Belgium: Signal de Botange (25/28)
From the underwhelming high point of Luxembourg we made our way to Dinant, Belgium. Dinant’s claim to fame is that it was the birthplace of Adolphe Sax – the inventor of the saxophone. This is proudly celebrated by the town with a museum dedicated to him, a golden statue of a saxophone, and a large number of other plastic saxophone statues dedicated to various countries around the world.
The other main attraction are the colourful buildings lining the river front. We had a mooch around before spending the night in a quiet spot on the hills above Dinant and the next morning headed to the highest point in Belgium, Signal de Botrange.
We arrived at the car park, and fetched the tripod from the van. On many of the smaller peaks we’ve needed to take the tripod as there’s not always someone around you can accost to take the summit photo. At this highest point a set of 20 steps has been erected, just to ensure you can gain a few more metres in altitude. It did make taking the photo a little more interesting, with only a 10 second timer on the camera I had to sprint steeply up the stairs to make it into the photo. By the fourth and final time, I was having to pause beforehand to catch my breath.
We spent the evening in the car park of an old coal mine, now opened for tourists. which had been gratefully kitted out with facilities for camper vans. We stopped by in the morning to see about taking a tour, but as they didn’t have one in English that day we decided it probably wasn’t worth the money and filled up our water containers before heading off. It was just after finishing the fill up that we noticed a pool of water on the floor. Initially we thought it was a spillage from filling up, but quickly realised that the previous evening our waste water from the sink had overflowed its container! We’d obviously got complacent and forgotten to empty it in a timely manner! After pulling everything out, and cleaning up the excess we were finally ready to be on our way. We made our way to Vaalserberg, the high point of The Netherlands.
From there we headed back into Belgium for a weekend of caving. One of our Dutch friends we’d met in Meghalaya, had organised us to meet up with a couple of Belgian cavers. In the morning we headed to St. Anne’s caving for a thorough explore and a few stops for some photography.
With a stop for a beer in the sunshine on the way back, we spent the evening in good company and making new friends. On Sunday morning we headed to De Keel quarry, abandoned marl quarries in South Limburg. Our Belgian companions were here to reshoot some footage for an upcoming video to showcase a couple of their sponsors products. We helped with the lighting and then had a poke around some of the other levels of the quarry. It was large and quite geometric with straight walls, tall ceiling, and 45˚ corner supports. After an explore and a short break for an underground coffee we headed back out into the glorious sunshine.
After a bite for lunch we set off to Dunkirk, where we had our ferry booked for Dover the next day. We stopped for the evening in Veurne and went out to celebrate the end of our trip with some tasty white-wine moules-frites from a local restaurant. Then in the morning we left for Dunkirk and the ferry home.
