Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

As you can possibly tell from the purring noise, I am on a train but not actually a British train.

Yes, this is a French T-E-R train. That effectively is a

local regional express. And

I'm speeding along probably about

80 miles an hour,

130 kilometres an hour

through southern France.

Just on my way from Bessie to set and I wanted

to talk about the way train fares work in France now there's lots of stuff which

says that train fares everywhere on the planet apart from the UK are all great and in

the UK they're terrible that's

actually not quite true but there are some amazing deals right now in France

for train travellers which kind of render travelling by car

just ridiculously expensive in comparison so So I'm speeding along.

It's a journey of about 25 minutes from Bessier to set,

covering about 30 miles, and the fare for that is a flat 5 euros.

Now that, of course, about £4.50,

and for a journey of that distance, that strikes me as a pretty good deal.

It's about 30% or 40% lower than the normal fare, but for some reason, this summer, they have a promotion called Advartageau Fute in this part of southern France. I have no idea why

they will call it that but they have done and we're speeding past by the way across the

flatlands of this particular part of the lovely French coast overtaking cars which are on the parallel

...