TOM CHESSHYRE is the author of twelve travel books that have taken him from Hull to Tripoli via assignments in North Korea, Nepal, India, the Falkland Islands, St Helena, Colombia, Patagonia and Iceland. He has contributed to the The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The New European, The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday. His magazine work has been for National Geographic Traveller, The Critic, Geographical and Condé Nast Traveller.
On his travels he has been hijacked in Africa, travelled by cargo ship round the Maldives, met tornado-chasers in America and followed in the footsteps of Graham Greene in Haiti.
His latest book is Slow Trains to Istanbul… And Back: A 4,570-Mile Adventure on 55 Rides in which he travels with an old university friend from London, via Paris, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, Passau, Bratislava, Budapest, Timisoara, Bucharest, Ruse and Sofia to Istanbul, describing life along the route to Turkey established by the flamboyant Belgian rail pioneer Georges Nagelmackers on his Orient Express service in the 1880s, before heading back via Greece, Italy and Switzerland into the Low Countries and home again.
Along the way it touches on the reality of rail travel these days (strikes and uncoordinated timetables), secret histories of the tracks from the old glory days of the Orient Express, the rich cultures of the places along the route, sometimes iffy current politics, and how trains take you to places you might never otherwise visit.
It’s also about reaching ‘midlife’ and breaking free for a while. Jerome K. Jerome’s protagonist talked about escaping reality on the journey described in his comic masterpiece Three Men in a Boat: “Change of scene, and absence of the necessity for thought, will restore the mental equilibrium.” Well, there’s a bit of that going on too. Railways allow you to zone out for a while – offering a temporary “vanishing act… down a pinched line of geography to oblivion”, said the great train scribe Paul Theroux (a little flamboyantly)… and why not?
Chesshyre’s previous book was Lost in the Lakes: Notes from a 379-Mile Walk Around the Lake District in which he travels to Penrith by train and sets forth on a giant loop around the park using the sixteen principal lakes as the focus rather than the ‘Wainwright’ peaks (though he pops up a few along the way, too). The idea is to to show a new way around the Lakes that suits the casual rambler while taking in key places such as Keswick, Cockermouth, Coniston, Bowness, Ambleside and Grasmere.
Along the route he talks to scores of people about the Lake District and learns about burning issues regarding second home and holiday homes causing many young locals to move out, the effect of climate change (the risk of terrible flooding), the damage to staffing levels caused by Brexit, and pollution from dreadful blue-green algae in some lakes.
Before that, was Park Life: Around the World in 50 Parks in which he describes a ‘journey’ remembering parks he has visited in cities during 25 years as a travel writer. He is inspired to embark on this ‘voyage of the imagination’ (calling on old notebooks and photographs) after falling in love with his local park in London – Richmond Park – during the Covid lockdowns.
Earlier, Slow Trains Around Spain: A 3,000-Mile Adventure on 52 Rides recounts a trip around Spain in a big wobbly S-shape beginning in Catalonia and continuing to Aragon, along the north coast to Galicia, south to Madrid and Extremadura, through the middle to Valencia, and down south again via Benidorm, Granada, Malaga, Torremolinos and Ronda to Seville. What emerges is a picture of the country seen through the carriage windows on a series of clattering rides, encounters aplenty thrown in.
Prior to that, his book Slow Trains to Venice: A 4,000-Mile Adventure Across Europe is another train travelogue from London to Venice via France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria – at a time when Europe, with Britain on the cusp of departure and populist movements growing, appeared at a turning point.
Earlier still came From Source to Sea: Notes from a 215-mile Walk Along the River Thames, recounting walking the length of England’s longest river a month after Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union. His other books include Ticket to Ride: Around the World on 49 Unusual Train Journeys, Gatecrashing Paradise: Misadventures in the Real Maldives, A Tourist in the Arab Spring, Tales from the Fast Trains: Europe at 186mph, How Low Can You Go? Round Europe for 1p Each Way (Plus Tax), and To Hull and Back: On Holiday in Unsung Britain.
He contributed a chapter about crossing the border into Libya to The Irresponsible Traveller: Tales of Scrapes and Narrow Escapes, a collection of travel stories published by Bradt in 2014. His Times article about Nepal recovering from the devastating 2015 earthquake appears in The Times Companion to 2017. He helped with the research for Robert Low’s W. G. Grace: An Intimate Biography and for Colin Smith’s biography Carlos: Portrait of a Terrorist.
Chesshyre lives in Mortlake in London.