Two recent travel pieces
The Australian
Edition 5 - TravelSAT 10 JUN 2006, Page 007
GOING CHEAP By Guy Rundle
Guy Rundle presents his tried-and-tested guide to low-cost flights around Europe
FOR decades, the budget traveller in Europe accepted that the necessary but painful core of the experience was covering the distance between the glittering capitals either wedged in the seat of a bus designed for tiny people, crawling through the industrial district of some hell-hole at 3am, or sharing a Kombi with a Dutch hippie named Wim with a theory about Frank Zappa and the moon landings.But that's all changed in the past 10 years. The cheap-flight revolution began in the late 1990s and now the continent is crisscrossed with every conceivable route, from the big capitals to disused military airports put back into service. With proper planning you can save hundreds of dollars on a holiday, but it takes a bit of work and lateral thinking.
1. Set aside a few hours for research: There are about a dozen notable cheap airlines and a range of more obscure ones, and the best way to get a good deal (if you are a little flexible about destination and date) is to compare as many as possible and try a few route combinations with different airlines. This is best done manually, website by website. There are several websites that purport to find the cheapest available flights but they're rarely completely up to date (prices can change within a day), and they often don't include the smaller airlines.The largest of the cheap airlines is Irish carrier Ryanair, with a network centred on London, Dublin, Barcelona and Berlin. It is aggressively trying to cement its leading position, building customer loyalty by offering free flights -- that is, for one euro cent, plus about E10 ($17) in taxes.Second largest is Easyjet, the company that really kick-started the low-cost flight revolution, but it certainly isn't the cheapest player on the market. Other carriers have their specialties -- Skyeurope, for example, is centred on Bratislava, the otherwise dispensable capital of Slovakia, and great for southeastern Europe. Wizzair specialises in Poland and surrounds. BMI Baby flies from regional British cities to Europe and has no flights out of London except for a few British Airways services.
2. Be thorough: There are many valid reasons why a really cheap flight could be lurking amid a range of more expensive ones. A carrier may be offering a destination at, say, E60 including taxes for 12 or 13 days and, right in the middle, there's one for E5. Why? Who knows? Maybe there was a one-way charter booked. Maybe it's a plane that has to be rerouted to get the schedule back in kilter. Keep various websites open in multiple windows, and jump from site to site. It's worthwhile keeping notes as you go to avoid getting lost in a variety of options.Two carriers that save research time by having an automatic lowest-fare search function are Jet2 and Thomsonfly. Unfortunately, most of their flights leave from Leeds or Sheffield, respectively. The others make you trawl, presumably in the hope you'll tire and book a mid-price fare.
3. Be flexible with dates and cities: The cheapest flights are at least a couple of weeks out and usually, but not always, in the early morning. Be flexible about destinations, too: many such flights are cheap because they are going to underused airports, and it's worth looking at the cities close to where you want to go and considering nearby alternatives.If you can find a cheap flight from London to Madrid, for example, well, congratulations, you don't need to read any further, but otherwise you might try flying into Santander (in the north of Spain) or Valladolid. Never heard of either? No matter: they are a two-hour or three-hour train ride or drive from Madrid, and flights there from Britain should be at rock-bottom prices.The alternative gateway strategy is particularly useful in countries with multiple destinations and cheap local transport, such as Portugal and Poland.You can even fly into one country to get to another -- for instance, the best way into Andalusia in Spain might be to take a flight to the Portuguese city of Faro, where a bus ticket or car rental to Seville will be much cheaper than flying direct.But beware the idiosyncrasies of local transport networks. It's easy to be too clever by half and arrive in Szczecin just after the departure of the twice-weekly train to Warsaw.
4. Make careful note of where the airports actually are: Many airports are only nominally in the city listed as their destination. Flying to Grenoble gets you to Lyons and a shuttle bus. The classic is Frankfurt, as what you're actually flying into is an airport called Frankfurt (Hahn), a couple of hundred kilometres from the city, with a half-dozen cities closer to it than the one after which it is named. Factoring in the cost of getting to the airport is crucial: it may well be more expensive than the actual flight.
5. Be careful booking multiple-leg journeys: The low-cost airlines are point-to-point, which means that even if you're connecting via the same airline, it won't automatically rebook a flight you missed because an earlier one was late. This is particularly important in winter when fog in Europe's north can delay takeoff by hours. Most airlines will rebook at a cost -- as much as pound stg. 40 ($100) -- that could be more than the actual ticket.Ideally, aim to arrive in the early morning and leave late afternoon from the same airport (landing in Stansted and taking off from Gatwick is to be avoided at all costs), thus saving the cost of a hotel.
6. Book return flights well ahead: It's easy to grab a cheap outward flight, forget to book a return and suddenly realise the only flights available have skyrocketed to full commercial prices. One solution, if your return date isn't all that definite, is to book multiple return flights. It may seem crazy but it's cheaper to book flights costing E15 out on, say, three consecutive Tuesday mornings six weeks ahead, rather than waiting until two days before you go and then paying E150. (Of course, you won't be refunded for unused seats.)Once you get over the weirdness of booking flights as if you were betting on a roulette table, you'll see it makes sense.
7. Be lateral: It might be cheaper and quicker to fly in a V-shape than to take a train between two destinations. It may well be easier to get from Esbjerg in Denmark to Gothenburg in Sweden -- and who among us hasn't needed to -- by flying into and out of Geneva (on different carriers) than it would be to take the two trains necessary to get there.
8. Be open-minded: One of the best things about the cheap-flight era is that it has opened up cities we might otherwise never have considered. Be willing to take pot luck and go where the cheap fares lead you. Who knew that the Pyrenees city of Pau would be such a mysterious border town? Or how about Lubeck in Germany, the city that invented marzipan and seems to run on it still? But don't feel too much like a carefree jetsetter: Ryanair has introduced a policy of charging extra for non-cabin luggage and other carriers are likely to follow.
* www.easyjet.com* www.ryanair.com* www.flybe.com* www.flyglobespan.com* www.flymonarch.com* www.jet2.com* www.bmibaby.com* www.skyeurope.com* www.thomsonfly.com* www.wizzair.com Illus: ArtworkIllusBy: Paul NewmanColumn: Travel
www.theaustralian.com.au
Wonderland of faded glory
Author: Guy RundleDate: 10/06/2006 Words: 1922 Source: AGE
Publication: The AgeSection: TravelPage: 1
Guy Rundle ventures to Porto, an imperial grande dame long since fallen on hard times.
Beneath an old art nouveau streetlamp, all metal leaves and curlicues, the man in the grey fedora is lighting a cigarette for the girl. Yellow light spills over the shoulders of his grey flannel suit. They're at the peak of a hill with the slender, delicately twisted baroque tower of the Church of the Clericos behind. People are hurrying to the station, some stopping off in the small side street bars, little more than a single beer tap and a few stools. The sides of the houses are dark with centuries of grime, but the street cobbles are a riot of colour, splashed pink, blue and yellow from the neon signs that hang outside each doorway, elegant, moderne.
It could be a scene from Edward Hopper, the visual poet of empty cities and faded glamour. In fact, it's a vision of the old world rather than the new, a winter evening in Porto, the second city of Portugal, an imperial grande dame long since fallen on hard times, and only now climbing out of them.
Although it scarcely lacks for accolades - its medieval heart is a UNESCO world heritage site; it was a European City of Culture - it remains relatively untouristed, one of the last ancient cities in western Europe so to be. While Lisbon seems headed towards a period in the sun as one of the great boutique cities of Europe, joining the eclectic company of Reyjkavik, Ljubljana and, er, Cork, Porto has either escaped, or missed out on, not only the current cheap air fares tourist boom, but also much of the latter half of the 20th century.
Like many second cities, it has neither the iconic pull of a capital city nor the seeming authenticity of a small village. Famous for being the home of port wine, with port bodegas - distilleries - lining one side of the river Douro, it is nevertheless a working town that does not orient itself overmuch towards visitors. The fedoraed and besuited men, the women in floral print dresses struggling up and down the numberless hills of the city, do not see themselves through the tourist gaze, do not feel themselves to be somewhere picturesque - which inevitably and paradoxically makes this city a rare experience, a must-see. The old shopfronts, the church facades come across in alleyways, and everywhere the houses decorated with hand-worked tiles - some shattered in the street below - ensure that its attraction lies in the fact that it is not merely forgotten but forlorn, a place made strange by its simple endurance. Its store of medieval treasures are neither better, nor worse than a dozen other cities, but they're beside the point. It is a city to sample for the ambience, for the sense of times past pooling; marooned.
Of course, it was not always thus. Porto was once one of the great cities of Europe, during, in the words of Hans Magnus Enzesberger, "that improbable moment in the sixteenth century when Portugal ruled the world". Turned towards the ocean, and a gateway to Europe, possibly since Phoenician times - the country's name "Porto do Cale" or "Cale Port" derives from it - it was from here, advancing downward, that the nation was formed in the vacuum created by the retreating Moors. It was the seat of the Portuguese kings, the home of its academies, and it is still a centre of its incomparable "fado" music, the slow melancholic folk blues, the lyrics of which extol the beauty of sadness and with endless tales of doomed love that make Leonard Cohen sound like Tiny Tim on laughing gas.
The city grew from a small town nestled near the Douro up and over the steep hills that surround it. Today it is still the hills that strike you - in the legs and lungs as much as the eyes - as a defining feature of the city. Steeper than Edinburgh, it can become vertiginous - turn a corner and the street will fall away before you. At other points, the pavement becomes steps as the slope becomes a climb rather than a walk. Strikingly, the geography has had its effect on the Portuenses - the population seems to be uniformly fit and wiry, hardened in the daily struggle against gravity.
Though it lost its title as capital to Lisbon early on, Porto retained a role as a commercial headquarters, not only for the northern industrialised region of Portugal (such as it is) but also for trade with the new world, and it was this that accounted for its second period of glory in the early part of the 20th century. Despite losing major possessions such as Brazil, the Portuguese retained a sizeable colonial empire with areas such as Angola and Mozambique. In retrospect it is not the country's most creditable period - of all the colonial empires (save for the Belgian), the Portuguese built the least and ripped off the most and it was Porto that the wealth of minerals and produce flowed through.
The old city was one of stucco and plaster, with the myriad port manufactories dominating one side of the river and two and three-storey houses and courtyards up and down the hills on the other side. The modernising boom left the centre of the city with a fund of striking art deco architecture, and the style spread throughout the shops and cafes in the older buildings. As the Salazar dictatorship closed the country off politically from the rest of Europe, Porto became an island of elegance and wealth. And then the '50s came, the colonies revolted, the wealth dried up and Porto simply stopped. As the European postwar boom bypassed the entire country, Porto froze in time, its buildings peeling and crumbling, its elegant interiors left unrenovated.
The result is that it's a wonderland of faded glory and another example of a city that does not know what it has. Those interested in the more traditional tourist attractions can visit the half-dozen churches that show the "azulejo" style at their best. Azulejo is a type of blue-painted or printed white tile, some of them - as on the facade of the Santo Ildefonso church (Praca de Batalla) - of extraordinary individual detail, others such as at the Almas Chapel (Rua de Santa Catarina) making large designs (the death of St Francis in this case) from hundreds of tiles. There are also good examples of them at the cathedral, though the cathedral itself is relatively unspectacular as cathedrals go.
Other attractions include tours of the port bodegas on the other side of the river (technically another town known as Gaia) and the port wine museum. The tourist office will urge you on to these, but they are really no more interesting than your average school excursion. Indeed, the best way to experience Porto is simply to wander around it. It's not to everybody's taste, but if you're the sort of person who likes the indefinable mystery of a good film noir, a De Chirico painting, a Paul Auster novel, then you'll feel pleasingly not-at-home in Porto.
At any street corner in Porto there are a dozen interesting sites - a chemist shop with the rounded windows and clean-white lines of "ocean liner" art deco, a bar with a long zinc counter and body, tapered and flashing brilliant metallic white, an unassuming stationery shop that is a masterpiece of art nouveau, with varnished wood detailed in metal strands spreading out like the lines of a fern.
Some of it is simply poor and rundown - the bus station, with its fake walnut panels, '50s lettering and buzzing fluoro, looks like a set from countless films noirs - but the whole effect is never less than striking.
Yet if there is one place where the whole style is expressed at its purest, it's in the cake shops. As befits a city caught in the '50s - when people ate about three times the amount of cake they eat now - these are everywhere, on every corner. The city is a giant Acland Street. Enormous vanilla slices, concertinas of cream, vie for space with the egg-custard tarts that have become famous as Portuguese tarts round the world.
Here they come in a dozen different sizes and versions. The shops - always with seating, always with a bar - are the focal point of Porto social life. People dash in for a pre-work coffee and croissant, for a morning tea or beer, for lunch - and everyone, but everyone stops in after work before going home. There are etched mirrors, there are marble-topped tables, there are long bars. People have one or two beers, a cake or a baked ham and cheese roll, and then at about a quarter to six, as if a whistle has blown, everyone disappears home.
Like the Spanish, the Portuguese eat late, around 9pm or 10pm. But - another reminder that the country is still of an earlier era - they rarely eat out. Of the hundreds of bars and cafes, fewer than 50 will be open past 7pm. In the whole central city, actual restaurants would number fewer than two dozen.
That doesn't matter, because, as night comes down, Porto has saved the best for last. The museums of neon lighting that have sprung up in Los Angeles and Vegas have nothing on this place - it is a living museum of a time when the neon sign was the epitome of high style. Perhaps uniquely among Western cities it has never torn them down and each evening the sky is lit with a rainbow of colours.
What makes the classic neon sign so distinctive is that it is not simply a backlit panel, as the bulk of lit signs now are. The green, pink, yellow, blue gases are running through glass tubes twisted and blown into the shape desired, an elegance born out of fragility. For some reasons the most ornate signs are those outside optometrists, who seem to have made extensive efforts to outdo each other, with signs that wink and stare, raise their eyebrows, or spiral in one eye and out the other in all the colours that the combination of electricity and noble gases will permit.
Why did they survive here when they have been torn out everywhere else? Who knows, but looking down the hill as a dozen different displays dance in the dusk, it's something to be thankful for - one of those strange regional variations that often go unrecorded because they cannot be fitted into a city's narrative of itself. They charm us so because they are a trip in time as much as space, back to memories of our own cities in an earlier era, before a certain distinctiveness of place was buried under the tides of McDonald's and Officeworks.
Porto, like all of Portugal, is slowly catching up to the rest of the West - its elegant tram system has been retired in favour of a newly built underground (two riverside tram routes survive). Whether it will retain its style remains to be seen - but is the prognosis ever good in these circumstances? If your tastes incline towards the painted shadows rather than the bright lights, you might want to visit before it's too late.
Fast facts
There are no direct flights from Australia to Portugal. TAP and Air Portugalia fly direct to Porto from most European capitals. Ryanair flies twice a day from London Stansted. The city's official tourism website is at www.portoturismo.pt, with a complete guide to city tours and visits to bodegas.
www.theage.com.au
