Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder for Monday the 29th of July.

I am at Paris-Aulay Airport, the airport to the south of the capital and I'll tell you a tiny bit more about that later on.

But mostly I want to

talk to you about why you might want to visit this place in the next couple of weeks

while the Olympics are on.

Can you get here for a reasonable sum?

Can you stay here inexpensively?

Can you actually get to see any of the events? Yes,

yes, yes, you can. I've spent the weekend here and it has been a particular joy because I've

felt as though I'm the only tourist in town. Yes, I've met lots of people here from abroad,

but they have been, for example,

former athletes who come here because they go to every Olympics, somebody who came from Malaysia just to watch the opening ceremony and is now heading home. The parents of the Cox for the

Australian women rowing team who are here obviously to support their daughter

and revel in the joy of being in Paris as well as of course the pride in their daughter for getting

to the other side of the world but I haven't met any actual real tourists of the let's Go to the Muzé d'Orsay, this incredible

place where you can find all kinds of brilliant art from the 19th century, particularly.

Here's how you go about it.

I booked my ticket two days before departure.

I'm glad I did because at that stage we didn't know that everything was going to go horribly wrong with Eurostar,

which it did very spectacularly on Friday the 26th of July, the day of the opening ceremony.

With the arson attack on the high-speed line from Leal to Paris, well that caused immense devastation,

cancellations and general misery for thousands of people. I've met a number of people who were

...