I’ve just spent a weekend playing host to a couple of old friends from Dunedin, NZ. I’ve also had a busy fortnight, hence the paucity of postings. There’s a bit of geek revelry in the pipeline, but first I’ve got yet another “I got horribly lost and walked for hours” story. In this one, I drag Lucy and Abby into the outskirts of Amsterdam and we almost end up sleeping under a bridge.

I’ve said it before, and no doubt I’ll say it again: I’m a terrible tour guide. I don’t know the tourist hotspots of my adopted city, I can’t stand the red light district and I don’t visit coffeeshops, I’m too cheap to recommend guided tours but I don’t know enough amusing anecdotes to give my own free version. And I get lost on a daily basis in the normal course of things, let alone while exploring –under protest– some out-of-the-way corner rated “must see” in whatever guide book my visitors are carrying this time.

The irony of this situation is that I get loads of visitors, because Kiwis love to travel and Amsterdam is fun to visit, and every time I give the same excuses and disclaimers and every time my guests leave vowing never to return… but there’s always a fresh batch on the way. So this time I tried out a new strategy: I put Lucy and Abby through a military-training-style test of physical and emotional stamina, which they survived with surprising aplomb.

The avowed aim of the evening’s entertainment was to arrive at a birthday party, around 10pm. I had the address, and had looked up the relevant connections. Abby wanted to visit the red light district after dark (why? why do they all…) so we gave ourselves some extra time and left home at 9 or so. Tram to Nieuwmarkt, grumpy striding through the dodgey bits, arrived just in time at the station and caught our bus.

We were heading for a stop called Spaarndammerdijk. Around where it should have been, was instead the Spaarndammerstraat stop. In retrospect, this was the one. Of course, we didn’t get off. We waited for the Spaarndammerdijk stop, which was nowhere near Spaarndammer straat or dijk. Instead, it was almost at Sloterdijk, in an industrial sort of region where the streets are named after electrical components (Kabelweg, Accumulatorweg, Generatorstraat, Isolatorweg and my personal favourite, Teleportboulevard). Half the bus got off at the same time, and evaporated into the night, leaving us alone on the street.

I still thought at that point that we were on the right heading. A little further west than we needed to be, perhaps, but nothing extreme. So we started walking back east along Transformatorweg. I checked the map at the bus stop we left from, and then checked again the next stop we passed. (Yes, in retrospect this was a bad sign: we could have got off there, right? Right. Or even earlier.)

That was the first emotional challenge of the evening. Because according to the helpful little “you are here” arrow on the second bus stop, we were moving directly away from our target. Now, I have a generally faulty sense of direction, but I used to cycle more or less this route when I lived in Zaandam, and the thought of being so totally turned around was giving me quite some trouble; it wasn’t doing the girls any good either. I overcame their dissenting voices by walking faster than they could keep up to the next bus stop to check… and discovered that in the ten minutes or so that we had been walking, we hadn’t moved anywhere.

It seems that the resolution on the bus station maps is much less than the pictures would have you believe, so as far as the maps knew we were still in the same place. This was reassuring, in a sense, but it also meant that we’d probably started even further west than I thought. We soldiered on.

About this time I found a crossroads, and phoned ahead to Daan (whose birthday it was) to get directions. He didn’t recognise the name of the street we were on (another bad sign). Called us back ten minutes later, having looked it up, and I’m very glad Abby and Lucy don’t speak Dutch. The conversation went something like this:

“How on Earth did you get there?”

“I don’t know, we just took the bus and got off at Spaarndammerdijk, I don’t understand it.”

“Well, you have to come back. It would have been quicker to walk from the station, you know.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope, you’re really in the back end of nowhere out there.”

We did make it back, without further loss of direction, and arrived at about quarter to midnight. But there were a couple more exciting moments on the way.

The most terrifying, in retrospect, was following the road under the railway overpass to get back to the Amsterdam side of the tracks. There were some four or five people swaddled in blankets, lying on scavenged mattresses, at the side of the footpath. Thank heavens for wide cyclelanes, we gave them a wide berth and nobody gave us any trouble.

After that tense little moment, our last trial was relatively anticlimactic: on arriving on the street Daan lives on, we found ourselves in the middle of a science fiction movie set. Something like Cube, or the space station scenes in 2001; or, now I come to think of it, strangely reminiscent of recent Mac styling. Boxes, with subtly rounded corners, and restrained coloured panels in tastefully irregular patterning. No house-numbers, heaven forbid, that would have totally ruined the effect, darling. By this point we were exhausted (the girls had got up at 4 that morning to catch a flight from London) and slightly hysterical, so we staggered around the compound trying to find the block we needed, laughing at the colours and making scary-alien pounces at each other.

We found it, like I said, just before midnight. The party was fun (expect a post soon about Daan’s WC lighting solution; tasteless and geeky, but highly amusing), but the whole experience basically just reinforced my love for my bicycle. Lucy and Abby tell me they had a good time, but I somehow suspect they won’t be coming back to visit anytime soon. Anyone else planning on stopping by, take warning: buy a map and compass, and do your own navigating!