Travelling from Paris to Istanbul by train is an undertaking made famous by the historic Orient Express. ![]() Poster advertising the Orient Express from 1891. I give her a cuddle and in return she informs me that the red-light district is good for Japanese food. The third thing I notice is a lady offering free hugs on the main square. Parts suggest Bath, others Milton Keynes, others the Tirolean Alps. The second thing I notice is that the city’s architecture is anything but uniform. A toddler three rows back has been kicking off since Karlsruhe.Stepping off the train at Stuttgart, the first thing I notice is the lack of a station (it has been levelled in readiness for a new one). Train journeys can be spellbinding like that: clock time seems to melt away. It’s been eight hours since London, and yet it hardly feels like 10 minutes. Lowly fields go by in a flash, and so do Nancy, Strasbourg, Noisy-le-Sec. ![]() The doubledecker TGV towers above the land it cuts through. All I have to do is get on the right trains and find my accommodation. ![]() My trip from the UK to Turkey has all been planned and booked via Byway, a tour operator which specialises in flight-free, sustainable travel. (The scheme is called Tumbleweeding and offers shelter to writers in exchange for helping out in the shop.) By heading there I’m being hopelessly nostalgic, but in the event the queue to enter the shop is round the block and I don’t make it inside. With just two hours to play with, I cold-shoulder the signature attractions and make a beeline for Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the Seine, where I once slept next to the poems for three months in my 20s while working on my first book.
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