Pollare to Lessines

What a lovely cruise today.  The Dender River is beautiful.  It meanders through the countryside between forests and meadows with sheep and cows.  

It is narrow and deep, at least 3.00m.  Again today we went through 4 locks, with a total rise of 8.3m, and 4 mobile bridges. These are all hand operated and manned by mobile teams (3 different teams today) so you only call them once and they follow you on the road and open each bridge and lock for you.  They also call ahead to the next team to advise them a boat is coming their way.  But it is a lot slower than an automated system and it took us 5 hours 15 minutes to do 20 km.

2 of the teams consisted of 2 men who seemed to be competing with each other to see who could wind the gates open fastest. Rather entertaining.

We passed through a lovely town called Geraardsbergen and wished we had continued further yesterday and stopped there overnight.  It has a rather nice public dock.

The scenery is changing - hills!

But we didn't expect to this!

We crossed from Flanders into Wallonie.  Up till now I have been trying my hand out at Dutch (well, speaking to them in Afrikaans and mostly it works) but if they didn't understand me, or more likely I didn't understand them, they always spoke in English.  At the first lock in the French speaking Wallonie we waited at the lock but nothing seemed to be happening so I phoned and asked if I could speak English.  "Non!" was the very abrupt reply.  So I scratched around in my memory for the French I learnt 40 years ago and managed to make myself understood and even understood her reply: she would phone her colleague and we must wait.  So we tied up to this funny little dock.

Ian took a picture of the antiquated engineering.

We had to wait because there was another boat coming in the opposite direction so the lock keeper dealt with them first.    We only saw two other pleasure craft all day, and no commercials.  The locks are much smaller than we have encountered before and really rather quaint.

We had decided to stop at Lessines because, according to our waterways map book, there would be a free mooring here.  At a town we expected it to be a town dock.  But no, it isn't, it consists of 3 or 4 bollards in a derelict dock area; not the most salubrious surroundings!

It's only a 10 minute walk to the town centre, but not really worth the bother.

We had to chuckle at this great big barge with an outboard engine - a trifle under-powered surely!

And finally, here's a pic of me writing last night's blog.