Travel Reference
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visited the beguinage, its courtyard lawns swimming in daffodils, but mostly I just walked the streets, agog at
such a concentration of perfection. Even the size of the place was perfect - big enough to be a city, to have
bookstores and interesting restaurants, but compact enough to feel contained and friendly. You could walk
every street within its encircling canal in a day or so. I did just that and never once saw a street I wouldn't
want to live on, a pub I wouldn't like to get to know, a view I wouldn't wish to call my own. It was hard to
accept that it was real - that people came home to these houses every night and shopped in these shops
and walked their dogs on these streets and went through life thinking that this is the way of the world. They
must go into a deep reverberating shock when they first see Brussels.
An insurance claims adjuster I got talking to in a bar on St Jacobstraat told me sadly that Bruges had
become insufferable for eight months of the year because of the tourists, and related to me what he clearly
thought were disturbing anecdotes about visitors peeking through his letterbox and crushing his geraniums
in the pursuit of snapshots. But I didn't listen to him, partly because he was the most boring fart in the bar -
possibly in Flanders - and partly because I just didn't care to hear it. I wanted my illusions intact.
For that reason I left early in the morning, before any tour buses could arrive. I went to Dinant, a
riverside town on the banks of the stately Meuse, crouched on this day beneath a steady rain. It was an
attractive place and I would doubtless have been highly pleased with it if I hadn't just come from Bruges and
if the weather hadn't been so dreadful. I stood on the bridge across the river and watched raindrops the size
of bullets beat circles in the water. My intention had been to hike through the southern Ardennes for a couple
of days to see if I could recognize any of the little villages and roads I had walked around on my first trip, but I
hadn't packed for this kind of weather - I was already soaked through and shivering as if I had forgotten to
take my malaria tablets - and instead, after only an hour in Dinant, I walked back to the station, caught the
first train to Namur and travelled on to Spa. One of the virtues of Belgium is that its tininess allows you to be
anywhere else within an hour or two. It takes a while to get used to the idea that the whole country is
effectively a suburb of Brussels.
I had no particular reason to go to Spa, except that it always sounded to me like a nice place, and
indeed it proved to be, set in a bowl of green hills, with a wooded park, the Parc de Sept Heures, a grand
casino out of all proportion to the modest town and a pair of big white hotels standing around a little island
of green called the Place Verte. I liked it immediately. The rain had stopped and left the town with a clean,
fresh feel, vaguely reminiscent of sheets lifted warm from a tumble dryer, and it had an eerily timeless air of
convalescence about it. I half expected to see limbless soldiers in brown uniforms being pushed through the
park in wheelchairs.
Spa is the original spa town, the one from which all the others take their name, and for 200 years it was
the haunt of Europe's royalty. Even up to the First World War it catered to aristocrats and grandees. It was
from Spa that Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, a milestone that marked its decline as much as his own. Today it
didn't seem to cater to anyone much, at least not at this time of year. I went to the tourist information centre
in the park and, after browsing politely at the displays, asked the man behind the counter where all the kings
and queens were.
'Ah, they do not come any more,' he said with a sad smile. 'Not so much since Peter the Great.'
'Why not?'
He shrugged. 'Fashions change. Now they want the sunshine, the sea. We still get the odd baron, but
mostly it is wealthy Germans. There are many treatments available if you are interested.' He waved a hand
over a selection of brochures and went off to help a new caller.
The brochures were all for places with no-nonsense names like The Professor Henrijean Hydrology
Institute and The Spa Therm Institution's Department of Radiology and Gastro-Enterology. Between them
they offered an array of treatments that ran from immersion in 'natural carbogazeous baths' and slathering in
hot and gooey mudpacks, to being connected to a freestanding electrical sub-station and briskly
electrocuted, or so it looked from the photograph. These treatments were guaranteed to do a number of
things I didn't realize it was desirable to do - 'dilate the dermal vessels', 'further the repose of the
thermoregulatory centres' and 'ease periarticular contractures', to name but three.
I decided without hesitation that my thermoregulatory centres were reposed enough, if not actually
deceased, and although I do have the occasional periarticular contracture and pitch forward into my
