Here is the full version of Guy’s great adventure escaping the volcano from Cannes at this year’s MIPTV.  Put the kettle on and enjoy…

It is natural that a major natural thump like a volcano should have a knock-on effect on reality, even in the rarefied reality of the MIPTV television conference in Cannes last week.

As news spread through the convention centre, television execs who once were super-confident media types descended into confused children, lost without control of their Outlook Calendar.

My first surreal moment happened the morning after the volcano struck, though I cannot say it was directly related. I was in the shower after a heavy night networking and drinking rosé wine. (Aside: I never drink rosé unless I am in France, and then I only drink rosé). In the shower the soap dish was at eye level and so directly in front of me was the small hotel bottle of shampoo. On the back of the bottle in large letters was the instruction “Avoid eye contact”. I instinctively turned away and stopped looking at it in case it popped its lid and sprayed molten sandalwood all over me. I gave it a quick sideways glance as I left my room, and deadlocked the door.

Out in the Palais des Festivals, it was dawning on everyone that having the whole of UK airspace closed was going to impact on everyone. This appeared to be a major issue for most people who absolutely had to get to other conferences, meetings, loved ones, dinners in other countries. I tried to reassure them that actually these were not that important in the grander scheme of things, and that a volcano erupting and covering most of northern Europe’s stratosphere with a sulfuric cloud was probably a valid excuse to cancel. Personally I was also still trying to reconcile my own issues with a bottle of shampoo that had instructed me to stop eyeballing it. A volcano exploding was just another surreal moment.

To be fair I had my own personal deadline to be back in London for the weekend as I was looking forward to catching up with my sister who I had not seen for a long time, and who was going to meet me in London when she got back from a short break in Italy. We had worked to get our flight times closely synchronised so I was upset that I was going to have to break the plans.

Given that the largest episode of Race Around The World had just started since Germany invaded Poland, I also figured that any bright travel idea that I had would undoubtedly be shared by half a million others. This was the time to zig when everyone else was zagging.

With the other Aussies in MIP we talked about taking the Eurostar to Paris and then to London. This would be a lovely romantic European journey speeding through the French wine countryside at an epilepsy-inducing speed. But half a million people had also thought of this and the trains were already full for four days. Indeed, a few Eurostar employees had also realised this and had put up the price of a single train ticket to 900 Euros. Given the French train workers were also in strike, the French rapidly became a ‘target demographic’ for all the wrong reasons. We spent most of dinner that evening trying to find a translation for “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”.

We looked into renting a car and driving, but I have a feeling half a million other people had also thought of this and the Channel tunnel would be seeing stationary traffic for a while.

In a flash moment of genius (well more of a slow recognition of a good idea but it was the fastest thought I had had all morning), it dawned on me that my dear sister in Italy would also be struggling to get back to London, so why not just hop on a train to Italy.

I had inter-railed a few times as a teenager and the rail networks could not have possibly changed in the past twenty years, so I packed up early on Friday morning and, dragging suitcases so heavy that they could have stopped any airplane far more effectively than a volcanic cloud, I walked through the cobbled streets of Cannes to the train station.

Feeling very happy to be setting off on a European adventure again, I bought my ticket and ran onto the train which had mysteriously appeared twenty minutes before its scheduled time. Just as I was about to dive through the closing train doors, the nice lady who ran my B&B in Cannes appeared like magic next to me. I think I gave her the same sideways glance I gave the shampoo bottle as she said: “Monsieur, votre carte de credit” which I must have left on the counter when I was paying for the room. I gave her an enormous and slightly incredulous Thank You before grabbing the card like Indiana Jones’ hat before the doors completed their guillotine closure. The French have managed to filter their French Revolution death technology subtly into their current day public transport system with admirable success.

I knew I would have to change trains a few times between Cannes and Florence, but with a day in hand and now a credit card in the pocket, it would be a time to embrace randomness and see what the Universe had to offer.

The first change was at Nice for the train to the Italian border town of Ventimiglia. The platform number for this train changed three times in the ten minutes before departure. If this were Central Station, it would not have been so much of an issue as all platforms are easily accessed by walking to end of the platform and moving to the next one. In these stations, all platform access involves dragging my cases down a couple of flights of stairs to the pedestrian tunnel under the platforms, and then back up again when you reach the platform number. A subconscious thought dropped into my head, as I wondered how my chiropractor is.

On board the train I realised that I had been right that nothing had changed in the past twenty years. At all. In fact I might even have been in this very carriage when I was travelling in Italy before. I casually checked to see if my ‘I heart’ graffiti was still there.

Anyway, with time on my hands I thought it would be a good moment to recharge the prepaid local mobile I had. After all, I needed to text the crew in Cannes that all was well and I had not just disappeared, and I needed to text my sister that I was coming to see her in Florence.

The train route between Nice and Ventimiglia hugs the mountainous coastline, providing stunning and luxurious views of the small towns and villages and the Mediterranean sea glistening temptingly in between the railway’s tunnels. I made a discovery on the journey that the open air railway sections last almost exactly the time it takes to phone the pre-paid recharge number, enter a 16 digital credit card and expiry date, but not quite long enough to listen the autovoice repeat the number so you can then press 1# to confirm the recharge before the train enters the tunnel and the line cuts out. I am absolutely not exaggerating that I repeated this routine 7 times between 7 consecutive tunnels before switching the phone off.

As we reached Ventimiglia, every mobile in the carriage beeped simultaneously as the Italian phone networks SMSed their “Welcome to Vodafone Italy” message.

In Ventimiglia, it was easy to buy a ticket to Florence. Well, easy once you realise that Florence is called Firenze in Italian, that you need three tickets instead of one, and that all of the automatic ticket machines declined my credit card.

Oh and of course now the French pre-paid network does not work in Italy so all communications were officially down.

PART DEUX - PRIVATE JETS, HIRE CARS AND IPADS

The global company Power Gen has offices in many countries and it localises its websites into different territory. Each local site has its own domain name, thus powergenuk, powergenfrance, and the unfortunately elided powergenitalia.

Gazing out of the train to Florence and thinking of this made me laugh out loud. So much so that the people sitting around me all gave weird looks. I got back to playing Flight Control on the iPad.

The volcano had now closed Paris airport and the cloud was expanding east and south. Yet the story was slipping down to second or even third position on the Guardian website. Being in the midst of this, I can see the chaos that is building. With each day that goes by around 17,000 people get bumped from their booked flights and join the queue of people wanting to get home. There is a set number of allocated flights that airports can handle every day. So for every day that goes by, the problem grows. As I reach a score of 78 on Flight Control, I realise what dire problems would occur if too many planes were to appear at an airport simultaneously. Especially if I was an air traffic controller.

I change trains for the fourth time at a town called La Spezia for the final leg to Florence. On the platform are a young American couple on their honeymoon. They look at my lack of rucksack and ask me what I am doing travelling through Italy. “Escaping the volcano cloud” I say. They look at me strangely and start to move away. “But…but…haven’t you heard about the volcano”. They say this is the first they have heard of it as they do not speak Italian so only watch MTV. Even when the apocalypse arrives, there will be people whose last image as the world burns will be the latest Lady Gaga duet. Not a bad image, come to think about it.

Florence railway station is buzzing at rush hour. I have been on trains now for 10 hours and offline for the same amount of time. The cab driver understands my elementary Italian - a combination of Spanish, French and Super Mario Bros.

The cab winds its way out of Florence up to the small hillside town of Fiesole, arriving up the crunching gravel driveway of the Villa San Michele as the sunset over the golden domes of Florence. I smell of trains, of other peoples’ perfume, of airbrakes and oil, of Albanian labourers, dogs, cigar smoke and faulty air-conditioning. Whatever. I am in need of a weekend of rest, and have just arrived in a C16th converted monastery where the staff call me Mr Guy, where there is a heated outdoor pool, unlimited prosecco, Molton Brown bathroom accessories and ethernet into the room.

The next morning I wake up to an email from EasyJet. “A volcanic eruption in Iceland is pumping clouds of volcanic ash into the atmosphere. We are very sorry but your flights have had to be cancelled due to the risk from volcanic ash”. I top up the bath with Prosecco and forget about the world.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, a clock has started ticking. It is Saturday and my Qantas flight is due to leave on Wednesday at midday to go back to Sydney. I am missing my partner and my 17-month-old son. My seat at the dinner table in Sydney has been filled by a laptop running a Skype video call for 10 days. When he reaches out to daddy, he hits the space bar. The chilled Zen approach is starting to wear off, and I do not want to have that flight cancelled.

Aside from catching up with my sister’s family, there is an option of hitching a lift with them from Florence to London via private jet. At a time where flexibility is the answer, hopping onto a Netjet flight at any point we want seems like a genius idea. This is a world where the pilot turns around and asks if you are ready to take off, and where the seats not only go forward and back, but can rotate as well. It’s like dodgems on rails at 30,000ft.

Unfortunately, jets are airplanes just like any other jet plane, and on Saturday afternoon the Managing Director of Netjet sent out the totally responsible but galling email that they had cancelled all flights and were not taking any bookings for a week. Over dinner, we decided to drive back from Florence to London, and try to get a berth on the car-train through the channel tunnel.

Three adults, two kids. Two laptops loaded with games, two iPhones, one iPod touch and an iPad. A drive through four countries with the appropriately celebratory goal of reaching Reims, the capital of Champagne.

It is 8am and we crunch down the driveway and through madly narrow Italian roads as the fog lifts from in between the vines around Florence. Overnight, Florence airport has been closed, eastern European airspace has closed down, and Spain has been added to the list of affected countries. The cost to British Airways has been quoted as 130m pounds per day.

While the short-term impact of the volcano has been air travellers, there will be a rapidly increasing impact on other sectors as international deliveries are cut off completely. Flowers from Holland, international courier deliveries including my Amazon orders, Ebay purchases. The loss of trade is much larger than just airlines.

We also do not know the health impact of this cloud. I cannot believe that the health ministers are publicly saying that when tonnes of invisible particles of volcanic glass and lava descend back to the ground it will not have an impact on our health, as well as livestock and crops. While I am not holding my breath about making my flight back to Sydney on Wednesday, I feel that holding my breath is exactly what we should be doing normally. Should we be wearing masks?

We power-drive through Europe in shifts. Through northern Italy and into Switzerland. We hear that there are traffic snarls through the motorways of central France. We thank the satnav gods for directing us through Switzerland. It is raining and the mountains are steep and sharp. They are impressive but are dark, jagged and not alive with the sound of music. It is a relief to be in the long tunnels, even the claustrophobic 15-kilometre Gottardo tunnel. There are moments of stationary traffic through tollgates and borders, but nothing we cannot make up on the open freeways.

As we re-enter France, the kids have exhausted two iPhones. The iPad is holding up admirably. The kids are playing Doodlejump, Bondi Rescue, Sally’s Spa and Jungle Crash. I have got them testing the latest version of the Project Factory’s new iPhone game called Scratch and got great feedback. As the iPad dies, I bring out the secret weapon of a PSP and we buy a car charger for the various Apple devices.

My filmmaker brother-in-law has never seen so many gadgets in one place and I sense that there is mild sense of worry about what all these games may be doing to their imagination and sociability. Naturally, I think it’s a good part of their development, and anyway it keeps the car atmosphere positive and fun. I have called myself the Arcade Manager.

We arrive in Reims around 10pm. The hotel is gorgeous and we tuck straight into champagne and a coq au vin. I locate all the power sockets in my room and start what my 8-year-old niece calls “The Holy Rechargingness” in preparation for the journey tomorrow. The iPad sleeps well.

It is early on Monday morning. A week ago, I had a full day of meetings with clients, partners and potential investors in London. These have all been shunted and we are now en route to Calais. The newspaper headlines are talking about five days of airspace closure. I post a Facebook update giving odds of 3:1 against Qantas opening flights by Wednesday.

As we leave the hotel, the concierge tells us that a number of people arrived late into the night having got snarled up in the traffic from Italy to France. There is no sense of triumphalism that we avoided it, merely an acknowledgement that we need to get going to meet the booking time across the Channel.

Close to Calais, we pass a taxi packed with suitcases with Lisbon number plates. Lisbon! I look through the windows and see an unshaven taxi driver looking a bit like Saddam Hussein did when he was caught by the Americans. This will have been the fare of his life. Later at Calais, I bump into the taxi again and talk to the occupants. They paid 2,200 pounds for the journey. “We just needed to get home”, they say. They have not shaved for a couple of days and look exhausted. As the cab driver leaves, I watch him pause at the first roundabout as if taking a deep breath before starting back to Portugal.

I call Flight Centre in Sydney and start to plan the other options. As this stage, these boil down to a single decision about whether to stick within the system and trust it, or break out and go freelance. Sticking within the system will involve waiting in London for the airways to clear, for the booking systems to unclog, and rolling dice about when my flight will be rebooked. The advantage here is to accelerate our plans to expand The Project Factory into the UK and reschedule the meetings. Freelance will involve taking a train to Athens or another southern European city, and aiming to get a flight from there. This should get me back to family and all the booked pitches and projects closer to schedule.

PART THREE - THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

I am so used to staying in hotels that I nearly stole the bathmat from my mum’s apartment this morning.

Yesterday we had crossed under the channel tunnel in the awesome car-train. It is awesome not only as a feat of engineering, but also because it feels like you are driving into the belly of a riot van. The outside looks like sheet steel and the windows are reinforced and let in light with the reluctance of a nightclub bouncer.

We have been met at Calais by a driver from my brother-in-law’s movie company. He drives like he’s been watching Jason Statham movies and actually managed to kick up dust reversing up the M25 to get to an exit he missed.

We stop at a café. The whole experience is unbelievably crap. The first thing you see when you walk through the semi-functioning sliding doors is an orange cone in the middle of the entrance warning that a tile is broken. The men’s toilets are broken. But worst of all, Wimpy still exists. The company that pioneered the square hamburger in the eighties has survived and rebranded. And what a rebrand! I would love to have been part of the brief to the agency. I imagine it went something like this: “Hi. We are a hamburger chain that has somehow managed to bump along the bottom of the fast-food chain for years without actually going bust. We have a few motorway outlets where we can afford the cheap rent. We do not know whether we will be around next year, and we want all this reflected in our new brand design please.”

The logo has shrunk in between the burger buns, leaving the sort of empty space that mirrors the queues for their food. It really looks like someone has left a burger in an air-conditioned room for 15 years, and it has woken up as a logo.

After inhaling a toasted panini that looks like roadkill, Jason Statham takes off again and an hour later we arrive in London. The iPads are surgically removed from the kids and we look at the progress of the volcano cloud which is still spitting out from Iceland. The unpronounceable name of the volcano is Eyjafjallajokull which I have anglicized as i-ya-faaka-y’all.

We check the status of flights on the Qantas website, and it is now that I get the news that I did not want. 36 hours before QF31 leaves London for Sydney, it has been cancelled.

I call Qantas to rebook, and have two options: Upgrade to a one way business class for $8,300 which leaves on 27^th April, or hang tight until the first available flight on 1^st May. 1^st May!

This is not a hard economic decision, but I am gutted to remain as a Space Bar Dad via Skype for the next ten days.

And thus the next week or so will witness the birth of The Project Factory’s London office. Today we have opened up channels into two agencies, two television channels and have been asked to submit pitches to two European broadcasters for transmedia shows. It’s a new dawn and a new day.

As I said goodnight to my 6-year nephew last night, he playfully punched me in the chest like an Italian Boss and, a propos of nothing, said: “I got two words to say to you. Don’t give up the dream, buddy.”

Jago, the next ten days will be for you.

[EPILOGUE: Thanks to Flight Centre, Guy managed to reschedule his flight to the 28th March 2010 - only four days after the original schedule, and just in time to arrive at Sydney airport and go straight to see Tears for Fears and Spandau Ballet play live at Sydney Entertainment Centre.  Gold!…..]

[First published by Mumbrella.com.au. Thanks Tim!)