Amsterdam: Boat cruise, Scheepvaart museum and last day stuff

One of the most popular things to do in Amsterdam as a tourist is to go on a boat cruise. We decided to take it up a notch and we rented a boat from boaty which we could drive around the canal ourselves for 3 hours. It was awesome!

I was at the boat first so I got taught how to drive the boat. It took a while to get used to it, but in general it was very easy. We got a map to navigate through the canals and off we went! I’ll let the pictures do the talking…

The best part about the boat ride were the ducks. They’d wait for the boat to get close and then swim up to where the boat was making waves and then swim in the waves. It was really cute.

After the boat cruise we decided to get an early night as we were all still recovering from the previous night. I ended up going to the bar are on the ground floor of my hostel (ClinkNoord) where they have a table with a sign “Solo travellers meeting point”. My roommate and I got some drinks and joined the solo travellers table.

I honestly thing solo travelling at hostels is an awesome experience. You meet so many interesting people from all over the world, share your travel stories, and if you’re lucky someone is from a city you’re going to and they can give you “tips from locals”. At the end of the night the table had people from Canada, USA, South America, Paris, Australia, Ireland and London.

Scheepvaart Museum

The next morning our group split up to do different things, so I decided to go to the Scheepvaart museum. Walking to the museum I saw this dove on the bridge eating some seeds. I took a chance to try and take a photo of the dove, assuming it would fly away. Strange enough the dove just looked up at me and then continued eating.

I was a bit reluctant to go to the museum, I mean how long can you look at ships? Well, turns out quite a while – and I didn’t even go to all the sections!

The museum contains some paintings, all containing ships. I’ve always loved the sea blue, and this painting highlights it beautifully.

There is a room dedicated to navigational items, which I hardly understood, but the room was laid out in a really creative way with sea lines drawn on the ground, indicating what is on display in front of the line.

I saw this cool looking item that looks like an art piece. It’s called an armillary sphere and it’s a celestial globe containing a small sphere in the middle which represents earth. The globe as a whole symbolises the universe.

There was a whole section about South Africa about the Dutch East India Trading with the “Cape of Good Hope” as a stopping point. People visiting the Cape as a stop over would draw maps and pictures of the cape and of the things they saw there, or other people would draw pictures of what was explained to them. This was a drawing of Table mountain in the 1700s.

Another interesting piece from the South Africa section was this sea map drawn of False Bay.

The best part about this museum is actually on the outside of the museum. They had on display this Royal Barge, which was built specifically for King William I in the 1800s. It only completed roughly 30 trips as it was only meant for royal usage.

My favourite part was going on this ship. It is a replica of a ship that crashed and it is open for the public to visit. It’s accessed via the museum.

It was a really awesome experience just walking around inside the ship and seeing how they lived back in the middle ages.

The master bedroom, with a really low roof!
Some cheese in storage

They even rescued the daily menu that hung in the kitchen. From what I can make out they had a lot of beer and wine!

Before leaving the ship I decided to try out the VR journey. They had a room with a bunch of seats and VR head sets which has a “show” every 15 minutes. The show is basically a journey through the 16/1700s of Amsterdam, where you “fly” over the ocean with all the ships there and get to experience what it must have been like in those times.

After I left the museum I decided to go checkout the bouldering gym 20 minutes from where I was staying. It looks the same as in SA, though the routes are setup a lot different. The colours indicate the difficulty level – blue is harder than green for example.

I got in a good workout and felt a little bit less sad for missing all of the climbing happening in SA, and then went to dinner with my friends in one of the highest buildings in Amsterdam.