You cannot have missed the hype surrounding Eurostar’s imminent move from its existing London terminal at Waterloo to St Pancras. For those anxious to get from Paris or Brussels to London in a rush, the Eurostar train is certainly the way to go, offering city-centre-to-city-centre journey times with which the plane simply cannot compete. Fares start at €38.50 one way.

Eurostar old hands have often moaned at the painfully slow approach into the old Waterloo terminal—an approach that will soon become a thing of the past. But we always rather liked it. The train creaked round curves and crawled over Victorian viaducts that afforded delicious perspectives on south London life. There were glimpses of Caribbean street life in Brixton, the brooding hulk of an old power station at Battersea, and the washing hung out to dry on the balconies of apartment blocks at Nine Elms.

When the new route comes into public service on 14 November 2007, trains will dive under the Thames in a new tunnel well to the east of London and briefly remerge above the ground in Essex before taking a subterranean route under east London to reach St Pancras, 20 minutes quicker than the old line into Waterloo. It remains to be seen whether the south Essex marshes at 180 miles per hour have quite the same fascinating appeal as Brixton and Battersea at 30 miles per hour.

Eurostar tickets can be booked online. For more on city approaches with Eurostar see hidden europe’s features on London and Brussels.

This is the first in a series of fortnightly blog posts by the editors of hidden europe.

A few weeks ago, we stumbled upon hidden europe, an amazing publication devoted to the lost corners and secret terrains of Europe. We blogged about the magazine, ordered six back issues, delighted in the unexpected arrival of the current issue in the mail, and then blogged about it some more.

This sort of fan activity doesn’t usually happen in a vacuum. Naturally, we sent the editorial board effusive, gushing emails. Happily, they weren’t put off by our enthusiasm, and today the editors of hidden europe write the first in their fortnightly series of posts for the EuroCheapo Blog.

We’re pleased as punch.

Recently we learned about the existence of UK site Motorhomeholidayswap.com. Site founder Chris Farrow, who hails from the north of England, emailed us to tell us about his business. Just six months old, Motorhomeholidayswap has already facilitated motorhome/campervan exchanges among people across Europe, North America, and Australasia.

Members need to cough up the annual fee of £45 (€66; $91) to exchange motorhomes, though registration itself is free.

Motorhome exchange—much like house exchange and other cheap exchange-oriented strategies—looks like a great way to cut down on costs and assemble a budget-friendly itinerary. We say right-o.

As low-cost airlines extend and strengthen their route maps, it’s become increasingly difficult to find truly exotic, untouched places to visit. Even given our expansive definition of Europe, which extends to the Urals, includes the Caucasus, and then swoops down to envelop Turkey, it’s ever more difficult to find places where tourist traffic is light.

That said, we can think of a lot of places firmly off the tourist track, like Northern Cyprus. (And, yes, geography purists, we know that Cyprus is not part of geographical Europe.)

While the southern part of Cyprus is thriving—it’s a part of the EU, will begin using the euro as its currency in January, and is booming economically—the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus remains politically isolated and on the physical periphery of Europe.

That said, we’re beginning to pick up on an as yet faint buzz about Northern Cyprus. It would appear that decades of isolation translates into undertouristed ruins and uncrowded beaches, among other fine draws.

The only way to get to Northern Cyprus by air is via Turkey. We found a mid-October one-way airfare from Istanbul to Ercan on the Cyprus Turkish Airlines site today for TRY 111.93 (€62.17; $85.63).

Also check out the North Cyprus Tourism Centre’s official site.

For over a week now we’ve been staring at a postcard sent to us by Miranda Siegel. Postmarked Kangerlussuaq, it bears an image of snow-covered houses in the Greenlandic town of Ilulissat. Miranda reports having eaten caribou, muskox, and arctic bilberries, among other exotic delicacies during her recent Greenland adventure. She also reports that capital Nuuk needs a budget hotel.

In news from another arctic land, we learned today that Karelian Trains—a partnership between Finnish and Russian Railways—have ordered four high-speed trains for the company’s Helsinki-St. Petersburg route. In 2006, the passenger tally on this route jumped 26 per cent over the previous year’s numbers. The company clearly hopes to maintain this momentum.

A range of European low-cost carriers are experiencing difficulties. Air Berlin’s recent profit warning and Vueling’s halted forward momentum are just two examples of this season’s troubles.

Now comes the news that SkyEurope will close its Krakow and Budapest bases in late October. The airline is spinning this shift as a reinforcement of “its position in Prague and Vienna”—a brave face, certainly, but contracting its bases from five to three hardly hints at financial strength.

We hope that the contraction works for them, as SkyEurope has been one of our favorite European LCCs for some time now, in large part due to their Bratislava base and their routes to Croatia and Bulgaria.

1. We’re still working our way through some back issues of the remarkable hidden europe. On our commute this morning we had our nose in issue 12, which came out in January of this year. The long feature on night trains made us wistful; the shorter article on Flemish béguinages and their contemporary inheritance (in which we learned that the Brugge béguinage accommodates four dozen single women today) was fabulously suggestive. The piece that almost made us miss our stop, however, was a short, enticing little “snippet” on the diverse and lively Brussels ‘hood of les Marolles.

2. The EU is full of smaller regional groupings; our favorite among these is the Visegrád Four, which encompasses Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The Czech Republic took over the Visegrád presidency in June, and will hold it through mid-2008. Among other things, the Visegrád group has the potential to serve as a bridge between Ukraine and the EU, should that direction be eventually pursued.

3. Today, Ryanair announced a massive six million seat sale. Fares are technically free—passengers pay taxes and charges only. Tickets are on sale through September 10 for travel from October 1 through February 7. Blackout periods include October 19-November 4 (for flights in and out of the UK and Ireland only) and December 18 through January 8.