HOW LOW CAN YOU GO? – ROUND EUROPE FOR 1P EACH WAY (PLUS TAX)

Tom Chesshyre, Hodder Trade Paperback, £10 (US$20)

One day Tom Chesshyre was trying to book a flight to Ireland online. He came across the name Szczecin and, having never heard of it, he decided to go there instead. Low-cost airlines have this effect on Europeans. As Chesshyre puts it: “Why am I going to Poland’s second biggest port in the middle of winter? Am I mad? Have I lost my bearings and my marbles? It’s not that at all. The reason I’m going to Szczecin is precisely because no one else wants to go.

And so began Chesshyre’s travels around Europe. As he puts it, he had no plan of action other than “...to see for myself 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”. As a result, the book takes you on a fascinating journey, discovering the history of little-known towns in Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Germany, Norway, Finland and the Czech Republic.

Chesshyre chats with the local people and spends the weekends at cafés, nightclubs, visiting churches and museums, investigating what these towns have to offer and why low-cost airlines such as Wizz Air, Ryan Air, Easy Jet and SkyEurope chose them as destinations.

On his travels, Chesshyre meets the mayor of Poprad, ice skates in Tampere and enjoys a “Hot Horse” burger in Ljubljana. The characters he meets and the places he ends up in make for an adventure on every page, although some discoveries of the world behind the iron curtain paint a depressing picture. Chesshyre soon learns that while the young people head for the brighter lights of Western Europe, many of them feel a sad sense of loss at leaving their hometowns.

Felicity Cousins

Tom Chesshyre, a staff travel writer for The Times in the UK, has been a contributer to the European edition of Business Traveller with a series of articles called Chesshyre on the Cheap, which he wrote while researching the book.