Giethoorn

Small electric open boats hired by the hour from operators along the canal. No licence is needed for them, they move at walking pace, and an hour or two is enough to get out of the village and into the reed beds.

The footpath running the length of the old village along the canal, past thatched farmhouses on their own islands, crossed by wooden arched bridges. Walk it early or late; at midday it is a queue.

A farmhouse kept as it was when the village dug peat rather than sold boat trips, with the tools, the byre and the living quarters intact.

Roughly a hundred square kilometres of the largest bog in north-western Europe, immediately outside the village: otters, black terns, and reed still cut for thatch. Boat or canoe is the way in.

The single decision that changes the visit. The coaches have gone by early evening and the village empties; the canal at dusk with nobody on it is the thing everyone comes for and almost nobody sees.

Steenwijk is the station, on the Zwolle to Leeuwarden line; from Amsterdam allow a change and the better part of two hours. Bus 70, running Zwartsluis to Giethoorn to Steenwijk, makes the connection all year, with a seasonal line 270 from March to October.

Neither line 70 nor 270 runs in the evening. If you are not staying the night, you are on somebody else's timetable from mid-afternoon, which is exactly why most visitors leave at precisely the wrong moment.

The old village has no through road. Park in the paid car parks on the outside and walk in. The footpath along the canal is the only way through, and it is single file whenever a coach has just unloaded.

May, June and September: the water is warm enough to be out on, the reed is up, and the coach traffic is thinner than in high summer.

November to March. Half the boat hire is shut and some kitchens close, but the village is a village again, and a hard winter freezes the canals.

July and August, and any warm weekend from Easter onwards, when the paths through the old village genuinely jam.

Be on the Binnenpad before nine. The first coaches arrive mid-morning and the difference between the two hours is total.

Take a whisper boat out before the hire queues build, and head away from the village into open water.

Eat on a terrace over the canal while the day-trippers are at their thickest. It is the right hour to be sitting still.

Out into Weerribben-Wieden by canoe or on the marked walking routes, well clear of the village.

Back for the hour after the last coach leaves. Dinner in the village, and the canal to yourself.

Two former Zuiderzee harbour towns about fifteen minutes away, with the brick architecture Giethoorn does not have and none of the crowds.

Forty minutes south: a star-shaped moat, the church tower everyone calls the Peperbus, a bookshop inside a Dominican church, and a real city to sleep in.