This post currently finds me in Budapest, Hungary, which is the last stop on my Easter holiday travels. I was supposed to fly back to London this afternoon for my third and final term at Oxford, but, as you may have heard, a volcano with some unpronounable name erupted in Iceland last week. You might be wondering, “What sort of havoc could this geothermic activity on an island in the extreme reaches of the North Atlantic possibly wreck upon the world at large?”
As I am personally learning, quite a lot. The volcano sent a cloud of volcanic ash some 20,000 feet in the air, and the wind has blown it southward into Europe’s major air traffic routes. Northern Europe, which includes England, has been disproportionately affected: London Heathrow has been closed for days now, and flights have been cancelled en masse, including mine. This situation is simultaneously horrendous and hilarious — probably more the latter than the former if you have the fortune to not be in Europe at the moment — and underscores just how fragile our man-made aviation systems are, yet, in my search for alternative methods of getting back to Oxford, it occurred to me how very connected this continent truly is: I could take a seemingly infinite number of combinations of trains and/or buses to transport myself back to the United Kingdom.
For the record, I’m not going anywhere near the much vaunted European rail system: the lines at the station in Vienna, the city I was previously in, were unfathomably long, and I can only imagine that trains will be equally crowded. Instead, I shall be embarking on a 23-hour bus from Budapest to Amsterdam on Friday, a train from Amsterdam to Hoek van Holland, an overnight ferry from Hoek van Holland to Harwich, a train from Harwich to London, and a bus from London to Oxford. Wish me luck, for I will need it.
