One river, three countries

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on 16^th May 2025.

The same river has carried us through three different countries in the past two weeks. One river but with many different names. It’s known as the Maas in the Netherlands and La Meuse in Belgium. At times long canalised sections run close by the river and they are given different names, the Julianakanaal and the Albertkanaal for example. In France it used to be called the Canal de l’Est – Branche Nord, a terrible name for such a majestic river, then it was re-named La Meuse Ardennaise or La Meuse Lorraine depending on which region you were in at the time. Most recently it is called simply the Canal de la Meuse.

Whatever the name, whether a free-flowing river or a canalised waterway with locks to allow navigation, the water is a constant, flowing steadily on. Or so it seems. In reality it is in constant flux, swelling with heavy rains, becoming diminished in times of drought and increasingly having to adapt to our need for water to support our agriculture and industry in an unstable climate.

One river with many faces, as I hope the following pictures and videos will show you.

On the Albertkanaal in Belgium the landscape becomes harsh and inhospitable. So much concrete. Sprawling factories, some all shining steel, others rusty red and collapsing in on themselves, redundant icons of a time now past. Great mounds of recycled waste being emptied into barges and taken who knows where, someone else’s problem.

On one occasion we noticed effluent spewing out of a pipe, turning the water a sickly milky-white. The water birds were largely gone but against all odds we saw a pair of ducks with a brood of eight ducklings paddling for all they were worth beside a long, high concrete wall, the wash from passing commercial barges making it a treacherous place for such tiny bodies.

We go where the river takes us and see what it shows us, and it can change very suddenly. The factories disappeared and were replaced by green fields and trees, horses grazing on the hillside, impressive mansion houses and immaculate lawns.

Earlier I said that the river had many faces but so often the landscape is shaped by us, a reflection of how we live, and how we care for our environment, for better or for worse.

And so into France, our third country. The Meuse cuts a deep furrow through the hills and forests of the Ardennes plateau and the landscape changes again, dramatically so. Towering hills clad in a lush abundance of trees with the river meandering through it, twisting and turning on itself, passing through small hamlets where life is slow.

The weather was unseasonably warm, and one night we had a heavy thunderstorm. The next morning we woke to find the hills had disappeared, cloaked in a thick mist. A local fisherman raised his hand in farewell as we cruised by, but a few seconds later the mist folded itself around him and he was gone, a ghostly outline and then nothing.

For days now we’ve seen hardly any other boats. We don’t understand why. This has been some of the most beautiful cruising we’ve ever done and yet each night we moor up alone.

For the next stage of our journey we leave the big rivers behind and travel through the French canal network. Less sitting around enjoying the scenery and more locks to get through. In the next few days  we have a staircase of 26 locks on the Ardennes canal – no sitting around at all if we want to get through them in one day!

See you next week.

MJ