Trains and boats and ... buses

As the song goes, 'trains and boats and ...' oops, sorry, no planes.

These are interesting times for travel and travellers. As an editorial in 'Le Monde' put it, 'for the last five days, humanity has been dancing on a volcano'.

I bought the newspaper at a motorway service area on the outskirts of Nantes, on the second day of a journey by coach from northern Spain. With a number of colleagues and through the good offices of our hosts, Peugeot, we were making our way to an Irish Ferries ship at Cherbourg, due to sail on the evening, and eventually home the next afternoon.

What was intended to be a quick overnight at Elciego in northern Spain, involving a total of four hours of flying time and a day driving a new model Peugeot, turned into a week away from home and office.

But I was one of the fortunate ones. I had it easy. Not stuck at an airport with a family and money running scarce, trying to get home after a holiday. Or not watching a planned holiday disappearing on an airport board of flights cancelling like falling dominoes. Even my work didn't suffer unduly because I had my computer and the internet. And time.

Lots of time. Especially on the coach, the journey on which has reminded me of just how big France is. And beyond France, the wider continent. Up to last week it had become a shrunken place with nowhere further than a couple of hours or so in the air. But without the planes on which we have come to so depend, it has stretched mightily.

It is a coincidence that I was actually driving on the glacier on top of that particular Icelandic volcano a few years ago. Even ate lunch on it from the tailgate of a Land Rover Discovery. I knew that it was considerably beyond the predicted date of its next eruption and I clearly remember wondering what would happen if it did?

Well, now I know. Now we all know. A belch from a dyspeptic planet and the transportation system of a whole continent was bumped back decades. To when air travel was only for a few rich, and the rest of us would measure distances in days and weeks instead of short hours. When trains and boats and the long distance coaches were kings of mass transport.

Of course, it is better now than then. The trains are faster, the boats much more comfortable, and the coaches are smoother and more efficient and have excellent networks of road to travel on.

And maybe we're going to get used to using them all again. Because, I think, even when nature takes its course and the weather sorts out the spews from Eyjafjoll (it's a much easier spell in French), the certainties of air schedules will not return for some time. If for no other reason than volcanoes live to a different pace than we humans, and now that Eyjafjoll is awake she is likely to stay that way for quite a while. She might even waken her neighbours and then there could be a much bigger row in the camp.

I rather suspect that the episode will make many hundreds of thousands quite wary of booking holidays using airplanes. Not so much for any supposed danger, but because they don't want to be left stranded again. And many more who were forced into the experience of using ferries for the first time will have found that these days it is not an unpleasant experience at all, and will consider using them in the future.

On the ferry, the Oscar Wilde run by Irish Ferries, there was a tangible air of people having escaped. We had been fortunate to get places from earlier in the week. Others were still hanging about at the terminal, hoping for cancellations to make space for them. The ferry was already booked solid for the next week or more.

The Captain held back departure by half an hour so that the company could take on board 50 or so other people who had found their way to the ferryport without bookings. Tears of despair and frustration which had been evident in the terminal as those of us with bookings moved through, changed, I reckon, to many tears of relief.

Onboard, it turned out to be a place for meetings of friends and acquaintances. The first person to come up to me on the ship was an old friend from my RTE days, Donncadh O Dualainn, longtime presenter of 'Failte Isteach' on RTE Radio 1 on Saturday nights and a real old master of radio. He and his wife had spent the previous five days trying to get home from Paris, staying in five different hotels.

Apart from ourselves in the Peugeot/Gowan Group crew there were other well known names from the Irish motor business. Paddy Murphy, formerly of Mitsubishi Ireland, who had driven up from the south of Spain with jazz musician Paddy Cole and other friends. They had rented a minibus. Bill Cullen and his partner Jackie Lavin had motored up from Faro in Portugal in a rented Ford Transit minibus. (Which broke down on the trip, apparently, and the Renault dealer will no doubt dine out on that for some time.)

From closer to home, Kilcullen-based solicitor Pat Reidy and his wife Valerie, along with Mark Weld and his wife Zoe and their toddler, had also made their own way from Spain. And a barman I used to know in The Paddocks in Naas from several years ago, Seamus, had found himself stuck in Genoa, Italy. He had got to Cherbourg via Geneva and Paris.

As I finish this (most of it was written on the coach and on the ferry), a certain normality has been restored to Europe's airspace and transport systems. It yet remains to be seen if any lessons will be learned from the whole saga. That same editorial in 'Le Monde' suggested that, in addition to Europe's humanity 'dancing on a volcano', the biggest lesson for us all was one of 'humility'.

Mother Nature can teach such lessons. It is not at all certain that we learn from them.

Brian Byrne.


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