Touring Holland in luxury campervan

A new type of campervan combines the elegant interiors of a gypsy caravan with the solid feel of a truck. Rhiannon Batten falls for its stylish practicality on a tour of northern Holland.

WE were only away five minutes. My friend Lucy and I had gone to check out the campsite's shower block.

When we got back to our campervan, there was a strange man lying underneath it, transfixed. But, then, this was no ordinary campervan. This was a Tonke Camper.

Part monster truck, part Little House on the Prairie, Tonke Campers are the creation of Dutch documentary film-maker Maarten Van Soest.

Hand-built in the village of Wagenberg in the south of the Netherlands, they combine a traditional wooden caravan with a modern truck.

"Compared with normal campers there's something like beauty involved," Maarten told us, when we arrived to pick up our Tonke.

Named after Maarten's daughter, the vehicles combine two of his passions - cars and wood (his father had a company making exclusive wooden toys). But the idea of creating a plaything for adults came to Maarten after he offered to transport a friend's gypsy caravan on his lorry.

"My wife and I decided to make a holiday of it," he said. "It was so different from normal camping, where everything is lightweight and plastic. There was a granite kitchen top, oak chairs, a cast-iron stove.

Two years ago he sold his first Tonke Camper.

While the business mainly makes them to sell, this summer Maarten has started renting out Tonkes by the week.

Reaching Wagenberg to pick up your van is straightforward - you take the train from Amsterdam to Breda, in an hour and 40 minutes, and Maarten will pick you up from the station for the short drive to his village.

Better still, if you're flying, head for Eindhoven or Rotterdam, both of which are just 30 minutes from Breda by train.

So where should Lucy and I go? "Most of my customers don't stay in Holland," said Maarten, explaining that, with a shower, toilet and kitchenette on board, the Tonke is really designed for wild camping, which is not officially allowed in the Netherlands. Instead, most campers head for France.

There must be something worth seeing in the Netherlands, though, we insisted. Pressed, Maarten suggested Friesland.

"I'm from the south, so the north is for me more interesting. Friesland is truly Holland. It's below the water level. They still put cows in boats to transport them."

"And once we're there," I asked, climbing into the driver's seat, "what do the Dutch do on holiday?"

"We go to the beach, read Jamie Oliver's books and cook. We eat stampot, a kind of mashed potato with vegetables, served with sausage. Most Dutch people say it's their favourite food - it's the diesel of this country, what people run on."

Another thing the Dutch do a lot of is cycling (Tonke Campers come with an on-board bike cupboard). Sounds great, but alarming in practice if you're suddenly in charge of the biggest vehicle you've ever driven.

It didn't help that the tourist board's advice is that anyone who hits a cyclist is 'automatically assumed to be guilty (until proven innocent)'.

As I put the Tonke into gear for the first time, it was like one of those documentaries in which Canadians move a three-storey house from one end of the country to the other on a giant transporter.

We trundled through Noord Holland from the town of Zaanstad along lanes sandwiched between canals. Herons and cormorants sliced the water's edge beside a patchwork of blue and green. Soon this gave way to a tourist-board fantasy of thatched windmills and fields of peonies and football-sized alliums.

I was starting to relax but then we came to De Rijp, a model village with the proportions of, well, a scale model. After squeezing over the narrowest of bridges, we entered this immaculate Toy Town.

The houses were made from neat little bricks or chocolate-painted wood. Their handkerchief-sized gardens were bursting with rambling roses and geraniums, which would have been lovely to look at if I hadn't been so focused on the road. As we snaked through the cobbled main street, I caught myself breathing in.

That night we stayed near Castricum aan Zee. Divided into woody glades rather than being one large field, Bakkum campsite is the oldest in the Netherlands.

Old doesn't mean shabby, though, and they've recently added luxury safari tents and beach huts.

A 1km walk across dunes brings you to a long, white-sand beach. We parked the Tonke in a shady spot and set off along the apparently deserted shore.

Each Tonke is custom-designed. Ours was the smallest version, but still felt about three times as big as your classic VW campervan.

Next day we headed towards Friesland via the 32km Afsluit dyke, an extraordinary feat of early 20th-century engineering.

When you reach Workum, where the main road that used to be a canal is now filled in with concrete and cobbles. Near the picture-postcard main square, we sat at the vegetarian cafe, It Pottebakkershus, where pots of lavender decorate each table.

After browsing in Workum's antiques and interiors shops, we pushed on in the late afternoon sunshine, passing cheese farms, little houses by canals with boats tied up at the bottom of their gardens and even an old man cycling along in clogs.

Later that evening, we pulled onto a grassy pitch at Camping Rijsterbos, in the village of Rijs, opened the back doors and sat at the kitchen table, toasting the scenery.

Our home from home had won us over, we admitted. Manoeuvring with such a large backside isn't so hard once you get the hang of it and it had definitely been an easier - and quieter - ride than we would have had in a classic camper.

We even discussed how we would customise the Tonkes we planned to order if we had some spare cash. 'I'd definitely change to a green interior colour scheme,' said Lucy.

And perhaps Maarten could design one that came with an electronic field around it to keep uninvited Tonke fans at a respectable distance.