Category Archives: Transport

Four days in Porto.

DSC_0924Back to Portugal again, but this time the heady delights of Porto instead of last year’s Algarve. Arriving in the middle of a heatwave, I sweat my tits off for the remainder of the trip; as milk was a bad choice for Ron Burgundy, so here was my predilection for trousers and sweatshirts. No matter, the situation was somewhat rectified (t-shirt donned) after a decidedly traumatising wait in a sauna of a taxi rank. It’s a lovely city replete with multi-layered sandwiches and aesthetically pleasing denizens eating the sandwiches. For the record, I didn’t eat any sandwiches. I did, however, source cheap mushroom pâté from a convenience store. Winning.

The Patrick Bateman Palace.

Phil Collins accompanied this cheeky vape in the apartment. “No smoking,” said the agent. I’d like to think I’m half-rebellious, but not full-anarchist. The place was plush, an impressively air-conditioned getaway from the sadistic Teletubbies sun.

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Super Bock.

This is the de facto Portuguese national beer. In the local supermarket 24 bottles will set you back six euros. For some perspective on the matter, a warm, dirty pint in an Edinburgh boozer/hovel will cost you £4. Super, indeed.

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Jumpers.

I thought this bloke was gonna chuck himself off the bridge, i.e., kill himself. I took a snap for longevity. Fortunately, he was a member of the local money-making youth, many of whom dive into the river for tourists’ shrapnel. I didn’t give him anything (because I’m stingy).

Arty-Farty pretentions.

There was a moment of sadness on this jaunt. I could have taken a simple point-and-shoot snap of an inviting building, but instead chose to shove my ersatz Liam Gallagher sunglasses in the frame in an attempt to arty-farty it up, to just be that shamelessly banal.

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Ryanair.

And fuck Ryanair. Shockingly awful once again. No further comment.

 

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Siberian airspace during the USSR.

I thought an 11-hour, 6,000-mile flight from London to Tokyo was hell on earth, a suspended furnace of ghastly smells and even worse movies. On such claustrophobic ventures I do enjoy unearthing the laptop for a disaster-themed bonanza – Flight (2012) with the inimitable Denzel, Air Force One (1997), and an Air Crash Investigation bumper pack. If you’re going to reek worse than durian in a hobo’s socks, you’re going to be subjected to terrifying plane crash fun.

A wee peek into the Cold War glory days of grim and we find an 11-hour trip today the relative Shangri-La of a plane journey. For obvious reasons, the communist paradise of the Gulag restricted its airspace, with only Soviet planes allowed to fly above the Soviet Union. The solution was for Western airlines to traverse the Arctic, stop at Anchorage, and then proceed to Tokyo. This sub-zero town in Alaska was for a semi-epoch the transport hub for travel to Asia. With the fall of the Soviet Union it is now once again a backwater, the perfect milieu for the very bleak Christopher Nolan movie Insomnia (2002).

Today, Russia wields enormous power through its control over the Siberian flight corridor, and the country chooses which airlines have access (with great cost to the airline). Post World Cup this summer, one of the greatest fears of commercial airlines is that escalating tensions (some might say warfare, this proxy or cyber) between Russia and the West will usher in another airspace ban, with passengers once more forced to city-hop en route to their desired destination. The nineties and noughties – 9/11 aside – just might turn out to be the Golden Age of flying.

We don’t want shit like this happening again:

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France, 1940 – debunking the ‘Halt Order’.

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Up until last year and the release of Dunkirk (2017), it was generally assumed by the layman and amateur historian that the successful evacuation of Dunkirk was due to the lax, complacent attitude of the German Army, this a direct order from Hitler to halt the armoured divisions as a benevolent peace offer to the British. Only now has consensus gathered amongst us part-time carnage bookworms that this is nothing but a fallacy. Myths are embedded within official military narrative and it happens because they are convenient, an easy answer to overwhelmingly complex logistical and political issues. The laziness, with exceptions, of the modern historian is so rampant that contemporary sources are taken as gospel, i.e., works by peers. It’s as if the archives don’t exist.

James Holland’s recent digging into this seemingly forever contentious event now appears to have silenced the Hitler apologists (that he didn’t want to intensify war with Britain, bla, bla). The order quite simply came from the frontline generals, and Hitler’s subsequent involvement was as an intervention between competing branches of the German military. For an in-depth anatomy of the whole mess, I highly recommend this piece on Holland’s own website: http://www.griffonmerlin.com/2016/07/17/dunkirk-1940-hitlers-halt-order/

Fittingly, the Russians just this past week let forensic experts analyse Hitler’s teeth, dispelling, one would hope, the belief that he fled to Argentina in a U-boat or emigrated to the Moon.

Further reading:

http://www.griffonmerlin.com/2016/07/17/dunkirk-1940-hitlers-halt-order/

https://skeptoid.com/blog/2013/04/15/no-hitler-did-not-let-the-british-escape-at-dunkirk/

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-24/why-the-germans-blew-it-at-dunkirk

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/06/the-war-in-the-west-review-james-holland

 

 

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The Ultra Long Range A350 XWB.

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The cutting-edge Beast is here, and will soon smash records and traverse the 9,521 miles between Singapore and New York with Singapore Airlines. To think that commercial air travel isn’t even one hundred years old yet; this is only the beginning.

Further reading:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/airbus-a350-ulr-xwb-first-flight/

http://www.traveller.com.au/worlds-longest-flight-airbus-ultra-long-range-a350-xwb-takes-to-the-sky-for-the-first-time-h0z5ls

 

 

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Flight from East Berlin.

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Berlin went apostate after the Wall’s crumble – it is now a free-for-all, one of those clichéd multicultural hubs, the EU’s sociological vanguard. Not so back in the Honecker days, a Stasi-sprinkled 1984.

The audacity of this escape is bonkers, so too the entirely legit video recording of the getaway. Old Skool VHS-C home video footage isn’t half gnarly when the camera roams free in the exterior à la Paul Greengrass. No one wants to see a wee sprog from the States wail like Chewbacca on an ecstacy overdose upon opening a Nintendo 64; mind-blowing vistas is what it’s all about.

Escape artists:

Ingo Bethke, a border guard, fled East Berlin on an air mattress in 1975, crossing the River Elbe into West Germany. In 1983, his brother Holger did one better, using a zip line from an attic to Ingo’s car on the other side of the wall. It was six years later that the two brothers, having learned to fly, dressed in military garb, painted Soviet red stars on two planes, flew over the wall, landed in a park (with one place circling overhead), picked up the third brother, Egbert, and then flew back into West Berlin, arriving at the steps of the Reichstag. They then went off and got pished on a smorgasbord of alcoholic delicacies. Incredible.

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Icarus (x3) they were not. Totalitarianism breeds creativity, just ask Jean-Paul Sartre. And nothing spotlights the stupidity of that lunatic Soviet ideology than getting a free pass to fly around with abandon merely because there are red stars on your plane.

Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) so comically captured those last dying days of the GDR. Imagine that mixed with The Great Escape of the Bethke brothers. Why isn’t this a movie yet?

Further reading:

http://articles.latimes.com/1989-05-29/news/mn-692_1_berlin-wall-west-berlin-allied-sources

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/07/berlin-wall-escape-stories_n_6090602.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/focus/2009/10/200910793416112389.html

 

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Bilbao Baggins.

Bilbao was a laugh. Ah, to go back to a time without bills and responsibilities, when the only struggle was choosing which rancid alcopop to shove down your trousers in a supermarket (in my experience security guards can’t run more than 50 yards without crumbling into a wheezing heap).13882428_10157389370085691_1176700627100006367_n

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The Beast from the East – Edinburgh.

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Snow is hell. As Scots, you’d think we would be able to cope with the scenario but evidently not. The whole country is static, with bewildered cattle stocking up trolleys with bread and milk.

Anyway, sometimes there are serene scenes. It looks lovely out there.

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On the sauce in Salzburg and Munich.

Back to Salzburg and Munich again for a double-headed session. To think the birthplace of Mozart and Doppler was now the temporary milieu of beer-compromised attempts to retrieve a Snickers bar from a dilapidated vending machine at 4:16 a.m.

 

Salzburg is a place with many bars, sadly few ATMs (seeking a Geldautomat is depressing), and with a most varied supply of charming newsagents, which appears to my primary interest these days. Somewhere down the line vistas ceased to be of fascination. I couldn’t find a Lidl, though. Gutted.

 

The salient memory of Munich was feigning a limp in order to use a disabled toilet, and attempting to escape the city for the airport. There was “something wrong with the tracks,” they kept barking at me in the station. I don’t think I’ve ever been on so many trains to get to one destination, and so drained of vitamins throughout. I thought I was going to die on that plane home from an overdose of fatigue and amaretto. But I didn’t.  Good times.

 

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The Boeing 314 Clipper.

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Look at this madness. A bygone age, passengers on Boeing’s 314 Clipper were graced with sleeping compartments, lounges, changing rooms, and a bridal suite (De Lux Compartment) for trans-Atlantic travel. Some of the images of the time (1930s and ’40s) appear ‘pre-history’, as if this is how all air travel should be; we were denied it by economics and the rather vexing religious cuckoo.

The Emirates A380 business class experience is the closest parallel to that luxury flying boat; think Patrick Bateman from Dubai to Sydney with all the mod cons. What’s missing, however, is … well, look at that photo of the Clipper interior – it’s pure shameless decadence at 13,000 feet, but without the sandals and hoodies. Every Master of the Universe is suited and booted.

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When I make my millions from pulling off the most daring robbery (don’t tell anyone) since the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, I’ll be flying from airport to airport on one of these Emirates bad boys, a bottle of £20,000 champagne and the Mighty Ducks movies to accompany my victory laps. I won’t be visiting places; the airports will suffice.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.flyingboatmuseum.com/boeing-314-clipper-flying-boat/

http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-the-luxurious-boeing-314-clipper-2013-8?IR=T

http://www.boeing.com/history/products/model-314-clipper.page

https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/hawaii-by-air/online/pan-am-clippers/what-was-it-like-to-fly.cfm

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Berlin and Szczecin booze crawl.

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Back to Berlin again for the fourth time. I’ve seen every Lonely Planet tourist site to death in the Grey City so these days reserve my curiosities to the bars and the incredible possibilities of the late-night U-Bahn adventure. I did glimpse the Brandenburg Gate from a taxi but was too busy reading an article on The Telegraph website about Jupp Heynckes and his Bayern Munich resurgence to take any extended interest. When I first set eyes upon that Prussian landmark I thought it a wonder to behold; now I’m not even bothered it exists. Weird.

What I lionise about Berlin is its seeming randomness and that it’s embraced by the locals (one presumes) as just another quirk on the city grid. It’s one of the reasons I never make a plan or an itinerary. Going for an ad hoc five-minute nap on a concrete pallet outside the Fernsehturm TV Tower was never on the agenda, but then neither was venturing out that evening. Berlin, may the Flying Spaghetti Monster bless you.

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Szczecin, Poland.

This town has little to offer. If Berlin was the party, Szczecin was the crypt. I got the sense that it’s just a memory of a place, residue from a forgotten age. It’s decent for a pint but architecturally has all the appeal of a urinal concocted from toilet paper. This is the only photograph I took, a shot of my two travel companians walking on the pavement, such was the boredom of the topography. You’d be better off drinking in your living room whilst watching daytime television than entering this wasteland.

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Bus oddities.

We took the bus to the Szczecin hovel. It was your usual journey peppered with beer, energy drinks, trance music, and a gruesome shit in an appropriately depraved toilet designed for midgets. The return mission was sadly characterised by a Vladimir Putin doppelgänger in the seat in front who demanded our ears for a two-hour monologue about the trials and travails of his life. Reeking from a single beer, he burst out laughing at our most innocuous observations on Szczecin, and upon our arrival back in Central Bus Station ZOB asked us to wait with him awhile to discuss the comparative footballing merits of Robert Lewandowski and Thomas Müller. Odd bloke. Escaping him was a convenient metaphor.

 

 

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