You go away for a week and...

To travel is, hopefully, a better thing than to arrive back in the office. For a good definition of the word "tirade", try this: spend a week drifting around the Caribbean, then on Thursday wander back into work and enquire, casually, "Has anything been happening?"

The salvo of ripe language by way of response affirmed that, indeed, quite a lot had been going on: snowstorms, the closure of the London Underground for three hours because of power cuts, and the fire in the Channel Tunnel.

Two components of this trinity of calamities have diminished, but the third will have long-term repercussions for Britain's travellers. Among them, our illustrator Sally Kindberg (whose work appears on page 13). After her journey from Brussels this week, she vowed "I don't ever want to go on Eurostar again."

At lunchtime on Tuesday, Ms Kindberg was in Brussels, trying to catch a train to Waterloo. The fire had taken place the previous evening, so she assumed the train operator, Eurostar, would have contingency plans up and running. The problem was, the company didn't seem to have any.

"Nobody knew what was going on. One Eurostar official offered me the numbers of three airlines, but wouldn't let me use his phone." The queue for the public phones was so long that she gave up and waited to find out what Eurostar would do with the hundreds of stranded passengers.

Eventually a plan was hatched. Travellers would go by Eurostar across the French border to Lille, change trains and head for Calais. A bus to the docks would connect with a ferry over to Dover. Here, waiting coaches would take everyone to Ashford. Another Eurostar train would cover the final leg to Waterloo, arriving in London by 9.30pm.

If the theory of this six-stage journey sounds unappealing, the practice was much, much worse. Early on, the passengers waited an hour at Lille station for the Calais train. To compensate, perhaps, the waiting buses at Calais were super-heated. This would have been fine - except that the passengers were stuck on the buses for nearly three hours.

It turned out that they were waiting for a SeaFrance ferry. This was a curious choice of shipping line on the part of Eurostar, since there are two much larger companies -P&O and Stena Line - that each operates at least one ferry to Dover every hour.

The wait on the coach was better than the voyage. "It seemed to me there were too many people," says Ms Kindberg. "There were not enough seats, so loads of us ended up sitting on the floor." They had been issued with refreshment vouchers, but these were valid only from one cafe - which soon sported a queue of serpentine proportions.

The search for food became academic. Ms Kindberg lost her appetite when some fellow passengers began a demonstration of synchronised sea-sickness. "Many of them had chosen the train to avoid the Channel crossing. Some people were getting hysterical."

During the two-hour sailing, passengers were assured that they would receive a refund on their Eurostar tickets - a promise, says Ms Kindberg, on which the company reneged. But the immediate concern was to reach London.

"We had to change buses between leaving the boat at Dover and reaching Ashford station. Then the train took ages to reach Waterloo, where we finally arrived just before 2am. I was lucky because I live in London. Lots of other passengers who were heading further had serious problems. Eurostar was offering to find hotels for people, but refused to pay for them. One young French girl who was supposed to be travelling on to York said she was going to spend the night waiting at King's Cross."

Ms Kindberg managed to persuade her against hanging around London's hub of prostitution and low-life, then set about finding a cab home. By now, fights were breaking out among frustrated passengers arguing over taxis. "One driver told me that there had been plenty of cabs earlier in the night, but they'd all been taken by Eurostar staff to get home."

There was no sign of the promised refund, either. Ms Kindberg finally procured a complaints form, whose small print revealed that she could expect only a free trip on Eurostar. "There's no way I want another ticket", she says.

The strength of feeling in her voice mirrored the reaction when I asked if there had been any travel news of note this week. I would have offered Ms Kindberg some duty-free rum had I not already been obliged to use it to pacify colleagues.