One Man's Guide to Cheap Flights
How to Fly Round Europe for 1p on easyJet, Ryanair, Wizz and others
How Low Can You Go: Times' travel writer Tom Chesshyre's tale of his budget airline Odyssey round Europe using cheap fares to places he can't spell and can't pronounce
Like a poor man's Marco Polo, Tom Chesshyre has the bright idea of occupying his weekends by taking ridiculously cheap flights on budget airlines like easyJet and Ryanair to places no-one would have heard of if the no frills flyers hadn't put them on their route maps.
The author, a staff travel journalist at The Times in London, admits that he can't spell and can't pronounce most of the places he plans to visit, and he scarcely knows which countries most of them are in, on the fringes of the new Europe. He has been to Machu Picchu, the Grand Canyon, the Pyramids, Petra, the Great Wall of China and the Serengeti. But why is it worth a budget airline flying to Poprad in Slovakia, Haugesund in Norway or Paderborn in Germany?
This is the very thing that fascinates him. He works in travel and even he has never heard of Szczecin till he spots it on the Ryanair website while booking a cheap flight to somewhere else. In a spirit of enquiry, he sets off to find out where they are and what they're like. It reminded me of the moment that kicked off Paul Theroux's wonderful first travel book The Great Railway Bazaar, that helped kick-start the whole modern travel writing genre back in 1975. Standing at London's Victoria Station one day, Theroux realised that he could catch a train here and go all the way to Vladivostock, at the far side of Russia. Tom Chesshyre shares that same moment of truth, though he ends up on the Stansted Express rather than the Trans-Siberian Railway.
The Trans-Siberian was probably more comfortable, as Chesshyre begins his budget travels in December in a cold and crowded train carriage on the Stansted Express, which isn't moving because, apparently, 'a table is broken'. This is a serious security risk, it seems. Chesshyre's train ticket to Stansted Airport cost him more than his cheap return fare to Szczecin in Poland, the start of his low-cost quest.
Despite the fact that Chesshyre has travelled the world, he sets off to these strange places like an innocent abroad. He has no idea what to expect, no preconceptions, which all adds to the book's enjoyment. He has no agenda, an open mind and an open notebook. His disarming honesty seems to work like a charm on people. He seems able to walk up to anyone, from elderly Welsh ladies in Bourgas, Bulgaria, who turn out to be racist, to scary-sounding lovers of 'dark industrial' music in Ljubljana in Slovenia. 'Hi, I'm Tom,' he says amiably, 'What's your name?'
Chesshyre doesn't play it relentlessly for laughs, like a Bill Bryson or Tony Hawks. He has a genuinely curious mind and while there are jokes galore, usually at his own expense, he also wants to know who these people are, what their lives are like and what are their ambitions. It's a learning process, for the author and for the reader. It catches that spirit of travel, where you never quite know what will happen next, who you'll meet, or where it will lead.
Chesshyre's cut-price tickets also take him to Tampere in Finland, Rijeka in Croatia and Tallinn in Estonia, where he gate-crashes two stag party weekends and ends up at a medieval lesbian banquet. He jumps into ice-pools in Finland, meets cut-price dentists, economic migrants and has a hilariously bad time in Brno in the Czech Republic. He also gets drunk regularly, and (a telling detail) keeps in touch with some of the people he meets on his travels.
The author ends the book with two interesting interviews. The first is with easyJet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou, who not surprisingly is an evangelist for cheap flights, extolling the financial benefits and suggesting that if we didn't travel so much, we'd probably go to war more often. Regular travellers do know that the cliche is usually true, that travel broadens the mind. If George Bush had backpacked through Iraq in his gap year, would he have wanted to bomb the country to hell years later?
The second interview is with Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth, invited to put the case against low-cost flying. Unfortunately for Juniper, he admits that he himself has to fly to places to do business, while wanting to cut down the amount of flying the rest of us do.
Chesshyre's book is a hugely enjoyable read, as he is one of those writers who, like the great Norman Lewis, knows that the story is in the people you meet on the way. Get them to talk, and you do the listening. Tom Chesshyre is a very good listener.
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How Low Can You Go? Round Europe for 1p Each Way (Plus Tax) by Tom Chesshyre is published in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton at £10.99
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To read about buying a cheap flight to Spain, click here.
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