Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
8. Amsterdam
Arriving at Amsterdam's Centraal Station is a strange experience. It's in the middle of town on a sunny
plaza at the foot of the main street, the Damrak. You step out of the front door and there in front of you is -
gosh! - every hippie that's left. I had no idea there were still so many of them, but there were scores, if not
hundreds, lounging around in groups of six or eight, playing guitars, passing reefers, sunning themselves.
They look much as you would expect someone to look who has devoted a quarter of a century to lounging
around in public places and smoking dope. A lot of them seemed to be missing teeth and hair, but they had
compensated somewhat by acquiring large numbers of children and dogs. The children amused
themselves by frolicking barefoot in the sun and the dogs by nipping at me as I passed.
I walked up the Damrak in a state of high anticipation. Amsterdam had been Katz's and my favourite
European city by a factor too high to compute. It was beautiful, it was friendly, it had excellent bars and legal
dope. If we had lingered another week I could well be there yet, sitting on the station plaza with an acoustic
guitar and some children named Sunbeam and Zippity Doo-Dah. It was that close.
The Damrak was heaving with tourists, hippies and Saturday shoppers, all moving at different speeds:
the tourists shuffling as if their shoelaces were tied together, looking everywhere but where they were going,
the hippies hunched and hurried, and the shoppers scurrying around among them like wind-up toys. It was
impossible to walk with any kind of rhythm. I tried several of the hotels along the street, but they were all full,
so I dodged behind the prison-like royal palace at Dam Square and branched off into some side streets,
where I had vague recollections of there being a number of small hotels. There were, but these too were full.
At most of them it wasn't even necessary to enquire because a sign in the window announced
NO VACANCY
in half a dozen languages.
Things had clearly changed since my day. Katz and I had stepped off the train at the height of summer,
asked our way to the Sailors' Quarter and got a room in the first hotel we came to. It was a wonderful little
place called the Anco, in a traditional Amsterdam house: narrow and gabled, with steep, dark staircases
and a restful view of the O.Z. Voorburgwal canal four floors below. It cost $5 a night, with an omelette for
breakfast thrown in (almost literally), though we did have to share a room with two slightly older guys.
Our first meeting was inauspicious. We opened the door to find them engaged in a session of naked
bed-top wrestling - an occurrence that surprised the four of us equally.
'Pardon us, ladies!' Katz and I blurted and scuffled backwards into the hallway, closing the door behind
us and looking confounded. Nothing in twenty years of life in Iowa had quite prepared us for this. We gave
them a minute to disengage and don bathrobes before we barged back in, but it was clear that they
considered us boorish intruders, an opinion reinforced by our knack, developed over the next two days, of
always returning to the room in the middle of one of their work-outs. Either these guys never stopped or our
timing was impeccable.
They spoke to us as little as was humanly possible. We couldn't place their accents but we thought the
smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under. Their contempt for us became
irredeemable in the middle of the second night, when Katz stumbled heavily from his bed after a gala
evening at the Club Paradiso and, with an enormous sigh of relief, urinated in the waste-basket.
'I thought it was the sink,' he explained, a trifle lamely, the next morning. Our room-mates moved out
after breakfast and for the rest of the week we had the room to ourselves.
We quickly fell into a happy routine. We would rise each morning for breakfast, then return to the room,
shut out every trace of daylight and go back to bed for the day. At about four o'clock we would stir again,
have a steaming shower in a cubicle down the hall, change into fresh clothes, press our hair flat against our
heads and descend to the bar of the Anco, where we would sit with Oranjebooms in the window seat,
watching the passing scene and remarking on what fine people the Dutch were to fill their largest city with
pleasant canals, winsome whores and plentiful intoxicants.
The Anco had a young barman with a Brillo-pad beard and a red jacket three sizes too snug for him
who had clearly taken one toke too many some years earlier and now looked as if he should carry a card
with his name on it in case he needed to remember it in a hurry. He sold us small quantities of hash and at
