Take off your clothes and fasten your seatbelt

Hamburg: There are nudist beaches, nudist resorts and nudist hotels. It was only a matter of time before an enterprising travel agency came up with nudist charter flights.

Step aboard the charter flight, take off all your clothes and stow them along with your hand luggage in the overheard compartment. Then take your seat, fasten your seatbelt and enjoy air travel in the all-together.

You do have to wear clothing in the departures and arrivals lounges and in transit to your nudist destination. But for die-hard "naturists" this is altogether the dream of travelling in the all-together.

"People are booking flights like crazy," says Enrico Hess, the travel agent in the eastern German city of Erfurt who came up with the gimmick only a couple of weeks ago.

"Word has spread like wildfire around the world. There's a naturist network and they have been calling me day and night," the 34-year-old travel agent says.

The first flights for next summer to the German Baltic Sea island of Usedom have already been booked out -- six months in advance.

"Actually, it was not my idea to start with. A customer came in and said he was a lifelong nudist and enquired as to whether there were any charter flights for nudists," Hess says.

"I thought he was joking, but he was dead serious. He said naturists love to kick off their kit any time they can. If you have a plane load of nudists on their way to a nudist resort - then why not let them do their thing in the confines of an airliner cabin at 32,000 feet where they're not going to disturb anybody on the ground?"

Hess's Ossi Reisen travel agency caters to East Germans, who call themselves "Ossis." Germany has a long tradition of nudism, and eastern Germany is the heartland of the "naturism" movement.

As early as the 19th century, naturism was seen as a way to combat the urbanisation of the industrial revolution and to help city dwellers to get back to nature.

To this day, most big city parks in Germany have a hedged-off nudist section. The nudist meadow in Munich's famed English Gardens attracts camera-toting tourists from all over the world every summer.

And in East Germany under Communism, nudism was a way for people to shed the constraints of everyday life and to be free. East Germans were not allowed to travel to the West. But they made a point of liberating themselves of their clothes at lakeshores and seaside beaches.

And now that East Germans are able to fly off to anywhere they wish, they seem bound and determined to unbind themselves of their clothes.

"It's amazing," says Hess, "but there is a tremendous demand for nudist hotels, nudist restaurants, nudist bars, nudist gyms - you name it, and nudists want to take their clothes off and enjoy it in the raw."