How Low Can You Go? Round Europe for 1p each way (plus tax) by Tom Chesshyre
In his hugely entertaining and unputdownable book, Tom Chesshyre, a travel writer at The Times, flies to several hidden corners of Europe on one of those 1p flights (each way plus taxes) that low-cost airlines such as easyJet, Ryanair and Wizz Air offer regularly. He snaps up these fares basically because, as he says in his introduction, “no one else wants to go” to these destinations.
Chesshyre has “seen the Venices, the Monacos and the Barcelonas”. He admits that he has been lucky enough to travel to “many of the world’s most famous sights: Macchu Picchu in Peru, the pyramids in Egypt, Uluru in Australia, the Grand Canyon in America, Petra in Jordan, the Serengeti in Kenya, Table Mountain in South Africa, the Grand Palace in Bangkok and the Great Wall of China” but while browsing Ryanair’s website for a flight to Dublin, the names of other little-known cities in Europe catch his eye.
“Where exactly was Brno?” “Where or what was Oujda?” “Bydgoszcz and Poznan?” The established travel writer admits that he didn’t even know where these places were. This is the starting point for his book: to see for himself “all these places I hadn’t been to, couldn’t pronounce and would never have heard of, if low-cost airlines didn’t fly to them.”
The spirit of adventure took hold and so Chesshyre starts his odyssey in December in a Stansted Express train carriage, crowded and grimy and stationary and (eventually) late-arriving. The train ticket to Stansted cost more than his return fare to the Polish city of Szczecin.
With a blank notebook and an open mind, Chesshyre pitches up in Poland’s second-biggest shipyard. Actually, in true Ryanair style, he lands at Goleniow airport, 40km from Szczecin, and makes his way to the city with a friend he made on the flight. Hubert is a returning migrant, who is going home for the weekend to visit his girlfriend. “We must watch out for the big pigs!” Hubert tells Chesshyre. This is the first interesting fact Chesshyre relays. If you like hunting wild boar, the Western Pomeranian forest is the place to go.
While the well-known guidebooks are not exactly well disposed towards the city – Chesshyre quotes Rough Guide: a “gruff workaday place that bares few of its charms to the passing visitor” – he finds the history fascinating and relays that fascination very well. Chesshyre investigates the “political to-ing and fro-ing” over the past couple of centuries by going to meet Marian Jurczyk, the President of Szczecin, who not only extols the natural attributes of the city, but also tells Chesshyre that “Polish women are very beautiful … And you are a young man, eh?”. “The President of the city is offering me its women – definitely not bad, I’d say, for a first morning’s work,” Chesshyre writes.
This is the type of research that Chesshyre puts into his travels. He finds the people who can “explain” the city and contextualise the air service to the destination – whether it be British squaddies in Paderborn, Germany, home to 4,500 troops and more than 12,000 Britons in total or speculative British property investors flocking to Bourgas on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast to make their fortune in bricks and mortar.
Along the way, he has a miserable time in Brno, the Czech Republic’s second city; makes a side trip to Nokia (and takes a picture on his … Nokia phone) while visiting Tampere in Finland (“Finland’s Manchester”), which he says is like living in a Lowry painting, and goes to the last of the washing machine factories in Poprad, Slovakia (bit of low-cost airline trivia here: Ryanair calls the destination Poprad-Zakopane, but the two cities are 25km apart and in two different countries. Poprad is in Slovakia and Zakopane is in Poland).
The final chapters of the book concern a couple of places much more familiar to the average UK reader: Camden, to meet Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of easyJet and “serial entrepreneur”, who is evangelical about the benefits of low-cost flying, even, according to The Economist, doing “more for European integration than all the politicians in Brussels put together”, and Shoreditch where he discusses environmental concerns with Tony Juniper, the executive director of Friends of the Earth, who does not agree that “Low-Cost Airlines Make Europe Work”. Juniper puts to Chesshyre the anti-aviation case of managing flights.
How Low Can You Go? Round Europe for 1p each way (plus tax) is a wonderful book: entertaining, funny, informative and thought provoking. It is the perfect book to delve into on one of those 1p flights.
