The peace is broken as a boat passes by with half a dozen lads singing loudly in Dutch, swigging cans of lager as music blasts from a speaker. Someone hushes them from behind a hedge, but they sing on.
Incredibly, I meet someone who came to Giethoorn by accident. Brazilian Melissa Corbett was looking to stay in not-very-nearby Zwolle, but couldn’t find accommodation so booked here on a whim instead.
Keen, like me, to take to the water, we hire an electric boat together the next morning. “I can’t believe I came here accidentally,” she laughs, as we glide under wooden bridges and weeping willows. “It’s incredible.”
The main canal is bedlam. Day-trippers have arrived and it’s total gridlock, the dull thud of boats bouncing off each other ringing out across the town. Despite the water dodgems, locals glide through the slow-mo carnage with cool tempers and cold beers, Dutch flags fluttering proudly from sterns.
Eventually, we get moving and motor along to a nearby lake. Corbett keeps chuckling to herself. Giethoorn has that effect. “It’s just so beautiful,” she says.
The lake is busy with boats and kids splashing in the water, which is shallow enough to stand in – and clean. It wasn’t always that way, though.
“In the 1980s there was a film of oil on the water from all the engines,” says Gea Ardesch, owner of The Black Sheep hostel, as we moor up near her property. “Now we have all these clean, electric boats, which are silent.”