On Tuesday evening, former football player Wesley Sonck watched an episode of Travel Waes: Flanders about the nature of his youth. With a wide gesture he pointed towards the rolling hills: ‘We are all going to France and we all think it is beautiful and when we see something like this we think: ela.’
All he wanted to say was: beauty is often just around the corner.
Earlier that evening, Sonck’s fellow Fleming Arnout Hauben had already proven this extensively. After his infectiously cheerful journey along and across the Mediterranean, he now travels across the Low Countries with his friends Philippe Niclaes and Ruben Callens, in Straight through the Low Countries (VPRO). Hauben walks from Ostend to Pieterburen and – in the words of practically every First Dates participant – ‘let everything just come to him’. Watch him go slowly through endless lowlands, backpack on, sun on his head. And then just wait and see who or what you meet.
When he passes a historic site, Hauben gives a mini-lecture on Dutch history, but the program is at its best during the apparently unprepared conversations with the people they meet on their walk. On a beach on the Scheldt they meet a crispy Sean Connery lookalike, elsewhere a miller who graduated as a lawyer and in the Kempen – home area of the Flemish cycling pride Wout van Aert – a flag of Van Aert’s arch-rival, Mathieu van der Poel, flies. Once in the home of the VDP fan, they end up in one of the largest Van der Poel collections in the Benelux. There is a story everywhere: at a pigeon race, in an abbey with a replica of The last Supper or with a Dutch postman who complained about the tiny Flemish mailboxes. He had a parakeet at home. Pete. ‘Whistle, man!’
Tuesday’s best meeting was pre-cooked: after fifteen years Hauben saw Rob and Eddie again, two men with disabilities about whom he had once made a documentary a long time ago. Together they visited the grave of the couple with whom the men had lived at the time. They laid flowers and both gave emotional speeches.
“Is it okay?” If you look back, it was more than good.
Straight through the Low Countries is a very nice program. Not least because of the choice of music, which forms a parallel walk through the Low Countries. The first three episodes already featured fragments of George Baker, Spinvis, Noordkaap, Bram Vermeulen, Golden Earring, The Radios, Diesel, Tröckener Kecks, Triggerfinger, Eefje de Visser, Het Zesde Metaal, The Scene, the Dolly Dots and Doe Maar. to hear. On Tuesday evening the men finished in Scherpenheuvel, led by Raymond van ‘t Groenewoud: ‘It was love, love, love for music!’