48 Hours in Zottegem, Belgium

48 Hours in Zottegem, Belgium

Jay Wilkinson,  April 2018   balthazarw@gmail.com

Road cycling enthusiasts and beer lovers find fulfillment in the Flemish Ardennes with classic cobbles, climbs, and ales.  Zottegem is a town of 25,000 less than 45 minutes by train from the major Belgian cities of Ghent and Brussels.  If you’ve read up on Belgium, you may know that there are two major languages: French in the south (Wallonia) and Flemish, a form of Dutch, in the Flemish north.  But your high school French will do you no good in Zottegem, although it is only 10 miles from the border with Wallonia.  I learned that the Flemish will go across the globe to help others, but still roll their eyes about the backwards Walloons. English is the second language in Flanders. 

We prefer to travel with our own fitted bikes on the back of a rental car, settle in one place for a few days of cycling and then drive onto a new destination.  Airline charges for cycles across the Atlantic run to $150 - each way.  Saris Bones racks are light, break down into parts that fit into a suitcase along with your clothing and once adjusted, are quickly mounted onto most cars.  Alternatively, high end road bikes may be rented at Olympic gold medalist and current pro racer Greg Van Avermaet’s shop, Veloloft, in  nearby Nazareth.  The proposal for long cycling days here assume well-conditioned riders with suitable equipment. 

You’ll not see big hotels in Zottegem. But a variety of B&Bs and guest houses are found in town and surrounding countryside.  The small 2 star De Brouwerij (Brewery) hotel sits on a Zwalm millstream, a few miles out of Zottegem.  It has its own kitchen and two minutes away on the other side of the Zwalm is the charming Bostmolen (Forest Mill) Restaurant.  

Cycling the country roads of Flanders is a joy made easy by the comprehensive system of signposts for the fietsroute (bike routes). http://www.fietsroute.org/Cycle-Networks.php. Map your route in advance and write on a piece of paper the numbered intersections you wish to pass through.  Stay in noted sequence and you can leave your map and GPS in your back pocket.  Each intersection on the cycling routes is numbered and arrows at each direct riders to the next point on the list.  Few routes or lanes are bike-only but drivers are used to cyclists and respectful.  You can roll out onto the system right outside the De Brouwerij.   These suggestions are for well-conditioned cyclists.

Day one of cycling could take you to Da Muur, The Wall.  Your fietsroute can plot a course through moderate climbs and descents on country roads and through small towns on the way  to this famous cobbled climb through the town of Geraardsbergen.  The Tour of Flanders or Ronde de Vlaanderen is the top race of the Spring Classics, the one day bicycle races in Belgium.  Until recent years, it almost always included Da Muur. The run up is more than a half-mile from the river at town center up through cobbled streets at an average grade of over 9%, with some sections approaching 20%.  

Cobbles, or semi-regular paving stones, typically the size of flattened softballs (or according to the Flemish, babies’ heads) were, a few years back, regarded as leftovers to be removed or paved over in the name of modernity.  Today in Flanders they are preserved by law and rebuilt with pride.  A farmer paved a new cobbled section of road for the pleasure of welcoming The Ronde riders through his fields - it worked!  Plan this trip for a sunny day as experienced cobble riders are challenged to stay upright in wet conditions.  Perhaps you should plan a lunch stop at a Geraardsbergen cafe after summitting Da Muur.

Plot your route back to Zottegem through Steenhuise and then onto Herzele where you can observe three windmills in various states of repair.  The  stone Molen te Rijst was built in 1794 and has been restored to working condition for exhibitions.  Even when not operating, we who are not mechanically inclined can enter the mill, look at the works and figure out how the power of the wind is transmitted from vanes through gears and belts to the massive stones that grind grains and seeds.  The wind power is also harnessed to a system of cogs, gears and levers that rotates the whole mechanism within the stone tower to face the wind and gain the maximum benefit. According to legend, no child, male or female, was ever born to any of the millers’ families and  thus the crowning weathervane is a mule, the symbol of infertility.

Returning to Zottegem, you may want to stop at the town square and take a seat outside one of the cafes for a beer.  Just one, as alcohol content tends towards the high side.  Check the drink-by date: one gueze (wild-fermented beer) I drank in 2009 was to set expire on April 17, 2028, my daughter’s 47th birthday.  And if you have not had Belgian frites, the original “french” fries, do try them.  Fresh cut, double fried and served with a variety of sauces: mayo to Heinz to curry-ketchup, you’ll not regret it.  Ride around the small downtown.  A great variety of small shops - clothing, jewelry, bakery, grocery, cell phone, butchery and mailbox. Yes, a shop selling only mailboxes!  A tourist info office is on the main square across from the church.  

Leaving Zottegem on the main road towards Oudenaarde - yes, safe for cycling, will get you back to the Brouwerij in 30 minutes or less.  After changing, you might take another beer here or at the patio outside the Bostmolen, my favorite spot on the stream overlooking Flemish farmlands and fietsroute.  If the beer and surroundings are so inviting that you decide to stay around for dinner, it is hard to go wrong with “vlaamse stoverij”  “carbonnade flammande” or Flemish beef stew made with a heavy Belgian ale.   No place in Belgium is far from the sea, so try the tiny grey shrimp dishes, mussels or other offerings.  And chocolate, definitely Belgian chocolate.

Summer in Belgium means long evenings with twilight that may last beyond your bike-tired legs' bedtime.  The latitude is well north of that of Montreal, Canada.  If you have the stamina,  Zottegem puts on weekly free music events outside the Kasteel Egmont, the former home of a prominent Count, whose beheading in 1568 triggered the Low Countries’ fight for independence from the Spanish empire.  Three-generation families, roving toddlers, a score of teens (male) gather at one corner, a score of teens (female) in another, disabled neighbors, couples and singles hang in front of a portable stage  on the castle grounds.  One band switched effortlessly from heavy metal to Michael Jackson’s Beat It.  The next week, credible covers of  Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis.  Another night’s performers, doing classic 80's rock, featured father and daughter lead singers.  Her boyfriend delivered to her a rose - and dad demanded a bouquet!  Hearty laughter from the audience and the band then pumped out a few bars of the wedding march.  Yes, beer is available for purchase.  But I saw no drunks.

The Brouwerij’s continental breakfast is modest compared to those overwhelming repasts seen in fancy European hotels but sustaining, high quality and part of the price.  

Day two’s ride.  Still up for it?  Plot your fietsroute to take you a bit north and east to the Paddestraat, a hill-less cobbled street just west of Zottegem that is travelled by three or four of the Spring Classics every year.  You can experience the benefit of riding the drainage ditch on the side of that road.  Wend your way around to the Provincial Archaeology Museum where you can stop to see Gallo Roman building remains, a statute of Julius Caesar and findings of farmers, antique collectors and scientists of the region.   Head north a bit and include the Molenberg cobbled hill, another “classic” on your route, or take a random choice and you may,  by luck, encounter it on your own, as I did on my second Flemish ride.  It is no Muur, but a shorter, gentler hill in the countryside, easy if you are not in the peleton with 50 of the world’s top cyclists.  

Most of the fietsroutes take you onto quiet paved county roads through flat-to-rolling farmland, villages and a few small woods.   Most homes, barns and outbuildings are brick and utilitarian as are typical buildings in the towns. Belgian was a battlefield in both world wars and the miracle of Flemish development only took off in the once-poor north in the 1960s.  Retail “trash” is not, alas, unseen, especially on main roads leading into Zottegem, Oudenaarde or other towns.  Churches and tiny private chapels are frequent sights and grand manors of former nobility pop up now and then.  Dairy, beef and grains are tended in this region.  Pigs, goats and horses will watch you pedal past. Closer to the ocean, fields of hops fuel the ales of Belgium.  Streams like the Zwalm are small until they arrive at the Schelde, a major river that drains the region to the ocean through the port of Antwerp.    

Westward, make your way towards Oudenaarde, finish line for the Ronde these days and home of the Ronde Centrum, a museum of the Tour.  Central to the Flemish fiets story is Eddie Merckx, “The Cannibal”, and holder of 5 Tour de France 1st place finishes.  You can see his first win in 1969 taking up a full front page of the Het Nieuwsblad - and on the rear of the leading Belgian paper, a second front page showing Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. Thousands of years of cobbles are displayed and explained.  Historic bicycles and bidons arrayed.  Videos.  A sixties era cycle team car.  A gift shop.

Depending on the extent of your site-seeing and remaining energy level, you could ride south to the cobbled climb of the Koppenberg, 2000 linear feet of climbing with an average ascent of 11%, topping out at 22%.  Suggestion:  plot your way to the top and just look down as many pros and young riders have to dismount and carry their bikes to the top.  Not enough challenges yet?  Locate the Kluisberg, the Kreisberg and other notable climbs, some cobbled and some asphalt, for your return to De Brouwerij.

If you can later drag yourself from the shower to the car, you might take your companions to Zottegem’s Kasteel Breiveld, a restaurant on the grounds of a city-owned thirty-four acre hill-top park on the outskirts of town.  The grounds are laid out in a naturalistic English garden style with walking paths that take visitors through a variety of vistas, water features, woods and the large collection of flowers, trees and shrubs from around the world.  Food at the  castle, rebuilt in the neo-Flemish Renaissance style 110 years ago, is served in a variety of prix fixe menus or a la carte.

Perhaps not everyone in your party,  perhaps even you, are not up for two days of cycle-focused sweating.  In addition to the archeology and cycling museums and countryside tours, the cities of Ghent and Brussels are 45 minute no-transfer train rides from Zottegem.  Having happened accidentally into the opening day of Ghent-fest, a music and theater festival attracting great performers and enormous and happy crowds to a fantastically cultured city, it is my must-see for non-cycling events.  In 2018,  the 175th annual party is set for July 13th to the 22nd.  

Before my time in Belgium, my impression was of a grey and boring “Low Country” without the vaunted excitement of Amsterdam sparking in its northern neighbor.  Several months living in Zottegem and working in Brussels convinced me much to the contrary.  

Ready yourself, as for our next “forty-eight hours” we will ascend into surrealism  and The Search for the Absolute with lunch at  Brussels’ La Fleur en Papier Dore (Gold Papered Flower)  - the home cafe  of that bowler-hatted, well-camouflaged false banker, Renee Magritte.  What was the purpose of his meeting with John Wayne? 


more to explore: https://www.fietsnet.be/routeplanner/default.aspx.   http://www.bles.be/drupal/.  Local gin.  Art.