Europe without the frills
Journalist Philip Nolan spent a year travelling to 33 destinations in Europe with Ryanair. The result is a chaotic, bizarre and at times hilarious odyssey. Edward O'Hare reviews
Ryanland: A No Frills Odyssey Around the New Europe. By Philip Nolan. Published by Hodder Headline, €12
Nobody can accuse Philip Nolan of leading a dull life. When not in the air or aboard some luxury car, he spent 2006 plummeting 86 metres to the ground on a Spanish funpark ride, speeding across the Swedish countryside in the world's fastest train, partying in Lithuania, praying at Lourdes, finding himself pinned between the colossal buttocks of two gargantuan ladies in a German communal washroom, trying to get out of Knock Airport without losing his sanity, watching a duet between a man and a mechanical digger and coming up with reasons to murder clowns. Ryanland is his personal chronicle of this hectic, wondrous, constantly bizarre and sometimes downright terrifying year.
The cause of all these far-flung wanderings was one simple but ingenious idea. Early last year, Nolan became intrigued when a Mexican student staying at his home in Dublin told him that she was going to see Paris, Milan, Rome and Berlin during a single week's holiday. She explained to Nolan that Ryanair's low-cost flights meant that she could now afford to visit all these cities and keep her expenses at a minimum. This new notion of cheap travel around Europe sent the awardwinning journalist to his computer. Before long he had begun to plan a modern-day odyssey of his own.
Philip Nolan rightly argues that flying Ryanair has now overtaken inter-railing as the most convenient and economical way for people on a budget to get around. He decided to test just how much of Europe Ryanair's various routes would allow him to see. By taking advantage of the airline's eccentric concept of geography and its massive expansion – which has lately seen it establish operations in some of the more remote regions of Europe – the writer set out on an epic and increasingly comic adventure that would eventually take him to 33 major destinations and countless other locations along the way.
Ryanland refreshingly avoids the pattern followed by most travel books. Philip Nolan refused to coordinate his escapades, choosing his destinations at random instead. This was a wise move – the catapault unpredictability of the book keeps the reader's interest alive. A couple of his targets happen to be close geographically, but not always culturally. His trips to Glasgow and Edinburgh, for example, might as well be to two completely distant countries. Also, Nolan chooses places for personal reasons, such as a return visit to Elland Road, the home of his beloved Leeds United, as often as he makes voyages of exploration, like his survey of several of the recent EU accession states.
The huge number of destinations on Philip Nolan's list inevitably means that he can provide only brief assessments of each. These range from five pages, which he allocates to Paris and London, to 10, which Nolan reserves for the likes of Rome and Berlin. Some readers may instantly dislike this very impressionistic form of reportage, which can be irritatingly sketchy at times, with Nolan seemingly making sweeping judgments apparently based on whatever surroundings he finds outside the doors of his hotel. But considering he often had only one full day in each location, he has done well to convey the sense of each locale. He is very strong on the brute facts of travel, such as the availability and cost of accommodation, food and transport. Nolan also has a vast armoury of pop-culture references that immediately put the reader in the picture.
The main reason this book will be bought and enjoyed is for its anecdotes. These come thick, fast and are mostly very funny indeed. After years of overseas reporting, Philip Nolan is not exactly an innocent abroad, but he does seem to have a peerless knack for winding up in ludicrous situations. Within pages, we find him trapped in a urinal in Gothenburg surrounded by crossdressers on, of all occasions, the night of the Eurovision Song Contest. Next, he's in Sweden being chased by bouncers out of a hotel bar designed by Terence Conran when he mistakes a stylised ice bucket for a stool. No sooner does he pull up a chair in Paris than he becomes convinced the man beside him at the bar is an escaped psychopath and has to run away. This is only the beginning.
Porto holds no end of surprises. Philip Nolan arrives in a hotel which, although supposed to have been built “with input from some of Portugal's top architects”, looks to him as though it were “really drawn on the back of a fag packet by a man who had just lost his glasses” and which has “interior decor straight from a cheap 1970s porn movie”. In Old Salzburg he gets led astray in a back alley called Schmuckspassage and ends up in the tiny bar of an inn built in 1377 whose curtains “I fear, may be original” and whose new section “appears to have been assembled during an episode of Changing Rooms that was recorded as a politically-correct sop to the blind”.
It gets worse. High in the Alps, a sinister woman offers to channel Philip his “alpha waves”, but to his disappointment this only involved being thrust naked into a glowing plastic box, where he had to listen to a sound that resembled “calves farting”. Whilst in the Camargue, he goes in search of internet access to view an urgent message but has to wait for hours when the only computer terminal in his hotel is occupied by a gentleman looking at pictures of, you guessed it, the Camargue. In Catalunya, he is lured inside a seedy club by a man who Nolan takes to be Russian, but who claims to hail from the West of Ireland. Seconds later, he is accused of stealing a bottle of water. Cue a punch-up. Nolan runs into the street and appeals to the police who promptly draw their truncheons on him. An evening at a dog track in Cork should have come as a relaxing interval in his misadventures, but Nolan spends it trying not to go out of his mind when his female taxi driver repeatedly asks him if he knows whether she is going in the right direction.
The more atrocious and deplorable Philip Nolan's experiences become, the more fun they are to read about. Jet-lagged, he wakes to find himself in the Opera House in Bratislava in the middle of a performance of Rachmaninov's ‘Variations on a Theme' by Paganini just as the other patrons pounce on him for snoring. He finds Brno, the second city of the Czech Republic, about the most unremarkable place on the face of the earth. By far the worst trip has to be his truly nightmarish excursion to Blackpool which, in Nolan's account, sounds like some surreal underworld in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Avoiding tattered amusement parks and soot-covered beaches “about as welcoming as Abu Ghraib”, he wanders into a horrifying wax museum populated by ghastly effigies including Michael Jackson “looking like Teri Hatcher with a moustache” and Pierce Brosnan resembling “William H Macy”. It comes as a surprise that the proprietor is not Donald Pleasence or Vincent Price.
These disasters make the discovery of genuinely pleasurable locations even more of a reward for Philip Nolan. In Bristol he admires the splendid creations of the legendary engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, including the Great Western Railway, the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the SS Great Britain, a 332-foot luxury transatlantic liner recently restored to its original majesty after years of neglect. Stopping over in Derry, he sees how a bright and vibrant community has at last emerged from the shadow of the Troubles.
The sublime cathederal city of Lincoln offers Philip Nolan spiritual solitude. He has a sensational time in Santiago de Compostela meeting pilgrims on the Camino. Berlin shows Nolan some of the triumphs and tragedies of modern history, while Malta is a living time-capsule of all that is ancient. Overall, the champion destination is Biarritz, which seems to boast everything from beaches to casinos and which is for him the summation of all that is good about living in Europe. It is also close to Lourdes, where Nolan observes the famous shrine and reflects on the importance of hope in life regardless of religious persuasion.
A reader's enjoyment of Ryanland will depend on how much they like Philip Nolan as their guide. He is an old-school journalist: tough, knowledgeable and opinionated. His style of presentation is far removed from the painful political correctness of most modern travel writers. It is hard not to lose patience with him when he has his 50th drunken confrontation or when he goes to the trouble of finding a jacket with copious pockets just to get the better of Ryanair's luggage-weight restrictions. But Nolan has unfailing enthusiasm, charm and a swagger that makes him the best candidate yet to become the Irish Jeremy Clarkson. Ryanland could have been just another gimmick book but in Nolan's hands it is a witty and thought-provoking guide to the wonderland of contemporary Europe.