Canal Tour sightseeing in Amsterdam

After our lunch at Vinnies, we decided to go on a canal tour. Poul and I sometimes have very different ideas regarding what’s good sightseeing. While skyline watching from a rooftop bar is my thing, Poul is more of a hop-on-hop-off-bus-kind-of-guy, but it was very hot that day in Amsterdam, so we could both agree that seeing the city from comfortable seats on a boat was a good idea.

I was all lights! camera! action! at the first couple of bridges we passed, but then I realized that we were going to pass A LOT of bridges on that tour. Amsterdam has around 1500 bridges, and they all look beautiful, so no need to stress about the photo documentation.

There are plenty of canal tour operators in Amsterdam, and we just picked a boat close to our hotel. The price was 10,50 EUR per person for a 60 minutes ride in an ok boat, which was slightly cheaper than most of the tours we saw advertised around the city. The automated audio guiding was first delivered in Dutch, and then in English, so we didn’t hear about some of the sights, until after we had passed them. For those interested in learning more about Amsterdam and the historical buildings along the canals, I would recommend booking one of the tours available with a live guide and not just a tape recorder.

Most of the boats have glass ceilings, which probably works to protect the passengers from wind and rain as well as preventing people from standing up and get their heads, or other body parts, crushed, when the boats pass under the low and narrow bridges. Though taking photos through an inch of glass can be challenging. Our boat was only partially covered, and we were lucky to score some open-air seats in the rear.

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