Terps, borgs and the pink granite coast: Old salts and sinful delicacies

We drove from North Holland across the massive dike, the Afsluitdijk, entering Friesland.

This is the dyke that has turned a salt water sea into an inland freshwater lake.

Once we cross we immediately feel that we are leaving the more heavily populated regions behind us. No more do we have to watch every twist and turn for cyclists, walkers, cars or lorries, it seems. There is suddenly room for us on the road.

The Netherlands is one of the top three most densely populated countries in Europe and in the south the towns and villages almost seem to merge. No sooner are you through one minefield of a town than you enter another. They all have incredibly narrow roads with bicycle paths to one or both sides and often a canal to the side of that. There barely seems enough space for two cars to pass on most of the roads we drive, but somehow, they do.

In Friesland, the roads seem wider immediately. Even little footbridges are brilliantly designed. The houses seem larger, and there are more detached homes appearing. But it is the farmhouses, here, that are the most startling.

Many are of the kop-hals-romp style, where the kop is the head and contains the house; the hals is the neck and the linking section, while the romp is the barn where the animals spend icy winters. There are other farmhouses of the stelp type, shaped a bit like a pyramid. Their roofs are sometimes tiled at the front, but the larger portion at the rear often has a layer of thin tightly woven thatch.

All are massive.

The square kilometres of glasshouses growing vegetables, fruit and tulips in the south have given way to vast expanses of flat land where hay is being harvested and fat Friesen cattle dot the landscape along with herds of wooly sheep butting their new wobbly-legged lambs.

Walkers are out today in their big thick coats, high boots and scarves tied neck high. On ice cold Mondays shop owners in the Friesland region stay in bed, or rest beside their cosy log fire. They wisely don't open their shops until well after lunch.

We notice many little police cars driving all roads in the Netherlands. They seem always to be behind us just as we're a few kilometres along from a stop and just as Peter is still pulling up his seatbelt. Furtively.

Our preferred lunch spots are canal side and today we found a good one to eat our salami and cheese on caraway and pumpkin seed buns. But we're having a hassle finding a consistent lunch bread we love. In France, almost any french stick is brilliant. Here, sticks are not so common. Bakeries are few and far between compared with France. Rolls tend to come pre-packaged and end up tasting a little dry or a lot doughy, while all the sliced bread we've bought so far seems a bit too airy. We tend to rate the bread daily and French sticks are still our favourite if we can find them.

In Friesland, the villages we've been visiting are smaller and the supermarkets are of the formula variety, like Lidl. Fruit and vegetables also come pre packaged which can be a problem for us.

Tonight, for example, it is so cold we were hoping for a hot stew, but all the carrots in the shelves come in packages too large for just one or two meals. We want one carrot only, and one is nowhere to be found. Nor can we find just one turnip, or one little swede. So, we've had to settle for a package of mixed frozen vegetables, just to get the variety. Trouble is frozen ones don't usually have that lovely fresh flavour or crunchy texture.

Our two favourite stops today were Hindeloopen and Sloten.

Hinderloopen is a wee Venice with tiny canals that drain into the big inland lake, the Ijsselmeer, that was once a salt water sea. This is an old seafarer's town, and many a captain's house with an interesting facade, is still standing.

Some of the old salts spent their day today chatting on a bench seat that backed on to the lock keepers cottage. Out of the wind.

We were told by one of the locals that there is only one professional sea captain left here. He often sells eel from the lake to the restaurateurs and we found his smoke house further down the street, angling off the back of his sea captain's shanty, all black, and shiny, and prettily decorated.

We drove into woodlands further towards Sloten. And plateaus of sand, called gaasts, spread higher than the rest of the canals and fields. The gaasts were left behind as the Ice Age withdrew and some we saw today were being mined for sand.

Canal boats, disconcertingly, appear to sail in the flat green fields. It takes a moment to realise that the canal is so much lower than the land and can't be seen from the road.

Sloten is a pretty postcard village with an octagonal windmill at one end and two rows of gabled houses facing a canal lined with tall topiary trees pruned down to their nubs and nobbly bumps.

Here we tried our first appelbollen, a sinfully delicious doughnut filled with apple and dredged in a thick coating of icing sugar.

We keep finding foods here that are criminally addictive.

No wonder the locals walk, cycle and run so regularly and with such fierce intent. They want to make calorie space for one more appelbollen, I do believe.