A short day, dictated by the availability of affordable accomm… but some of the loveliest cycling so far, following the river. Eek! It’s the Meuse!
I’d had a sleepless night in a noisy dorm. If only science could invent some device that enabled people to listen to music or films on their phone without disturbing others. They could call them ‘head-phones’, perhaps. Too sci-fi, I suppose.
Anyway, to clear my head, I rode back into town and up the hairpinned cobbled lanes to the top of the citadel that overlooks Namur’s grand confluence of the Meuse and the Sambre. It was only eightish and I had the chilly, sunny, breezy morning to myself.
Then it was a fabulous twenty miles alongside the river on a wide car-free towpath, shared with a few other leisure cyclists this fine day.
At one point I stopped to admire a large concrete ship in someone’s garden. As random Belgian sculptures go – the country is the home of Magritte, Delvaux and other surrealists, after all – this was pretty conventional.
I rocked up at Dinant well in time for lunch. The riverside buildings looked rather splendid in the sunshine – it’s a more photogenic place than Namur – and I spent a pleasant hour and a half pottering round the centre.
Much of this was taken up with the legacy of Adolphe Sax, the place’s favourite son: the man who invented the saxophone around 1840. I remember being most amused when I found out the saxophone was actually named after a chap called Sax, but I was much younger then. Well, about thirty, anyway.
The sax was originally intended as an orchestral instrument but for various reasons never quite became a regular part of it. It did, however, become a – perhaps even the – great jazz-solo device. Most people could probably name more famous sax players (Parker, Coltrane, Rollins, Young, Hawkins, Getz, Shorter, Pepper, Desmond, Mulligan, Webster etc etc) than famous Belgians (Poirot, Tintin, the Smurfs, Mannekin Pis etc).
Dinant certainly celebrates the horn and its creator. Huge decorated plastic saxophone figures adorn the main bridge and various central locations, and Sax’s house (-ish) on Rue Adolphe Sax is now a free museum. A statue of the inventor sits nonchalantly on a bench outside, as if waiting for his solo in some cool jazz standard.
I left Dinant south along the river, past the famous Rocher de Dinant. Its narrow gap evidently trapped WWII German tanks, much to the delight of locals (including some vague relatives), many of whom would remember the terrible massacre of their city by the same country in WWI.
I headed south, leaving the Meuse behind. The road rose to the hilltops with fine views over a riverside stately home.
If the cycling up till now had been the laid-back calm of Paul Desmond, the stretch from here to Beauraing – along main roads, as it was now hot and hilly and I just wanted to get to my accomm and have a beer – was more the threshing intensity of John Coltrane. At least it wasn’t Evan Parker.
Still, I got to Beauraing, and the luxury of a room to myself, in mid-afternoon. (And it’s pronounced ‘boh-rang’, by the way, not ‘boring’.) Plenty of time for a local beer or two amid the chatter and laughter of families enjoying the local cafes.
I like cycle touring.
Miles today: 35
Miles since Essen: 132