Italian nuns aid AAOC escaping ash cloud travel turmoil

Some stories are so improbable that they must be true. This one is, and the subjects may find themselves dining out on it for weeks to come.

Dorset businessmen Anders Hildebrand and Jon Walthall of Anglo American Oil Company Ltd (AAOC) in Wareham found themselves stranded in picturesque Vicenza, north-east Italy, after ash from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption closed European airspace last week.

Anders and Jon were in the city, about 60 kilometres west of Venice, for the annual conference for Aspen alkylate petrol, a sulphur- and benzene-free fuel that AAOC distributes from its Wareham office.

“We knew on Thursday that returning would be tricky, although the extent and duration of the shutdown surprised us all,” began Anders. “And while Vicenza, home of football legend Roberto Baggio and former rally world champ Miki Biasion, is a beautiful city and a great place to stay, we needed to get back to business.”

Their EasyJet flights cancelled, the pair chanced their luck with the Italian state railway, the Ferrovie dello Stato and the first train to France.

So had everybody else.

“The station was packed with people,” said Jon, taking up the story. “Quite a few Brits were there although they seemed to be taking it in their stride better than some nationalities. The bizarre thing is that, despite the chaos, the trains were running on time.

“I always thought that was an urban myth,” smiled Jon.

On time the trains may have been, but Anders and Jon boarded their train without tickets.

“One rather excited station employee urged us to get on, while another, calmer one told us to queue and get tickets,” said Anders. “Not knowing when we’d get away, we jumped on as soon as possible.”

It was at that point that the adventure took on a rather filmic twist.

“We found ourselves in a carriage filled almost exclusively with nuns,” said Anders. “No seats were available, but the sisters took pity on us and squeezed up where they could and we managed to have seats.”

Jon, meanwhile, was laughing quietly to himself.

“I kept looking round for an acoustic guitar to be strummed before a Julie Andrews-style bout of community singing began. I was quite disappointed when it didn’t.”

The irony that the pair had been attending an ecological conference when an act of God caused European airspace to be shut, resulting in their being in the company of 50-odd nuns on a train, was not lost on Jon.

“We were in Vicenza with our colleagues from Aspen discussing how to make the environment a better place when er... ‘divine intervention’ took over,” he commented.

A more immediate problem – lack of tickets – soon occupied their minds.

Said Anders, “A few hours into the journey, and with no ticket inspector having been round, we knew that one soon would. We weren’t sure whether we could pay on the train or if we’d be thrown off at the next station, which could have been in the middle of nowhere.”

Jon said that some of the nuns must have heard his and Anders’ conversation about their tickets – or lack of.

“They started talking among themselves, all the way through the carriage, and smiling at us in a... well, I suppose reassuring way,” he said.

Within an hour, the carriage connecting door opened and the inspector entered. The pair braced themselves for at best a verbal dressing down from the official and at worst an unscheduled sightseeing stop at the first station up the line.

“We saw something being passed hand-to-hand by the nuns, from the direction of where the inspector had just been,” said Jon. “Quietly, one of the nuns pressed something into my hands with a grin. It was two tickets that had just been checked, passed to us from up the carriage.

“The train being so busy, the inspector hadn’t time to stamp or mark or them and he looked at ‘ours’ and carried on. We breathed a sigh of relief and said a quiet ‘thank you’ to the nuns.

“We gave the tickets back, of course,” he said, adding, “It was a little like the scene in The Great Escape when the Allied POWs’ papers are checked on the train. I kept wondering if I was the Donald Pleasance character and Anders was James Garner's or the other way round,” he added.

The rest of the journey to Paris passed without incident, although the chaos at Gare du Nord, in the French capital, surprised the intrepid eco-warriors.

“The station was jam-packed with people,” said Anders. “Trains [to England via Eurostar] were leaving late, early and without being announced by station staff. People were wandering around outside clutching their luggage. Children were crying. We overheard some Brits stating that they’d been told they could stay in their hotel, but that the rate was to triple. Others told us that car-hire rates had gone up 1,000%.”

After a day’s wait in Paris, divine intervention was possibly at play again when Anders and Jon boarded, without any fuss, a train to St Pancras – this time having bought tickets – during a lull on Sunday.

They arrived in London before catching another train to Gatwick Airport – their point of departure for Vicenza – and their car.

“It gave me an idea of what it’s like to be in a disaster area,” said Jon. “We felt like refugees fleeing God-knows-what in some third-world country, but it was Europe in the 21st century.”