Travel: How to keep airline pilots tanked up

The Man Who Pays His Way

WHEN I saw the Toronto lamp-post minus the brand-new bicycle I had locked there some hours earlier, I thought of Michel Tasse. He was the Quebecois businessman I met last weekend on my flight to Canada's largest city. Rather than the 300-mile hop to his home in Montreal, he had mistakenly taken a 7,000-mile round-trip from Toronto to Gatwick and Manchester - which involved flying directly over Montreal, twice.

"I asked for a parachute", he told me, "but they wouldn't give me one". Even though the airline had twice failed to check his boarding card correctly, he declined to direct any ire towards Air Transat. "There's no use being mad", he said calmly, even though 24 hours of his life had been lost in a haze of jetlag and inflight movies.

His tolerance is an example to every traveller. So I merely sighed when I saw that the gap where my bike should have been was as wide as the prairie. I adopted a stoic calm as I mused that the brand-new C$399 (about pounds 160) bicycle was presently being ridden around Toronto by someone who knew how to crack a Kryptonite lock. And even though my credit card and pride were bruised, I chuckled.

The director didn't, though. We are here filming for BBC2's Travel Show about the joys of a short break in Toronto, with particular reference to how benign the place is compared with its neighbours 30 miles south across the US border. "Clean and safe" is how the Toronto tourist office describes its city. What a good wheeze, I'd suggested, to buy a new bike (which I wanted anyway) that could be used for filming and that I could then take home, within the customs limit.

Cycling sequences, the director pointed out, are difficult to shoot if the bicycle is missing. So I rented one instead, and regretfully added Canada to the growing list of places where tourists are targetted (see below for plenty more shocking examples). But you can't fault Canadian villains: beyond some ignominy, inconvenience and insurance excess, no real harm was done. Even the lamp-post was unscathed.

The second great advantage of Canada being more sane than its southern neighbour is that hitch-hiking seems both safe and reliable - just as well in the world's second-largest country, where public transport is stretched thinly. For a trip to Algonquin Provincial Park (a Devon-sized dose of wilderness, 200 miles north of Toronto), there is little option but to hitch the last 50 miles from Huntsville.

On Monday evening, the first two lifts took me easily to the halfway point. But as night fell I got hopelessly stuck at the town - well, gas station and a scattering of cottages - of Oxtongue Lake. After half-an- hour, as the traffic dwindled and I realised that my feeble efforts were being witnessed by a camp-fire's worth of holidaymakers between the road and the lake, one of them came to enquire about my destination. I replied with a smile, as forced as it was wan, that the last 25 miles would surely present no problem. I tried not to think about all the attacks on humans by bears that I had read about.

An hour later, he called over from the camp fire: "I can't bear watching you any more. Get in the car". And no, he would not take a single cent towards the cost of petrol for his unplanned 50-mile round-trip. This was the first time in far too many years of hitch-hiking that a spectator has rescued me - and, in the process, restored my faith in Canada as the best intentioned of nations.

MICHEL TASSE demonstrated, by reaching Gatwick and Manchester with no passport, valid travel documents are not always essential to journeys abroad. But, as thousands of people who are waiting for new British passports realise, they tend to make travelling easier.

The root of the present crisis at Britain's passport offices is not entirely because of a misconceived new computer system: demands are heavier because the Passport Agency failed to communicate effectively the change in rules about children's passports.

On 5 October, there was one significant change: it was no longer possible to add children under 16 to a parent's passport. That's all. But despite the best efforts in these pages and elsewhere, the message the travelling public received was that now all children would need their own passports.

Not true: any child who is already on a parent's passport may travel with them until they reach 16, or the passport expires. This was deliberate: the policy was to be phased in to avoid exactly the sort of demands presently stretching the Passport Agency. Rather than bickering over whose fault the whole horrible muddle is, officials and politicians should be seeking to reassure holidaymakers that children who appear on a parent's passport won't be sent home.

My father's passport is now happily valid till July 2001. As I explained last month, the document - which is of the fine old blue variety and was due to expire this month - has outlived the intended extinction of hardback passports in favour of new EU versions. He turned up at the Petty France passport office and got it extended for two more years without fuss or fees.

Yet this is no match for some of you. The most enduring of all, writes Nigel Long from Bristol, has not even had to be extended (yet): "My wife's passport was issued in Peterborough on 12 September 1991, and expires on 12 September 2001. We were surprised to get the old-style passport at such a late date.

"Unfortunately, she has not used the passport for some years. We have become so fed up with flight delays and cramped aircraft, that we now holiday in England."

u

WHAT DO President Suharto of Indonesia and Nicolae Ceausescu have in common, besides being particularly brutal dictators? Both appear on a not-extensive list of VIP guests who've visited the original California Disneyland, which opened this week in 1955.

They appear alongside the "Red Chinese Table Tennis Team" and Fred Gurley, president of the Santa Fe Railway, photographed alongside Walt himself. He'd be appalled to learn that, far from increasing demand for rail travel, only a handful of trains cover the 40-minute ride from downtown Los Angeles to the theme park's local Anaheim station today. And the connecting bus service has now been removed, leaving public-transport-spirited visitors with a $10 cab ride.

AM I correct in recalling, during a stint cleaning planes at Gatwick, hearing that the British government refused to license the Boeing 727 as safe for UK airlines, even though it was then the most successful aircraft ever? I seem to recall the idea was to stimulate sales of the British-built Trident: now the only examples left are wingless wonders used for fire practice.