explained that salt was being produced there, he began reasoning aloud.

“If the groundwater is salty, how do they farm? Look at how differently God has created different places. In our region people farm. Here they can’t, so they make salt and survive.”

My father and I immediately responded together.

“People simply build their lives around what their land allows them to do. What does God have to do with it?”

That conversation stayed with me.

Because perhaps that is the story of every human settlement.

People do not wait for perfect circumstances.

They negotiate with whatever the world gives them.

Where the sea shapes the land and leaves its water behind, people learn to turn that abundance into a livelihood.

If there is fertile soil, they farm.

If the land offers something else, they find another way to make a living from it.

Civilisation is perhaps nothing more than humanity learning how to turn obstacles into occupations.

For centuries, Giethoorn remained almost completely enclosed within itself.

The village had its own church, its own little bridges, its own boats and its own rhythm of life.

The canals wound through the village like streets, while the boats became the natural way of moving from one home to another.

The houses stood quietly beside the canals, surrounded by trees, ducks, chickens and an astonishing amount of water.

The people lived within this small world and, for generations, had little reason to leave it.

They married within the community.

They lived among people they had known all their lives.

While the rest of Europe moved through centuries of change, Giethoorn seemed to remain suspended somewhere in the past.

Then something unexpected happened.

The outside world discovered it.

In 1958, a Dutch film called Fanfare was shot in Giethoorn.

People came to see the place where the film had been made.

And then more people came.

And more.

The village that had spent centuries isolated from the world suddenly became a place the world wanted to see.

The irony was beautiful.

Giethoorn did not have to leave its isolation to discover the world.

The world came looking for it.

Restaurants appeared.

Shops appeared.

Tourists arrived from different countries.

The village slowly became one of the Netherlands’ most recognisable destinations.

Even the offspring of migratory birds travelling from Africa began arriving seasonally, adding splashes of colour to a place that already seemed to have been designed for a postcard.

As we moved through the canals, Alex pointed towards the houses.

Most had beautiful thatched roofs.

Then he pointed out a few houses with tiled roofs.

Those, he explained, traditionally belonged to people such as the mayor, teachers and priests.

He rubbed his fingers together.

Money.

Even in a village where roads had been replaced by canals, the language of wealth needed no translation.

But Alex’s relationship with Giethoorn was more complicated than that of a guide simply selling its beauty.

He was proud of the village.

He was also worried about it.

Wealthy outsiders had begun buying houses there, not to become part of the community, but to spend a few weeks or months enjoying the village during summer.

Those houses remained empty for much of the year.

Land prices rose.

The people who had always lived there found it increasingly difficult to remain part of the place they called home.

Tourism had brought prosperity.

But prosperity, Alex seemed to suggest, could also quietly destroy the very thing people had come to see.

Recent regulations limiting property purchases by people who do not actually live in the village gave him some satisfaction.

Perhaps Giethoorn had finally realised that a village cannot survive merely by becoming beautiful for other people.

It must remain a home for the people who belong to it.

At one point, the canal opened into a lake.

In the middle of the water was a tiny boat.

A young boy was selling water and ice cream.

As our boat approached, he pulled himself towards us with surprising strength.

He asked everyone what they wanted, collected the orders and hurried back and forth, delivering everything with the energy of someone who had discovered that even a lake could become a workplace.

I asked Alex how deep the water was.

He took the small stick he was carrying, pushed it into the lake and measured.

“About a metre.”

I looked at the enormous expanse of water around us.

A metre.

It seemed almost ridiculous.

But perhaps that was Giethoorn in miniature.

Everything looked deeper than it really was.

Everything looked more complicated than it needed to be.

Alex eventually brought us back to where we had started and suggested that we rent our own boat.

We took his advice.

The price of a boat was too much for me alone, so I found four others willing to share one.

A couple.

An elderly man travelling with them.

Another young man.

And me.

Five people who had met because of a bus journey, now entrusted with a boat in a village where getting lost was surprisingly easy.

At first, the husband took control of the boat.

The other young man and I were far more interested in taking photographs.

Eventually the controls came to me.

That was when Giethoorn discovered my lack of boating experience.

I bumped into one side.

Then another.

I managed to make the boat behave after some time, but by then I had already gained the attention of several passing boats.

We had two hours.

So we continued.

The canals twisted and turned.

Wooden bridges appeared one after another.

Houses looked familiar.

Trees looked familiar.

Every corner seemed as though I had already passed it.

But there was one problem.

We could not find where we had started.

For a moment, I understood the desperation of someone lost at sea.

I remembered Papillon and its lonely protagonist drifting without knowing where the world had disappeared.

We were not in the middle of an ocean.

We were in a tourist village in the Netherlands.

Yet the feeling was strangely similar.

Fortunately, I had saved our starting location on my phone.

Eventually, we found our way back.

We returned the boat within the two hour limit.

Alive.

Unarrested.

And, most importantly, still in possession of the boat.

After lunch, I left the others behind and wandered through the village alone.

There was no schedule left to follow.

No guide.

No bus.

No instructions.

Only the quiet rhythm of my own footsteps.

I crossed wooden bridges, wandered beside the canals, watched boats glide silently across the water and paused before houses that seemed almost too peaceful to belong to the hurried world outside.

For the first time that day, I was not travelling with a group.

I was simply walking.

And perhaps that was when I experienced Giethoorn most completely.

Not through Alex’s stories.

Not through the boat.

Not through the camera.

But through silence.

The village seemed to ask for nothing.

It did not demand that I see another attraction, reach another landmark or take another photograph.

It simply existed.

And for a while, so did I.

As the afternoon slowly surrendered to evening, I made my way back towards the bus.

I looked back at Giethoorn one last time.

For centuries, this little village had lived almost as though the rest of the world did not exist. Then the world discovered it, turned it into a destination and began travelling thousands of kilometres just to experience the quiet life it had once been forced to live.

Perhaps that is the strange fate of beautiful places.

They become desirable precisely because they have remained untouched by the things from which people are trying to escape.

As the bus pulled away, the canals, bridges and thatched houses slowly disappeared behind me.

For a few hours, I had stepped outside the ordinary rhythm of life and entered a world where water replaced roads, silence replaced urgency and getting lost was almost a pleasure.

Now I was leaving that little world behind.

Giethoorn had given me a few hours of escape, and the familiar world was waiting patiently at the end of the road.

The quiet life of the waterways was fading behind me; the noise and routine of everyday life were beginning to return.

The little island of solitude had said its goodbye and I was returning to the mainland of ordinary life.