BCM Study Tour, part 1

This is LONG overdue. Apologies to all. I can't promise much better in the next couple of weeks either, but i'll try.

We embarked two weeks ago on a trip around Holland. Two minibuses, 25 students, one lecturer, and an unwitting PhD student (dragged into driving the second bus). We drove, from Oxford, to Nijmegen, Holland, on Monday. It was a long day. We picked up Brit Nick at the ferry dock in Dover. White cliffs (left)! We drove through France, Belgium and Holland, and thanks to our intrepid drivers, plus a few amazing strokes of grace from Caroline, Laura, Matt and others - we made it to our small town just 3 km from the German border. It was a fun drive through the countryside, and the roads seemed just as confusing to me as in England. No one had to worry about lack of cheer (below) thanks to Antoniya.
The town we stayed in was Beek, just outside Nijmegen. It was right on a river, which i found out was a fork of the Rhine - a strange fork. This was when it was really impressed upon me that Holland IS a delta. The river splits upstream of Nijmegen, and doesn't rejoin itself - its the opposite of what we normally think of as a "fork" in the river. It was an anti-confluence. The whole country is essentially one large delta, and as the rivers get close to the ocean outlet, they split and splinter into many riverlets and streams. Thus, the flooding, the incredible feats of engineering, the fertile sedimentary soils. The Netherlands is famous for being a country almost entirely below sea level. They've engineered their way out of submersion, into what we now now as Holland. In this incredibly structured, manipulated environment was where we were to engage on a massive study tour of conservation. And it was one of the best places we could have done this, in the end. It reminded me of the predicament of New Orleans, except Holland has had extensive draining, dredging and diking for much longer. However, the problems remain that this is a place which WANTS to be underwater, and it is only through feats of human ingenuity that we've managed to make it inhabitable. Next destination: Dutch nature reserves.