Magical Misery Tour

In 1979 I went on a coach tour of Europe with my then-girlfriend. We’d booked with a major tour operator: a household name at the time. In those pre-internet days they advertised their products in glossy brochures. We took the train down to London and stayed overnight in a hotel so we could catch the coach early the following morning.

We discovered that our mostly older fellow travellers came from different parts of the Commonwealth. Likely they’d flown to the UK and decided they might as well see the rest of Europe while they were at it. So we had a mixture of South Africans, New Zealanders, Aussies, Indians, Canadians, Caribbean islanders, and maybe a couple of Americans. I don’t recall any other Brits like ourselves.

We crossed the Channel, headed towards Belgium and stopped for lunch somewhere in the French-speaking part of the country. Before we got off the bus our courier grabbed the microphone. You’ll enjoy the food here, she said. This is an excellent restaurant. It won’t always be as good as this. What a strange thing to say, I thought. Why would you plant that seed of negativity in customers heads? Things can only go downhill from here, she’d effectively told us. We sat down in the restaurant and they served our first course: egg mayonnaise. In 1979 foodie culture had yet to take off in the UK. We still had our Berni Inns, our plaice and chips and our Black Forest gateaux, and I couldn’t see anything particularly sophisticated about this dish. My seventies British eye perceived half a hard-boiled egg with a splodge of what looked like salad cream. And I don’t care for eggs. I forced it down with a view to educating my palate.

We stayed overnight in Brussels and drove on to Lucerne the following day. This set the pattern: early starts, long days in the coach and arrivals just before dinner. If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium, as the film title goes. Typically we had to have our luggage down by the bus straight after breakfast, as early as 8 am, ready for the driver to load it into the hold. An Indian fellow passenger approached me in the Swiss hotel. We’re next door, he said. Your wife won’t be pleased. He laughed nervously. We have to share a bathroom. Though mistaken on the wife bit, he wasn’t wrong regarding the female displeasure. His knowing man-to-man tone struck me. Of course neither of us men will care about the bathroom, he rightly implied, but the ladies are a different matter. I photographed the Chapel Bridge in Lucerne and took the cable car to the summit of Titlis on my own. My girlfriend didn’t fancy that one. Overnighting in Innsbruck we saw the Golden Roof. Then we headed over the Brenner Pass into Italy, a country I’d never visited before. We had a hotel in the mundane part of Venice, far removed from the canals and gondolas. When we visited the historic centre the following day, warm rain soaked us to the skin. I noted the brown August aridity of the Po Valley as we continued to Rome. There our fastidious local guide warned us off the trinket-sellers and turned up his nose at the Spanish tourists walking and singing arm in arm. In Florence we did the Uffizi. Pisa’s tower leaned as expected, but matters reached a tipping point when we arrived in Nice.

Our driver, a young and saucy francophone Belgian, had clearly had his fill of early starts and luggage-humping. Even in Rome we’d had to load our bags ourselves, but now in Nice he began a truculent work to rule. We had on our itinerary a tour of the Corniche roads and Monte Carlo, with stops at key points so that our courier could expound on the sights. Instead he drove the route at top speed without halting, as if to say: I’ve fulfilled my contractual obligation and that’s all you’re getting.

By this stage we’d noticed that he and the courier had a thing going on. We’d seen them drinking and laughing together in the evenings and we suspected they continued their liaison upstairs. The driver had worked his Walloon charm on the Englishwoman and she’d put herself in a difficult position. Though nominally in charge of the whole show, she now had no authority over the driver on account of their relationship, or so we surmised. Judging from the murmurings we overheard, other passengers interpreted the situation similarly. And the way the driver related to some of the passengers caused us to suspect a darker side to his attitude: a touch of racism perhaps. He’d had to fetch and carry for non-whites and his primitive mind couldnt cope.

So it seemed that a coach tour holiday differed from a sofa, a fridge, or a jacket: items you could buy from a catalogue, expecting to receive a consistent product. The quality of our vacation depended to an uncomfortable extent on the complex relationship between forty customers and two company employees. Of course the fault lay very much with the driver. You could argue the courier had acted foolishly, at least in her choice of boyfriend, but could she have remedied the situation anyway? De facto the driver wielded the greatest power in our claustrophobic little bubble. And some of the passengers made a bad situation worse. Oh you’ve gone very quiet, a white South African woman shouted pointedly as we drove northwards through France. Aren’t you going to tell us something about that castle we’ve just passed? The courier, previously chirpy and full of information, had lost heart by now. She feared no doubt the inevitable complaints to the tour company that would get her into trouble. Why rub salt into her wounds? Her snide tormenter annoyed me just as much as the stroppy driver.