The Cafe de l’Hovercraft, established 1966, stands opposite the jardin Richelieu in the heart of Calais. I like the cheerfully retro name, harking back to a cross-Channel service from another age.
And I particularly enjoy the venue for its dozens of variants of Welsh rarebit, the gargantuan “Yeti steak hache”, and its extravagant hours (10am-1am, daily) for those who arrive in the French port with a Yeti-sized appetite after a long, uncertain journey.
At dawn on Good Friday, the notion that I could dine at the brasserie that celebrates the aeroglisseur seemed implausible.
I was booked to travel on the 9am Flixbus departure from London to Brussels. The previous Friday, tens of thousands of coach passengers had spent many hours stuck in queues at the Port of Dover. And Good Friday promised to be another tricky day.
Service 815 was leaving from Victoria Coach Station, the UK coach industry’s mother ship. As I approached, ferry companies and the Port of Dover were warning online of waits of two to three hours on what was expected to be the busiest day of the Easter weekend.
“Don’t forget to bring food, drinks and entertainment for your journey,” the port’s Twitter feed advised.
Easier said than done. While the journey I was undertaking was not quite as ambitious as Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, demand for supplies was so strong that many of the shelves at the coach station’s Pret a Manger were already empty
At least there was no great time pressure. Forget two-hour check-in for flights, or one-hour Eurostar deadlines: Flixbus, which had sold me a ticket from London to Brussels for £61, suggested I arrived a good five minutes before departure. The driver, Hussein, checked my ticket while my folding bicycle – cunningly disguised in a black canvas bag – was stowed in the hold.
Our correspondent’s journey began on a coach
(Simon Calder)
Aboard the double-deck, acid-green Flixbus, I was supposed to be in seat 7A. But it seemed to be occupied, so instead I took 18D – a window seat in the last-but-one row. Our departure was delayed due to a Liverpool-bound passenger discovering – in the nick of time – that he was on the wrong coach. I hope he made it to Merseyside.
Progress through southeast London was sluggish. The coach paused to pick up passengers at Elephant and Castle – at what was…
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