This first year of us living in England has turned out to be the year of “B” cities—Barcelona, Budapest, Bath, Brussels. Cheesy, I know.
About six months ago, I was reading on one of the Travelling Spouses facebook pages about Grottes de Han, or The Caves of Han-sur-Lesse. I looked up some info about this place online and figured it would be fun to take a short trip to Belgium, but not to the famous Northern part of the country (Ghent or Brugge, which we have passed by during our Thanksgiving Day trip). Instead I wanted to explore the laid back South—region of Wallonia.
You can see on this map, everything south of Brussels is called Wallonia. Wallonia even has its own capital—Namur. The main language spoken is French. We figured if we survived in Japan for three years without speaking Japanese, we can do anything.
This time we crossed the channel on a ferry. I found an amazing deal a couple of months ago—it was only $70 for all five of us (and our van) to get to Calais, France from Dover. So I, worrying about Robert getting seasick on the ferry, still bought the ticket. And guess what!? He was fine! So it’s only deep sea fishing in FL and big boats in Australia that make him sick…maybe we should take a cruise after all.
Getting on the ferry was another fun part. With ten minutes to spare before check-in closed, we arrived to the place where you queue to get your car tag and all that stuff. So we get there and see enormous lines of cars and realize there is no way we’d be able to get through any of those lines in ten minutes. Robert, being a crazy minivan driver, decides to play “I am a BIG van” driver and races passed all the cars to join a much shorter line for lorries and BIG vans. Once you get there, there is no return. A moment later, we realized that none of the lines is moving because there is no guys at the check-in booths. So that explains the enormous lines…we are not late…everyone is just waiting for the check in. Well, after five minutes, the booths to check in finally opened, but Robert and his minivan are stuck behind two trucks that are apparently having issues and not moving forward at all. On our right, all those regular cars that were in line for a while, are whizzing passed us. Finally, Robert decides to join them after all and we gracefully roll up to the check-in booth. As you see, our attempt to get ahead in life did not pay off-haha. Okay, but really…it was a bit stressful not to know if we were late for the ferry or what, since it was our first time taking it.
The ferry ride was about one hour and thirty minutes (the chunnel train is only 35 minutes, but did cost more). Although the seas were choppy, the kids kept wanting to go outside to be blown away. We had lunch and walked around….and no one got seasick.
We couldn’t see the Cliffs of Dover very well on the way to mainland.
We only had a little over two hours to drive to the place where we were staying after we got off the ferry. It started to rain heavily, so that was not fun. We found our place in a small town of Luttre, which was in a perfect location to explore Wallonia and from where we could take the train to Brussels. This is the place (and not our bikes).
It had two bedrooms upstairs and kitchen with living room downstairs. Just perfect for the price. Unfortunately, because it was still raining and kids were kind of tired of being in the car, we decided to not drive anywhere else the first afternoon we were there. Instead, we walked around town (in the rain), found some croissants and stocked up on some snacks, fruit and chocolate at the grocery store. That was the first time I realized that when I try to think about any French word to say (and I mean ANY!), only Japanese words come to my mind. The lady at the pastry shop did not speak much English at all, but since I knew the word “croissant” and knew how to use my fingers to count, we were good-haha.
The next morning we woke up early to set off on our road trip South. The weather was much sunnier and warmer than the day before, so we were all excited. We got into our car, found our best friend, the GPS, and started plugging in the address for Rochefort, the place where those famous caves are located. Well…the screen of the GPS would not light up. We could hear him (our GPS has a manly British voice) but could not see anything. We were bummed. After further investigation (asking all the other passengers in the van if they had been playing with it or something), Katya said that she might or might not have stepped on it the night before when she was unloading water bottles from the car. She said that since only one door was unlocked, she had to climb into the car through the front seats…and that’s when she might have stepped on something that looked like a GPS. We are not sure if that’s what broke it because there is no crack or anything on the screen, but it definitely added some adventures to our driving in a foreign country. Good thing we had a sat nav and maps on our cell phones! That’s the only we could get around since we had no atlas or printer to print out directions from our laptop.
All right, no more stops. We got to the village of Han Sur Lesse in less than an hour. We were there ready to get on the first tram (it’s a hundred years old) that took us to the cave’s entrance. 
The guide that took us inside the caves gave his narration in three languages—French, Dutch and English. So we always had time to take a few pictures and look around while he was speaking French or Dutch.
The caves were discovered in 1815. To this date, about 14 km of caves full of natural formations of stalactites and stalagmites have been discovered. Only 2 kilometers of this are open to the public. When the caves were first opened, lamps or torches were used to guide the visitors through the caves, and therefore, some of the stalactites and stalagmites have acquired a shade of black. Now the lights are switched on only during visits, in order to protect the structures. 
The caves have been in existence for about hundred thousand years. A 2 inch-long piece of stalactite/stalagmite takes 100 years to form. All the stalactites and stalagmites continue to grow and we can see water still seeping through.The oldest stalagmite is 6 m high and 21 m wide. It is more than a 100000 years old!
This cave is also amazing because you can actually see the river Lesse run through it. During winter months, the river level gets so high that they have to close the caves. The only other place in Europe where a river can be seen flowing through the stalactite/stalagmite caves is located in Slovenia.
In one of the two biggest caves, there was a short 5-minute light-sound show. The kids really enjoyed the lighting effects which made you notice all the details on the ceiling and walls. These biggest caves were possibly formed as a result of huge earthquakes (Alex liked that part). Till the Second World War, visitors were taken inside the caves by boat the present day exit. A cannon used to be fired before the visit began to keep away evil spirits. This tradition is being kept up even now, except that it was done at the end of the visit. The whole tour lasted almost two hours, but the kids did great.
After our visit to the caves, we munched on the baguette we bought in the morning with some yummy cheese and sandwich meat, plus some fruits and carrots—that’s our standard cheap lunch when we are on the go in Europe.
Here is a picture I snapped while walking from the cave’s exit back to the visitor’s center.
Our next part was the “Safari” ride on a special bus that took us out into the wildlife park.
Our choice was a trip into the park by foot, or a safari bus ride with narration that would last an hour and fifteen minutes. We thought it would be a great idea to do the safari ride AFTER the caves tour since the first one required walking. I must admit, the safari part turned out to be a bit disappointing…not only because the narration was only in Dutch and French, but also because we did not see very many varieties of animals—maybe twenty or so.
Kids loved these Pumbas which were the first animals we saw-haha.
Mark enjoyed seeing the animals between asking me, “Can I have some gum?” or “Can I play on your cell phone?” or stating loudly “I am starving!”.
More animals…
Who needs safari animals anyway if you can see these guys everywhere?
After an hour on the safari bus, we were ready to get going—it was around two in the afternoon by then. If I were to do this part over again, I’d only see the caves and skip the safari part.
Yikes, this post is too long. Okay…so on to another fun part of our day! Looking for things to do for families, I stumbled upon the place that does RAIL BIKING. Have you ever heard of rail biking? I knew that the kids would love it, and it would be fun to see the countryside of Belgium this way. So we drove to Falaen, a tiny village close to Dinant. 
And this is what we looked like on one of those rail bikes. Just imagine Robert to the right of Mark.
This is what Alex looked like from Robert’s vantage point. 
And here is Katya.
And this is what Robert’s feet looked like. 
The route we took was only 6 km. Since the kids wanted to go as fast they could, it took us less than 20 minutes to get to the other village (and we had to bike back as well).
I gave a it a try (while Robert was running ahead of the rail bike taking pictures and video taping us). It was really fun, and not very easy going up the hill with five people on it.
As we were riding our rail bike, an older couple caught up to us, trying to “bump” us. The kids had a blast trying to out ride them. When we arrived to our rest stop, we started chatting with that couple, as we had almost an hour to spare before we had to ride back to Falaen. It turned out that the this couple has travelled the world with the man’s job as well. They have lived all over Europe and even in Florida. We had a lot of in common things to talk about—moving around, kids, the US, and Belgium chocolate. They were here to try out rail biking and see if it’s something their teenage grandchildren would like to do on their day out. The couple seemed very highly educated and quite posh, in a good way (their children went to boarding school, all I could think of was Harry Potter). We discussed how when they travel they go out to eat to very nice fancy restaurants, dressed up for the evening, and how their children learn to sit and color or play for hours during the dinner event. I thought back of some of our family dinners when we travel….and decided we have lots to learn still (or more money to make to be able to go out to such fancy dinners-haha).
Anyway, it was great to chat with them and occupy our time with good conversation and yummy waffles. I say “yummy”, but Mark did not think so. They were not sweet enough for him, even with some powdered sugar sprinkled on top. I assume they were Liege waffles, nothing like the Belgian waffles we have for breakfast in the states.
Around five o’clock we finally rode our rail bike back to where we started our ride. We then drove to Namur, the capital of Wallonia, to find some dinner. Namur was a pretty neat town, but we did not love it, possibly we did not have enough time to see all the cool parts of it. We parked the car by the Meuse river and walked to the town centre. I had a place in mind where I wanted to try out French crepes, so we used our phone to help us guide us…until it died right before we figured out which street to take. We wondered around the centre of Namur for quite a while, just enjoying the feel of being in the middle of a Belgian old town. Finally, I stopped at one of the central cafes and asked in my perfect French about the restaurant La Mere Gourmandin. Miraculously I was understood! The waiter took great care of us and led us in person to the next street over to show us the way.
The crepe place turned out a beautiful place that is definitely worth a visit. This is my real French crepe, made of buckwheat.
Alex had pasta that he loved. And Katya was very disappointed because she thought she’d ordered pasta, but I ordered a crepe for her, by mistake.
After spending $15 on water (!!!! one more reason why I like living in England—free tap water!) we left the place and headed back to our car along the river. It was beautiful, or maybe it seemed more beautiful than it was because our tummies were full.
Kids took turns singing under the bridge as it had some fantastic acoustics in that spot.
I hope you have not fallen asleep yet. It is a very lengthy post. I know I won’t remember the details even in a year, so I must write them down here.
Hope you’ll come back soon to read about our SWEET trip to Brussels, picturesque stop in Dinant, and a very grumpy old Belgian man.
Lyana
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