Manchán Magan: On the zen of slow travel, and keeping his feet on the ground

Manchán Magan opens up to Noel Baker on his refusal to fly, travelling Europe by train, and life after cancer

Sat, 17 Aug, 2024 - 02:00

Noel Baker

Manchán Magan loves the train so much, that the day after we speak he is planning on taking a trip from Dublin to Kerry — purely so he could get some work done.

“I have to focus on a gnarly chapter of a book I am writing,” he says, adding quickly, “and my mum is down there” — as though the sheer peace of trundling down our main rail line wasn’t reason enough.

Clipping along the rails is central to the 54-year-old’s latest TV project, Manchán’s Europe By Train, a four-part series for RTÉ in which the intrepid writer and documentary-maker travels around our benighted continent, eschewing budget flights, and stopping off wherever the notion takes him.

It seems a logical step for a man who declared in 2019 that he would no longer take flights for holiday purposes or for travel journalism — something which he says all but put the brakes on that particular line of work.

“In the last five years that I have given up air travel, that has meant a lot more buses, ferries, and trains, and it does slow you the hell down,” Manchán says from his home in Westmeath.

It is also “significantly more expensive,” he adds, but no matter: He clearly loves the chug of the train and, as his new show illustrates, it does not mean an end to the adventure.

As it happens, recording the show came in the midst of an altogether different type of journey — or, as he puts it with a laugh, “when Tommy Tiernan told the world I had cancer”.

It was on Tiernan’s chat show earlier this year that it emerged Magan had prostate cancer. It was never likely to obstruct him, however — after all, on the show, he said of his diagnosis: “But that is making me feel more alive than ever.”

Manchán reveals that he is now in remission, though adds that — while his medical numbers are all in the right place now — “you’re still meant to do things” to keep it that way. It may well be that the spectre of cancer added something extra to the filming of Manchán’s Europe By Train, in which he and his small crew launch into a Kraftwerkian TransEurope express trip, starting in Dublin and taking in Wales, London, Brussels, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Zagreb, Lake Bled, Genoa, Monaco, Toulouse and San Sebastián.

“It was a massive journey,” he admits, but said he wanted “to give people a sense of what was the reality of deciding to take your holidays by train — the pros and cons.”

Manchan Magan travels entirely by train in Europe by Train.

To hear him describe enjoying the immediacy of your surroundings as you travel by train, it’s clear he is a fan. “Even on the first day, we leave Dublin Port [by ferry], arrive in Wales, and two-and-a-half hours later, I’m ziplining down an old mine at 140mph speeding through the air,” he recalls.

As Manchán points out, unlike airports, train stations tend to be located bang in the centre of whatever town or city you visit. While you may still end up legging it to a certain platform to make your train on time, “it is a myriad times more enjoyable than the cattle-like experience of going through an airport”.

What’s more, he says that his progress along the Mediterranean coast would have ended up being more expensive if he’d taken the number of short hop flights that would have been required. He adds that the simplicity of travel by rail meant that he could just decamp somewhere like Toulouse in France — “a city I knew nothing about” — and get an immediate sense of the place.

It all syncs perfectly with his inveterate sense of curiosity, something which helps explain his peripatetic working life, which started when he began taking long, wending journeys overseas with his brother as they followed the “zen of travel”.

It’s not to say that he doesn’t have some favourite plane memories. For example, he recalls landing into a farthest margins of northern Canada to meet the Inuit, visiting remote Zambia, and going to an island off Taiwan where people lived under the ground, all on tiny, two propeller aircraft — which sounds pleasantly like Indiana Jones.

He thinks he may even have imagined flying into Peru on board “a grown-up plane”, which uniquely had wooden furniture inside — including teak shelving — adding: “It’s like a memory from another world”. However, he is clear that plane travel as it is currently configured cannot go on untrammelled.

He still flies for cultural reasons, such as when giving lectures, but sees the move in France to effectively ban internal flights as a sensible policy. “The way that it will change is it goes back to a reality that you and I knew — in the late 80s, it was always a bus or a train, the option of a flight just wasn’t there.”

On this latest rail journey, there were many highlights. His discovery of a vibrant Congolese community in Brussels brought him back to “the most exciting time in my life” in the early 90s, when he stayed in what was Zaire. The Croatian capital of Zagreb was another eye-opener. “Inland Croatia was an entirely new vista for me, and I lost my heart to it,” he says.

“In Zagreb, they just don’t have tourists — they were genuinely excited to talk to me.” This led to a host of ecological activities and a hot-air balloon ride, one which dropped to the level of the treeline.

Manchán’s travels tend to be street level and he has, he says, been in places in the past where a sense of tension was palpable. But his recent travels around Europe has indicated to him that the continent is not anything like as fractured, or as fractious, as the news cycle would suggest.

“It woke me up to this idea that we are fed these stories by the media — that Europe is in conflict and the world is in conflict, to focus on disharmony in the world,” he says. In the Balkan states, he was instead astounded at the regularity with which people urged him to drink the river water, proclaiming it the best and purest in Europe.

For Manchán, it was more than a sense of national or regional pride, it is rather a knowledge of the importance and centrality of nature to people’s lives.

As he says of the prompts to “please enjoy our water” — “I haven’t heard that line from anyone apart from indigenous people.”

In Hungary, now closely associated with autocratic rule, Manchán says many ordinary people would quite openly criticise the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and were focussed on their locality.

“On this trip, communities were excited by new, innovative things,” he says, not least the drive in other European countries to live more sustainably — something that he feels could be a model for how Ireland can change its approach.

“I used to think I would have to do a big, long journey to New Zealand and West Africa to get radical new perspectives, but there were so many of them,” Manchán says.

Manchán Magan in Schull, Co Cork. Picture Dan Linehan

He uses the example of the Italian port city of Genoa, where a woman at a market went into lengthy, passionate detail about making basil pesto. She took him pretty much by the hand to find the best pine nut, then selected the 22-month aged Parmesan cheese and the different types of basil on offer.

“There was a time when we had that locality,” he muses. “I was really humbled that that was still going on.”

In the Basque city of San Sebastián, everything opens up to the sea and a typically younger generation take the time to clean up the cigarette butts.

It all meant that when he returned, he found himself settling on the “99% more positive things happening in the world”.

Maybe his recent brush with mortality also played a part but, regardless, it seems Manchán and slow travel just go together.