Simon Calder’s year in travel

The Man Who Pays His Way: The good, the bad and the kind

Rosy prospect: the Greek island of Thassos (Simon Calder)

What turned out to be my last Thomas Cook Airlines flight left Gatwick at 9am on 2 August, with friendly, professional crew, and arrived safe and on time at Kavala in northeast Greece. It was the beginning of my most enjoyable journey of the year: a trip to Athens, the pretty way.

In the 50 years since I first ventured abroad, I have observed that travel gets relentlessly better: horizons and opportunities widen, costs and barriers fall. And so it proved in the summer of 2019.

From the airport, a fellow passenger gave me a lift the 10 miles to the port of Keramoti – a classic departure point for the Greek islands, with a scruffy, welcoming cafe dispensing fresh salad drenched in olive oil as you wait for your ship to come in.

Thassos, draped with pines, sharpened into focus as the mainland receded. This volcanic relic is much more verdant and vertical than the archetypal Greek island. The peak in the middle is higher than any in England, and every twist in the precarious perimeter road revealed a view so splendid that I was glad the bus driver had made the trip a thousand times before.

Later, I discovered the main town happens to have a meadow strewn with antiquity, and an implausibly rewarding archaeological museum.

My Mythos beer sank with the sun as the ferry drifted back to the reality of the mainland. The airport was still 10 miles away, which presented a problem as the last bus had left. Not for the first time this year, I was rescued by generous lift-givers – but certainly for the first time, I travelled in the back of a Greek army truck. There are more conventional ways to arrive at an airport.

That journey was blessed – last week’s, less so. To reach Sharm el Sheikh shortly before the first British flights for four years went back in, I was due to touch down at Eilat on the Sinai peninsula shortly before 11am. What could possibly go wrong?

Here’s what. The airport closed the runway until 1pm. At that point there was a rush to get in. My flight, from Warsaw, was the last of three. With 400-plus passengers ahead in the queue, the wait for passport control consumed another two hours. So I reached Dahab bus station in Egypt four hours later than planned. The promised express bus to Sharm el Sheikh set off about 20 minutes late, and made it all of two miles before breaking down with a crunch and a thud and a curse.

Eventually a replacement arrived. But instead of taking us all along the coast, the new coach returned to the bus station of broken dreams to become the last departure of the night, requiring another hour’s wait. I was in a slice of Egypt the Foreign Office had warned me to avoid. But everyone did their best to help a stranger in a strange land.

Perhaps I should have hitchhiked, since thumbing in 2019 was more rewarding than ever – especially in north Wales. In August I successfully hitched, for the first time, a car towing a caravan (Caernarvon to Holyhead, with a driver who was a head teacher). Before that, in June, I thumbed in successive lifts my first all-electric car (a Nissan Leaf from Llangollen), and my first narrow boat – across the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, Thomas Telford’s absurd high-altitude marine highway.

For the first time since the early Victorian era, a year begins without Thomas Cook organising travel. Many of its excellent people are still unemployed (though this week I met one of the cabin crew from that flight to Kavala at the ticket barrier at Gatwick, where he is now working). And for the first time since the 1970s, a year begins in which the nation has chosen to narrow horizons and build barriers.

Kind souls, though, are everywhere.