hello and houghton dark I'm in the
historic city of Alkmaar in Holland and
if you just said the country's actually
called the Netherlands Holland is only a
small part of it then ten points to you
and then - 20 points because this
actually is Holland
anyway el kamar seems like a great place
but this video is about how I got here
by crossing the sea on a bus
[Music]
this is Leo Arden the capital of
Friesland province in the north of the
Netherlands and not in Holland you can
catch many buses from this bus station
but only one of them drives 32
kilometres across a-c so we're gonna get
that one and just to recap this bus is
going from here low warden to here
alkmaar via here the C a one-way ticket
costs 20 years but I've shelled out an
extra 1 euro for a day ticket so that I
can get off and back on again about 30
minutes into the journey there's
surprising news for Swiss passengers as
we turn off at the Dutch seaside village
of Zurich this is the last stop before
we cross the sea and in most countries
that would mean the bus now drives onto
a ferry but this is the Netherlands so
instead the road just carries straight
on across the water this isn't a bridge
they literally just built a motorway in
the sea in fact more accurately what
they built is called the F slope dike in
English that translates as this shutoff
tank and it's basically an extremely
long dam that separates and shuts off
the bay on the left from the North Sea
on the right behind that grassy Bank
construction began in 1927 with ships
dumping a mixture of sand silt rocks and
clay into the water in enormous
quantities eventually creating a 32
kilometres barrier that you could for
example put a motorway on the idea was
that if you shut off the bay you could
drain it and lower the level of the
water why would you want to do that
well the productivity shall we say of
Dutch people have been increasing and
now there were lots of little Dutch
people and the population was getting
bigger
normally this would mean cramming more
people into the same space but a Dutch
politician called Cornelis laylee came
up with a brilliant idea why don't we
make more fish it was such a brilliant
idea that there's now a statue of him
here standing majestically looking out
over the waves next to a bit so here's
how it worked since much of the bay was
very shallow you only needed to drop the
water level by a few metres to create a
whole load of new land for housing and
farming these three huge areas including
all the cities and villages that stand
on them now didn't exist before the a
flower type they're what's called
polders the Dutch had been draining
lakes and creating polders for years
this was just the same thing on a much
bigger scale the project took six years
to complete with between four and five
thousand people working on it every day
and here in the middle of the dike
there's a monument to the workers
marking the spot where they closed off
the final gap but more interestingly for
me right now there's also a little cafe
here which saves Frisian specialities
such as slaw Husker hot ball with Pindus
awesome features well I'm sold
and I'm pretty sure I burned off most of
the calories straight afterwards by
climbing the observation tower and
hauling this door open up here you can
see the almost surreal sight of the
motorway stretching into nothingness in
both directions and it gives you a sense
of what an incredible piece of
engineering this really is it is however
an 80 year old piece of engineering now
and like many 80 year olds it's in
danger of becoming a little bit leaky a
four-year program of reinforcement has
begun which will replace the outer
cladding of the dike while widening the
body and raising it by 2 metres this
will protect it from rising sea levels
in the future allowing it to protect the
thousands of Dutch people who live work
and catch buses on land that simply
wouldn't be there without the a flower
tank
[Music]
thanks for watching if you enjoyed the
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you soon
you