JUST as Parisians must tire of fireworks over the Eiffel Tower, and Egyptians yawn at the sight of pyramids at sunset, a couple of years in my adopted homeland of the Netherlands had made me rather blasé about pretty little towns with historic churches and canals. Dordrecht, however, was undeniably charming: a warren of spindly old buildings tilting over rust-coloured brick streets dusted with fallen leaves. "Dordrecht, a place so beautiful, tomb of my cherished illusions," a lovesick Proust once called it. For Alexandre Dumas, it was "a smiling city". On a wintry weekday morning, the streets were quiet but the city felt quietly prosperous, unsullied by the tour groups and stag parties that blighted towns further north. Cyclists rattled over bumpy cobbled streets, weaving between shoppers carrying plastic bags filled with bread and potatoes.

As in many Dutch towns, water was omnipresent. Around almost every corner came another small harbour, tucked between tall warehouses and houses lined up like books on a shelf. The city seemed like a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces missing, the gaps filled with spillover from the river. Near one small harbour, I found the Nieuwe Kerk, an ancient colossus with curved brick walls and a wooden tower painted the colour of butter. Only in the Netherlands, I thought, could a building that was nearly 1000 years old still be known as the "New Church". Now deconsecrated, it had been converted into a home furnishing store where pilgrims could worship overpriced cookware and candles. A man passing by on a bicycle stopped to offer me a piece of bitter, coal-coloured Dutch liquorice, or drop. I declined, but took out my notebook and wrote: "The people in Dordrecht are nice."

According to the books I’d consulted before arriving, Dordrecht was once a wealthy and powerful place. The city was encircled by rivers – the Maas, the Dordtsche Kil, the Hollands Diep, the Nieuwe Merwede – and its location made it a natural trading centre. A dense network of inland waterways enabled German merchants to travel all the way to Amsterdam, Antwerp or Bruges without breaching the stormy North Sea. Travelling downstream was relatively easy, but in the other direction teams of slaves were sometimes used to pull boats against the current. However, the city’s prosperity was not to last. Ironically, the growth of waterborne trade proved to be its undoing: as trade volumes grew, larger boats were used, and Dordrecht’s relatively narrow harbours and shallow channels became increasingly cramped. The city was eclipsed by larger ports elsewhere and slipped into relative obscurity, a mere spectator to much of the trade that continued to pass on the Maas. Once a major trading city, it was now a relatively sleepy backwater.

I wandered towards the river and found a row of small cafés squatting along the brick waterfront, each with the high glass screen the Dutch like to sit behind whenever they are compelled to go outside. A young waitress hustled past carrying a tray of traditional Dutch bar fare: greasy bitter ballen hot snacks with mustard, and small glasses of beer wearing thick foamy hats. "Lekker!" the waiting customers cried in unison. "Tasty!"

I sat on a bench to take in the view of the river, and was joined almost immediately by a girl of about 16 with dyed pink hair, porcelain skin and a pierced nose. Opening a plastic shopping bag, she removed a cardboard shoebox and gazed lovingly at the hideous pink sports shoes nestled inside. "Mooi, he?" I asked, gesturing at the river and attempting to strike up a conversation. "Beautiful, isn’t it?"

"Yes," she said, staring at the shoes. "They are."

My allotted time in Dordrecht almost up, I walked along the river bank to a floating metal pontoon, where the Waterbus ferry service to Rotterdam was already waiting. I’d seen the same boat pass through Rotterdam at the height of summer, overloaded with middle-aged Dutch couples with bicycles and picnic baskets. Today, on an overcast Tuesday morning, I had the boat almost to myself, shared only with three lost-looking Polish men in tracksuits. Pausing on the gangplank, I bought a ticket from a young crewman who was dressed in a smart sailor’s outfit, but apparently shared the common Dutch belief that there was no such thing as too much hair gel. When I asked for a ticket to Rotterdam, he requested I confirm my destination twice before obliging.

"Yes," I said in Dutch and then in English, "all the way to Rotterdam."

Fifteen minutes from Dordrecht by train but more than an hour away by boat, Rotterdam was an unusual destination at this time of year: a long haul on a vessel that was too slow for commuters and too cold for tourists. A bell rang and the boat charged backwards at an alarming speed, sweeping through 180 degrees as it withdrew from the harbour’s embrace. Following bitter experience with Dutch railways, I had expected the ferry’s "high speed" designation to be an ambition rather than a description, but for a boxy barge it moved surprisingly quickly and I scrambled to hold down my notebook and jacket as we roared away from Dordrecht. To the right lay a massive wooden replica of Noah's Ark, with a giraffe standing sentry on the bow. To the left was the first of a seemingly endless series of forks in the river. With a lurch, the boat surged down the right-hand fork towards Rotterdam.

A succession of small towns with names that could choke a child were quickly left behind: Alblasserdam, Papendrecht, Ridderkerk and Krimpen aan den Ijssel. Cycle route signs on the riverbank pointed to others well known to history: Gouda, of the cheeses; Oudewater, where suspected witches once were weighed to see if they were light enough to ride on a broomstick; Loevestein, where Hugo Grotius, the 17th-century father of international law, made his escape from a castle hidden in a wooden chest. Gradually, the landscape became less idyllic. The compact cottages of suburban Dordrecht gave way to the trappings of light industry: small factories and warehouses, cranes, piles of sand and sections of pipe waiting to be loaded onto barges. A string of three low-slung barges passed by in the opposite direction, each piled high with gravel and looking dangerously unstable as they bucked like a skipping rope in the ferry’s wake.

We stopped at a small pontoon near a car park and picked up a few passengers: a dorky-looking father in a red baseball cap and three excited children, all waving goodbye to oma (grandma). As the ferry surfed away from the shore, the children leaned out over the railings while their father fussed, holding onto their belts and imploring them to hang on tight.

"Wees voorzichtig!" he cried, "Be careful!" He probably had good reason to worry: a couple of days previously, local newspapers had told the story of a 19-year-old woman who had nearly drowned not far from here. Thankfully, she was saved by a 90-year-old fisherman who downed his rod and jumped into the river to save her. "It was my duty," Jaap Koppers told the local news. "But it was just as well she was not too fat."

I revelled in the wind and fresh air, but as we left the factories behind, what was most noticeable about the scenery was the lack of anything to notice. Apart from a few farms and spiky church towers puncturing the horizon, the landscape was almost completely featureless. The high dikes blocked the view from the river, and behind them lay not much to see anyway. I reread a page from a 1920s travel book that I had copied into my notebook: "The stranger who cycles this way is unfortunate, but if he does it again he is a fool; the more especially as there is absolutely no interest on the way." Another historical traveller had been even more succinct, pro-posing a mathematical formula to summarise the landscape in these parts: "[grass + water]". For me, the scenery conjured up memories of a favourite book from my childhood, long before I ever set foot in the Netherlands: The Cow Who Fell In The Canal. Some 25 years after my parents read me the book, I could still remember almost every word.

This is an edited extract from Why The Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into The Hidden Heart Of The Netherlands by Ben Coates, published in paperback by Nicholas Brealey Publishing, £9.99