A Humorous Adventure Trip Through Communist Eastern Europe and Turkey

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & DEDICATIONS

None. That's right, no acknowledgments. This is all mine I'll have you know. Each grammatical error, spelling mistake and politically incorrect statement; every time I wrote naughty and disgusting things, it’s all me, it’s all as I saw it.

I don't have to acknowledge anyone.“A dedication maybe?” I thought about it and decided against it. I never read that bit in a book anyway. You know - the bit where the author lists everyone in his family and then drops names he thinks readers might have heard of. If I was to dedicate or acknowledge I guess it would be to Raelene, our trusty Mercedes Benz 207D campervan which was already 10 years old when we started out from Frankfurt and after nearly 80,000 kilometres it/ she had only cost us $27 in repairs. But, I mean, you can’t dedicate a book to an inanimate object can you? Can you? Oh what the hell. I hereby acknowledge and dedicate this book to Raelene, temporary home, fun platform, peasant observation deck, shelter from the storm, hide from which to spy on topless young ladies (when my wife wasn’t in) and..Oh yes – transport.

And thank you to all the guys at the Mercedes Benz factory for putting Raelene together so well, and the people who made the screws used to hold Raelene’s dashboard on and the people who made the comfortable drivers seat and…..I could go on and on. There was that Polish guy at the Bulgarian border who sold me a whole bag full of marijuana for only 50 bucks. That really brightened up an otherwise grey country that had little else going for it.

Introduction

This book probably won’t ever make it to publication. One reason is that chapters 13 – 22 were lost when a couple of Bulgarian border guards decided to turn our campervan inside out in the hope that we’d call a halt to the proceedings by offering them a bribe. We did, and they stopped throwing things out of the van door, but not before the bulk of the ten missing chapters blew away into Yugoslavia.

It took us 4 hours to get through the border crossing and, once inside Yugoslavia, we went looking for the missing sheets of my manuscript but the Yugoslavians wouldn’t let us search the forests so close to the border. They pointed guns at us and told us to move on.The writing is in the form of a series of letters that I sent to my family and friends while travelling with Alicja through Communist Eastern Europe and Turkey. My intention was to use them as the notes upon which to base a book but, alas, few of the letters reached their destination and those that did have since been lost.

This "book" is about an adventure; an adventure that can never be duplicated or recreated by anybody because Communism no longer exists in the countries through which we travelled. The political situations in the old Yugoslavia, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary have now changed. As Communism disappeared from those countries; with it went the vast majority of the nasty, petty officials in Government offices, police stations, border crossings, caravan parks and public toilets that used to delight in making life difficult for Westerners.

It tells the story of an Australian couple who, fed up with their daily, stressful 9 to 5 office existence, went looking for another country to live in. So, it isn't a travel book but a collection of observations, conversations and incidents made as we traveled around. The majority of them were written in Raelene (our van) in the evenings. Some were written in people’s houses, others on ferryboats, in amphitheaters, at the beach and in one case, perched on an upturned olive oil can underneath a street light at two o'clock in the morning. I think it’s a good read and I hope you think so too.

Peter McLaren

P.S. If you're a publisher and like what you read here, please contact me.

Letter 1

Well we've done it - sold everything, thrown our briefcases in the rubbish bin, and given our business clothes to a charity. No jobs, no prospects and so far no worries. We have enough money to last us for a couple of years providing that we go easy with it and we're going to see what happens. I'm sitting under a palm tree on the grass next to our chalet on Tioman Island trying to figure out how this word processor works so that I can write this book. I think this island is an atoll but I'm not sure. Whatever it is, I like it.

It's in the South China Sea just off the coast of Malaysia and it's the kind of place we've always dreamt of spending a holiday - coral reefs, jungle, dusky maidens (I hope) palm fringed sandy beaches and warm water - in the sea that is - I haven't tried the taps yet.

Half an hour ago we checked into our chalet at the resort, unpacked our things, and sat down to a cup of tea made with one of those portable electric water boiler things which are sold in travel shops to people like us who don't want the management to know that they’ve been making tea in their rooms. I wandered out to the little veranda with my tea to look at the palm trees, and observe the nasty stinging insects which my Dad had always told me inhabited tropical climes, when I was approached by one of the locals carrying a walkie talkie. He looked like a sales representative. He was absolutely immaculate in his blue shirt, blue tie, blue trousers brown face and matching brown feet.

“I'm with Secure a Tea Service” he said with a broad white ventriloquists smile. What a concept I thought? back home we've got your Dial a Pizza services and telephone sex and you can get ladies of the night to come and visit your motel room, but here was this nice man, this chocolate coloured purveyor of the porcelain, offering to secure a tea service for me. Now, although we didn't really need a tea service, I thought I'd find out the going rate for a 36 piece, duty free Willow Pattern, or perhaps even a Ming? I've never seen a Ming tea set but they must be good because they're so famous aren't they? I mean, everyone's heard of the Ming Dinners/Tea.

I was about to open my mouth when the gentleman, inclining his head towards my shoes which were outside the door, suggested that I put them inside – “in case somebody takes a shine to them.” I thought to myself that if anyone did take a shine to them it would have been the fist time in a long while but I didn’t say anything. And anyway, they were suede. This was my first Malaysian/English conversation and after a little chat regarding the type of people who steal other people’s shoes, it transpired that he wasn't selling tea services at all. No - he was with (the) Security Service.

But back to this word processor. I should have taken some instruction on it when I first bought the lap top and had the salesman load the program for me because I must admit that it's got me absolutely xpxp *** ked .njnj@ czspx## **@ the.#....'king thing.


Normal service will be resumed as soon as the writer works out how to save his work to the hard disk.


Yes, where was I? Oh yes - it's got me absolutely befuddled - that's the word - befuddled. Funny word befuddled, don't you think? I wonder if there's such a word as fuddled? Perhaps I'm flummoxed or beflummoxed. If I was, I'm not now because I've found out how to work this thing - unbeflummoxed that's what I am now. I should have bought a dictionary along with me too I suppose. No more interruptions from now on, I promise - I'm now a fully-fledged word processor operator. Got fledge all over me, covered in fledge I am, even in the nether regions.

We were sitting in a little open-air restaurant on the second morning here when I glanced up at the palm trees and noticed a huge lizard, motionless, about ten metres from the ground. We looked around at a few more trees and saw three more of them measuring anything up to two metres long from head to tail - lizards that is - the palm trees here are much taller. I immediately made enquiries with the waiter as to the sure footedness of these reptiles because I didn't want to spend the rest of the vacation worrying about lizards loosing their grip and falling on our heads, in our breakfast etc. He told me that they are very shy, scared of humans and that they climb trees to steal baby birds and eggs. He didn't say anything about them being sure footed. After a quick scan of the menu to determine that they didn't serve baby birds, we ordered the fish. I wouldn't have minded the omelet but Alicja thought that the lizards, while they probably couldn't visually identify the eggs in an omelet, might still be able to smell them and home in on our plates.

Tioman Island is a place where you have to be careful of other things falling on your head too. I guess we've all had dreams of laying on a tropical island under the swaying coconut palms? Well, I'd never thought about it before but coconuts are big, heavy objects and if one fell on your head while you were laying on the beach in your reflective sun-glasses eyeing the exposed buttocks of the female tourists, it could change forever your future outlook on life - and make quite a mess of your reflective sun-glasses to boot.

So there I was laying on this beautiful beach watching beautiful young girls buttocks when I looked up and saw all these green coconut bombs just waiting to Isaac Newton their way towards my thinking apparatus. We'd only been on holiday for four days and already I'd encountered a stressful situation so when we got back to reception I asked the gentleman behind the counter if any of their guests had ever had the misfortune to have been metabolically disadvantaged by falling coconuts.

He was very reassuring and told me that the coconuts were the property of a man with a trained monkey who was given them in return for his (and the monkey's) services in ensuring that all the insecure nuts were removed from the tree well before they were ready to drop.

“How do the man and the monkey actually do the work?” I enquired.

“Excuse me sir?”

“How do they work together – the man and the monkey?”

“Yes sir, very well generally speaking but sometimes the monkey is little bit, how do you say…recalcitrant, and then they have problems and the man has to beat the monkey”

“I mean the method, the way they get the coconuts from the tree to the ground. How do they actually pick the coconuts?”

“Yes sir. You see sir; first he sends the monkey on an investigatory trip so to speak you see sir”

“You mean up the tree?”

“Yes sir. That’s what he does. The monkey is on a long string sir, and when the man commands him, he runs up and twists his [the man’s] nuts until they fall off. Then he inspects his stalks to see if they’re green and then…”

“Shit”, I found myself whispering to Alicja “I hope the bloody thing doesn't mistake me for its owner, I'd hate to be metabollockly disadvantaged by a trained monkey”.

Tropical Islands, if Tioman was typical, weren’t shaping up to be quite what I was expecting. In fact, this one seemed to have to potential to be downright dangerous. One morning we struck up a conversation with two French girls who were busy photographing a large spider and I asked if they had seen the big lizards yet.

“Yes”, they said, and went on to explain that at the place they were staying, there were "snacks."

“What, lizard snacks”? I said. –“Yes” they assured me, “lizard snacks”. I asked what kind of snacks they had, thinking to myself that perhaps we might go for the Lizard Mornay on toast or Lizard Wellington or something.

“Pythons” came the reply. How did they ever get Concord built, I wondered, if French/English communication could be so confusing? I mean…I’m surprised the bloody thing had any bracks to stop with.

It turned out that a large python had been found at the place they were staying and I asked exactly where it was that they were staying - it turned out that they were staying in the same place as us! Not having a snapshot of a genuine wild python in my album, and thinking that a good shot of one would impress the hell out of people, I visited the resort office again and saw the man who told me the one about the monkey and the mans nuts. I asked if I could see the said snack. He told me he didn't know anything about it, had never heard of pythons being found on the premises and that pythons lived in the jungle and didn't venture into the resort.

“Anyway” they said, “pythons are a protected species.” This news didn't exactly serve to put Alicja's mind at rest and she voiced the opinion that if any species on Tioman Island needed protecting it would probably be a good idea to start with the tourists. The next morning I asked a man who was doing the garden outside our chalet if he knew anything about the mysterious python and he was much more forthcoming than the people up at reception. He charged me two dollars and took me to the cool room where the python was coiled up on the concrete under a few damp sacks. It wasn’t huge. It just looked like a coil of condemned garden hose but thicker. I took a couple of photographs and he told me that pythons were sighted in the resort gardens every month or so and that they like to live close to human habitation where they can steal chickens.

On the fourth day of our stay we hired a fishing boat to take us around the island. Rahim Nordon Singh was the name of the skipper and proprietor of this once proud hulk and his mate was called Ali. Ali was a nice guy. He was dressed in a MacDonald’s sun visor and a pair of bright pink shorts and he had a face like a clumsy beekeeper. We were hoping that we'd have a romantic day under sail but there was hardly any wind so we had to settle for the chugging of the diesel engine. As we cruised along the coastline we worked out that it was running at around one chug per palm tree and it made a horrible knocking sound once it had warmed up. I wouldn’t have put to sea with an engine banging like a dunny door in a gale but it didn’t seem to bother Rahim and Ali. They didn’t seem to hear it.

I told Rahim that we wanted to go snorkeling and he said he knew just the place. Ten minutes later we stopped in a patch of sea and they threw down the anchor. “Snorkeling this one place” Ali said. Alicja, ever cautious, asked if there were any sharks in these waters and pointing towards a little island some 2 or 3 kilometres away Ali said that the sharks lived over there. I was quite happy about the situation because, after all, he must have known because he lived there. It occurred to Alicja however, that sharks were really good at swimming and she wouldn't go over the side which disappointed me because she'd agreed to go with me when we were at breakfast.

Suitably attired with goggles and snorkel I jumped in and started to look around. It was an awe-inspiring sight. I’d never had so much awe. Brimming with awe, I was. I was awful. I was also very struck with….. awestruck, that’s the word. See, if you look for a word for long enough it just comes to you doesn’t it? Just like that! Acres of coloured corals, shoals of colourful fish going back and forth in unison (no corn plasters like in the municipal pool back home) and the water was so clear that it was as if I was floating in the sky. It was so deep that I experienced a sort of vertiginous sensation. Didn’t know ver-to-go. It was far too deep for me to attempt to swim to the bottom and so I just lay there on top of the water watching it all go on. There was so much life to look at that I'd never seen before and it was so quiet and relaxing that I became totally wrapped up in it and forgot the rest of the world existed for a few minutes. The only thing missing was David Attenborough.

I would have been content just to float there for hours if it hadn't been for a big splash on top of the water. I bobbed up to see a life buoy on a rope next to me and Alicja screaming at me to get back in the boat pronto so I grabbed hold of the life buoy and was towed back to the boat at high speed by the two men. It was probably only a matter of seconds until I was at the side of the boat but a second can seem like an hour when the word shark is being shouted. As Ali and Rahim leaned over the side to pull me up on deck my heart was banging like a diesel driven doughnut and I was coughing as a result of swallowing water in my panic. Alicja pointed behind me and sure enough there was a shark about 3 metres in length cruising around about 20 metres from where I had been snorkeling.

Alicja had seen it first and raised the alarm but the crew just told her that it wasn't going to come over our way and when she finally started shrieking, they couldn't see what all the fuss was about. I told them that I thought myself very lucky but Rahim dismissed it with a wave of his hand telling me that the shark wasn't hungry. “Much faster dis shaak wen im ungry. Just wunna luk atcha no problem.” I indicated to him that I, the client, had a problem with snorkeling in shark infested waters and suggested that we continue with our cruise. Rounding the next headland we caught sight of a lovely, secluded bay with an old thatched roofed, wooden bungalow situated right on the beach. There was a flat area of a hectare or so around it backed by a thick belt of coconut palms and behind this, a steep, cloud topped mountain covered in jungle. It looked like the sort of place I have always imagined myself living in ever since I started reading National Geographics in Doctor Ford's surgery when I was a kid and I asked if we could go in a little closer to shore for me to take photographs.

Rahim just smiled and ran the boat right up to the little landing jetty and tied up. Ali whistled and out came the owner and his wife and invited us in. Well, not exactly in but to a table outside the door of the house through which we tried to sneak glances when they weren't looking. They gave us coconut milk which we didn't much care for and
I had a few words with the man. He didn’t understand either of them. My Malaysian, being in its formative stages, wasn’t quite up to his level of English, which was almost half as good as Rahim’s. Rahim interpreted for us and although he wasn't a lot of good at it we got by.

The couple who owned this little shack seemed to have it made. The man's grandfather had planted the coconut trees and ever since his father died, the plantation has been his. The grandfather had to wait for years before he saw any return from his work but his grandson is reaping the benefits. He told us that there was absolutely nothing he could do to promote the growth of the coconuts, they don't need pruning or spraying and you can't even pick them, they just fall when they're ripe. All he had to do was pick them up from the ground and, as most of them are growing on a slope, they roll towards the house when they fall. He said that once a year before they fell he walked around with a machete cutting the undergrowth back and that was about all he had to do apart from transporting them to his little jetty ready for collection by a boat from the mainland. He was paid for them on the spot and it provided enough to live on for the rest of the year. On reflection I think it's the best lifestyle I've yet to come across.

We didn't actually get to see the inside of the house but from the doorways we could see that there wasn't much in the way of mod cons and no electricity, but the setting was exceptional. A small stream ran through the property close to the house and although there wasn't a garden, nature had done a great job with flowers, bananas and a green lawn kept down by a humped back cow. The only contact these people had with the outside world was by boat because the jungle was impenetrable. They didn't even have a boat of their own; they just stood on the beach and flagged one down. The husband asked what I did for a living and I've had so many jobs that I didn't know which one to pick.The last one I'd had was as a marketing manager in a computer software house and I didn't fancy trying to explain that to a person who didn't even have electricity so the profession I chose was that of carpenter.

I don't know why, because I've never been one, but I suppose I thought that it would be easy to explain. I should have chosen software manager though because he took me all around the outside of the house and verandah asking me advice on how to repair the bloody place. I didn't have a clue and I was glad that Rahim's English wasn't too hot because we finally agreed that it was all too difficult to translate. I don't know how I missed being a carpenter in all those jobs, perhaps I'll take it up sometime between holidays.

We said our goodbyes and continued our circumnavigation of the island which now had to be done in a hurry because we'd spent so much time talking to the coconut couple. All these beautiful secluded beaches without a soul on them would be just the place for dark, sensual, dusky maidens dressed in sarongs, seductively showing lots of leg and half their boobs like you see in reproduction prints above the fireplaces of English council houses opposite the flying ducks. Alas they're all Muslims and the women cover themselves from head to foot even when they go in the water, which isn't often, and I suppose explains the absence of a Sufi Muslim women’s Olympic swimming team.

Nothing eventful happened for the next 3 hours as we cruised the coast looking at the beaches, palm trees and mountains. I shouldn't think this place has changed much since Europeans first came here and, with perhaps the exception of the introduction of a small number of rubber trees, it must look pretty much the same as it did 300 years ago. It would have been a wonderful experience to have come across somewhere like this all those years ago – to have been the first one to discover and name it. It put me in mind of the Intercourse Islands which, I think, are down in the Pacific somewhere near Australia. I don't know how the Intercourse Islands got their name but I can guess. I reckon that years ago, after they'd been at sea for three months out of sight of land, the look-out sighted the yet to be named Intercourse Islands and started bellowing "land ho". And this big, unshaven, sweaty chef came up from down below, wiped his forehead and said “where the fuck are we?”

So, we chugged around the island until at last we were in sight of the village of Tekek where we would be disembarking. Just then the engine, which I'd entirely forgotten about, chugged its last chug. I scrambled down to the stern and peered down into the engine room/pit/black hole where Ali and Rahim were both sitting on their haunches looking down in the dumps. The dumps is a nautical term for the place wherein the engine resideth. There was a big hole in the crankcase and a twisted connecting rod sticking out of the side.

“That's the end of your engine” I told them.

“No” said Rahim “tomorrow fix him, fix ‘im good”

I told him that this sort of thing was not fixable and he'd have to get another engine although perhaps he could salvage some parts from this one. He picked up a rag and wiped the other side of the crankcase down revealing a six-inch square sheet metal patch riveted there where it had happened once before and I had to admit that it was possible to fix ‘im good – well, fix ‘im temporary anyway. It was only after I walked back to the bow to tell Alicja what had happened, that I realised that we were in a bit of a spot. We were becalmed with no engine, no wind for the sails and a couple of kilometres from land. I asked Rahim what we were going to do but he wasn't at all phased by the situation. “We wait til nudderwun boat come long” he said. I asked when he thought "nudderwun boat" would actually come long, to which he replied that he didn't know but that we might as well pass the time with a spot of fishing. He passed the fishing gear around and baited the hooks for us and we all sat there fishing for about 20 minutes when "nudderwun fishing boat" did indeed come past and towed us in to the jetty.

Everything about these people was so casual and if something of this magnitude had occurred in the office only three weeks ago I would have had a panic attack. So would the cleaners come to think of it – would have made a real mess of the carpet. I must admit that my immediate concern when we broke down was not so much that we might be stranded but that it might be a while before I got to a toilet. Something I'd eaten hadn't agreed with me and I had diarrhea so as soon as we hit the land I left Alicja to pay Rahim and ran for the jungle. I'd never been caught short in a jungle before and didn't know what to look out for. I was hoping that none of those big, egg eating lizards or nut twisting monkeys on strings would come along while I was in a vulnerable position.

While I'm on the subject of diarrhoea I must here relate what happened to this English guy Andrew we met here who had just been on an organised tour to India with his wife. He said that when they came down for breakfast one morning only half the group had turned up because the other half had all got the dreaded Delhi belly and were on the toilet for the day. This was the day they were all due to visit the Taj Mahal and they would only get the one chance as the next day they were due to go somewhere up country. His wife Julie had always wanted to see the Taj Mahal since she was a kid and visiting this place was half the reason that they'd chosen India as part of their holiday.

They were both feeling perfectly well and since they'd followed religiously the travel agents advice "drink only bottled water" he thought that this was the reason. As they got on the bus for the trip he remarked to his wife that all those silly sods back at the hotel should have known better and that everyone knew that the drinking water in India was not to be trusted. They travelled out to the Taj Mahal and he was standing with the group listening to the guide when it suddenly hit him that he had express diarrhoea in proportions industrial. He reckoned that he only had 30 seconds to find a toilet or do it in his pants.

He said they were on the lawn right in front of the Taj' when he left the party and started running around in circles looking for a bush or anything to hide behind. There was nothing but grass. It was all over in no time, he just couldn't hang on and he pulled his trousers down and shat on the lawn right there in front of the Taj Mahal, which his wife had always wanted to visit. He said that there were hundreds of tourists walking around and elegant Indian ladies strolling past in beautiful saris and if his nails had been long enough he would have burrowed into the ground and hid in the hole. It was the most embarrassing time in his entire life and he had no paper so he took off his T-shirt and wiped his bum thinking that he could throw it into the first rubbish bin they came across.

He eventually stood up and turned around to face the rest of the group, who were all looking horrified, when he noticed a Japanese tourist standing a few yards away who was just putting his video camera back in its case after having filmed the event. His wife almost died of shame and refused to walk around the Taj Mahal. She got straight back on the bus and waited for the rest of the party to return. She hardly spoke to poor old Andrew for the rest of the week they were in India and the rest of the group didn't want to be seen with him. The final humiliation came a couple of days later when they were all in a restaurant somewhere and on his way back from the toilets he glanced over someone's shoulder and saw that they were all looking at a photograph of him evacuating on the grass with the Taj Mahal in the background.

He said that although there were hundreds of people walking about on the day, the photograph was taken from a low angle and all that could be seen was the Taj' with this tranquil pond in front of it and him in the foreground shitting on the grass.

Letter 2

Oh dear, chapter two has arrived. Chapter one ended a bit abruptly I thought but I just couldn’t think of what else to write about. I’m sure that by the end of this chapter I will be such an experienced writer that the transition to chapter three will be much smoother. I did think about including the scenes of incest and sodomy we witnessed one day when we were trekking along a jungle trail in the middle of the island. Unfortunately though, I just couldn’t bring myself to write about such depravity so you’ll just have to imagine it. Suffice it to say that it was overt in the extreme and it had us fascinated. It fascinated another onlooker too! I nudged Alicja,

“look over there” he’s having a wank”

“Where, where, where?”

“To the left of the big tree with the creepers”

“He’s not is he, d’you think that’s his dick?”

“What else would it be, a tumor? It’d have to be a bloody itchy one too if he’s got to scratch it like that”

We watched the monkeys for another five minutes or so until a much bigger one came along and chased the others off. Very entertaining it was though and I went back the next day at the same time with the video camera but there was no repeat performance. The jungle was still. I remember when my father caught me masturbating. He told me what every boy’s Dad of that era told his son, that I’d go blind. I looked at Tugger Wilson at school, the next day and he had glasses. That’ll do me, I thought. I’ll just do it a little bit and wear glasses like Tugger Wilson. Poor old Dad. He’s been gone a long time…he should be there by now. I’ll always remember his last words “Fuck, a Bus, AAAAARGH!!!” He taught me to swim did Dad – getting out of the sack was the hard part.

Two days after the monkey peep show our stay on the island came to an end and although I wanted to get on with our trip I was sorry to leave. It was such a good place that I’d have liked to have stayed until I got fed up with it. We boarded a tiny plane on a grass runway in what was no more than a clearing in the jungle. The captain announced that it was the shortest runway in Asia and I believed him because I remember landing on it. It had frightened the hell out of me as the angle of descent was so steep that I realized why the word kamikaze in Japanese translates to “divine wind”. I was heading for the next stage past wind although there would have been nothing too divine about it.

But now we were taking off and I was confident that the pilot knew what he was about. Even so we rushed towards the thick green wall of jungle at an alarming rate and didn’t clear the trees by much as we headed skywards pressed back in the seats. In no time we were up aloft and heading for Kaula Lumpur where we would catch our plane to Heathrow.The view from the plane window was stunning. The waters of the South China Sea were so clear that we could see that Tioman and its accompanying islands were just the tops of mountains rising up from the ocean floor. In Tioman's case the whole mountain from its base on the seabed could be seen, the island being just the green summit encircled by a ring of sandy beach where it joined the water.

We landed at Kuala Lumpur Airport with 10 hours to spare before catching our connecting flight so we caught a taxi to the city for a look around. We were hoping to find a traditional Asian bazaar in Kuala Lumpur but its modernity surprised us. Like Singapore the city is full of up to the minute clothes, perfume and jewelry shops. None of that interested us so we found a large supermarket to walk around in.

I loved it. Much more fun than perfume shops and the smells were better. We cruised the shelves and counters looking at all the different spices on sale, picked up things we’d never seen before and felt them and smelled them and then we came to a wall of fish tanks. The whole wall was taken up by some twenty or so of these tanks, all full of brightly colored tropical fish. It was very soothing to the eye, calming and tranquil and so we stood for a while to watch them. My doctor’s surgery back in Melbourne had a big aquarium, which, Doctor Andrews told me, made his patients relax while they were waiting to see him. I must admit that I’d always been in too much of a hurry to spend time watching Doctor Andrews’ fish but the display in this Kuala Lumpur supermarket was so much bigger and really did have a calming effect. Birds and animals get all stressed and dart about but fish just glide around changing direction with hardly any perceptible movement, all serene like.

Suddenly a hand appeared in one of the tanks and dashed around until it grabbed a large, pretty blue and yellow striped fish and the fish and the hand disappeared. It all happened so quickly, and I was feeling so relaxed and laid back, that my tiny brain couldn’t quite work out what was going on but I knew that the hand was too big to have been on the end of a kid. The rest of the fishes in the tank didn’t look at all serene now; they were left spinning around like they’d been sucked into a whirlpool. The water was all misty and they were banging against the sides. I was just thinking about telling the guy who was stacking the long white radishy things with blotches on the shelves when, around the edge of the aquarium wall, I saw a "fish butcher" whack the head off of our nice blue and yellow striped fish with an axe. He popped it into a plastic bag and threw it on the scales, slapped a price tag on it and handed it across the counter to a lady who stood in line at the checkout with the unfortunate creature still flapping its last throes.

I got to thinking about how we view fish, or is the plural fishes? They’re not terribly warm and friendly creatures as far as we humans are concerned but they’re still sentient – they still feel pain. But fish don’t scream when you chop their heads off do they? Like…if you fancied a lump of pork for dinner you wouldn’t just lop the head off a pug would you? Of course you wouldn’t. It was a spelling mistake. It should have read pig. Pigs would scream like hell while their heads were still attached and we’d feel sorry for them. Pugs too for that matter. But if you’re a voiceless fish, who gives a toss about you. I’d never thought about it before but I will in future – every time I sprinkle the salt and vinegar on one.

Oh yes, where was I? Kuala Lumpur wasn’t it? Well, that’s all about Kuala Lumpur because I lost my notes. Our flight from K.L to England was with Royal Jordanian Airlines and I must say that we weren't looking forward to it after hearing various stories about Arab airlines in the past from friends. Royal Jordanian however, offered the cheapest fares because, according to the travel agent, many Westerners are scared to use them. By this we presumed he meant the sort of people with missile allergies and so forth but he told us that it was because Arab airlines "tend to be noisy" - so we booked at once.

At the airport as we started to queue up for boarding we began to see what the travel agent was getting at. There were men with entourages of six or seven accompanying ladies loaded down with transistor radios, portable televisions and one with a huge, white plastic hippopotamus measuring about a meter in height. There was arguing, laughing, joking, smiling, yelling, screaming and loud discordant Arabic, almost musical, sounds coming from the transistor radios. I smiled at the ladies, the men scowled at me and I looked away. We had to spend 45 minutes in the queue with me trying not to look at any of the Arab ladies while two very serious looking security guards went through all the hand luggage in microscopic detail. The lady directly in front of me looked like a cross between a Dalek and a post box. She was completely covered in a bright red gown and headscarf and there was a horizontal slot in the front of her matching red veil.

When it was our turn to front up to the security guards things began to look decidedly nasty as I refused to let my films go through the X-ray machine. They kept pointing to the "film safe" sticker on the front of the machine and I tried to explain that the effect of one x-ray machine was OK but the films had already been through two previous machines and the effect was cumulative. I stood my ground and won the day but they did seem intimidating and they removed the batteries from my camera. I didn’t mind about the camera batteries as the last thing I wanted to do was point the camera at one of the Daleks and end up buried under a whole load of Royal Jordanians. Once we took off things improved considerably. We didn't hear a peep out of the Jordanians and we both agreed that it was the best airline we'd ever used. The cabin crew were magnificent, nothing was too much trouble and the food was really cool. The coffee was hot though.

Part of the cheap air fare deal was that we would have to stop over in Aman (the capital of Royal Jordania) for six hours and we envisaged having to lay around on airport seats. But when we arrived we were issued with transit visas and whisked off to a palatial hotel some five kilometers from the airport, given a free breakfast and a double room with a shower. A wake up call was all part of the service and we left on the last leg feeling completely refreshed. This time we had some English hostesses on board and the difference was all too evident. Pained expressions, a feeling that everything was too much trouble and they were cold, terribly cold. I thought they should all have had second vaginas fitted to go with their holier than though attitudes. We couldn't help but notice the contrast between them and the Jordanian girls, who quickly got to know their passengers, had a laugh and a joke with them and exuded personality.

Upon disembarking at Heathrow, a smiling young Royal Jordanian girl was waiting at the door with a tray containing the radios and camera batteries taken from the passengers at Kuala Lumpur. Unfortunately somebody in front of us had already taken mine. Losing a couple of camera batteries was no big deal so we went down to the luggage retrieval roundabout to pick up our suitcases and waited until all the luggage and passengers had gone. There was only one suitcase left - it was identical to mine - and it didn't take a genius to figure out what had happened. But where was he, the silly sod who'd taken mine? So there we were in the airport lounge at Heathrow with only the tracksuit I stood up in, no spare underpants and storm raging outside the doors - welcome to England.

We were picked up by my sister Pauline and her husband Jack and taken to their farm near Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds in a draughty Land Rover in freezing temperatures. I’d never met Jack and on the way I eyed him up and down to see if any of his clothes would fit me. Only the socks, I thought. It was a Sunday. The shops were shut. I couldn’t go out and buy clothes and by the time we arrived at the farm two small lumps had appeared behind my ears. I was delighted - the disappearance of my testicles had been giving me cause for concern.

We'd only been in the house for a few minutes when we had a telephone call from a man at Luton airport. He had my suitcase and was organizing a courier to send it over to us. I was thankful that Alicja had gone to so much trouble with the labeling of our luggage. She’d thought to include Pauline's telephone number. I hadn’t seen my sister since she moved to the Cotswolds. The whole area was like one great big model village, the stuff that fairy tales are made of. Quaint little stone houses with little stone walls dividing the fields, little old ladies in little quilted polyester jackets and little old Agatha Christie tea shops serving little scones with strawberry jam in little dollops from little spoons.

Chipping Norton, I’m sure, is the little old lady center of Great Britain. The little old ladies all have the same white permed hair and blue framed glasses and it's impossible to tell one from another, just as if they all came out of a mould in a Terry Gilliam cartoon. There's an inordinate number of them and they all seem to congregate in Chipping Norton which, but for the blue and white colors, from the air resembles a penguin rookery. It also seemed to be the quilted polyester clothing center of the world. It’s just as if Chairman Mao had decreed that everyone over the age of forty must wear quilted polyester jackets. And on warmer days, quilted polyester sleeveless waistcoats.

I was asked to bring along the video camera to film a fiftieth wedding anniversary which Pauline had been seconded to organize in the village hall. There were sausage rolls and sandwiches, cups of tea and fairy cakes and hordes of little old ladies engaged in a sort of little old ladies feeding frenzy. The highlight of the evening was the Freddie Dix dance band, fresh out of retirement just for the occasion. The Freddie Dix dance band was fresh out of everything, wind, music, tune, you name it. Apparently they used to play at all the local dances when all these septuagenarians were young and, as if that wasn't enough, they had the original vocalist with them.

She was seventy-five if she was a day and I'd put her at around fourteen stone (if indeed a fourteen stone old time music hall vocalist is putable anywhere). Anyway, we'd never heard anything remotely approaching the vocal gymnastics of this musical matriarch, who, it seemed, had a set of bagpipes built into her vocal chords. She was out of tune and, most of the time, was singing a different tune to the band who were also out of tune. Meanwhile, I was supposed to video the whole proceedings without laughing - a task I just wasn't up to. At the interlude the Chipping Norton Male Voice Choir entertained us (or at least that was presumably their intention) with some interminable funeral dirge and I think that, all in all, it was probably the most comprehensive assault on our ear drums to date.

So how does one go about filming an event like this? I filmed Freddie Dix and his septuagenarian syncopaters. I filmed each table of little old ladies and little old men gumming the crusts off little triangular sandwiches. I filmed the people preparing the sandwiches, Freddie Dix again then all the people at the tables again and I still hadn't taken up 15 minutes of video film. Only the occasional foot tapping loosely under a table served to remind us that we were not at the Chipping Norton annual taxidermy exhibition.

Then, suddenly, it was all over well before I thought it had started and they all left the hall in one great seething mass of brown and blue polyester like a Barry Manilow audience at a working mans club upon being told that the meat and potato pies were now being served at the bar. We stood at the door and watched them as they moved in a wave up the street like a tsunami full of surfing lemmings or, perhaps, an outback Australian mice plague. And suddenly, silently they were gone. We had intended to present the happy couple with the video tape at the end of the party but decided to watch it ourselves first and edit out the unkind remarks made by one of the lady sandwich makers concerning the musical dexterity, or lack thereof, of Freddie Dix's vocalist. "When Fred 'an me wus first wed we'm used to live on a pig farm down Rollright way 'an we 'eard a racket like that'n evry time they filled the bluddy troff."

For the past fifteen years my sister Pauline has worked with mentally handicapped adults and really enjoyed it. Like many people who adopt similar professions she finds it totally fulfilling rather than frustrating and enjoys the company of her patients. She sometimes takes them home to the farm at weekends and she organizes all sorts of outings for them. She tells the most hilarious stories about some of the things which go wrong on these excursions and I have asked her to write a book on the subject but she's totally involved in the work and never has the time.

She told me how last year she took a group of fifteen to London’s Hyde Park where they were all intrigued by a man who was feeding the birds and was covered from head to foot in sparrows. Upon seeing Pauline's charges so intently watching him, he lined them all up alongside each other and gave them each a piece of stale bread so that they could attract the birds too. When he got to the end of the line handing out the bread he turned around with a smile on his face. The smile quickly faded. The bread had all gone - they'd eaten it.

On another occasion, she took them all to the Barbican Centre and they had to go up to the first floor. It wasn't until she stepped off of the escalator at the other end that she realized that none of them had ever been on an escalator before in their lives. The first two reached the top and fell over and the next two fell on top of them. The next two fell on top of them again and still they kept coming in waves, all bolt upright like shop dummies, until they were all piled up in a great screaming heap blocking the escalator.

Of course, when it came to going down again there was no way they'd get back on the escalator and there were no stairs. In the end, they had to open up the fire escape and let them walk down. This was something which the authorities were reluctant to do because there was an IRA bomb threat on the place and they had to arrange security from the police department first. Meanwhile Pauline's charges wanted to use the toilet, which they couldn't do because the toilets were on the ground floor.

One of Pauline’s patients, Andrew, a man in his early thirties, was a kleptomaniac and even though she always kept an eye on him she would still find all sorts of things hidden in his room after each outing. She'd long since given up on trying to modify what was most obviously an incurable condition in Andrew. Before taking her clients on outings in the village Pauline would telephone building societies and banks and explain that this man had a need to steal things and that she'd be taking them all on a walk around town the next day. Could they perhaps drop in and say hello to the staff behind the counters? The managers of these establishments were, without exception, most understanding and would place out of date free brochures on the counters for Andrew to steal. The manager of one bank used to stand at the door as they all left and he’d hand out brochures to them all. Andrew would be most upset when this happened as he’d gone to the trouble of stealing his share when they first walked in.

Andrew was well aware of his condition but just couldn't help himself and after each outing would present himself to Pauline to be searched. Pauline and Jack had moved house shortly before we arrived and there was a truck load of unwanted odds and ends at their old house which Pauline thought would come in useful at work and so took the works minibus and four of her patients, including Andrew, to collect them. As they left the house and prepared to board the minibus Pauline began her routine search of Andrew but upon putting her hand in his right hand trouser pocket she came into contact with something warm and clammy. She recoiled with a start and told him off - he smiled weakly and produced a sausage which he'd stolen from the fridge.

It was good to be in England again after such a long absence. There were so many things about the place which I'd forgotten - the pubs, the humor, the lush green of the countryside. Even so, I couldn't help thinking that a large, daily dose of sunshine would do the place the World of good. England is so well looked after, everything is so neat and cared for, but without that Germanic sort of sterility and thoroughness. The hedges in the Cotswolds are all neatly cut, the grass at the sides of the roads is kept down and people look after their gardens and do things purely for decorations sake. A nation of analy retentive manicurists on a grand scale.

In accordance with our plan it was soon time to start looking for a left hand drive minibus and we spent two weeks scanning the papers and making phone calls but there was nothing suitable to be had so we decided to head for Belgium where, the guide books said, they were easy to find and cheaper than anywhere else in Europe. Before leaving England I rang the Belgian consulate and they mailed me the addresses of four large car parks where pre abused minibuses and vans were bought and sold privately on Sundays. At last we knew where to go. Not being able to find a van in England had been something of a disappointment mainly because we had so much luggage with us. We’d sent two suitcases ahead of us from Australia and a heavy box of tools which were much cheaper to send than to buy again in England.

We booked tickets on a bus and hovercraft service and were puzzled to find that it cost less to go to Belgium from Chipping Norton than to go by train up to London and back in the rush hour. The trip across the channel was uneventful and the landing was unexpectedly smooth. The hovercraft travels at quite a lick and doesn’t slow down much as it approaches the land. From my position in the front of the craft it was disconcerting to see the land looming up so fast and the hovercraft still going at full speed. I braced for the bump but nothing happened as it glided smoothly up the beach. We eventually got off the bus in Brussels with four suitcases, a tool box and two big bags. In all it weighed in excess of 100 kilos - practically all we thought we'd need for a trip of approximately a year's duration. I had already pre booked into a youth hostel, which, as it turned out, was less than a hundred meters away but at the time, we didn't know it.

We couldn't possibly carry all the luggage any distance so we looked around for a taxi. The driver and I had a difficult job fitting everything into the car and when we eventually sat inside and gave him the address, he was far from happy at putting in so much effort for such a short trip. He threw his arms up in the air and uttered what I took to be a few run of the mill Belgian curses and we drove just up the road and stopped outside the Jacques Brell Youth Hostel. We unloaded, paid him and he spat on the ground at Alicja's feet and left blaming us for his having lost his place in the taxi rank for nothing.

We registered at the hostel and received a room on the fifth floor which normally would have been nothing to bother about but in this case the lift had broken down and we had to carry over a hundred kilo's of baggage up the stairs. Nothing daunted we got up early the next day, bought a newspaper and went off to look for a van - and had the camera stolen while we were reading the newspaper on a railway station bench. It all happened in a few seconds and we were doubly annoyed because we'd only had it for six weeks and it had been bought especially for the trip. Needless to say, it wasn't insured and the police couldn't have given a damn.

We wandered the streets of Brussels in the rain for 4 days looking for a van, both catching extremely heavy colds or the flu, or something equally nasty, in the process but found nothing remotely suitable. We'd been told that Brussels was the cheapest place in Europe to buy a car and it's true that the prices were incredibly low but the availability of vans was just about zilch. As for the Belgian Consulate's four addresses - they were all two years out of date. Brussels was not a happy experience for us and everything was very expensive, especially eating, but it certainly is a beautiful city with a large square in the center called The Grand Place. The architecture and atmosphere have to be seen and felt, you can't describe it. The buildings around the square, the town hall, the cathedral etc. were all built in the 1600's and are so well preserved and maintained that it was hard to believe that they were anywhere near that old. Ornate Gargoyles were everywhere and lots of Turkish people - don't know why I thought of Turkish people after typing gargoyles? Some of my best friends are gargoyles - honestly.

Anyway, according to our guide book, Victor Hugo is supposed to have said that Brussels had the best city square in all of Europe, but then again, I don't suppose he had his camera nicked, caught the flu and had a taxi driver spit at his feet while he was there. Brussels has one area of narrow cobbled streets with fish restaurants on either side where the rich people and those on EEC expense accounts sit and eat dinner in the evenings. The displays of seafood outside the restaurants were nothing short of spectacular and should be classified as an art form in their own right. None of your Kuala Lumpur style whack its head off with an axe and shove it in a bag here. No, these fish had all been dispatched by slow suffocation.

We wandered up and down looking in restaurant windows at overweight, balding, middle aged Euro civil servants accompanied by tall, beautiful, long haired, blond women eating their beautiful food and drinking their expensive wines and it made us hungry. So we found a Lebanese take away food stall run by a short, fat, greasy haired, unshaven, Lebanese gentleman with a wart on his nose and a scar cheek, ordered a sharwarma (the cheapest thing on his menu) and went to bed back at the youth hostel with a packet of flu' tablets.

Unable to find the minibus of our dreams after ten rainy, influenza packed days in Brussels, we caught the train to Germany where a friendly, English speaking chemist told us that we hadn't been taking flu' tablets at all but something for allergies. We got off at Frankfurt (on Main) after a very pleasant ride and everything, for some reason, immediately felt better than Brussels. For one thing all the road signs were in one language we didn’t understand. This, in stark contrast to Belgium where they were in both Flemish and French (two languages we didn’t understand) and quite frequently one’s map is in one language whilst the name of the street you are looking for is in the other.

The first thing we did was to put the luggage into the railway station safety lockup so that we had a reasonable degree of mobility. Then, with "Lets Go Europe" in hand (a great publication) we chose a cheap hotel and telephoned them. “Yah vee godda room vor vive niyts” he said and so ve godda taxi unt vent zere. It was called The Pension Lohman and was a spotlessly clean no frills guest house in Stuttgartner Strasse just 3 minutes from the station and the prices were ridiculously low. Herr Lohman, the proprietor, helped us a lot, reading the classified ad's in the paper for us and telephoning people who had vans for sale, advising us on prices and telling us what trains to catch to get to places. All told he probably saved us a week's van hunting time.

In the evenings he regaled us with stories about when he was a young man in Hitler's army on the Russian front. He was most careful to point out that he was in a green uniform not a brown one. I didn't know what he meant but I pretended I did. Maybe the extra nasty SS Nazi types were dressed in brown? He told me at breakfast one morning that he had only just met his wife when “I levt her behind to go to ze front” - at least I think that was how it was meant. However, as I didn't get a glimpse of her behind I couldn't assess how big a loss this would have been to him at the time. Time had, however, taken its toll on her front.

When we told him that we would be going through East Germany he told us how he happened to end up on the Western side of the Berlin Wall. He lived with his family in East Berlin and managed to get himself a job interview in Frankfurt. He attended the interview and stayed the night with relatives, returning home on the evening of the following day. It was too late. The wall was already in place and he was cut off from his family. It took him almost a year of writing letters before he finally received a reply from his brother but he eventually established regular contact and has been sending them a monthly remittance ever since. "Only forty marks you understand. It's nothing to me but a fortune to them and if they knew how well I was doing they probably think I was stingy."

We enjoyed Frankfurt, it was clean and tidy, there were some good walks to be had down by the river and it had a palmengarten - an enormous building containing all kinds of palm trees and tropical plants. What was in some respects dismaying, was that it made most British cities look decidedly shabby by comparison, especially London, and the Metro was far better looked after than the tardy looking London underground. The food was inexpensive and first class and we ate most of the time at the railway station restaurants where the variety was outstanding and the service fast. Frankfurt Central station has at least 50 shops in it, restaurants and take-aways, a supermarket, fruit stalls, newsagents, shoe menders, perfumeries, photo shops and a whole lot more as well as a tourist information centre with a permanent staff of four around the clock. A very different concept in railway stations to what we were used to.

We eventually found the second hand van we had been looking for. Finding a van in Frankfurt was no trouble at all, there were lots to choose from and we became the proud owners of a 1980 Mercedes 207D diesel engined van. It was high enough to stand up in and we could walk through from the cabin - something we considered essential, especially on rainy days. There was already a sink, a cooker and a bed in it but it all needed re arranging before it would be suitable for the trip we had in mind and this task was reserved for Poland, where labor was cheap. We spent two days running around Frankfurt buying everything we thought would be difficult to buy in the communist countries before heading east at 4am on a grey, drizzly Wednesday morning with the van piled so high that we couldn't see out of the back windows.

We drove for a couple of hours before stopping at a petrol station for a few last minute Western supplies but when we went to move off, the starter wouldn't work. The petrol station had no mechanic and my tools were buried under mountains of supplies so we ended up getting a push from a couple of truck drivers and resolved not to stop the engine, unless parked on a slope, until we arrived in Warsaw.

Letter 3

Gee this is going to be a good book. See how smoothly chapter two has just blended seamlessly into chapter three. I found out how you do it. You type a whole load of pages and then just plonk the cursor down anywhere and call it a new chapter. Fredrick Forsyth told me about it and he should know. After all, he made a great job of that Ulysses book didn’t he? Perfect punctuation in that last chapter about Molly Bloom’s dream Perfect too was the West German countryside. A bit too perfect for my liking really. It wasn’t so terribly different to England, apart from the architecture of house and church, but it was all in such good condition that I thought it somewhat sterile. Everything just had to be perfectly painted and the flowers in the window boxes had to be just so. Old buildings were all restored so well that they had little character and a missing roof slate or a weed ridden garden now and again would have gone some way towards giving me the feeling that there were humans living in the houses. If the English were a race of anally retentive manicurists as I described them, then the Germans were a race of anally retentive engineers. Their gardens were well engineered with rows of flowers looking like their owners only had them in the garden because they couldn’t afford bricks. The roads were perfect, the telegraph poles were perfect and kids standing at the school bus stops were as well dressed as Hansel and bleedin’ Gretel are in the fairy story books.

Perhaps I shouldn’t criticize it because the people are probably perfect too. But I’d already seen enough of that sort of thing, that sort of culture. I was eager to set my eyes on East Germany again where the customs officers were some of the nastiest pieces of work on the planet and everything is falling to bits. The border hove into sight (notice the word hove. Not bad is it? I might use it again later) after a few hours and after passing through the West German side we drove a kilometer or so and rounded a corner only to see a queue of cars at least half a kilometer long. We knew at once that we were entering a communist or, as they like to call it, a socialist country - queues are a distinguishing feature of them all.

It was obvious that this was going to take a while so it gave us a chance to try out our campervanning skills for the first time. We re-arranged all the boxes so that we could reach the gas cooker, made a cup of tea and a sandwich and just sat there in the queue with the heater and the radio on, sitting high up above all the little motorbike engined Polish Fiats and the plastic bodied two stroke Trabants. We were the center of much attention and discussion amongst the other drivers who all stood around with long faces pushing their toy cars along in the queue to save their precious petrol which they'd all queued so long to get. We must indeed have looked like rich Western tourists sitting in our Mercedes with the engine running all the time. Little did they know that we couldn't switch the thing off without having to push start it.

An official approached us, took our passports, visas and car papers and put them on a long, covered conveyor belt to send them down to the officers in little glass booths who would process them. The men in the glass booths could stop and start the belt as they wanted and it was strange sitting in the van further down the queue and watching our documents go past us. Upon reaching customs it was a welcome relief to find that they weren't as nasty as they had been the last time we were here, although they didn't seem to like their customers very much. They asked a few questions in a gruff sort of manner and wanted to know if we were carrying a radiotelephone or firearms. I opened the side door of the van and asked the inspector to take a look inside. He knew exactly what I'd invited him in for. I held up a carton of cigarettes, he took them, stuffed them inside his jacket and left without a word. Then they ran a trolley with a mirror on it under the car and told us to go. Apart from the long wait it wasn't a bad experience at all although nothing like the West German border guards who wished us a good trip and smiled a lot.

As we drove off we saw others who hadn't come off as lightly as us. Three cars were outside the customs sheds being systematically dismantled, their owners watching and waiting impassively. The seats were out on the ground, petrol tanks removed and pieces strewn all over the place. There were very strict rules for transit tourists traveling through East Germany. You were not allowed to stop anywhere except at designated petrol stations and shops, where they tried to extract much needed Western currency from you. They also checked your speed constantly with radar and fined you in West German marks if you were driving at above 100 kilometers per hour. It seemed to me to be an admission that something in their economy wasn’t working if they wouldn’t accept their own East German currency for speeding fines.

If you stopped and engaged anyone in conversation or deviated from the transit route they would catch up with you and put you through a makeshift roadside court after which they also fined you in West German Marks. The name of the game was to get as much hard currency out of you as possible while you were passing through. At each road junction where it's possible to turn off the transit route, there was an observation tower occupied by two men with binoculars who kept the police informed by radio. Of course, the transit route through the country was the showpiece so that tourists wouldn’t get too bad an impression of the place but even so, the road surface was very bad by Western standards and the countryside looked as though the farmers all went on strike ten years ago and hadn’t returned.

The petrol stations were grey, grimy places in bad repair and stinking of diesel, with petrol pumps in need of painting and holes in the concrete of their forecourts. Nearly all had cracked windows held together with sticky tape, no water to wash windscreens with and everything made of metal was rusting to pieces. The toilets at these places didn’t have paper in them or locks on the doors. They stank too and needed a coat of paint, although I doubted if they’d get it in a hurry, and when they did it would probably have been in the ever-popular communist gray. There was an all-pervading sense of grayness which matched the weather perfectly. For some reason gray was the most used color in East Germany. Service stations and factories, cars, trucks and agricultural machinery - all gray. If almost everything had to be painted in the one color I wondered why it had to be gray? Why not pink or blue? - gray’s miserable. Perhaps all their battleships had been sunk but nobody had told the paint factory.

The roads on which we were travelling were Hitler's original autobahns laid all those years ago in concrete sections and even now, some fifty years later, still waiting for a surfacing of asphalt. As we traveled over these big slabs of concrete the tires made a regular clicking sound like being in a train. From time to time we drove through small strips of forest - larches and silver birch trees - they made a welcome break from the monotony and I found myself wishing they'd go on for a little longer. The contrast with West Germany is not worth describing. Communism just doesn’t work and one day soon it has to fall in a heap because it simply can’t keep up. Nowhere is this more evident than in the difference between the two Germanys where, if you didn’t know, you would say that the inhabitants of the two countries were from two completely different races.

Much more interesting than the countryside were the various forms of transport which we shared the road with. For some unknown reason all cars and particularly trucks from Eastern Bloc countries are ugly. I'm sure that the general populace doesn't find them attractive and their designers know what good looking cars look like so why it is that communism produces such gross ugliness in automobile designs I am at a loss to understand. Where are the commie designed Ferrari, Porsche or Jaguar equivalents I wonder? Good looking design, regardless of manufacturing quality, costs no extra so why? Perhaps the system destroys the artistic and the creative instincts in people.

Most remarkable were the Polish cars in East Germany, or rather, what was in them. Poles are perhaps the world’s most active independent trader\smugglers and nowhere are they more active than on the route between Poland and West Berlin. It’s the only Western city they don’t need a visa to visit and they can complete the round trip from the Polish border to West Berlin and back in a day. In West Berlin they can sell agricultural produce such as meat, eggs, tomatoes and so forth at markets or direct to shops at eight to ten times the price they could get for it in Poland. Even so, by West Berlin’s standards, the prices of the goods they smuggle in are still dirt-cheap. In Warsaw meat is rationed and you have to bribe the butcher with a bottle of vodka to get a decent cut but in West Berlin you can buy all the Polish meat you want.

On the return trip they take all sorts of things, some of it sheer rubbish. They go around car wrecking yards and pick up old tires which are worth nothing in the west but which people back home have to wait months to get hold of. They even take home and sell ordinary free supermarket bags because it’s a commodity the system in Poland can’t produce in any quantity and certainly not with any quality. It’s considered quite trendy to be seen carrying a Western supermarket bag around in Warsaw. Generally, Poles buy the cheapest, worst quality western goods possible because they’re still better quality than anything produced anywhere in the Eastern Bloc and there’s a ready market for them back home.

The tiny 625cc motorcycle engined Polish Fiats we passed along the road were, without exception, loaded to the gunwales. We saw one car with literally thousands of small, individual cartons of orange juice covering every square inch of space but the driver’s seat. The roof rack also was stacked high with orange juice too and its overall weight was evidenced by the sparks, which flew from the back of it as it scraped the ground on the bumps. I looked in the mirror as we passed it and even the right hand side of windscreen was covered in orange juice drink cartons. The driver couldn’t possibly have seen anything behind him. He was completely cocooned in the stuff and if he he’d had a collision he would have made headlines.

“Man Drowns In Orange Juice in His Own Car”

Just imagine running into the back of this mobile orange juice pool. There’d be a big bang and suddenly your whole world would turn orange as it splashed across your windscreen. It would be like driving into the navel of the world, a citrus mega-flora heaven where they play Scott Walker records all day and you lay around bombed out on LSD listening to Al Ginsberg and Timothy Leary lectures. Some cars carried all manner of unidentifiable rusting metallic junk in such quantities that, from behind, you wouldn’t have known there was a car and trailer under it all. None of it looked useable to me but Alicja said that it was the raw material they wanted – Polish steel mills turned out crap and any Western steel was worth having.

Other cars had roof racks and trailers loaded down with engine parts, gearboxes and car wheels. Weeks later, in Poland, we decided that it would be a good idea to carry a second spare wheel for the van. We bought a used one from one of these traders who’d bought it at a wrecker’s yard in Germany. We had to pay twice the price we would have paid for a new one in Germany but there was no option. He was the only guy who had one. I estimate that he made at least a month’s Polish wages on the deal but it was cheaper than going out to the West to buy one.

But back to East Germany. We drove at the legal limit of 100kph all the way through it and weren’t overtaken once because everyone was either driving to conserve petrol or was so loaded down with contraband that they couldn't go any faster. When we reached the Polish border there was a queue of about three-kilometers for trucks and half a kilometer for cars. More sandwiches and coffee. The queues were moving very slowly and we kept the engine running because we knew we wouldn’t be able to start it again. After a while a customs officer asked us to turn it off because of the diesel fumes. We explained that our starter was broken, thinking that maybe they would get on and clear us through customs quickly just to get rid of us. They didn't, and we waited.

There were three booths in a line, one after another which we thought were all Polish because they were all painted the same color (you guessed it, gray). The first one turned out to be East German and the official who processed our papers asked us in Polish if we had any vitamins for him. We didn't know what he was talking about and asked him what he meant.

"You don't have any vitamins for me"?

"I don't think so", said Alicja. "We have a few aspirins and stuff in the van."

"These vitamins could have a percentage", he said

Alicja looked blankly at him and he opened the door of his booth so that we could see the bottles of booze on the floor he'd been given by the people before us. I'd already seen the person in front of us giving him what looked like two wristwatches. We had no alcohol so we gave him a carton of cigarettes and he waved us on to the next booth. Customs officials throughout Central & Eastern Europe are, without exception, on the take and the most expedient thing to do is to accommodate them with a bribe of some sort. You can stick to your guns and insist that you are not obliged to pay anything but you may have to wait for hours while they go through your car. Worse still, they simply keep you waiting and hand you onto the next shift. I’ve known people who have waited for 2 days because they had nothing to give to the customs officials but the customs officials thought that they had.

Having got past the East German side we moved up to the Polish booth where the officer told us to stop the engine because he couldn't breathe for diesel fumes. When we said we couldn't stop it because we'd never start it again, he replied that he couldn't let the car through because our papers were not in order and anyway, if we couldn't start the van, then it was unroadworthy and we could on no account enter Poland with it. He didn’t even look at our papers! He told us to go to the side of the road, park up and “switch the fucking old antique of a thing off”. As he walked away he muttered that he didn't have time to mess about with us and he'd maybe come over and attend to us when he finished his shift. He probably thought we’d capitulate quickly with a bribe as Westerners are notoriously impatient but we thought we’d have some fun and wait him out.

We weren't worried at all. It was a nice sunny day, I needed a rest from driving and we didn't have any appointments to keep. I’d made sure to park on a slope so I could get the van started again and we drank tea, rearranged the boxes once more and tried to get some sleep. He came over about three hours later and apologized saying that he'd had a very hard, stressful day because two of his colleagues were on leave and the work load was heavier than usual. We waited for him to finish and then, without a word between us, I opened the dash pocket. There was nothing inside it but a packet of cigarettes with an American ten-dollar note sticking out of the top of it. I inclined my head towards the cigarettes but he looked for me to hand them to him. I didn’t make any move towards them so he pulled a stamp and inkpad out of his pocket and put his hand out for our documents. I handed him the cigarettes and our passports, which he stamped and walked back to his booth. I ran the van down the slope a little way and started it in gear, looked in the mirror and let out a big screaming WHOOOOP! I’d cut the ten-dollar note in half and I still had the other half for the next greedy bastard customs officer we came across. I vowed next time to run a horsehair through each cigarette with a needle too because apparently it makes you cough like a Russian delivery van.

To put these bribes into perspective for those readers who are not familiar with the ways of the Eastern bloc, a Polish customs officer at the time earned the equivalent of fifteen American dollars per month and if I’d have been straight he would just have taken ten from us. Poles who go to West Berlin to sell their illegal meat, butter and eggs make something like twenty-five dollars per trip. Depending on how close to the border they live and the availability of produce to sell they can do three trips a week. In this way they can earn themselves something like five times the customs officer’s monthly wage in just a week! Faced with this enormous financial disparity the customs officer can search their car and confiscate their goods or he can do the smart thing and take a few dollars from the driver in return for his turning a blind eye.

It seems to me that when a country pays its customs officials so little in relation to what most of the people he interviews each day earn from smuggling, that country is inviting bribery and can’t expect it’s officials to remain incorruptible. No matter how well principled the customs man is, sooner or later his kids are going to want new shoes or something and he's going to take what the driver offers him. It's ironic that all across Poland there is an acute shortage of meat while every day vast quantities of it cross the border into Germany in private cars. Heading south it was immediately apparent that Poland was a little more human, a little warmer to a visitor than East Germany albeit still very austere. Driving through the place felt much safer to us than East Germany because Alicja speaks the language and we have our relations here to help us if we run into problems. It was by now late afternoon and we had hopes of reaching Warsaw and a welcome meal and a bed at around midnight.

East Germany for the most part suffers from the effects of collective farming and we didn't see anything which you could call a farm there at all, just the odd corrugated iron tractor shed and fields of the same crop stretching for miles into the distance, all very boring. But in Poland we drove through dozens of villages with little mixed farms with a few ducks, cows, geese, chickens scratching around, maybe a couple of pigs and always a horse or two. We drove on past duck ponds, haystacks, and fruit orchards. In the villages the peasants were returning from the fields carrying their scythes over their shoulders, dogs following at their owners heels. Old women with wizened faces and headscarves stood talking on the pavements or sat on wooden benches in the gardens. And as the light began to fade we could see candles flickering in the village cemeteries.

The road, although narrow, was surprisingly well surfaced and we were making good time but as darkness came upon us we realized that the roads had no reflectors of any sort. There were no cats’ eyes in the middle of the road, no white lines, no arrows on bends and it was difficult to tell where the roadsides ended and the fields began. Shortly after dusk we began to come up behind horses and carts all of which were dark in color and not one of them had a reflector or rear light. By the time we reached the city of Poznan it had come on to rain. Poznan was a large city which did have a few dim street lights around the place but it also had large holes in the road which were filled with road colored water and I couldn’t see them. Had the streetlights have been over the holes it wouldn't have been so bad but as it was, driving was dangerous. We gave up our hopes of reaching Warsaw that night; I'd been driving and waiting at border posts for 15 hours and figured it was time to throw in the towel.

We looked for somewhere on a slope to park for the night. A hotel was out of the question; we had to sleep inside the van to avoid having our gear stolen. The land all around was flat as a bottle of Bulgarian lemonade so we found a muddy lay by at the side of the road and reasoned that for a packet of fags we'd be able to get a tow in the morning. I slipped a blank into the pistol we’d bought in Germany to scare off would-be muggers and we went to sleep on the boxes in the back. Awake at five thirty, I put the kettle on for coffee and found that our milk had gone off.

“Fuck”
“Why are you swearing?”
“Because the fucking milk’s gone off”
“I thought you weren’t going to get annoyed at small things anymore now that you’re not working”
“You’re absolutely right my dear”
“So?”
“So, I’m looking forward to a lovely cup of black coffee”
“That’s it; see…not difficult is it?”

She was right. I made the coffee and sat sipping it in the driver’s seat.

“Oh shit”
“What’s up?”
“That portable toilet chemical stuff we bought has leaked all over the bottom of my coat”
“How come?”
“Oh shit shit shit”
“What?”
“Look at it. It’s all over the bottom of my shoes”
“I thought you weren’t going to get annoyed at small things anymore”
“That wasn’t me that was you. Look at it, I’m fucking annoyed”
“Look, here comes a truck, ask him if he can give us a tow to get started”
“You ask him”
“I don’t speak Polish”
“Yes you do, you speak enough to ask for a tow”
I got out of the van and walked up to where the truck had stopped. The driver wound the window down and raised his eyebrows. I couldn’t think of the word for tow and so I asked him if he thought the weather was going to be fine. He said that the radio was the best place to find that sort of information. I agreed and looked at my boots. He asked if that was my van over there and I told him that it was but that it was a bad product. I knew it was a stupid thing to say but my conversation was limited by my small vocabulary. Then I asked him if he could start the van for me and he looked at me kind of suspicious like and wound the window back up. I didn’t know what to do so I went back and told Alicja who thought it was hilarious. I was still telling her about it when we heard the guy start up and drive off. It was another hour before a garbage truck came along and agreed to give us a pull to start but the thing was too light and the wheels spun in the mud. After the garbage collectors had left I tried the starter and the engine burst into life. I hadn’t thought about trying it before and we found, subsequently, that it would always start first thing in the morning when it was cold.

We eventually arrived in a grim looking Warsaw at eleven in the morning feeling tired and dirty. We hadn’t told Alicja’s mother exactly when we would be arriving, only that it would be in spring and we wanted to surprise her. Had she known our exact ETA she would have stood in queues for a week all over Warsaw trying to get extra food. We’d bought boxes full of food with us from Germany. A surprise it was, but more for us than her. She'd rented out the spare room, in which we were intending to stay, and we had nowhere to sleep. The lodger, a young woman from the country who was studying in Warsaw, was at home when we arrived and we could see that she was worried about being thrown out with nowhere to go. She went off to her room and a few minutes later we could hear her sobbing her heart out. We tried to reassure her by saying that we’d sleep on the floor that night and then find a relative to stay with but she said she’d feel guilty for being there in the middle of a family reunion and lots of other Polish stuff I couldn’t understand.

After an hour, during which Alicja's mother telephoned everyone she knew, the lodger was placed with friends on the understanding that she could return when we’d gone. I ran her and her luggage to the new place in the van and we paid a hundred American dollars inconvenience money to the people who were going to house her. I wondered out loud about inconveniencing these people but Alicja’s mum said it was a Godsend to them as the whole family didn’t earn that much in a month. We no longer needed the suitcases we’d been lugging about for so long and we gave them to the girl. They weren’t anything special and the wheels no longer worked but she was thrilled to bits. I saw why later, hers were made of papier mache.

When we returned to Alicja's Mum's apartment we had to carry the entire contents of the van up six flights of stairs because the lift was out of order and her mum was adamant that the van would be gutted by thieves in no time if anything was left in it. I was getting utterly sick of carrying our things up stairs. The last time was in Brussels when the lift had been broken in the Jaques Brell Youth Hostel. This time we had a big van full to the brim, I was dog-tired and it took the best part of two hours. At last there was time to relax and we both took a welcome bath. I was glad we did because the hot water went off the next day and only made the occasional brief appearance over the next six weeks. A year later we were still getting letters from my Mother in Law saying “we had hot water for a whole month”. Yes this was Poland all right, land of the occasional hot water and pre-loved scaffolding. We remembered experiencing exactly the same situation 4 years before when we were here. As soon as we found that the water was hot, everyone took a bath because they never knew when they'd get the next one.

The hot water supply in Polish cities is not an individual thing, you don't have your own hot water service, it comes from a great big central water heating plant usually located on the outskirts of town. It’s is pumped through underground pipes to the apartment and office blocks all around the city and to see steam rising from manhole covers in the middle the roads is a familiar sight. The city councils are forever renewing the pipes and, as they don't have the money required to buy good quality Western pipes, they quickly disintegrate in the corrosive hot water and they have to do it all over again. Hot water is not a service to be taken for granted in Polish cities - it's a sporadic thing.

For those fortunate enough to have telephones it’s common practice all over Polish cities to call friends and family and ask if you can come over and have a bath at their place. People seldom refuse these requests because they knew that it can be their turn not to have hot water next time. If you don’t have a telephone you either just turn up at your relatives apartment with your towel or you stay at home and heat water on the gas stove in pots and pans. The hot water that heats all the apartment and office radiators works on the same principle and when that goes off people have to be resourceful. I’ve seen people heat half a dozen house bricks on the gas stove and place them on two cold bricks on the floor and rotate heaps of these hot bricks around their apartments to keep warm. The person who’s actually heating the bricks on the stove has the warmest job but he/she nearly suffocates from carbon monoxide poisoning because of all the gas being burnt in the kitchen.

As for the pre loved scaffolding, it looks as though it’s been in service since before the Bolshevik Revolution. No, I’m wrong – before the Industrial Revolution. You don't see scaffolding in this sort of condition in the West because workmen would refuse to use it. No insurance company would insure people working on it. It’s all bent and rusty and the clamps which hold it together are on their last legs. When you see it erected on the side of a building it looks like a heap of rust colored sticks just blew up against a wall in a hurricane. There's no such thing as new scaffolding so, as it falls by the wayside, it's replaced by wooden saplings of varying lengths taken straight out of the forest and nailed together.

On our second night in Warsaw we went out to eat at a Vietnamese restaurant which offered, on the menu, such imaginative delicacies as Roast Piggy, Chicken with bamboo and Goat in fire. In Australia we were frequent visitors to Vietnamese restaurants and we knew what Vietnamese food should taste like. This wasn’t remotely like it and included things like beetroot, Polish sausage, turnips and pickled cucumber. The restaurant staff was all North Vietnamese who had been sent to Poland to study mechanical engineering, had married Polish girls and applied to stay here. They were interesting guys and, as we were their only customers at the time, they entertained us.

They told us that they'd been given an intensive Polish language course when they first arrived and this was something that had equipped them for living in Poland afterwards. When they were officially given permission to stay in Poland the regulations didn’t allow them to hold work permits but there was no law to prevent them from opening a business. They'd spent a considerable amount of time wondering what kind of business they could go into with limited funds and they finally decided on a restaurant but there were problems - none of them had ever cooked before, they didn't have any recipes and couldn't find woks to cook in.

Being mechanical engineers, designing and making the woks had been within their realm of expertise but, from my observations, they could have done with a few lessons in carpentry - the hand whittled chopsticks were a trifle lumpy and tasted of, I believe, pine sap. The next stage in their project had been to comb every grocery shop and market in Warsaw looking for authentic ingredients but they only found one - rice. This explained to our complete satisfaction the distant tang of burnt cabbage which hung around in the background of each dish we sampled. When combined with the fact that it had been cooked by mechanical engineers in home made woks, who hadn’t visited Vietnam in years and had no culinary training whatsoever, I would venture to say that we had experienced a Vietnamese culinary delight without parallel in its country of origin.

Things were ridiculously cheap for us in Poland and we ate out at the very best restaurants every day even though, in a city of one and a half million, there were only a handful of restaurants worthy of the name. One night we went to a very formal and posh place where the waiters spoke English. They didn't have a table for us as they were fully booked but said that we could get a meal in the other room at the grill. We sat down at the bar\grill and the waiter\chef told us that they only had one meal on the menu, steak and chips. We ordered one each. Mine was a pretty good steak but it was a little underdone, so having checked the price, which was a whole $1.50, I asked for another one.

"Another steak please, well done." "Thank you very much sir", he said, thinking I was complimenting him on his cooking of the last steak rather than giving him an order for the next one. I ate two underdone steaks that evening.

Inflation here, they say, is running at something like 80% p.a. and it really brings it home to you when you get into a taxi and there is a little piece of paper informing you that you must multiply the meter reading by 13 to get the current fare. We bought a few odds and ends for the van one day and they came to a price which was too much for the cash register. The shop assistant had to divide the price by four and ring it up four times on the cash register which was made for service in times when the currency was stable.

Alicja's Mum had had a fridge on order for over a year and was still waiting for notification that one had come into stock for her. The next time we were passing the shop we went in to inquire about it. The manager found the paperwork but told us that he had no idea when a fridge would be allocated, what size it would be or whether it would be of Polish or Russian manufacture. “It's the luck of the draw”, he said. “I have no control over it”. We thought we'd try cutting through all the crap and offer a bribe. There wasn't much beating about the bush. I showed him a ten-dollar note, he asked us to choose which fridge we wanted from the storeroom and we had it delivered immediately. This, of course, meant that someone else's mother who'd had a fridge on order for God knows how long, would miss out for a while longer. The cost of the fridge was the surprising part of the deal, it was $22, it looked good and it worked when we plugged it in.

Things generally were better than on our visit four years previously, the shops were better stocked, there were a few Western cars on the streets and, in Warsaw, the odd splash of color on buildings. Diesel for the van cost 3.35 cents per litre and we made arrangements to have long-range fuel tanks made and fitted. Commercials had just started to appear on Polish television. They were terribly amateurish but what else could be expected? They were the first form of advertising ever to appear on Polish TV. We saw a sign one-day in the city. It was for the film Dirty Dancing but had been translated into Polish as "Rotating Sex.

In the subway in Central Warsaw every day were some old buskers, pensioners supplementing their income, not just the odd one but a whole orchestra. They sounded good too, much better than Freddie Dix of Chipping Norton fame. On May the First, a big day throughout the Soviet Union, we watched a Polish country and western group perform in the street singing in English with American accents -down south American accents. They were word perfect although they probably didn't speak a word of English. Next came a very passable trad' jazz band, again singing in English, "everybody wanz mah babbee but mah babbee dun wanz nobbudy budmee" I felt a little sorry for them because they were good and lively but no one in the audience seemed to be entirely with it, no foot tapping and no applauding the solos and only a small attempt at applause at the end.

Photocopying too had just found its way to Warsaw but there were only about ten photocopiers in the whole of the city. You still had to fill in your name and address on a slip of paper so that you could be traced in case you were duplicating subversive literature, but nevertheless, four years ago there was not one commercial copying outfit in Warsaw.

A few days later I disgraced myself when we attended a Polish military funeral. It was for a man who had been an army Colonel and which, apart from the family, was attended by four busloads of army personnel. They were tall young soldiers with straight backs, razor sharp creases in their trousers and bags of spit and Polish or was it…pol?. This may need clarification. I didn’t mean Polish. I didn’t mean to imply here that they were Polish and carried bags of spit. Heavens no - I don’t know what they were carrying in their bags!

The coffin arrived in a gray van just like the regular vans you see driving around Warsaw - no distinguishing features at all to let one know that it was a hearse. The coffin was placed on a gun carriage and a mournful sounding military band led the way with the slow marching soldiers behind them, followed by the coffin with friends and relatives bringing up the rear. At first I had the impression that it was going to be an impersonal affair with the army taking over the proceedings and the family being somewhat left out of it. But it was well organized and when we arrived at the grave, the army stood in line to one side and let the family go to the front. They had organized a microphone for the two speakers and throughout the entire proceedings, three soldiers stood at the grave side straight as ramrods holding red cushions on which were displayed the man's medals. The army's demeanor in the event was respectful and dignified. In fact I formed the impression that it was a good way to run things because people weren't left wondering what to do, what protocol should be observed, and so forth.

There were, at various intervals, orders being given to the dozen or so soldiers who were standing behind me - orders which I couldn't understand, and when the order came to fire the salute, I didn't know what had been said. Suddenly, very suddenly, from out of the gray, an officer standing in front of me bellowed out a word, there was an enormous bang, I screamed "FUUUUCK" and hit the ground. I thought he'd seen a bomb dropping or something.

When I opened my eyes and took my hands away from over my ears I was lying on a heap of freshly dug mud staring over the edge of the grave straight at the coffin. I was dressed in my brother-in-law’s suit which now had mud all down the front of it and his cuff links were all gummed up with mud too. Of course, I did know that this wasn't exactly the way in which I should deport myself at such an occasion, but it was automatic. I looked up to see if anyone was left standing. Of course, everyone was. Although they didn't speak English I was sure they were all familiar with the word fuck - it's international. I got to my knees. They were all horrified at my behavior and stood there looking down at me with gaping mouths. All, that is, except for this one guy of about thirty years of age who started giggling under his breath and had to excuse himself. I saw him standing at the gate smoking as we were on our way out and he took one look at me, turned away, and started laughing again.

The cemetery was beautiful, covered in trees, it was like being in a forest and quite unlike Anglo Saxon burial places which by comparison seem cold and reserved and lack feeling. There were small bench seats at the ends of many graves that had obviously been built by the relations so that they could come, sit quietly and remember. There was a touch of unruliness about the place that seems to me to reflect the Polish spirit. I don't mean scruffiness, no, it was more cared for than most Anglo Saxon style cemeteries. It was more a naturalness, a wildness, a few weeds, primroses, lily-of-the-valley, forget-me-nots and that sort of thing.

One thing which did strike me as being unusual was that there were a number of newish graves on the headstones of which there was a persons name and birth date but no date of death. I was told that they had already been built, bought and paid for by people who are still alive but presumably don't want their death to be a burden on others. I regarded it as plain morbid and defeatist and I wanted to kick the owners up the ass and tell them to start living again because people with that kind of mindset are already a burden to others. Anyway, when I was at the cemetery I saw a peculiar thing. In amongst all these strange Slavic names on the headstones, some in the Cyrillic alphabet, one stood out. His name was Edmond Russell and I wondered how come he ended up there. Perhaps he was a tourist like me who went through a red light or maybe he'd been at a military funeral and had a heart attack when they'd fired the guns. I want to meet him when I get to heaven. I want to get pissed with him and have a good laugh about Polish cemeteries.

Alicja's uncle and aunt recently bought a farm about 40 km from Warsaw. It has an enormous barn with a concrete floor and electricity - ideal for messing around under cars - so we’ve been going down there to work on the campervan. On the way there is a road sign saying Moscow 1200 km and every time I see it I am reminded that we are only two days drive (if the roads are any good) from the capitol of Gorbyland. It seems very exotic to me.

Funny how Russians have this way of honoring their politicians and leaders by naming cities after them isn't it? And then sometimes they finally get around to admitting that the guy was a real bastard and rename it after someone who's in vogue at the time. I mean, there's Ho Chi Minh City, St Petersburg, Stalingrad, Leningrad, etc. etc. Us good guys don't have Nixonville, Churchilltown, Reagan City or Thatcherville etc. do we? I'm sure that one day, when all these poor sods have finally got color television and hot running water, and the rest of the World is living on the moon, there'll be a Gorbograd or Gorboburg or something.

Letter 4

Through shortage of materials progress on the campervan was slow. There were lots of small items we didn’t think we’d have difficulty in finding in Poland but not being able to find them has held us up. Even little things like screws were in short supply.

One day I tried on someone else's glasses and I found that reading was much easier so off we went to the opticians to order a pair. The eye test was rather primitive, or at least I think it was, bearing in mind that I've never been tested for spectacles before. They put these glasses on me with frames which were open at the top and then inserted different glass eyepieces and asked me if I could read a piece of paper which they thrust into my hand. I failed miserably but then they realized that I couldn’t speak Polish and they had me sit in a chair and do an eye test in baby language. I needed plus one ones, glasses, that is, and I picked them up two days later. They cost two dollars and seem perfectly all right to me.

Knowing that we’d need visas for the other communist countries we'll be traveling through, we took ourselves off to the city one morning and spent time knocking on the doors of the consulates. Jugoslavia was pretty good apart from the fact that the door was locked and there wasn't a sign to tell you how to communicate with the people inside. Eventually though, someone came along who had a key to the door and we followed him in. We only had to wait an hour (we were the only people in there) and we walked out with our visas.

Czechoslovakia was a little long-winded. The first time we applied, they said that they couldn't give us a visa unless we presented our car papers, so we had to go away and come back again. The application forms were in Czech, German, Russian and English only. So, Poles who don't speak any of these foreign languages have a bit of a job applying. I thought it was utterly stupid not to have forms in Polish given that 90% of the people who would be applying for a visa in Warsaw would be Polish. There was not even an office at which people could apply for Czech visas. It was all done on the outside stairs of the consulate building with the odd Czech office worker putting in an appearance now and again. You filled out your form and just waited. It took 6 hours.

At the Hungarian consulate which was crappy, but by Polish standards quite nice, it was a different story altogether. They had a room, with a roof and windows and everything. There were two coffee tables, eight seats, two pairs of scissors and two bottles of glue. There was a window with the curtain closed and a sign pinned to the curtain in three languages. The English version said "PLEASE DO NOT KNOCK, IT IS VERY DISTURBING". I looked all around the room for the concealed video camera, which enabled the staff to see the people in the waiting room but to no avail. No one way mirrors, no paintings on the wall with moving eyes, no trained barking animals etc. Nothing, absolutely nothing at all. No means of communication with the people on the other side of the window was possible. The lazy good for nothing sods just opened the curtain when they felt like it. What were the scissors and glue for? So that you could cut up and stick your own photographs on your application form. They required three photographs. The Yugoslavians didn’t require any!

The Bulgarian Consulate probably won the prize. The application form wanted you to name every person you knew in Bulgaria and all sorts of totally irrelevant rubbish. When we arrived, the place was open but nobody was in. At least, nobody was sitting at the window and some people had been waiting there for two hours. I banged on the window with my car keys, flicked coins up in the air so that they landed with a resounding ding on the table inside the window and I also whistled God Save the Queen but nothing worked. We waited about an hour until a Russian guy came along and read a little notice for us. It was a tiny notice measuring about 3 inches square and it was taped to the door. It said that it was some sort of Bulgarian national holiday (a very rare event a Bulgarian national holiday believe you me) and that they wouldn't be working. Only thing was, this notice was in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Now, the Cyrillic alphabet is not the alphabet of Poland any more than it is that of Australia so why? I just couldn’t understand why. Anyway, to cut a long story short, this guy arrived wearing the poorest quality wig you've ever seen (looked like Armadillo fur) and after a lot of arguing with the locals and a few of his fellow office workers he took care of us. He said that it would take at least a fortnight to get a tourist visa. I said that we were going to travel around his country and spend some money there so couldn’t the visa issuing process be speeded up because we would have to spend two extra weeks in Poland just waiting to set off for Bulgaria. He asked if we would be spending American dollars in Bulgaria. “Yes” I said “just like these” and handed him a US $10 note. He called out to someone who took our passports and came back in around five minutes with visas stamped in them.

And now a word about Polish manufactured products. SHIT

Fitting out our campervan in Poland was a frustrating exercise. Polish metal drill bits are no match for the German steel, which the van is made of, and even when they’re brand new they go blunt before the hole is drilled. Right-angled brackets vary from 85 degrees to about 100. An average packet of fifty screws contains the following: 4 with no threads, 9 with no screw slots, 10 with so little thread that you might as well use them as nails, 6 which twist in half as you use them, 8 with the slot off center and 10 with the slots barely visible. As you paint with Polish paintbrushes (assuming that you are lucky enough to have found paint) the hairs just fall out wholesale. I thought I’d chosen a particularly bad combination of brushes and paint and I mentioned it whilst in friends place one night. He showed me around his apartment and everything he’d painted had hairs all through it.

Rivets are of such poor quality that they simply don't work, some of them fit in the riveter and some don't and the pins pull through the majority of them. Rivets are in fact, so bad that I just can't see the point in continuing to manufacture them.

I bought two battery terminals for the van and asked an electrician to install them but he said that their life expectancy is only six months and I should hunt around for some Western ones. We bought a glass teapot that lasted one day before the hot water got the better of it and it cracked. The teaspoons burn your fingers if you leave them in the hot tea because they are made of some highly conductive cheap alloy material. The best Polish product we've seen so far is the glue used to fasten the price stickers onto things. You don't have to break your fingernails to remove the labels because they just fall off. I could go on and on, in fact I have a bit haven't I ? Anyway to generalize, one buys a product and repairs it prior to using it.

By far the biggest problem is finding things in shops, anything. Two or three visits to a hardware store in Australia would have fixed us up with everything we needed to convert the van into a camper but here we have had to visit at least fifty shops and then make do with what we could get. The van looks like the inside of a Russian tank. The cupboards are built out of that brown, fibrous electrical insulation material that printed circuits are printed on and you find on the inside of transistor radios. Spartan and industrial are the two words that spring to mind every time I walk into it. I can imagine spies sitting in a space like this listening to secret radio broadcasts. The only suitable plastic containers we could find for carrying odds and ends like scissors were thermos flasks with the insides removed and we have a row of them lined up behind the sink looking like artillery shells.

Last week we were introduced to a couple who got divorced three years ago so that they could go on living together in the same flat. They’d had an interrogatory visit from the housing authority who found that the flat that they were occupying was too large for a married couple without kids. Two single people with two beds and two televisions etc. however, are entitled to more room so they got divorced in order to continue their married existence in the same apartment. And today I met an American at a bus stop and one of the first things he said to me was "listen man, I been comin' here for the last five years and I can tell yah that as soon as yah start appplyin' any logic to any of this shit you'll go nuts. Yah just let it happen around yah". How profound these American chaps are I thought.

Listen, did you ever think about Pigeons? I mean… whether it hurts them when they take off? See, we were walking around this castle place the other day and I heard this flapping noise and I knew what it was straight away, it was a pigeon taking off. They always make this flapping noise. We needed a cup of coffee and I thought we may as well disappoint ourselves right there and then so we sat down and ordered at the castle above ground dungeon style coffee shop. We chose a rickety table near a window because the holes in the table-cloths looked fresher than the rest and the window was a little less dirty in that spot. Outside there was a rusting balustrade with half a dozen pigeons lined up on it. Have you ever noticed that before they take off, pigeons sort of take a little dip, defecate, raise themselves up again and then launch themselves? Well, they do.
Anyway, I studied them quite closely as they took off. They all beat their wings together under their breasts which caused the flapping noise I wrote about around eight lines ago. It must hurt I should think, and it might have something to do with how pigeon breasts are so nice and tender when you eat them. But other birds don't do it do they? Swans make that kind of whippy-whistly-swishy noise as they take off but no other bird beats the shit out of itself every time it gets airborne. I reckon it's another one of Gods little cock ups like Platypuses which have to shut their eyes when they go under water to look for food.

I saw a great opportunity for a photograph the other day but I didn't have the camera with me. We were in a market place here in Warsaw and in the middle was this great big shed and when I looked into it there were these three big fat ladies. They had wrinkles on their faces like satellite photographs of the Grand Canyon and they were plucking chickens. In the foreground was this great pyramid of dead undernourished chickens with their necks lolling about like limp penises and the three ladies had feathers nearly up to their knees. There was a hole in the wall through which the sun illuminated the down flying around in the shed’s atmosphere and it looked just great.

The market was one of the most interesting places in Warsaw. I saw a brand new Russian microwave oven selling for thirty five dollars, still in the unopened box. I also saw a sub machine gun which the seller said was Russian but when he told me the make and model I’d never heard of it. All I know is that it didn’t sound like Kalashnikov. I’ve no idea why the guy showed it to me but I was looking at his stall which had painted pencil cases and ornamental, pearl handled penknives on it. I inclined my head towards the knives and he looked at me and, still looking me in the eye, pulled back a piece of rag and the gun was under it. I thanked him very much, nodded knowingly and turned to look at the heroically proportioned ladies bras on the stall next door. The market was the only place where you could get fresh vegetables that didn’t look as though they’d been stored for ages; these were grown by individuals who had gardens. Apart from the stallholders, there was a line of sad faced individuals, I suppose around eighty of them, just selling one object each, maybe a Western leather jacket or a car radio, a tire or an electric carving knife.

Poles have become somewhat unpopular with neighboring, Eastern Bloc, countries over the years because of the amount of independent trading and smuggling which they engage in. Some countries claim they’re becoming inundated with screaming hordes of Poles every weekend with cars full of goods to sell and so the authorities in those countries are trying to make things difficult for them. A friend told us that on the way back from a trip to Czechoslovakia last week, the Czech customs officers kept her for 4 hours while they went through her single suitcase. They were very unpleasant about her having two tubes of Czech toothpaste in her possession and she ended up having to leave them behind. I’ve been trying to imagine the length of the queues at the borders if they are spending that amount of time with some people. I can see we’re going to need some sort of in-van entertainment so we can while away the hours at border posts in comfort. I might get myself another inflatable woman. The last one went down on me. Inflatable women are safe you see, not like the locals. I went to bed with a Pole last night – I got terrible splinters!

Over the last couple of weeks Poland has been in the grip of election fever - if you can call a few badly printed posters election fever. This election could be the biggest thing ever to have hit the communist world and the eyes of the world are upon the outcome. Not having had a democratic election in modern history the Poles are learning electioneering for the first time and although you have to start somewhere, I'm beginning to wonder if they'll ever get the hang of it. Solidarity's effort seems to be concentrated on small posters picturing Lech Walensa with each Solidarity candidate. They were all taken in the same room with Lech baby sitting in exactly the same position and with the same, inane half smile on his shiny little peasant-like face. It must either have been a marathon photo session for him or the pictures are all photographs of a photograph of him with each candidate. Either way any old ladies cake stand in Australia could out-advertise Solidarity.

The government effort from a Western point of view is abysmal too with just the odd incredibly boring poster often with no photograph at all! They aren't yet used to the concept that image is what sells and when you see the opponents on TV they look quite shabby. The Solidarity candidates don't seem to possess a suit between them and look uncomfortable in ties. One of them I saw giving a speech this morning. He had a jacket that looked like his missus had woven it from homespun and his shirt collar was too small causing the lapels to stick out like little wings. It looked for all the world like his Adam’s apple was about to take flight and his blood red tie made it look as though his throat had been cut. Sometimes in the city you see a van with speakers on top with the occupants announcing their election promises. Trouble is, that the quality of the sound is so bad that nobody can make any sense of it all. You can see shoppers asking each other “what’s he saying”. As for the state of the vans, well, I've seen far better ones on Australian building sites covered in concrete.

You know the smell of garbage? It's that smell you get in your rubbish bin no matter what you put in it. Funny isn't it? no matter what you put in, the same smell always comes out. It’s like when I was a teenager and I used to get drunk every Saturday night. I noticed that every time I threw up there was always carrot in it even when I was sure I hadn’t even eaten carrots. I finally came to the conclusion that I’d been throwing up all over the spots where someone else, who’d eaten carrots, had already thrown up before me. That reminds me. I had this mate called Malcolm Lovell and he used to drink more than he could handle of a Saturday night and then go and eat in Chinese restaurants. As regular as clockwork he’d throw up between the restaurant and the bus stop on the way home. One Saturday night we were sitting in the bus stop barely able to make intelligible conversation and he said

“Pete?”
“Pete?”
“Pete, Pete…………pete pete peeeeete?”
“What?”
“Jew know fukin Peekin?”
“No… oose that then?”
“Sssth captil o fukin India innit eh?”
“Noissnott, Ssthcaptol of China?”
“Thas got fuckall to do wiv it, ‘as it eh?”
“Alright then, wot about it then?
“ Well….well….I got this theory”
“Oh yea wassat then?”
“I reckon on Saturday nites the pavements infukkin Pekin’re coverd in steak an kidney pies that pissed Indians ‘ave thrown up like”

“Do they have carrots on India
“Fuck knows”
Well, residential Warsaw smells of it – sorry, not steak and kidney pies thrown up by pissed Indians. No, I was sidetracked… I’m still talking about the smell of garbage being the same whatever you put in it. Actually, I don’t know whether I’ll leave that bit in the book when it’s finished so if it’s not there when you read it, don’t worry about it. On the other hand if it’s not in there..you won’t… know ….abou…….t ..it? Oh dear I think senility is slowly………

Yes, back to garbage.

I'm now working on the campervan at a lock up garage at a housing estate where they have blocks of flats and I can smell garbage all day. These blocks all have the same garbage dumping/collection point which was overflowing last week and now there is so much of the stuff that you can't even see the big bins for foul smelling food scraps and general rubbish. It's disgusting. As you walk into most blocks of flats you can smell that same smell in the entrance hall and up the stairs. The block that we're staying in has a big covered shaft with doors in it out in the hall on each floor and people empty their rubbish into it. It goes down the chute and ends up in a little room at ground level where some poor sod has to shovel it into rubbish bins. The shovelers don’t work at the same apartment block every day of the week and so it hangs around or a few days before it goes into the bins, which I might add, don’t have lids on them. It's then a further day or two before the truck comes to pick the stuff up so you can guess what the resultant stench is like. All this in twentieth century Europe!

Imagine being one of the people who has to shovel it all up. It would be like something out of a Charles Dickens novel "Oliverski A Week In The Life Of A Garbage Shoveler". I mean, what would you write in your diary each day?

Monday 6th: “Applied to the department for a crash helmet after being when struck on the head by cabbage stump from the chute while I was shoveling the potato peelings

Tuesday 7th: “I knew the people at number 37 weren’t going to keep that kitten.”

Wednesday 8th: "Number 10 have Americans staying with them, I saw the Hershey Bar wrappers"

Thursday 9th: “Thought I’d come across a stash of elastic bands but it turned out to be bacon rind”

Friday 10th: "Been on cabbage leaves all day, looking forward to the summer".

Saturday 11th "The woman at number 23 is not a natural blonde. I've seen the hair dye bottles and how come the people in number 14 can afford bananas, he's only a car mechanic"

My brother in law wants to move out of the city and live on a farm somewhere and so he advertised in the paper for one – one farm, that is…I don’t think he could afford a city. He received a number of replies. One of them was a 20-hectare place with crops and some natural forest about 70km from Warsaw. It had a house, some outbuildings, a tractor, a horse and a few other odds and ends and the price was US $5,000. Just as in other countries, people want to migrate to the cities, and farms here are cheap for this reason. I rather fancied a farm at this price and asked if it would be possible for a foreigner to buy one. Yes, was the reply but first you need to be a fully accredited, qualified farmer with papers to prove it. Oh' well, there goes another dream I thought. I was wrong, it can be arranged. I was introduced to a family friend who is a solicitor but he also wanted to be classified as a farmer so he could qualify to purchase a farm. He told me how to do it.

First he said he got himself introduced to the guy who runs the courses which people have to pass to become farmers. He paid the man a bribe of $25 and in return he received a certificate to say that he had completed the course. This, however, didn’t preclude him from having to take an oral examination about what time of year to plant cabbages, milk pigs or whatever it is that Polish farmers do when they’re not smashed out of their brains on moonshine vodka. He didn't have a clue, couldn't answer most of the questions, and he estimates that he got approximately 10% of the questions right. At the end of the examination he was told "OK we'll mail you your farming papers and from now on you can consider yourself qualified but don't try farming because you are not suited to it.”

When we bought the van in Germany it had a radio aerial on it which is made of some clever, metallic impregnated, rubber compound. I said that I didn't think that it was a very good aerial but the owner demonstrated how tough and flexible it was and challenged me to break it. It was tough too. You can bend it, stretch it, tie a knot in it, in fact do just about anything to it and it still works – it’s impossible to destroy it. Hadn't been in Poland three weeks when some rotten thief unscrewed it.

We have been seeing some Polish friends of ours who are here on vacation from Sydney and it has been great to get together in restaurants and speak English and have someone to have a moan with. Janusz, the husband, told me that he went down to the market here one morning and he saw a man in a small kiosk selling caviar. He asked the price of it and found that for what you pay in Sydney for 100 grams of caviar, you can get a whole kilogram of it here. It didn't take much thinking to work out that by taking one tin to Australia he could make $300 so he started asking a few questions about the quality and so on. The man said that if he was going to buy caviar then he should buy it from him because he knew the business. Janusz said he couldn’t see that there was much to know about the subject and that one can of caviar was the same as another if the brand was the same. He told the guy that he’d buy from whoever was the cheapest.

The guy invited Janusz into the shop and showed him two identical tins of the stuff. "Tell me the difference between the two cans" he said. Janusz swears that there was no difference whatsoever. Not only did they have the same printing on them but the same stamping in the metal lid of the can. "Right" said the caviar salesman. “We'll open the first one.” He did so and it was full of caviar. “So what” says Janusz. The guy handed Janusz the can opener and he opened the second can himself. It was full of sardines. "So", says the caviar Tzar, "you want caviar, you come to me". Can you imagine it? this guy runs his business by knowing which tin to open. I no longer continue to be surprised by these things, I hear or see them every day. The whole of the Eastern block runs on bribes, corruption, graft and just plain cheating.

In a few days time we’ll be leaving Poland to start on territory unknown to us and that’s what I’m really looking forward to. We have visas for Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Jugoslavia Bulgaria and Turkey. If we go on to Syria, Jordan and the middle east we’ll have to get visas in Istanbul or trust to luck at the borders of those countries.

We read in the Polish press this week that the Romanian police stop travelers for no reason at all and take them to the police station where they ask them a load of questions for an hour or two and let them go. When the people get back to their cars, they find that all their belongings have been ripped of. Everybody knows that it’s the police who orchestrate these robberies but there’s not much anyone can do under Czeauczescu’s corrupt regime. I’m sure I’ve spelt dictator’s name incorrectly but I’ve asked everyone how to spell it and it’s a spelling by consensus.

John and Julia, some friends of ours from Melbourne, went through Bulgaria a while back and on returning to their car one day they found that the number plates were missing. There was a note in German (their car had German number plates) under the windscreen wipers to say that they were illegally parked and that they could collect their plates at the police station. To get them back they had to pay US$40 - about 3 months Bulgarian wages.

We’ve taken some of these stories on board and have taken a few extra security precautions because a Western car, and anything inside it, is a prime target for thieves in commie countries. Our friends in Poland though, think that it’s best not to turn the van into some impregnable fortress because it will annoy thieves and they’ll set fire to it. Who knows?

Anyway, anyone trying to remove our number plates is going to have to work at it because I took heed of John’s warning and went overboard with rivets bolts and screws. We now have Europe’s most secure number plates and an alarm system which drives you nuts if you try to tamper with the car. Inside is a small metal safe welded to the floor and to remove it requires an oxy acetylene torch. To get in the door they have to saw through the best quality Polish cattle tethering chain and to drive it away they first have to pick a massive Russian padlock.

Well, it’s end of chapter time now so I’m going to bed. I’m not really as happy with this chapter as I was the last one. I think it’s too disjointed but if you’re reading it I must already have your money. I don’t really know what I’m going to write about in the next chapter either. I may leave it until we’re across the border in Czechoslovakia. There are lots more stories to tell about Poland but if this book ever gets published I want to keep them for the next book. This would probably be a good point for you to turn out the bedside lamp, roll over and annoy the person next to you. See you in the next chapter.

Letter 5

DATELINE RAELENE Speedo Reading 46,457 Kilometers

Do you like it? Raelene I mean. We wanted a typically Australian female name for the van and we decided that we just couldn't go past Raelene. These words are freshly typed and coming to you from inside the van at a little town called Kudowa Zdroj in the south east of Poland. It’s right next to the Czech border which we will cross first thing in the morning. Of course, it goes without saying that if this is a long chapter then some of the words won’t be from Kudowa Zdroj but from wherever we happen to be at the time. I just wanted you to know that in case you get to wondering how I’m typing things about Czechoslovakia when I just said I was in Kud……………..Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

Right, here we go into another action packed chapter of good quality reading adjectives.

After dinner we wandered down into the town and came across a pretty little chapel with big, thick wooden doors and a high pitched roof. It was shut but there was a passageway leading downstairs to the basement. I ventured down the steep steps supporting myself with my hands on the walls at either side. A rat ran up the steps past me and I jumped. It was quite dark and the walls were built of these large rounded river pebbly things. The door at the bottom of the stairs was locked so I went back up again and Alicja was there reading the notice board.

“I’ve just been down those steps but you can’t get in, it’s all made of big round river pebbles down there. I saw a rat too. What does it say on the notice board?”

“You wouldn’t be interested”
“Yes I would”
“No you wouldn’t”
“Oh, that’s not fair. You’ll know something and I won’t”
“OK. The river pebbles aren’t pebbles”
“What are they then?”
“Human skulls!”
“You serious?”
“Yes”
I bet that rat down there was living in dead Ernest then”
“Is there nothing you don’t have to make some smart remark about?”
“Can’t afford to, I want to get ahead….A head, get it?”

“If you’ll shut up for five minutes I’ll read you what’s on the notice board.”.

“OK then”

She read, I listened. Apparently all the interior walls were made of human skulls and the basement was packed full of them. It said that the local priest who lived in the 1760s probably got the idea when he visited Rome and saw the Catacombs. It went on to say that there was some sort of epidemic in the town and the priest saw his chance to get his hands on a goodly supply of the said building material. It also said that he enlisted the help of the churchyard gravedigger. What a barbaric thing is this Christianity when you think about it, getting gravediggers to exhume skulls so that you can build a nice little chapel to the glorification of your God. Skuldiggery, that's what I call it.

We left Warsaw two days ago and have been traveling through the most beautiful countryside all the way here. I’ve just realized that a more experienced writer would probably have put that information at the beginning of the chapter. I’ll have to get hold of Frederick Forsyth again – see how he does it. It's harvest time for a lot of the crops and we have seen the peasants out in the fields cutting wheat and probably barley (and other tall green things I don’t know anything about) with scythes and there are horse drawn hay carts piled high with the produce and children sitting on top. The drivers of these things very seldom look at the road at all, they just let the horse have its head and find its own way. Sounds quaint I know, but it's also very dangerous.

Before leaving Warsaw we were on the way home one night from the garage where we had been working on the van when we felt a little peckish, so we called in to the Holiday Inn. This hotel had only been open for two or three days and was opened with great pomp and lots of speeches by various government ministers and the ceremony shown on TV. It was politicized and the government owned press was making it out to be some endorsement of the Polish economy by the USA. Nothing like this had ever happened to Warsaw before and it was THE place to eat and be seen.

We drove into the car park and hastily changed into our cleanest jeans before fronting up at the restaurant. They were just on the point of telling us that they didn't have a table when I addressed the Maitre de in English and he replied that of course he had a table for us. We sat there with filthy fingernails and went right through the first class menu for an absolute pittance whilst they were turning Poles away in droves despite there being plenty of room. The staff only wanted Poles in the restaurant as a last resort because they couldn’t afford to give large enough tips.

I was showing off my best Polish to the English speaking Polish waiter when I ordered peaches with ice cream. Trouble was, I got my Polish words mixed up and asked for ice cream with radishes. He looked at me strangely as though the peaches mightn’t have been too good but I nodded my head to show that I knew what I wanted. After he left I realized my linguistic cock up and when he returned I saw that he had too, because he had the peaches and ice cream in his hand.

"I believe I ordered radishes just now,” I said with a smile. "My mistake sir" he said, and he went off to get the radishes. When he came back I didn’t want to get into even more linguistic confusion so I thanked him and ate the radishes and ice cream. He’d obviously told all his waiter buddies about it because they kept looking at me and walking close by on their way to and from the kitchen. Alicja almost wet herself laughing. At the end of the meal I asked in English for the bill. He appeared a few seconds later with a jug of milk having mistaken the word milk for bill. Alicja finally asked for the check and we paid and left wondering if they’ll be including radishes and ice cream on the menu next season.

We were so impressed with the Holiday Inn that we spent the night there - in their car park – and we have a photograph of me emptying our pee bucket down their drain to prove it. In the morning, looking a little the worse for wear, we went back inside and asked for breakfast. The restaurant manager asked for our room number because, she said, breakfast was only for hotel guests. I mustered my very best American accent and said in a loud voice that we'd been driving all Goddam night and had arrived before the rest of our party. I said I wasn’t in any mood to play games and that we needed coffee and something to eat before checking in. A young American in a suit with a Holiday Inn lapel badge came over, dismissed the restaurant manager with a wave of his hand and apologized explaining that it was only the third day the hotel had been open. We were given a guided tour of their rather impressive breakfast smorgasboard and conducted to a table. It was the best feed I’d had since leaving Australia and we spent about an hour there filling up on smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels, orange juice, real coffee and generally making absolute pigs of ourselves. I attempted to pay for breakfast but was told that it was on the house so we left a decent tip for whoever was going to clean the table. I was thrilled, I’d conned someone, and I was sure that it was a skill that would prove to be invaluable before our trip was over.

Every time I hear the word smorgasboard I remember my Dad. When I was about twenty-two and lived in England I was invited to a wedding reception and on the invitation it said that the food would be smorgasboard. I’d never heard the word before so I asked my Dad what it meant. He told me that it stood for the South Midlands Organized Gas Board and that they had a catering arm. I believed it and didn’t find out that he’d been joking with me until years after his death when I was invited to some function in Australia. When told that the food would be smorgasboard I immediately thought that the Gas Board had expanded their field of interest to include a colonial catering service. He used to say some strange things, my Dad. I remember once when I was quite small and he asked me what I’d been doing in school that day. I told him we’d done areas and circles and stuff. “So what do you know about circles then?” he said. “pi r squared says I”. “No, no son” he said. “Bread are squared, pie are round.”

On Election Day in Poland it was forbidden to sell alcohol and the day before it took place the vodka queues were everywhere and some of them must have numbered around 300 people. Another highlight of our stay in Warsaw was the Russian Army Song Festival on TV. Now that Gorbachev is courting the West, Russian TV is trying to appear a little more relaxed than it has been since its inception. It’s trying to look a little more laid back and Western but it’s, finding it difficult after a whole lifetime of being a government propaganda tool. Consequently, when it comes to the lighter things like song festivals the Russians aren't yet very experienced.

It was painful to watch the performers go through their repertoires in a sort of 1960s pseudo Western fashion. There were groups singing imitation Beatles songs but dressed in combat fatigues. Hands more used to clutching Kalashnikovs or vodka bottles looked decidedly uncomfortable around microphones and the singers were all stiff like amateur actors at their first rehearsals. The studio audience was supposed to vote with their applause but it was obvious that the whole thing was rigged because there was absolutely no spontaneity. Added to this was the fact that the TV viewing audience could see the feet of a man under the “automatic electronic applause register machine” which moved about every time the scores went up. The camera also kept showing the small audience at different angles in an attempt to make the crowd appear larger than it was. I can’t believe that even 5% of the Russian viewing public could have been so dumb as to have been taken in by it.

Then, the big surprise. Sexy ladies, very sexy ladies. They appeared halfway through the show and danced in costumes showing lots of leg. They were really good too, just like on American TV. The funny thing was though, that all through their routine, the words Glasnost and Perestroika flashed on and off in big letters across the screen as if to say "these sexy ladies were brought to you by the Perestroika Laxatives Workers Co-Operative". I think that Perestroika would be a good name for a laxative don't you? It’s been used so often now that it gives me the shits every time I hear it.

One night dropped Alicja off at the door of a hotel where we were to meet friends for dinner and pulled into a big car park on the opposite side of the road. I switched the engine off just as two men with walkie-talkies came up and knocked on the window. They spoke to me in German (most people do because the van has German registration). They could see from my face that I didn't understand and so proceeded with a couple of other languages. After having no luck with them either, one man turned to the other and said in an American accent "where the fuck d'yah think he’s from?" The other man said “Search me, let’s get Ziggy over here.” The first man clicked on his walkie-talkie, spoke to Ziggy and asked him to come over and “interrogate a guy in van who’s just pulled up in the secure car park”

Ziggy, a tall, professional looking young man in a Western suit and tie, turned up, clicked his heels together, bowed slightly and asked me if I spoke a range of different languages. I just looked at him blankly and he turned to the other two and said “I suppose you’ve tried the obvious - English?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he just turned back to me and said “I don’t suppose you speak English do you sir?” I said that I did but that he’d have to excuse my Australian accent. Ziggy, I could see, was a busy man and he was real pissed at having to come over and talk to me. He just turned to the two guys and with his hand extended, palm upwards toward me, said “gentlemen?” and he turned on his heels and left.

The first man took a step towards me and said:

“You really Australian?”
“Yes”
“Well, well. What da fuck you doin’ here?”
“The beginners course in polite car park management. What da fuck you doin here?”

“Would you fuckin’ believe it, a fuckin’ Australian comedian right here in President Bush’s security car park. You should stick around and I’ll see if I can get you some entertainment work after the speeches.”

“As long as you’re not paying in the local currency it will be a pleasure”

He then stepped up onto the van running board and with his face so close to mine that I could see the little strawberry seed-like pits on his nose said. “We’re gonna be parking 700 cars in here in ten minutes time and I don’t have time to fuck around – unerstand? I didn’t get a chance to indicate whether or not I unerstood before he followed up with “an if you don’t get the fuck oudda here reeeeal quick I’m gonna bust your ass into the Warsaw lockup an make sure they treat yah like a piece a shit”

Not wanting to have my ass busted into the Warsaw lockup any time reeeeal soon, I pushed down the door lock and wound up the window so he couldn’t get in. I turned the ignition key. Once….twice…The starter didn’t work again! AAAAGH panic! I wound down the window and hurriedly explained the situation at which the gruesome twosome congenial American car park attendants pushed me to start. Getting out of the car park wasn’t as easy as getting in and I had to be signed out by my friends with the walkie-talkies. They said that they couldn’t understand how I got there and that “operation car park” or whatever it was called had been planned down to the last detail and been pronounced secure hours beforehand.

I was glad to get out and park elsewhere and, walking to the hotel, I reflected that the only time I’d felt at all threatened in Poland had been by an American security guard. When I finally sat down in the hotel’s first floor restaurant Alicja said that they were beginning to wonder where I was. I told them that it was a long story but that George Bush had booked the car park opposite and I had to find another. One of the guys at the table motioned towards the windows which overlooked the car park where I’d been. I looked up and saw that there were about 20 plain-clothes security men standing on the window side of the curtains. We all agreed that eating in the place under these circumstances wouldn’t be much fun so we all went home to my mother-in-law’s apartment. She didn’t like it at all and the next day she railed against George Bush for causing her to miss some TV program.

We’d heard on the news that George Bush’s entourage was bringing seven hundred Volvo’s on its visit to Poland and that when they’d finished with them, they would be selling them. I wasn’t inclined to believe the story but the scene in the car park the next day on the news confirmed it – Volvo’s as far as the eye could see. There may be more to the story and maybe there was some deal where Poland needed the cars and the USA supplied them but it seemed incredibly extravagant and unnecessary to me. Needless to say, you don't just walk into the nearest Volvo agent when you are in the Eastern bloc and have problems your Volvo – there isn’t a Volvo agent in the whole of Poland! The roads all the way down to where we are now, at the Czech border, have been full of Volvo’s with their occupants cruising around seeing the sights; presumably at American taxpayer’s expense.

On the way down to the border we also saw lots of cars broken down with their owners up to their elbows in grease trying to fix them. To be a car owner here means that you also have to be your own mechanic. People can't afford preventative maintenance on their vehicles and consequently they break down a lot and at roadside stops they have ramps so that you can drive your car up them and work on the underside. I thought it was a great idea and that it should be everywhere but, as Alicja said, “how many times in the last 10 years have you had to get under a car on a trip?” The answer is that I haven’t and that says something for the reliability of Western cars as opposed to the junk available in commie countries.

We stopped at a roadside stall and bought 2 kilos of strawberries for 20 cents and I’m sure they were the best strawberries I ever had. Unfortunately, Alicja turned out to be allergic to them and I had to eat them all myself which I did during the days drive. I felt good, relaxed and at peace with the world; just cruising along through all this beautiful green countryside, sun shining, listening to Vince Jones on the cassette player and eating strawberries. There were lush green trees and peasants on bikes, rivers with dragonflies skimming around, tiny little haystacks of grass up on trestles so that the air cut get amongst it and dry it out. There were geese crossing the road and peasants drawing water from wells, drunken peasants asleep on the pavements and drunken peasants unconscious at the side of the road. The towns were even worse, men staggering all over the place. So many men here get pissed out of their brains in the mornings that it must cost the country dearly in man hours lost.

On the roof rack on top of Raelene we have a stash of things to sell or to bribe border guards with. There are 10 electric irons which cost $1.20 each, 10 torches, 5 men's suits, ten pairs of binoculars, a few fishing rods and reels and a few other items which we are hoping to sell at a profit in other countries to help defray the expenses of the trip. It could all be confiscated at the whim of a Polish border guard tomorrow but it’s very doubtful – foreigners don’t smuggle as a rule.

We bought a portable chemical toilet in West Germany but we haven't yet commissioned it. So far we’ve been heading for the bushes most of the time but when it rains we’ve been using an oval shaped plastic bucket with a clip on lid which was originally used to hold paint. The prescribed Modus operandi is to put a supermarket bag followed by a newspaper in the bottom before using it. I go to great lengths to select a photograph of someone I don't particularly care for and I managed to get Margaret Thatcher yesterday. Alicja, on the other hand, is nowhere near as discriminating and for her any communist will do.

Tomorrow we’ll cross over into Czechoslovakia but I’m not sure what I have to do now because It’s time to turn in and I’m not starting another chapter.

OK, here goes.

It’s another day now and we crossed over the border this morning. It wasn't too bad at all, mainly, I think, because we didn't look too Polish. We gave the customs officer half of a $10 note - whose other half was the property of a Polish customs officer on the Polish/East German border - inside a packet of Western cigarettes. All the Polish goods we had bought to sell were hidden out of sight and he waved us straight through.

The Poles though, were being searched thoroughly and we could see that it was taking them hours to get through the border. On the Polish side they had long inspection pits in the ground all concrete lined and with electric lights so that they could run cars and buses over them to look at the undersides. I don’t know what the Poles were scared of losing to Czechoslovakia, be it people or goods, but it all smacked of paranoia to me after having traveled through common market countries where the borders were virtually non existent.

For the privilege of visiting and spending one’s money in Czechoslovakia the Western tourist has to exchange US $15.00 into Czech currency for each and every day of their stay. This is the same (although the amount varies) in all the communist/socialist countries because they’re all broke and can’t buy imports with their own currencies because their money is worthless. The exchange rate the government gives you is a tenth of what you can get on the black market but you have to get an official receipt for your $15 per day or you’ll be fined when you exit the country. The next thing we, as Westerners, were forced to buy was coupons for diesel which were also at an exorbitant rate. It was approximately eight times the price per litre which a local would have to pay, and they wouldn't let us pay for them with the money we had just exchanged; it had to be paid for in US$ as well. At camping sites, we found later that day, they had two price lists, one for the inhabitants of socialist countries and a much more expensive one for us capitalists.

One of the first things we noticed after crossing the border were communist slogans on the walls of the little towns and villages. "Socialism is showing the world the way" and "Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union together forever" etc. The other thing which made me look twice were the loudspeakers all over the place throughout practically all the towns and villages. As we drove through places we could hear them. I don't know what they were saying but it’s a good bet that it was something political, something to do with the glories of communism. If it's so good, why do they have to keep telling people about it? it should be self evident.

The banknotes here have pictures of glorious World War 2 partisans on them standing with guns at the ready. It’s quite different to what I'm used to. Where I come from we have pictures of the Queen, kangaroos, Aboriginal paintings of lizards and stuff like that; all very benign and non-aggressive. I think that almost anyone would prefer to live in the sort of society which prints pictures of silly old ladies and animals on their money to one that has people with guns staring at you? Haven’t they heard?

The Czech countryside from the Polish border to Prague is boring compared to the Polish scene because there is collective farming here and the fields are larger and hence less variety of crops and colors. I like the word hence used like that, it gives a book a touch of class don’t you think? I’d like to use it again somewhere but I’m still trying to work the word hove in a second time. There were apple and pear trees lining the roads instead of Poplars or whatever, which I think is a great idea. We pulled off the road for a cup of tea and a pee about an hour out of Prague and it was then that I noticed that all the apple and pear trees were numbered. I’d love to know why the trees were numbered. Is anyone really going to steal a mature pear tree growing at the side of the road? I bet there’s a ministry of tree numbering keeping tabs on them all and generating all that spyful paperwork that commie bureaucracy revels in.

The trip all the way down to Prague was pretty ordinary and the approaches to it featured the same dreary old blocks of flats and run down buildings that greet you at the outskirts of Polish cities. Grey and scruffy, plaster falling off the walls, rusty gutters and badly maintained roads. We booked into a caravan park not far from the city center some time after the hot water had all been used up. We cooked dinner and washed and Alicja went to bed with a book. I sat in front of the van with the laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter typing these very words you see in front of you now.

You can join me here right now if you like. Fancy a cup of tea or would you like a glass of this wonderful Polish sweet spirit called Krupnik? I’m told it’s actually mead and it’s made from distilled honey. Look out of the windscreen with me. See that thing over there? It’s an East German caravan. Christ it’s ugly isn’t it? I wonder when they’ll empty that rubbish bin there under the street light, disgusting isn’t it. And look at that bloke over in the doorway, that’s where they keep the gardening tools and the lawn mower and things. The door was open when we first arrived a while ago and I could see in there. What’s he doing there anyway? Looks like he’s pumping up his bicycle tire. Let’s switch the headlights on shall we? Oh, that’s disgusting, bloody gross. We saw a monkey doing that in chapter one. Uugh! I’m shutting this laptop down now so you’ll have to go away until morning.

The next morning I walked over to the caravan park shop to buy something for breakfast. All they had was yesterday’s bread, some sad withered looking carrots and tins of Russian sprats. We breakfasted on our own stores and I went over to the ablutions block to wash the dishes. There was no hot water again so I went to reception and complained as best I could. I was overheard by a German guy who was checking out and he told me that he’d stayed at this same place a year ago and there was no hot water for a whole week.

We left the van in the park and set off on the bus to take a look at Prague. We alighted near a Tourist information office and they had a guidebook in English so I bought one. On one page it had the story of the Defenestration of Prague. I couldn’t work out what defenestration meant and so I asked if anyone there spoke English. A girl in, I suppose, her mid twenties, came over and asked if she could help me. “Yes” I said

“Can you tell me what this word means?”
“Defenestration sir? it’s an English word”
“Oh, I’ve never heard of it “
“It means throwing the bishops out of windows”
“Does it hurt?”
“I think this hurts very much the bishops”
“Do you mean religious men, church men?”
“Yes, they were the catholic bishops and they were thrown out of the windows by the proto Protestants”
I thanked her and we left. I found that her story was true, back in the middle ages a load of bishops were thrown out of windows in Prague. I couldn’t stop laughing when I read about it. Fancy walking along the pavement, minding your own business, when a bishop falls on you!

“Mummy, how did granddad die?” “He had a bagel stall on the pavement outside the cathedral and one day a bishop fell on him my love”

When we returned to the van I checked out the word “defenestration” too and it actually does mean throwing people out of windows. After seeing a few cities in this part of the world I wasn't expecting much of Prague but we were in for a surprise. It’s the best European City I’ve ever seen. It's absolutely beautiful. A sizeable river, the Vltava, runs right through the middle of it affording some of the most spectacular city views to be seen anywhere. It’s clean too judging by the amount of fish to be seen swimming in it.

The city center is vast and it’s all in first class condition; highly unusual for Central or Eastern Europe. The architecture is what makes Prague. There’s a whole city with buildings from the Middle Ages right up to the nineteenth century that have miraculously escaped the ravages of war. Churches, cathedrals, city gates, spectacular bridges, shops, pubs and hundreds of old dwellings all in a remarkable state of preservation. In West Germany and Austria they look after their old buildings well but there’s a certain sterility about the way they restore everything to a standard which, I suspect, is better than the original. Prague’s not like that, it has a lived in, believable look. The streets are cobbled with small square blocks of granite in two different colors arranged in patterns and there are dozens of different roof styles simply because the city spans so many centuries. If it weren’t for the tourists you really would think that you were in another century

We came across an unusual street while we were wandering around. It translates to "the street of Russian tank drivers", a reminder which I wouldn't think the Czechs would look upon too kindly considering that the Russians invaded the city with their tanks in '68 and killed a lot of them. On the good side, Kylie Minouge hasn't reached here yet. We’ve been plagued by Kylie Minogue posters and Kylie bloody Minogue songs on the radio everywhere we’ve been for the last two months, even in Warsaw.

Another place we visited was the old Jewish cemetery which, I think I'm right in saying, goes back to the 11th century. It looked more like a repository for headstones than a cemetery because it covered an area of only about 2 acres and there are about ten thousand people buried in it. How do you bury ten thousand people in a two-acre cemetery? Simple. Bury them twelve deep. Almost all the gravestones are touching each other. This peculiar state of affairs was brought about by the city authorities only allowing Jew’s this small plot of land in which to bury their dead over the centuries. It’s a strange sight to behold; row upon row of close packed gravestones looking like a gigantic stonemason’s sale yard painted by Salvador Dali.

Next to the graveyard is a little, centuries old, synagogue containing a gallery of drawings done by children - Jewish children. All the artists were Jewish kids who were murdered by the Nazis. They were all murdered before their 14th birthdays although most of the pictures were drawn up to 4 years prior to this. They were interned here in a concentration camp for two years before going to Auschwitz and meeting their deaths in the gas chambers after first being used as slave labor in the fields etc. There were little boy’s and girl’s simple drawings of butterflies and houses and normal life scenes which they had remembered prior to being incarcerated but one of them showed Jews with star of David symbols on their arms being hung at the gallows.

Shit. I can't convey the feeling I experienced and I’m crying now as I write. These kids just ceased to exist, were murdered when they should have been growing up, having fun, having kids themselves and telling them bedside stories and fairy tales. I’ve read books about what happened in WWll and I’ve visited Auschwitz, and Treblinka but nothing brought it home to me like this. I feel so angry about it.

This city is alive with German tourists; I wonder how they feel about seeing all this. I'm glad I'm not German because it would trouble me and I'd feel like walking around apologizing to everyone. The sad thing about it all is that my own girls, already adults, and no different to their contemporaries everywhere else, know nothing about it and probably aren't aware that it all happened. If one of their paintings was up on those walls I'd never stop shouting about it while I still had breath in me. The World should know about it so that they can see it coming next time and recognize the symptoms. The dirty, dirty bastards. At the end of this tiny exhibition there was a photographic display devoted to the liberation of the Jews in Czechoslovakia by the Russian army. Christ! What shit it is making capital out of it by a nation that has treated Jews the way that they have. Sorry, I got carried away for a bit but you should see it and then see if it leaves you impassive.

At one of Prague’s palaces there is an enormous hall with a substantial looking wooden floor and according to the guidebook it was used in day’s gone by for indoor jousting tournaments. I suppose that when you’re sitting around waiting for television to be invented, this is probably the sort of thing you come up with to fill in the cold winter nights. Anyway, to sum up Prague, you really shouldn't keep it out of your itinerary if you're doing a trip to Europe. It's impossible to be disappointed by it and if you change your money on the black market (ten times the official exchange rate) it's the best place to do most of your shopping. You don’t have to look for a black market moneychanger; one will find you within the first hour of your arrival – guaranteed.

We thought we’d spend a day in Prague but it took us a week to see it, during which one of our German 220-volt light globes in the van blew and the shops didn’t stock them. I visited the caravan park reception with the globe and asked the male receptionist if he’d ever seen a globe like it and did he know where I could buy one. He took an adapter out of his draw, plugged a power lead into it and held the globe sideways. He gently moved it around until the broken filament touched the spot it had come away from and welded itself back together. I was flabbergasted - overcome with pure flabber I was. He felt really good too.

A routine is gradually evolving in the van and I'm sure that by the time we've spent another 12 months living in it we will know enough about motor caravaning to write a book on the subject. We didn't foresee the need for a lot of the things that we are slowly acquiring. Bulldog clips, for instance, are great for sealing plastic bags containing your socks and underwear and they come in handy for joining your curtains together at night so that nobody can see inside. Velcro too is a boon. When sewn on to each end of a loop it allows you to quickly move the curtains out of the way so you can see through the windows when you drive off in the mornings. Caravan sites seldom have plugs in the sinks and a piece of car inner tube cut in a circle about 4 inches in diameter fits all sizes of plug 'ole. We did have all the kitchen stuff on shelves but we were constantly juggling things around to find what we wanted. In Prague we bought two plastic milk crates and cut out some of the sections between bottle holes to fit different items. We then put the whole crates on the shelves so that we could pull everything out in one hit for instant access. There was an added bonus to this – things became quieter. We hadn’t realized how much noise was caused by things rattling around on shelves.

After leaving Prague we traveled through the Czech countryside and particularly in the mountains. Some parts of it were ghastly. It appears that communism here has tried to bring industries to even some of the tiniest villages. In the mountains we drove through some beautiful areas with quaint looking little hamlets but with factories in the middle of them spewing smoke from their chimneys and foul looking liquids into the streams.

But more than Prague or anything else in Czechoslovakia I’ll remember one incident. We were on our way down to the Austrian border and began looking for a toilet or, at least, a decent sized clump of bushes. In a sort of driver’s roadside stop we saw a public toilet sign. Public toilets are a rarity anywhere in Iron Curtain countries and we pulled up. The toilet was like a big wardrobe with two doors and twin old-fashioned wooden toilet seats; the types that have buckets under them. These toilet seats though, hadn’t had buckets under them for a long while but people had still been using them. A swarm of flies greeted me as I opened the doors and the whole scene was absolutely foul. I took some toilet paper and headed for the trees behind the toilets but found that dozens of others had done the same and it was dangerous to tread anywhere in the vicinity.

I crossed the road but all that was there was an embankment going down to a field and there were people in the field picking strawberries or something similar. I went back to Raelene and took out our trusty paint bucket and a supermarket bag, which I stretched over it like a bin liner, and I made use of it behind the toilets. I tied a knot in the bag and then, emerging from behind the toilet with a clean paint bucket in one hand and a supermarket bag full of poo in the other, I thought about what I should do with the bag. I didn’t want to drive off in the van with it and I didn’t want to throw it in the bushes because the plastic would be around forever. It was then that I saw two garbage bins attached to either side of a light pole and I walked over and placed the bag in one of them. I stepped back into the van to find that Alicja already had the kettle on so I washed my hands and waited for her to make coffee.

I was sitting at the table looking out of the back window when a tramp’s head, unkempt and unshaven, popped up above the embankment on the opposite side of the road. He scrambled to the top and stood at the side of the road waiting for a truck to pass. Then, after looking both ways, shuffled across to our side of the road. He made a beeline for the rubbish bins and started going though the one I’d just put the bag of shit in. It was a cold morning and as he opened the bag I could see a cloud of steam rise up. He recoiled with a start shouting what I took to be a string of Czech obscenities at our van whilst, at the same time, making a series of internationally recognizable hand gestures. Alicja was yelling at me to drive off but I was paralyzed with laughter and stretched out on the floor so the tramp couldn’t see me. Then we both lay on the floor trying to control our laughter while waiting for him to kick the shit out of the van. When I peeped through the curtains a few minutes later there was no sign of him. We quickly poured the coffee down the sink and drove off quickly but as we were pulling out onto the road we found he’d been laying in wait for us. He came running through the trees swinging the bag around his head like David when he slew Goliath with a stone from a slingshot. He let go of it at the wrong moment and it flew up in the air somewhere over the top of the van and I kept on going. I’m killing myself laughing right now as I’m writing about it.

Tomorrow we head for Austria so this seems like a good place to end a chapter. Austria will be much more expensive than Czechoslovakia so we'll stock up on food and diesel here first.

Letter 6

It was a week after leaving Prague that we arrived at the Czech/Austrian border. In that week we found that Czechoslovakia had little to offer outside of its capital which seemed to be maintained in good condition only to attract the foreign tourist dollar. You could see that it had once been an OK country but it’s been neglected since communism came along. Pre war houses in the towns and countryside would have been attractive if it hadn’t been for the plaster having fallen off the walls and taking the paint with it. Post war buildings were in the standard, soviet packing crate style of architecture and hadn’t had a coat of paint in twenty years. The Tatra Mountains weren’t bad but if they’d been in Switzerland they would have been a whole lot better and the rest of the countryside was flat and boring with the soul extracted from it like East Germany. Perhaps the best thing about the place was the beer which was excellent and there were quite a few varieties of it. The same was probably true for their butter and sausage because there wasn’t any to be had.

When we reached the Austrian border we joined a queue stretching for about a kilometer and we settled in for a long wait. Car owners were standing outside their cars talking to each other so I exited the van and joined a discussion group by asking, in Polish, how far it was to Vienna. One Polish guy said "what are you waiting for? this queue is only for Poles, you have German registration so go up to the front". We pulled Raelene out of the line and drove straight to the head of the queue where the Czech border officials gave us no more than a cursory glance, stamped our papers and told us to go. For the Poles, it was a different story altogether. They searched nearly every one of them and quite thoroughly, smelling all their thermos flasks and any other containers, opening all their bags and going through their cars with a fine tooth comb. I’d never seen such blatant discrimination and I don’t quite know how I felt about being considered German and therefore good enough quality to go to the head of the queue in front of a kilometer long line of Poles.

When we came to the Austrian side ot the border post, the officer didn't want to look at anything and told us to proceed right away. We, however, had been reading our travel books which told us what to do at a border if you had a load of stuff on board that looked as though you weren’t going on a normal, month long holiday. We told him that we had a proper computer printed customs declaration which we'd like him to put his official stamp on so that, when we came to leave the country, they couldn't say that we’d purchased our computer, cameras, video etc. in Austria and were taking them out of the country without paying duties That was our mistake, he added up the value of it all and told us that he wanted 5,000 Austrian Schillings (14.5 to the US Dollar) which would be refunded at the border crossing when we left the country. After a lot of talk and a few outright lies he let us off but wouldn't stamp our declaration under any circumstances.

Tourists are only supposed to stay at registered camping sites within Austria but our guidebook said that, in practice, no one bothers so we decided to free camp and parked in the car park of a large mineral water plant in a little village. We had only just eaten and Alicja was having a wash in a state of semi nudity outside the back of the van when a great big truck came thundering into the car park. There was much frenzied activity on Alicja's part to cover up and afterwards I went over and spoke to the driver who said it was OK to park there and he gave us huge a bottle of mineral water with which Alicja completed her wash inside the van.

We awoke at 5am to the sound of even larger mineral water trucks, about fifteen of them. I made a cup of tea and had a chat to the caretaker (sign language only) who was opening up the loading bay. He seemed to be very proud of his job and he invited me into the plant for a look around. Inside, everything was in full swing and probably had been all night although we hadn’t heard the factory operating. There were two huge bottling machines pumping out mineral water and putting exactly the same stuff into ten different bottles all with different labels.

"Where is the spring?" I asked. "It comes here from somewhere through 9 kilometers of pipeline " I was told. I thought that in 9 kilometers of pipeline it must pick up a lot of other minerals from the walls of the pipe too! I don’t know what scenes a bottle of Austrian mineral water would have conjured up in my mind if I hadn’t already seen the factory. It would probably have included a couple of flaxen-haired virgins with embroidered blouses skipping about with carafes while men in leather shorts and bracers yodeled through Alpine horns in the background. This place was nothing like that, it was full on industrial.

I indicated that we wouldn’t mind filling a couple of our water containers with some mineral water and the caretaker directed me to an outside tap, indicating in sign language that it was all the same water. I took the opportunity to drain the water tanks on the van and fill up every container we possessed with the stuff. It doesn't make a bad cup of tea and it adds extra sparkle to your underpants when they are washed in it. Those readers that can afford such luxuries should give it a go sometime.

In the cool of the morning the area around the factory was alive with hares dashing about all over the place. They’d run a little way, stop and sniff the air and run on again without actually feeding on anything. Although I come from the country in England, I don't recollect having seen any before and I was surprised at how ungainly they look with those extra long back legs. They look like rabbits that have been worked over by an American hot rodder because they slope down towards the front.

During a lull in the animation with the caretaker, I tried to tell him, using signs, that I'd seen a lot of these animals the previous evening and I demonstrated by holding my two hands in front of me, and taking few little leaps forward. He walked over to the van and pointed to a sticker we had in the back window with a kangaroo on it. He then pointed to me and put his hands up behind his ears and took big leaps around the car park with his feet together to imitate a kangaroo. A car pulled up and a be-suited man with a brief case got out and had a few terse words with the kangaroo-impersonating caretaker and then, after establishing that I was an English speaker, told me “zis man dozn’t have no more time to play viss you.”

We left the mineral water factory car park with Raelene sparkling after having been washed in sparkling…Perrier, I think it was, but it could have been Evian les Baines, and for butter or for wurst (neither of which were available in the last country) we drove on into Vienna. We put a cassette of Strauss waltzes in the slot on the dashboard just for the occasion and turned the volume up as we cruised along in the sunshine with the green fields on either side of us. I think we had The Blue Danube playing just as we crossed the real Blue Danube. It was the first disappointment. It was a sickly great gray, green, greasy looking scar on the landscape. It looked like an industrial sewer, which in fact it probably is.

The city itself It was spotlessly clean and chock a block full of tourists, and most of them just had to sit at least once in a street cafe and drink the famous coffee and eat one of those oh so famous Viennese pastries. Every so often we'd hear one of those dreadful, American Alabama accents with "Oh my godfathers, Wilbur just looook at that gorgeous gargoyle." You could tell without even looking around that Wilbur would be dressed in checked pants and one of those bookkeepers eye-shade things with a Canon camera hanging around his neck and she'd have glasses with zircon encrusted frames, gray hair and an enormous ass covered with ribbed polyester.

Of course it was Wilbur's second trip to Vienna, the first one having been during the war when he was a GI, a good deal younger and he had hair. That time he didn't give a stuff about gargoyles, he was only interested in getting pissed and how many girls he could get with his Camel cigarettes and his knapsack full of nylon stockings with seams up the back. I bet he didn't tell her about that.

The younger Americans were all queued up outside Macdonald’s who were doing more business than any place else in town. Strange isn't it? all that lovely European food to be had and they still eat the same old un-adventurous crap. I would have thought that the type of person who is adventurous enough to travel all that way would have also been the type who would have tried something different. I recalled that, back in Warsaw, we had seen an American couple in their twenties trying to eat duck with a knife and fork in a restaurant. They just didn’t have the requisite skills to tackle it and we overheard them saying that they’d go someplace where the food was easier to come to grips with.

The trouble with Vienna is that although they have a smattering of nice old buildings, opera house, cathedral and all regular European city stuff, the streets are narrow and you can't get a chance to view them properly or take photographs. It's also seething with tourists and it's hard to see over all the heads. The cathedral, and just about everything else worth looking at, has other, usually modern, buildings so close to it that it spoils the view. At street level where the shops are thousands of tourists mill around the windows making life quite unpleasant and after three hours of it most people have had enough, especially on hot days.

Anyway, it's cultural, oh so cultural. Music, art, sculpture, the boys choir etc. So aware are they of this culture that on the door of the conservatoire of music at lunchtime, there is a sign which reads: Bach at 2pm - Offenbach at 1.30pm. Not really, I just threw that in to show you how cultured I am. I remember a joke from school, which went: What has 128 testicles and sings? The Vienna boys choir. So I guess Vienna was OK for a large dollop of commercialized culture but to us it was just another Western rip off city after seeing Prague. We’d looked at the art gallery, museum and cathedral as everyone does and we were all cultured out so we drove out of town to look for a bit of the Hansel and Gretel type country.

It was a hot day and we were both feeling in need of a good shower as the mineral water was wearing off when we passed by a caravan park. We turned the van around and parked outside it but couldn’t decide whether or not we wanted to stay there. Looking through the fence I could see people from the pool going in and out of the shower block and, seeing that there was nobody at the gate of the place, we took our towels and walked in. This place was the Hilton Hotel of the caravan world. The shower block looked as though it had a toilet, wash basin and shower for almost every person staying there and I've seen a lower standard in good hotels. We climbed back into Raelene feeling the best we had since staying at the little hotel in Frankfurt. It hadn’t crossed our minds before but we’d never been in a caravan park in the West. Our caravanning experience to date had all been in the Eastern bloc.

We located the Hansel and Gretel type country in the Vienna Woods and it was terrific. We walked for miles under beech trees on well-marked walking tracks wondering why Austrian men wear such silly looking walking gear. Long socks, baggy leather pantaloons down to their knees, walking sticks, embroidered waistcoats and William Tell hats with feathers in them. Some of the even wore those leather halter bracers with badges pinned to them and wandered around as though looking for their misplaced accordions. We'd just settled down after our dinner in the Vienna Woods car park (with toilets and hot running water) when a police car pulled up and the officer told us that we couldn't stay there and would have to go to the caravan park where we'd stolen a shower each. We told him that I was tired and it would be dangerous to drive and we just needed a little sleep. He pushed off saying that when he went off shift, the next police officer would be around. He was too, at 2pm in the morning. They drove up alongside the van and, keeping the engine running, knocked on the window. I woke up and pulled on a pair of jeans, went to the door and they just drove off without seeing us.

The next day we spent touring around the eastern side of the country which wasn't terribly exciting because the East of the country is not your Tyrolean, Julie Andrew’s Lonely Goatherd type stuff but rather flat. We then had to hang around for a day in a small town near the Hungarian border while we had Raelene's starter repaired again. We'd already had it repaired in Poland but we'd been cheated. The Austrian mechanic showed me the inside of the starter and it obviously hadn't had anything more than a piece of sandpaper rubbed around it. The guy from the repair shop in Warsaw had told us that he'd rewound it and that it was a big job to perform at such short notice and we were so grateful that we gave him a hefty tip. Cheating bastardski.

In the late afternoon, through inadequate consultation with the map, we found ourselves close to the Hungarian border and tossed a coin to decide whether or not we should go on through it or see a bit more of Austria. Hungary won out because Austria was so predictable and unexciting nothing we hadn’t seen before.

We crossed the Hungarian border, entirely uneventful, they were extremely friendly and waved 90% of the cars through automatically after stamping their passports and we went in search of a camping site. In Hungary you can't just park at the side of the road, you have to either stay in a proper camping ground or ask the permission of a land owner and then let the police know that you're staying there. If you stay at a proper campsite, they register your presence with the police, so you don't have to bother. We managed to find and book into a suitable site and after an hour or so, a man of about 25 years of age and dressed better than the average camper approached me whilst I was sitting in the van and asked me if I was going to Austria the next day. I told him that I'd just come from Austria and was going further into Hungary. We got talking and he asked me if I thought the border guards were very vigilant and if they stopped any particular cars eg. ones with Eastern block registrations and so on.

It transpired that he was an East German trying to make his escape to the West. I felt a little rotten at not offering to help him because I knew that the likelihood of us being stopped with Australian passports and a West German registered car was pretty slim and it would make such a difference to his future life but we couldn't afford to take the chance, I don't know what would have happened to us if we were caught smuggling him into Austria but the truth is I didn't have the guts. I really hope he made it. It's a strange situation having the one country, the one race split down the middle. Our next door neighbours were interesting to observe, both an East and a West German family together. I'd say that the two men were probably brothers judging by their ages and by the way they got on with each other. I suppose that the East German family couldn't visit the West Germans (and couldn't afford much more than a bar of chocolate if they got there) and the West Germans couldn't stand the hassle and the lousy holiday it would probably be if they went to the other side.

Hungary would therefore be one of those places where they would be still able to keep in touch with each other and it would be affordable for the East Germans. The difference in living standards though couldn't be more apparent. The West Germans had a large, luxury campervan with all the mod cons. It looked as though it would have had a microwave and air conditioning and there was a television aerial on it. The Eastern bloc family had this tiny caravan (most of them have tents) shaped like a lump of cheese. It obviously wasn't an old one but the standard of fittings and the actual construction of it was atrocious and it didn't have a sink in it.

The Western boy had a flashy looking moulded plastic skateboard which must have been the envy of his cousin and the two girls of about the same age (sixteen or so) looked so different in their dress. One had this years high cut, low cut lycra one piece swim-suit whilst the other wore a cheap looking, floral printed cotton bikini which looked like it was the first bikini ever invented. I wondered about the sort of conversations that went on after the respective families had said goodnight to each other. "do you think I should give him my skate board when we leave?, why does he talk about politics and quotas all the time". And on the other side "Kurt's a real show off with his skateboard and he keeps talking about his holiday in Portugal". "Dad, how come uncle Klaus ended up in West Germany after the war?. When I'm older I'm going to get out of East Germany somehow and never come back, Anika said that I could sleep in her room in Cologne".

There are subtle ways that you can tell an Eastern bloc family in a caravan site which are not always immediately apparent at first glance because they get hold of a few Western or imitation Western clothes and if you're the same as me, you can't tell the difference between languages. The Easterners don't waste their polythene bags for a start, they wash them and hang them on the line to dry. They collect herbs and hang them out to dry and their camera cases are invariably made of leather. All the Japanese camera cases are now made of synthetic material. You seldom see Eastern bloc people at the camp shop buying food because they bring it with them and their cigarettes, which they also bring with them are always in soft packs with washed out printing on them.

Of course there are much more obvious signs like the cars. Usually they have two stroke engines which make that blub blubbing sound when they tick over and most of the cars look out of date. Cars like the Trabant with its' hideous fibreglass body of 1957 appearance and the Wartburg, the name alone is enough to put you off isn't it? Sounds like something witches eat.
The one place you can't tell an East from a West German is at the dishwashing area, they both have that thorough, methodical way of cleaning their crockery and cutlery which makes you feel filthy. You'd think that they were about to perform open heart surgery the way they go about cleaning their utensils. Still, bet they've got no immunities, the first decent germ would make them keel over. Hungarian countryside is quite pretty, it's a lot more lush looking than Austria or Czechoslovakia and there are large fields full of sunflowers everywhere which at this time of year are in bloom and brighten things up no end.

Both of us had had enough of cities for a while and so we drove on up to the Danube Bend in the North. It's an area where the river has a big kink in it, up near the Czech border and it's one of Hungary's most touristed areas. I don't know if the people who write these travel books spend much time looking around the places they describe but they miss a lot and rave on about places that aren't half as good as places only 10 minutes away.

A good example of this is the Danube Bend area. The book recommended the small town of Estergrom which we had a look at and apart from the cathedral, which is nothing special, there's absolutely nothing of interest for the tourist. They made brief mention of a place named Visegrad, just up the road saying that it was worth a visit. There's nothing there any good either. But just 4 kilometres away, up in the mountains above Visegrad is a fabulous place called Jurta Tabor and it doesn't rate a mention in the books at all.

We're in Jurta at the moment and it's beautiful, so good in fact that we're spending 4 days here. The whole area is a large national park covered in trees and grass with little walking tracks going off in every direction and it's all beautifully maintained. There are a couple of castles here too but the main attraction is the theme of the whole park. Jurta comes from the word Yurt, the Mongolian, Ghengis Khan type, round semi conical tent and all the park buildings: toilets, rest areas, barbecues etc reflect this design. They are built of wood and some of them are quite sizeable and all in this Yurt like fashion. Some of them e.g. restaurants are open to the air in the middle and great to sit in and have your meal. I've also seen one of them, a large one built of short planks with the ends cut off at a 60 degree angle or so and fixed in a way so as to resemble birds feathers.

The caravan park we are staying in is laid out along these lines too and it's very attractive, the washrooms, reception, toilets, outdoor kitchen and eating areas are all built to the same overall concept, it all looks really great and it all blends in with the environment so well. The on site accommodation is in yurts about 12 feet across and made of a sort of plasticised canvass on a concrete base (which doesn't show) and they have proper wooden doors and are completely waterproof. Combine all this with a superb view of the Danube and some of those rolling hills with mist on them which look like the ripples running through the cream on top of apple strudel and it's something quite special. What's more, from Visegrad, 20 minutes walk down the mountain, you can get the ferry, hydrofoil or the bus straight to Budapest. We took the ferry down stream to Szentendre which is a small town built in the 17th century with a sort of Mediterranean atmosphere about it and we had a cup of coffee in the Boomerang restaurant. The streets are all cobbled and the houses are cute and it's the sort of place that you wish you could live in, flowers all over the place and well maintained but not sterile.

We visited Budapest from here too and that was a nice clean city. It's divided down the middle by the Danube with the historic buildings on one bank and the shops on the other. Budapest has even classier shops than Vienna and it's cleaner too. We were surprised to find that the shops contained everything one could possibly want and the quality of it all is excellent. Women's clothing is in the very height of fashion as are the women themselves, not just the tourists. It's another city which makes you realise how over rated Vienna is, Budapest is by far the better place. It's a good deal cheaper as well when you change your money on the black market with one of the hustlers who approach you.

You have to be careful with these guys though because it's their business and they are good at it. For example, say for arguments sake the official rate for your dollar is 60 somethings. The money changer will offer you 90 when the going rate is actually 80 and you think that you have a good deal. He'll be very pleasant and count out the money and hand it to you to count it. You then find that for your $100, he's only given you 8,000 instead of 9,000. You count it and tell him that it's 1,000 short and he says "give it to me", he counts it and says "you're right, sorry". Then comes the clever bit, he slips a couple of thousand into his pocket, produces the extra thousand and gives it to you and he's done it so deftly that it's just about impossible to see it happening.

Alicja and I usually do the deal together with one of us handling the money and the other one just watching the guys hands and even then you can miss it. All of this is done in an air of nervousness created by the money changer as he keeps looking sideways for the police because of course it's an illegal transaction which you are involved in. He wants to panic you so that you loose your concentration. He weighs you up as soon as he meets you and if you're not careful, you can end up with one or two one thousand denomination notes wrapped around a bundle of fives or tens.

There's one way to beat this guy and here's how you do it: you choose the person offering the best rate (the best rate offered is sure to be a con) and you agree on 95 when you know the going rate is something in the order of sixty. Then when he hands you only 8,500 instead of 9,500 you say thank you very much, pocket it, give him your western money and walk away. He's completely stuffed; he can't go to the police or anything. Sometimes you'll find that you want to change a bit more than you did in the first place and so you go back to where you did the last deal and you can't find your man anywhere. This is because he's done a really good con job on someone who looks like he's capable of getting nasty. He's netted a few hundred dollars and it's worth while going home and laying low until the tourist has left town. After saying all this, I should add that you do find the occasional money changer who offers you a realistic rate and does a straight deal.

In some countries they offer you a fantastic rate and do everything straight but when you go to spend the money, you find that the notes he's given you were discontinued 5 years ago. If this happens to you, don't breathe a word of it to anyone because it will be obvious that you've been dealing with a black marketeer which is an offence. So where was I? Oh yes Budapest, well, even if you don't change your money on the black market it's still much cheaper than a Western city and it's lovely, you'd never guess that you were in a communist country. Fruit is incredibly cheap, 50 cents a kilo or less for peaches, apricots, apples, cherries, strawberries, raspberries and a lot more and the quality is first class. Fruit in Australia I often found to be disappointing, particularly peaches which look spectacular but are unripe and they don't ripen when you get them home, no matter how long you leave them.

Another thing available here is fruit juice made from strawberries, delicious and again very cheap and the coffee is good. The coffee has been pretty good everywhere except England where it's insipid and tastes like the coffee you get in MacDonalds on a bad day, it doesn't matter how much you pay there either, it still tastes lousy wherever you go. The Benneton chain of clothes stores have shops in Warsaw, Prague and Budapest which I think is smart thinking right now that things in this part of the world are opening up to capitalism, they are there on the ground and the people are getting to know them. They had the best looking store in the whole of Warsaw, mind you, that isn't at all difficult. What I'll remember Budapest for though is the women. They had the greatest selection I've seen since leaving Australia, admittedly it was summer and women always look better in the summer when you get to see a little more of them but they were great and very sexy some of them, I now understand what a Hungarian uprising is, I had several of them.

In this part of Hungary the whole population with very few exceptions speaks German so you can always get by if you ask a German tourist (the place is overflowing with them) to read the menu or the bus timetable for you because just about all Germans can speak English. Germans and especially Austrians come here a lot at weekends to buy things cheaper than they can at home and they all stock up on sausage and tinned food etc.


When we were in Austria, we bought some insect remover for cleaning dead insects off of Raelene's paintwork and the stuff works, it really does. I wonder what it's made of because when I worked in the oil industry I learned that most solvents are made from basically the same substance that the stain that you want to remove is made from. Like, if you want to remove grease, you can use petrol because it's just a lighter version of the same product. Insect remover however has got me baffled because following the same logic I'm inclined to think that it's manufactured from Dragonfly vomit but Alicja doesn't agree because the average Dragonfly probably only produces something like 100th of a millilitre at a time and given that the bottle contains 500 mill they would never be able to produce it for the price. She also pointed out that you can't guarantee that every dragonfly will produce every day but I think that all you'd have to do is get them all together in a big cage and play Perry Como records to them all day and you'd never run out of it.

So far as communist country caravan parks are concerned, they have a lot to learn about maintenance of the washing, showering and toilet facilities. It's normal for the sprinkler roses to be missing from the showers and all you get is a straight jet of water and so far they seem to have a knack of keeping the water temperature at just below luke warm at any time of the day or night. None of them have enough slope on the floor to ensure adequate drainage either. I don't mean that you are knee deep in water all the time but the floors are always wet and squelchy underfoot. There's never ever a sink plug anywhere and taps usually spray you with water as soon as you open them as do a lot of the toilets when you go to flush them.

One noticeable thing is the different attitude to nakedness in the men's shower rooms between Hungarians and Czechoslovakians. In Czechoslovakia, all the men took their clothes off outside the shower, hung them up, showered, came out afterwards and got dried and dressed. In Hungary they walk into the showers clothed and wedge their clothes between the pipes where they usually get wet and do the whole thing behind the curtain, only emerging again when clothed.

As I'm typing this, a big storm is heading this way and the wind from it has just reached us. All the people who have tents are running around just like ants do before a storm. They are letting down their annexes and digging trenches around the outside of the tents to carry the water away. I suppose that's what all campers do but I've never seen it before. It's hit us full on now and it's really chucking it down and they're out there in their waterproof clothing and they've lit their lights inside their tents and they are cooking inside. I'm glad that we're in a van and can drive someplace else if it continues. Oh shit, what if the van attracts the lightning, the tents are all canvass and the caravans are made of plastic and we're the largest conductor of electricity in the whole place. Ooh look, someone's getting undressed inside their tent with the light on - must sign off now.

Alicja has turned out to be a first class navigator and she drives the van now too and we’re getting along with each other so well. We never doubted that we would, but some friends have told us that they were inclined to argue a lot when they were together in these circumstances 24 hours a day.

All for now. Alicja & Pete

Letter 7

CHAPTER 7


This is chapter um….7 I think it was? It’s so confusing writing a book. You have to remember where you filed things and what you called them and what you wrote about in the last chapter. It’s so stressful and your short-term memory suffers. Then you…. um…….. you……… Oh shit, I think I’ve developed a writer’s block. I can’t think of a single thing to write about….. Did I tell you the one about the two electrons who walked into a bar and the bar tender said there’s no charge for you and one of them said are you positive? …. No, that’s not how it went. There were two horses who walked into a bar and one said to the other “that hurt didn’t it?”…. no, I think I already told you about that in chapter three – or was that in the other book I’m writing, the one about porcupine taxidermy for fun and profit and how to stop your fingertips from bleeding? Truth is, I just can’t remember.

But wait, wait….Oooh! I can feel that old creative spark tingling in me gum boots right now, slowly oozing up me legs, past me nether regions, up through me spleen, around by me bile duct and now a sort of fizzing sensation mounting up to a creative explosion at the end of me typing digits – BOOM! God, that’s good, I needed that! Clears the old system out like a good sneeze it does.

This here is chapter 7 folks and we’re still in Hungary although we’ve left the Danube bend and all those fucking yurts. Yurt this, yurt that, every bloody thing was yurtypoos. I’m beginning to look like a fucking yurt, losing hair and the top of my head rounding off like that. It’s a good job I’ve grown a beard I suppose. Mind you, being bald headed with a beard may not be the safe way to go. I was at the bowling alley in downtown Budapest a couple of nights ago and I saw a man up at the refreshment counter who was completely bald apart from this great big beard. It looked as if he had his head stuck on upside down. I felt sorry for him when he sat down though. Somebody walked up to him, stuck two fingers up his nostrils and threw him down one of the lanes.

We’ve moved up to the north east to a town called Eger. For the last 30 kilometres on the way into the town we drove past fields of tobacco, sweet corn and sunflowers and on past countless small vineyards and plots of opium poppies. The city of Eger has turned out to be rather unique in that it seems to be permanently out of focus or, at least, fuzzy around the edges. We’ve been here for 5 days now and it seems to become progressively more blurred with each passing hour. I’ve worked out why it is. Eger has, according to the guidebook, two thousand private wine cellars. We’ve only covered about forty of them to date but we’re sleeping well when we can locate the van. Most of the wine cellars we’ve visited so far are small and under private houses or in root cellars in farmyards but what they lack in décor and professionalism is more than made up for by the hospitality of their proprietors. They don’t seem to do any work and just want to hang around drinking their wine at our expense.

No matter which winery we choose to visit the pattern is almost invariably the same. We arrive at the farmhouse gate and wait until the barking of the dog attracts the owners. They come to the gate, smile at us in between a tirade of curses aimed at the said dog, open the gate and motion to us to drive around to the house door. Then we disembark whilst the owner chases the dog around the van to stop it attacking us and we run the gauntlet from the van to the farmhouse door.

Once inside they take us to the cellar to see the bottles and discuss the finer points of their contents. They probably talk about botrytus and acid content and bouquets and such and we nod and pick the bottle with the most dust on it and ask how much. It’s always cheap, always fair to good in quality and ever undrinkable although we did have a bottle of white with a shriveled looking caterpillar in it. It just lay there belly up and flopped from side to side after each filling of the glasses but we were so drunk at the time that it didn’t seem to matter. We discussed it the next morning when we woke up but neither of us could remember who drank it or what happened to it.

Much more enjoyable than the wine is the company and the atmosphere. They feed us slices of salami and stuffed peppers and help us drink our wine as they show us black and white photographs of deceased relatives, World War II partisans and members of the lumpen proletariat who probably fall into both categories. They point out who these various people were killed or imprisoned by and we nod knowingly and roundly denounce the Russians or the Germans or whoever we think they’re telling us about. Quite a few of these farmer/ winemakers have relatives in Transylvanian Romania where they tell us that the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu treats them badly. I’ve found that after a couple of glasses of red, if one calls out the name of Mr. Ceausescu, turns sideways on the chair and spits on the kitchen floor, it meets with a very good reception and sometimes can even get one a free bottle for the road.

Anyway, this all works very well for a couple of visits but it becomes progressively more difficult as the day wears on and we’ve spent the last four nights sleeping in the van in the gardens and courtyards of farmhouses. At one place the farmer had a magnificent field of sunflowers in full bloom and I admired them and indicated that I wanted to take a photograph of him and his wife standing amid the sea of yellow. Both the farmer and I were three parts pissed and I don’t know what went wrong but he got a tarpaulin out of the barn and laid it in the field under the sunflowers and invited us to sleep on it. I barely remember him staggering off in the direction of the house as we collapsed on the tarpaulin. We awoke an hour before dusk with mosquito bites all over us and dragged the tarpaulin back to the house where he was asleep in a chair but his wife had cooked us a huge meal of pork shanks and some delicious dumplingy things which were so laden with paprika that I had cause to feel their heat again the next day. I think I could do this for quite a long period of time. In fact I never want to leave here. At the very next post office I’m going to apply to be a Hungarian.

Apart from its two thousand private wine cellars Eger, amongst other attractions, has some quaint old buildings and a fantastic collection of doors. Yes, doors; all carved in different patterns as though there’s a door competition going on in town. A number of very large double doors, which would admirably befit small English castles, are to be encountered on the city sidewalks which open up to reveal shady courtyards where families sit and eat their midday and evening meals. There's the mandatory castle and cathedral of course, and lots of little boutiques and beer houses with outside tables where you can sit and watch the German tourists huffing on their tea spoons and cleaning them with Kleenex tissues before they’ll stir their coffee with them.

It was in Eger that we bought a product that has changed our lives. It's an electric hotplate and it cost $8.00. Now we can save our gas by using the electricity in caravan parks and cook outside when the weather allows because cooking makes the van unpleasantly hot even on cool days when the sun is shining. Another bonus is that we use it as a heater at night. Back in West Germany we bought a good quality pressure cooker which cut our gas consumption down by about half and we wouldn’t now want to be without it.

After spending a week in Eger it took two more weeks to decide to leave the place. When we finally left at around 5am one warm sultry morning we took the back roads and headed for Aggtelek to see what the guidebooks described as possibly the most beautiful cave complex in Europe. We didn’t care how long it took us to get there; we’d stocked up on food, wine and fruit juice and we were carrying our accommodation with us like tortoises. We found the smallest roads on the map and then took every road we came to that didn’t appear on the map as long as it headed in what we thought was the right direction. Now we felt that we were seeing the real Hungary. We were used to kids waving at us as we went through villages but now we were in territory where the adults waved at us too.

We drove along mile after mile of lush green valley floors with mountains rising on either side of us and through small villages which would suddenly happen upon us at fifteen-minute intervals. As if taken straight out of postcards the tiny houses invariably had bowed rooflines and doors that were leaning over at an angle. All were newly whitewashed or painted in an orangey colour with window surrounds in contrasting colours and grapes growing over them. Geese and chickens wandered across the roads and the sheds and barns with thatched roofs looked as though they were a hundred years old. I pondered the parallelogram shaped doors in their parallelogram shaped doorframes. They looked great and I wondered how they came to be like that. Did the door and the frame gradually lean over together during the course of decades? If they did the occupants must have put up with years of sticking doors before both door and frame settled into their out-of-square shapes. Or were they just lousy carpenters who couldn’t cut straight? To my Anglo Saxon way of thinking everything must be dead square but it obviously isn’t that important. Nevertheless, if you build an out-of-square house it must be a real hassle when you come to put the roof on.

Funny what goes through the mind of a tourist isn’t it? I mean, I’m on holiday for God’s sake. Why am I spending time thinking about out-of-square Hungarian peasant’s doors? Only yesterday I was in a farmer’s kitchen enjoying a white knuckle drinking session and railing about president Ceau–bloody-sescu.

Almost every house had a well and these wells were covered by little house come dog kennel constructions in different styles, some of them were thatched and they covered the winding mechanisms used to lift the buckets. Some villages had four or five storks nests atop chimneys and lamp posts. I really like the look of storks because, like seagulls, they’re so clean looking with never a feather out of place. Australian kookaburras, by contrast, are unkempt, and to my mind, raggedy looking things always in need of a feathercut. Storks nests though, are a mess. Big round shambolic looking cylindrical constructions over a meter across and up to about a meter high with great big sticks poking out of them. If I was a stork and I made friends with a wren or an oriole, for example, I could never take them home to show them where I was born. I’d be so ashamed, worried that they’d tell everyone I came from a slum.

Villagers consider themselves lucky if a stork chooses their village in which to nest and every effort is made to induce the birds to stay and build. Some families place large wire platforms on top of chimneys for them to build on and others put car tires on platforms atop lamp posts and make artificial nests hoping to fool the storks into thinking they’ve come across a “renovators dream”. Storks quite like all this attention and have adapted to village life so well that you'd be hard pressed to find a storks nest in a tree anymore.

In two villages we saw purveyors of LPG bottled gas doing their deliveries in horse drawn carts. The houses had fridges and cookers powered by bottled gas. It was kind of surreal to me to see these two technologies placed so incongruously. (Shit that’s a good word isn’t it, incongruously? surreal wasn’t bad either). The automobile came about 50 years before the good Lord gave us bottled gas so I could only imagine bottled gas being delivered by mechanized transport. If God had have meant us to have bottled gas he wouldn’t have given us the horse would he?

In one village where we stopped to take photographs we were followed up the street by about 30 giggling kids. If I’d have had a penny whistle and a multi colored jump suit I’m sure I could have led them all up into the hills. I checked the street sign to see we weren’t in Hamlyn and I may go back and see if I can get the rat catcher’s contract next year. The house at the end of the only street belonged to a beekeeper and he had his hives right next to the house in a sort of pigeon loft. The hives were all made of straw, which had been twisted into rope and then wound round into a conical Chelsea bun shape. I remember as a kid in England seeing a honey jar with a picture of the same type of hive on it.

We arrived in Aggtelek camping ground in the early evening and from a distance it looked quite attractive with a little lake in the middle. It was only as we drew closer that we saw the tents in the middle of the lake. They’d had a flood. There were people sitting in their cars with their bedding on the roof looking awfully miserable and in the morning when I went to the toilet block I saw some of them sleeping out in the open with just a piece of foam rubber underneath them and a wet blanket on top.

Talking about toilet blocks, the shorts which are fashionable these days seldom have a zip fly in them and, depending on how long they are, it can be a difficult decision to make when it comes to whether to pee over the top of the waistband or lift them up and pee out of the bottom of the leg. Well, I was in a toilet block the other evening when a man came and stood next to me at the urinal and he had his toothbrush and toothpaste in his left hand and decided to pee "over the top" with his right hand. I don't mean he peed with his hand of course, Hungarians aren't that different. Anyway, when you pee over the top with your right hand, it means that you have to hold the top of your shorts down with the left hand. He let go of the waistband, which sprang up, and he peed all over his toothbrush. I looked at him with a half smile, half smirk and he felt like a real idiot. I got outside and burst out laughing it was just like one of those Mr. Bean sketches.

We were up bright and early next morning to go down the caves. The Lets Go Europe book said that the sights were stupendous and another book said that there is a 14 kilometre long cave down there and a gigantic lake measuring something like 2 kilometres if my memory serves me correctly. The whole area is riddled with caves stretching into Czechoslovakia and at some times of the year you can go on a 6 hour guided tour around them.

Our tour lasted for one hour and even that was 50 minutes too long. I found, as Alicja had already told me, that caves are not the most exciting places to be in. The guide only spoke Hungarian anyway which didn't help any. It was damp and dark and there were things hanging from the roof which looked like cheese that had been left in the microwave for 10 seconds too long and lots of German tourists taking photo's with compact flash cameras. I guess that cave buffs would find it all fascinating but once I’d seen one piece of over-microwaved cheese I’d pretty well seen them all.

When we emerged into the sunlight, it was a relief, and we went down the hill to the cafe for coffee. It wasn't a very plush looking establishment and although they had a coffee machine the coffee was pre made, cold in a jug, and as it was ordered they poured it into a cup and heated it with one of those electric elements which are sold to travelers to use in hotel rooms. I asked for milk and couldn't make myself understood too well but eventually the waiter produced a bottle with "Milky" printed on the label. " Yes" I said "that's the stuff". And great stuff it turned out to be. It was a kind of milk/coffee flavored liqueur and when stirred into the coffee the result was at least the equal of any coffee I’ve ever tasted. We were instantaneously hooked on the stuff, we had another coffee each to celebrate, and then bought all the bottles of Milky he could spare us. Twenty-three bottles of Milky took a bit of storing in our over-provisioned campervan and those which touched jingled on bumpy roads through another three countries.

The food here is superb, that's the only word I can think of to describe it, and it's so affordable for us. The cold meats especially are available in great variety and we've been trying everything we can lay our hands on. We met a retired Austrian couple in Eger who earn a modest living by visiting Hungary every weekend, filling their car boot up with Hungarian sausages, fruit and vegetables and selling them to their neighbors back in Austria. Practically every day we buy a kilo of peaches and kilo of apricots and we've had peach pancakes, peach fruit salad, peach juice and peach flavored yogurt. In fact we're publishing a book called 1001 Things To Do With a Spare Peach and it should be in your bookstores shortly. For those of you who are into kinky sex I'd recommend No 27 but first make sure that your peach isn't over ripe and that the chandelier is secured firmly to the ceiling.

Next we thought we'd check out Lake Balaton which is a large body of warmish water (over 100 km long) which serves as Hungary's seaside. Balaton is probably the biggest attraction in the country and pretty well all of its shoreline has been developed into resorts and caravan parks. It was school holiday time and we couldn't get in anywhere. A long day’s drive all the way along the north shore of the lake looking for a campsite found us exhausted and it seemed pointless to carry on looking. Receptionists at camping sites told us that people from all over Europe book their summer holidays on Balaton a year in advance. Sun ripened looking Germans, Swedes and Danes were to be seen in every nook and cranny of the lakeshore and could be heard every time we wound the windows down. These are the nationalities I class collectively as the YaYa people. All conversations with Germans, Swedes and Danes seem to be peppered with YA Ya and Ya Ya Ya.

I was very impressed with the everyday architecture in Hungary. Resorts restaurants, hotels, snack bars, swimming pools and even town halls displayed the most imaginative designs that either of us have seen for a long time. They build such incredibly tasteful and well-designed houses that sometimes you just have to stop and say "look at that". I don’t know why Anglo Saxon architects seem so tied and constricted when it comes to house design. Here they have fantastic rooflines in different shapes covered in thatch or shingles with whitewashed walls and brown Tudor type beams and everywhere are these big carved doors.

Despite communism the West Germans and Austrians have been coming here for years, and it's easy to see why. The whole country is exceptionally clean, which for a German is a prime consideration, but apart from that the Hungarians cater to them so well. At every restaurant, museum or place of interest, they address all foreigners in German and the restaurant menu's are in German as well. There is even a radio station called Radio Danubis which broadcasts all day and probably all night too in the German language. It plays pop music most of the time but gives out tourist information at regular intervals and the German news. Well, I suppose it’s German but I guess it could be another language that sounds like German. It could be like that Austrian Bayerish or whatever they call it. Anyway, they say things like “untflashendenbanguntminefingerburnen” which I think is German for some sort of electrical appliance.

Compared with other socialist/communist countries in the region Hungary’s public buildings are in good condition. In Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany churches, town halls and the like are in a shocking state of disrepair. We were walking around Pecs, another beautiful city, this time in the South, and I was saying to Alicja that it's a pity that the Poles just can't seem to restore and look after their old buildings like the Hungarians who most obviously have the craftsmen.

We stopped to admire an old Turkish built theatre in Pecs when we saw a gang of workmen restoring some of the gargoyles on the ground and I tried to strike up a conversation with them. I wasn't getting anywhere when one of them asked if I spoke Polish. They told us that most of the guys who do building restorations in Hungary and Czechoslovakia are Polish. The Polish government doesn't have the desire or the money to spend on the restoration of its own buildings and they hire out their tradesmen to other countries and take a cut from their wages. Looking up at the building they were working on, one of them said "yes, the Turks built it, the Poles restored it and the Hungarians will earn money out of German tourists with it". It’s not at all uncommon to come across Hungarian churches that began life as mosques and have been converted. Minarets and other relics of the Turkish occupation make the countryside just that little bit more interesting than in, say Czechoslovakia.

Hungary also abounds in thermal springs and there are thermal pools all over the place which are said to cure various ailments (I was going to say rheumatism but I can't spell it) and make you live longer. We booked into a camping site which had a thermal pool right next door so we thought we'd give it a shot. I had visions of a hot spring bubbling out of the ground into a natural rock pool, all clear and sparkling with little seats around the edge, rather like a giant hot tub I guess.

I’d conjured up the wrong vision. It was a regular sized full-blown swimming pool, the water was a murky brown color, it stunk of sulfur or some such farty smelling element from the bowels of the Hungarian earth and was considerably hotter than I like to take my baths. It was full up with people; chock a block full of wild thrashing Hungarians and the water was bubbling like it was full of Piranhas during a feeding frenzy. There were kids leaping off the sides into spaces the size of a teacup between other people. Central and Eastern Europeans have a much closer personal space than us Anglo types and it often bothers Westerners having people so close to them, invading their space so closely that they can smell the other person’s breath. Not so with me, I got used to it years ago. Or so I thought.

In this thermal pool people were so close that they were touching, rubbing bodies against each other. I could see a couple of women on the other side of the pool I would have paid money to have rubbed my body against but the place was so packed that I had no hope of maneuvering myself into position without exiting the pool and getting back in again which would have looked a bit too obvious. Instead, I continued to stand next to the Russian woman with the artificial leg, two gold teeth and shabby underwear. She was so big that I looked like her lunch. By that time I’d been pushed further towards the center of the pool and I had to battle to get back to the edge where I could get out. We ran away back to the van and drank coffee with Milky in it. I guess that if you live in a country with no coastline a thermal pool is a good place to take you kids for the day as they were catered for with playground equipment and there were a couple of reasonable restaurants around the pool.

I'm listening to the German language Hungarian radio station as I'm typing the words you see before you and I've just realized that all day it's been playing English language pop music. Have you ever noticed that English is the language of both pop music and T-shirts? There are tourists from all over Europe and the Soviet bloc here and their T-shirts, almost without exception, are in English. Most of the people wearing them I'm sure don't have a clue what's written on them.

I can't understand why Esperanto never took off. Wouldn't it be great for travelers if we could all communicate because we'd learned Esperanto at school? We've had some rather surprising meals just because we couldn't speak the language. That leads me quite seamlessly into spelling. You may have been wondering how come I'm such a good speller? Well it's easy. This word processing program I’m using has a dictionary of 80,000 words in it. Once you've typed your letter, you tell it to check the spelling and if it and it comes across a word it doesn't have in its dickshonree, it suggests half a dozen words for you to choose from. It was in this way that I found that the words wank and fuck were in it.

It must be someone's job somewhere in a programming development office to decide which swearwords go into the program and which ones don't. I bet they have fun. I can just imagine some of the inter-office correspondence:


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Inter Office Memo

Memo To: Tony Lanfranschi Manager. Program Development

From: Chuck Martin Programmer Dictionary Dep't


Dear Tony,
Can I have Bollocks?

--------------------------------

Reply: Yeah Chuck, fine with me as long as you don't charge the cost of the operation to the company.

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We went into a restaurant in Pecs which offered Kangaroo tail soup and Forgs legs. We’re not quite sure what a forg is but if they’re native to Hungary we hope they don’t bite. And today we heard on the short wave radio that East Germany is going to limit the number of people that it allows to travel to Hungary because too many of them are escaping through Hungary to Austria and then on to West Germany. It made us think of the guy we met when we first entered the country who asked us if we could take him across. I hope he made it.

We never cease to be amazed that Hungarians, Czechs and Poles just can't seem to put a slope on a concrete floor that will drain the water away in the shower and toilet blocks. We've seen the ultimate now, it was here in Hungary and both the Men’s and Women's shower blocks had drains in the middle of the floor at the highest point. The whole floor sloped upwards to the drain and there was stagnant water all around the edges.

We’re leaving Hungary tomorrow to go to Jugoslavia and we were a little sorry.

Letter 8

With some reluctance we left Jurta Tabor knowing that wherever else we were likely to stay in Hungary wouldn't compete and headed up into the North East of the country towards a town named Eger. For the last 30 kilometres on the way into the town we drove through fields of tobacco, sweet corn and sunflowers and mile upon mile of vineyards stretching out of sight over gently rolling hills.

Eger was a great place with, amongst other attractions, two thousand private wine cellars, some quaint old buildings and a fantastic collection of doors. Yes, doors. Eger contains a number of large old houses with shaded courtyards in which the locals sit all day, play chess, drink coffee and eat their meals. Each courtyard has an enormous pair of carved double doors and every one is different. In fact we came across a door making workshop in which upwards of a dozen carpenters were hard at it making new doors and repairing pre loved models any of which wouldn't have looked out of place on a Scottish castle.

There's the mandatory castle and cathedral of course but lots of little boutiques and beer houses with tables where one can sit outside and watch the Austrian tourists go by. As soon as we parked in the car park in Eger there was a tap on the window. It was a Polish black market money changer offering good rates so we had cheap money to spend before we even got out of the van and we went shopping straight away. We bought two products which changed our lives. A portable electric hotplate for the grand sum of eight dollars and a good quality German pressure cooker.

With an extension lead the hot plate enabled us to cook outside when the weather was good and it served as a heater at night. The pressure cooker cut our gas consumption down by about half. The cost of the gas was nothing to worry about but locating a gas sales establishment could sometimes take us the best part of a day and different countries had different fittings on their bottles. We parked just out of sight of the road in a large forest a little way out of Eger that night and were woken by the grunting and snorting of wild boars. Niether of us had ever seen wild boars before and when we pulled the curtains back and shone the torch on them they didn't bat an eyelid.

This was fine with us and we enjoyed watching them for a while but they were noisy and wouldn't go away until we put the car alarm on. In the morning when we went outside we saw that they had rooted up a large area of ground all around the van and defecated on our plastic water containers. After breakfast we took the back roads on the way to Aggtelek to see what the guidebooks describe as possibly the most beautiful cave system in Europe.

The way was mountainous with broad flat bottomed fertile valleys in which most of the villages were situated and we felt that at last we were seeing the real Hungary. In many villages up to this point the kids had come out to wave at us but now that we were in the little visited backwoods the adults were waving too. A campervan must have been a rare sight. The tiny hamlets were scenes straight from postcards, little houses with sagging roof lines and doors that were leaning over at an angle all nicely whitewashed or painted in an orangey colour with window surrounds in contrasting colours and grapes growing over them. Geese and chickens everywhere and old sheds and barns with thatched roofs which looked as though they were a hundred years old.

Almost every house had a well in the yard covered by little thatched house come dog kennel structures in different styles which covered the winding mechanisms used to lift the buckets. Some villages had up to four storks nests crowning the chimneys and lamp posts, scruffy ill defined constructions, more like a giant, flattened grenadier guards busby after a few hours in a spin dryer than a birds nest. Storks are considered lucky in this part of the World and every effort is made to induce the birds to stay and build their nests, including the placement of large wire constructions on top of chimneys, car tyres atop lamp posts and man made nests of twigs. Of the hundreds of storks nests we saw throughout Eastern Europe not one was in a tree or located more than fifty metres from a house.

We stopped in one village to change our gas bottles, not from a shop but from the gas delivery man who was doing the rounds in a horse and cart. He was standing outside the house of a bee keeper who's hives were kept in what looked like pigeon lofts and were made of straw which had been twisted into a rope and then wound round like a Chelsea bun into a conical shaped hive. I remember as a kid in England seeing a honey jar with a picture of the same type of hive on it. We arrived at the Aggtelek camping ground in the late afternoon and were suitably impressed with its appearance, especially the lake in the middle which was surrounded by tents and backed by steep hills. It was only as we drew closer that we saw the tops of a few other tents in the middle of the lake.

There had been a flash flood that morning when many of the campers were away from the camping ground and we were able to see the looks of horror on their faces when they returned later in the afternoon to find that they needed submarines to locate their holiday accommodation. Others were sitting in their cars with their bedding on the roof looking as though they'd had better holidays and in the morning when I went to the toilet block I saw some of them sleeping out in the open with just a piece of foam rubber underneath them and a wet blanket on top.

Inside the toilet block I stood next to a small, white skinned Hungarian sporting a pair of long, multi coloured shorts with Hugo Boss emblazoned on the left buttock. Long shorts these days don't have a zip fly and depending on how tight they are, a difficult decision confronts the "end" user as to whether one should pee over the top of the waistband or lift one of the legs. The small Hungarian had his toothbrush and toothpaste in his left hand and decided to pee "over the top" with his right hand. (by this I do not mean to convey to the reader that he peed with his hand of course, Hungarians aren't that different). When one decides to pee "over the top" with one's right hand, it means that one must hold down the waistband of one's shorts with the left hand. He did so - and peed all over his toothbrush. I laughed, he didn't.

We were up bright and early in the morning to go down the famous Aggtelek caves which the "The Lets Go Europe" book said were stupendous. One cave was said to be 14 kilometres long and a gigantic subterranean lake measuring some 2 kilometres in length awaited the intrepid visitor. The whole area around Aggtelek is riddled with caves stretching into neighbouring Czechoslovakia and six hour guided tours were on offer. We took a one hour tour which we later estimated to have taken approximately 50 minutes too long. I found, as Alicja had already told me, that caves are not the most exciting places to be in and as the guide spoke only Hungarian and no literature in English was available we may just as well have spent the time talking to our accountant.

Deep within the damp, dank, gloomy bowels of the earth there were things hanging from the ceiling which looked for all the World like cheese which had spent fifteen seconds too long in a microwave oven and a gaggle of Austrian tourists with compact flash cameras shooting off photo's out of flash range. When at last we emerged blinking into the sunlight it was with some relief that in front of us stood a cafe to which we repaired at speed for a cup of coffee before the party of Austrians could beat us to it.

It was run by a rotund, brown, bare chested man with a rotund brown, bare head widening out at the jowls. In the reflection of the coffee machine, which was unfortunately awaiting a service call, I inspected his gleaming pate for cracks just to be sure that I hadn't come face to face with the original Humpty Dumpty. The coffee was pre made, cold in a jug, and as it was ordered he poured it into a cup and heated it with one of those electric elements of the type commonly used by itinerant fruit pickers in dormitories. The milk jug too was awaiting a service call from the milkman but we were offered a substitute from a bottle labeled "Milky", a superb local coffee liqueur which we became instantaneously hooked on and thereafter scoured the countryside seeking to buy a stock of.

Hungarian food was superb, although perhaps some would find it a tad peppery, and so easily affordable that we embarked on a gourmet tour of the country sampling regional specialities, sitting in open air restaurants for hours on end gorging ourselves and watching the people go by. The shops too were full of an astonishing array of smoked and cured cold meats. Practically every day we would buy two kilos of peaches which we used in every imaginable way as they were so cheap. Peach pancakes, peach juice and peach flavoured yogurt for breakfast every morning and peach flavoured ice cream before going to bed.

What we didn't know about peaches by the time we left Hungary wasn't worth knowing and readers should keep an eye on the book shops for my next book "1001 Things To Do With a Leftover Peach." For those of you who are into kinky sex I'd recommend No 669 but first make sure that your peach isn't over ripe and that the chandelier is secured firmly to the ceiling.

According to the guide books, no trip to Hungary could be said to be complete without a visit to Lake Balaton. A huge body of landlocked water some one hundred kilometres long, it serves as Hungary's seaside and is the biggest attraction in the country, almost all of its shore line smothered in holiday resorts. So many holiday resorts on Lake Balaton were advertised in Hungarian tourist brochures that we decided not to drive into the first reasonable place that presented itself but to spend a while choosing the most suitable hotel with the best facilities.

We were by this time feeling somewhat shabby after such a long time in the van and were looking forward to a stay in a hotel with real baths and a laundry service where we could catch up on some washing. Alicja had already worked out that we'd get the seat covers, duvet, curtains and anything else we could easily detach, properly laundered together with all our machine washable clothes. We were unaware that it was school holiday time when every Hungarian, his kids, pets and a few hundred thousand Austrians descend upon this watery piece of paradise and no accommodation of any kind was available. It took two full days to cover the entire circumference of Lake Balaton stopping at dozens of hotel and camping sites only to hear the same story at each place, -you should have booked last year. The Swedes, Danes and Germans book two years in advance.

We finally gave up and headed for the area around Pecs further south in a quest to find a caravan park with one of the much vaunted thermal springs, Hungary being the therapeutic thermal spring capital of Europe with waters said to cure every unpronounceable ailment and rheumatism. This time we were in luck and managed to book in to a decent caravan park with a thermal pool within walking distance and set off hot foot (later to become even hotter), towels in hand for our first thermal pool experience. The vision in our minds was one of hot springs bubbling out of the ground into a natural rock pool, all clear and sparkling with little seats around the edge, rather like a giant hot tub. The reality was a little different.

It was a regular sized, full blown swimming pool full to the brim with a murky brown liquid hotter than any bath we'd ever taken. Perhaps it hadn't been filled to the brim at the start of the day but Archimedes Law had made it that way. It was chock a block full of wild thrashing Hungarians, the water bubbling like it was full of Piranhas during a feeding frenzy and kids leaping off the sides into spaces which weren't there until they landed. It was a first come first served event and as nobody was coming out, we slid in between the rest of them and stayed there for a full five minutes before coming to the conclusion that we couldn't stand the pace or the heat. It was an unusual experience for me, a first time communal bather, and I couldn't understand why people of all ages had to jump up and down like pogo stick passengers rubbing themselves against their neighbours.

I could see on the far side of the pool a couple of people I wouldn't have minded jumping up and down and rubbing myself against but my immediate pogo stickers were somewhat obese septuagenarians and the whole experience was lost on me. I'm pleased to say that we weren't put off by the occasion and over the following fortnight we visited several more thermal pools and found that it's one thing that is done well in Hungary. They were usually well maintained with attractive gardens, clean restaurants and toilet facilities and I suppose that if you live in a country without a coastline it's a good place to take the kids for the day.

It was while staying at a thermal pool park that I discovered that my word processing program had a spell checking feature, a marvellous idea which, once I found out how to operate it, saved me hours of work. Even more time would have been saved if I'd bought a legal copy of the software which would have come complete with a manual but as it was I sat up for hours experimenting with it. I could only wonder at the minds of the programmers far away in an office somewhere in California who seemed to have thought of every swear-word in the English language.

I was unable to stump it and it got me thinking. It must be someone's job somewhere in a programming development department to decide which swear-words go into the program and which ones don't. I wonder who it is that has the ultimate say on whether words like "fucker" can be included in a software package - probably the boss? Imagine the conversations and the correspondence which flies around the Microsoft building in such situations.

---------------------------------------------------------------

MICROSOFT
Date......
Inter Office Memo

MEMO TO: Bill Gates CEO

FROM: Chuck Martin Programmer, Dictionary Dep't


Dear Bill,
Can I have Bollocks?

--------------------------------

REPLY: Yeah Chuck, fine with me as long as you don't charge the cost of the operation to the company.

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The West Germans and Austrians have been coming to Hungary for years and it's easy to see why. The whole country is exceptionally clean, which for a German is a prime consideration to start with, but apart from that, the Hungarians cater to them so well. At every restaurant, museum or place of interest they address all foreigners in German, all the restaurant menu's are in German as are the day to day signs at the entrances to places of interest.

A radio station called Radio Danubis broadcasts all day and probably all night too in the German language. It plays pop music most of the time but gives out tourist information at regular intervals and the German news. Hungary must earn a lot of foreign currency from tourism and deservedly too because they do a lot of things right. In the city of Pecs in the south there was much restoration of old buildings going on and I remarked to Alicja that it was a pity that the Poles just can't seem to restore and look after their old buildings like the Hungarians who most obviously have the craftsmen. We stopped to admire an old theatre which was built in Pecs by the Turks and we saw a gang of workmen restoring some of the decorative friezes which they had removed to the ground.

I tried to strike up a conversation with them in the hope of getting an authentic photograph of these Hungarian artisans at work. I wasn't getting anywhere until Alicja heard one of them say to another in Polish -I can't understand a fucking word of German, I don't know what he's asking me. Much to their embarrassment Alicja answered them in Polish and we ended up buying a take away pizza and coffee each and having lunch with them in their mess hut. They were interesting guys and told us that there was little work for them in Poland and that working in Hungary paid about three times as much. The Polish government doesn't have the money to spend on the restoration of its own buildings so they hire out their tradesmen to other countries and take a cut from their wages. Looking up at the building they were working on, one of them said -yes,the Turks built it, the Poles restored it and the Hungarians earn money out of German tourists with it.

It's hard to say exactly what combination of ingredients made us like Hungary so much but the whole package was very appealing and we felt at home there. Hungarians seem to have a certain style which we didn't see elsewhere in Europe, the architecture, hotels, restaurants, food, the people, it all left an impression on us and we were in a way sad when the time came to leave and head across the border to war torn Jugoslavia. On our last night we eat at a restaurant in Pecs which boasted a menu containing kangaroo tail soup and "forgs legs." I'm not quite sure about the forg but I've an idea that they're big things like chickens and a sort of paprika colour.

when we got back to the van we heard on the radio that East Germany is going to limit the number of people that it allows to travel to Hungary because too many of them are escaping through Hungary to Austria and then on to West Germany. It made us think of the guy we met when we first entered the country who asked us if we could take him across the border. I hope he made it.

Letter 9

Driving south west from the Hungarian city of Szeged we entered Jugoslavia from the North at a small crossing where we weren't asked a single pertinent question by the surly unshaven border guards. The only thing they wanted to know was if we had any Western cigarettes. Jugoslavian inflation was, at the time, running at over 1,200% per annum and when we changed US$50 at the border, I thought the least they could have done would have been to give us a paper bag to take the money away in.

We ended up with close on a million Dinari as the exchange rate was 19,800 to the dollar. It's not easy to calculate the prices of things in your mind when you see something in the shops at 323,876 dinari and think to yourself, now, how many 19,800s go into that. Things in the shops all had about five prices on them because they have to alter them every few days. The shop assistants, as you might imagine, are by now quite adept at mathematics and very fast with it. Ever since the start of the trip we'd been swapping currencies which could have been highly confusing but for a going away present from one of my daughters. It was a brilliantly designed Japanese currency exchange calculator in which two exchange rates could be kept at any one time with instant reference to their worth against the currency we were travelling in. All that was necessary was to dial in the price seen in the shop and hit the "home" button to get the price in our own currency.

Also incorporated was a small map of the World showing the time zones and it featured both a calculator and an alarm clock. I understand that next years model will have breakfast making capabilities, tell the user what time the tide comes in, in the Seychelles on St Valentines Day and that the battery will be the size of a helium atom. Nevertheless, this little packet of technology was pretty well useless to us in Jugoslavia because the exchange rate varied so much from day to day. One shop we went into had a wire cage full of cabbages with prices written on them with a black marker. Alongside it the floor was strewn with detached cabbage leaves with the previous days prices on them.

Jugoslavia, like Bulgaria, was always one of those countries where communism hadn't worked but the bulk of package holiday tourists thought that it had. Bulgaria used to pour money into its Black Sea resorts in order to bring in hard currency and Jugoslavia did the same with the Dalmatian coastal resorts around Split and Dubrovnik to the detriment of the rest of the country, and it would seem, its population. The north of the country, through which our route would take us, is still, as it has ever been, an area to transit at the quickest possible pace. As soon as one enters Jugoslavia from the Hungarian border in the north it can be seen within the first 15 kilometres that Jugoslavians just don't care as much as the Hungarians. It's flat country and it grows the same corn and sunflowers as Hungary but the condition of the crops is poor, the stunted sunflowers fight the weeds for their existence and the corn looks undernourished with extensive bare patches in the fields where nothing grows.

The standard method of waste disposal in the villages of northern Jugoslavia is to fill up a truck with the village refuse, drive 2 kilometres up the road and dump it. The sides of the roads were scruffy and strewn with polythene bags and old tins with starved looking dogs eking out an existence amongst the mounds of reeking refuse. In all probability there are more dead and decaying dogs on the roads of northern Jugoslavia than the rest Europe combined. Outside one small town we stopped for a cup of tea at a designated parking area and while the kettle was boiling, I took a look at the toilets. They were of the "footprint" (middle eastern) type and full to the point that there was actually a mound of the stuff above ground level. How the last occupant performed his bodily functions could only be guessed at unless he hung from the ceiling. Footprints, for those yet to experience the pleasure, are used throughout the Middle East, in Asia and can occasionally be found as far West as France. There is no toilet seat, just two depressions in the shape of feet on either side of a sunken toilet bowl the top of which ends at ground level.

Advocates of this system point out that it is theoretically more hygienic because bums don't come into contact with seats on which less hygienic bums have been sitting. But in practice it isn't so. The modus operandi when confronted with footprints is to head for the bushes instead, but assuming that there is no alternative the user must be careful. To begin with it's not a bad idea to remove your jeans and hang them up above ground level for three very good reasons. Firstly, if you leave your jeans on and sit down in this position, the money in your pockets disappears down the small hole and unless you are absolutely broke the method of retrieval is out of the question. The second reason for the removal of your jeans is that the hole in the sunken toilet bowl is only about a third of the diameter of western style toilet bowls and they block up easily. Hence, when the chain is pulled the water and the material you were trying to dispose of tends to swirl around your feet. Feet are more easily washable than jeans. Thirdly, when crouched in the required position in western style clothes (as opposed to a flowing robe sans knicks) it's almost impossible not to pee in the back of your jeans as both hands are being used to support yourself in an effort to prevent you falling backwards into the hole. Because the holes in these things are so small that four sheets of toilet paper forms an effective seal, the managers and proprietors of the establishments in which footprints are located often provide a small pedal bin for used toilet paper which attracts the flies from the other side of town. To put footprints in their proper perspective, they are really designed for use by people with different toilet habits to the Westerner as evidenced by a jug and a water tap in each closet and no toilet paper.

The town of Novi Sad was the first place we stopped at and if the reader is ever in these parts..... avoid it. As Jugoslavia is another of these countries where it is illegal to free camp, we booked into a large camp-site. We walked into reception and were greeted by a Jugoslav/Aussie who had been in Australia for 16 years and returned here for a holiday in January and decided to stay......avoid him as well.

His wife told us that they were living like Kings on a disability pension from Australia.

Did his disability cause him any discomfort? I asked

-No, she said, -there's nothing wrong with him at all, there never was.

-So how come he managed to wangle a disability pension?

-He bribed a Jugoslav doctor in Melbourne who invented a back injury for him, she said looking at him proudly.

-All me mates was doin' da same fing?, the husband volunteered.

Had he in fact been disabled, it could perhaps have gone some way to excusing the disgusting state of his caravan park which was by far the worst we stayed in on our entire trip.

Filthy toilets, smelly drains, rubbish bins overflowing the grass un-mowed and everything in need of a coat of paint, we just used their electricity to boil water so that we could wash in the van and tried to avoid all contact with our surroundings. It was expensive too at $11 compared with a much better standard in Hungary for only $3 - $4. The toilets were so bad that people had taken to shitting amongst the trees at the back of the park and the area was full of the soiled newspaper they'd used as toilet paper - toilet paper being a hard to come by commodity in the shops. There was though, one redeeming feature about it - the proprietor spoke English and I talked him well into the night. What did he think about the possibility of ethnic strife rearing it's head in Jugoslavia, the Croats, the Serbs, the Muslims? I asked. The Serbs and Croats even in Melbourne seemed to be carrying on their ethnic squabbles.

-Couldn't give a fuck. They're all bloody mad, he said

What about the future, did he anticipate returning to Australia?

-This is the future, I'm fuckin' retired at thirty eight, don't 'ave to do nothin' an the money keeps comin' in. I can't think of a better future can you?

What about the caravan park, did he have plans, was he going to do any renovations, expand, splash a little paint around perhaps?

-What for? It's the only caravan park 'ere, people 'ave to stop. It's illegal to park up at the side of the road and you'd be bloody stupid to anyway.

-Yes, but what if someone else opens up a new caravan park in the area?

-Anyone investin' any money anywhere in Jugoslavia in the next fifty years would 'ave to be fuckin nuts.

I returned to the van late where Alicja was still reading in bed.

-What's he like?

-Well, It takes all sorts....and he was one.

In the morning the Jugoslav/Aussie proprietor showed me on the map how to get to the market. We wanted to have a go at selling the Polish goods we'd bought in Warsaw which were still stashed away in the box on the van roof. It was a large country market on a piece of open ground and it was full of Polish, Russian and Romanian traders standing around in the dust and thistles with their goods laid out on blankets on the ground and across the bonnets of their cars. First we went looking for the Poles who told us what to charge for our torches, irons and other odds and ends and offered to buy everything from us in one hit at a discount. We didn't want to sell everything to a middleman, mostly because we'd never been market traders before and we wanted the experience.

The Polish traders however, kept telling us that it could take two days to get rid of all that we had so we decided to try selling the stuff ourselves for a couple of hours and if unsuccessful, we'd then think about getting rid of it in one hit. Back at the van we set up our folding table and I went up on the roof to open the box and hand the goodies down to Alicja who within seconds was besieged with people wanting to buy the folding table. It was like an auction with people bidding against each other in a language we couldn't understand and they flocked to us like chickens when the corn is thrown out. As soon as I began to hand down the irons, we were engulfed and all ten of them went in as many minutes. The torches which we were told were only saleable in Bulgaria proved to be even more popular and so many people were arguing about them that Alicja couldn't keep track of the situation and gave them back to me and I auctioned them one at a time from the safety of the van roof.

In all we had, I suppose, about one hundred items for sale varying from milk jugs to men's socks but it was all sold in twenty minutes and they deserted us leaving us bewildered standing in the middle of the car park with hands full of money and wondering what to do next. The most sought after items had been things we didn't want to sell. Things like our sun glasses, my jumper, the van's outside mirrors, Alicja's bracelet and one man wanted to buy the van itself offering to run us to the Hungarian border as part of the deal.

Because Bulgaria, the next country en route, was said to be practically devoid of anything good to eat, and we wanted to spend a month or so there, we wanted to stock the van to the rafters in Jugoslavia. Unfortunately there was very little on offer except tinned fish and beans but we bought a large quantity of both in the hope that we'd be able to swap some of it for something more appetizing further down the track. Not being able to get all that we needed in the market, we took ourselves off to the shops where we realised our mistake as first time market traders. Our irons and torches were already on sale for twice the price we'd sold them for and our fishing rods were being sold at the check-out as we walked in, with their price quadrupled When our turn at the check-out came we found that the Jugoslavian money we'd received in exchange for the US$50 we'd changed at the border when entering the country, was a year out of date and the shop wouldn't take it.

An hour later we were on our way again and at around midday we pulled off the highway and into a small town to look for diesel. The road into it was strewn with rubbish, but once in among the buildings the scene presenting itself was like the qualifying round for Dantes Inferno - the pits. The whole town was covered in dust, the wind blew polythene bags around which stuck to the TV aerials and the chimneys of the tumbledown houses. Dirty, half starved sheep, goats, cats and dogs wandered around and old ladies struggled up the street bent double under large loads of cardboard boxes and other burnable material gleaned from the smoking rubbish heaps just outside the town. Some carried even higher loads of folded cardboard boxes which I suppose they burned to keep warm or block the holes in their broken windows although, at the time, the heat was sweltering. The people who were a bit better off were walking around with wheelbarrows full of cardboard boxes and firewood.

This place, however, had us worried. Our white coloured campervan stood out in all this mess like a washing powder commercial, a white tornado cutting a swath down the main street, and we were stared at as strangers in wild west movies are stared at when they drift into town. Then, as we slowed down at the approach to the petrol station, men ran up on either side of us and began banging on the windows and trying to open the doors. We drove straight on through the town and used the spare diesel in our canister hoping to find another filling station further on, petrol was sometimes hard to come by but diesel was available everywhere. As we moved along the road we saw carts and ploughs drawn by oxen which I thought had gone out of date in this part of the World. It added an incongruously Asian look to the countryside but something else which struck us was the complete absence of churches and castles. Everywhere we'd been so far, churches and to a lesser extent castles, were landmarks on the horizon but here they were noticeably absent.

That night we looked for a camp ground which according to the map and the Jugoslavian camping book, was a large one which accommodated some 1,500 people. It wasn't there. We asked the police where the place was and after looking at our book they were as mystified as we were, said they'd never heard of it and that it must have once been planned but never built. They reminded us that it was illegal to spend the night anywhere except in government authorized camping sites and told us too that it wasn't safe to leave the van unattended. We asked what options that left us given that there was no camp site and no hotels in town and were told that we'd just have to keep on driving. As we turned to go, one of the policemen called out to us and we turned around to see him demonstrate what was likely to happen to us if we camped at the side of the road. He drew his hand across his throat in a slicing motion!

Alicja threw the Welcome to Jugoslavia book back in the dash pocket and we drove north towards the Danube and spent the night parked in a small patch of trees alongside the river without incident. The next morning we headed down to Belgrade. Belgrade was described in one of our guidebooks as "Grim Belgrade" and for once the information was dead on. It is without doubt the most uninteresting capitol city I've seen, greyer than Warsaw. We only went there to buy slide film which we couldn't find anywhere in the smaller cities but there was nothing their either. We walked for hours in the city on a quest for the elusive slide film and we stopped at a restaurant and sat outside and drank coffee. We and found ourselves being hassled by a flower seller, trying to make me feel guilty for not buying a rose for Alicja. She was incredibly persistent and made her approach in German and a couple of other languages.

She was about eight years old with some Gipsy blood in her and once she worked out that it was English we were speaking, she started saying pleeeease over and over again in a most heart wrenching tone and I gave her some money to get rid of her. She didn't thank me and slouched over to another table to begin all over again with a French couple. The man, feeling embarrassed by her constant pleadings, bought a rose and the little girl tried to make off with his wifes sun glasses. He caught her, re-possessed the sun glasses and told her off in French but she was completely unaffected as were the staff of the restaurant who turned a blind eye to all that was going on. We were glad to get out of the capitol and back into the relatively clean air of the countryside again and drove around for the remainder of that day, and the next, looking for something - anything - interesting. We failed miserably and after looking for three non existent caravan parks advertised in Jugoslavian camping guide we entered the small town of Golubac hard up against the Danube which formed the border with Romania. Too tired to eat, we parked under the only street light in a scruffy, littered overgrown piece of ground, had a quick cup of tea and went to bed.

I got up first in the morning while Alicja was still asleep. I had breakfast and, knowing that there were no bushes outside, used the trusty plastic bucket toilet with plastic bag and newspaper. I stepped outside the van, plastic bag in hand to find that overnight, a market had grown up around us and as I turned to go back a man wanted to know what was in the bag. I tried to tell him that it was just rubbish but whatever it was he was still keen to buy it. I kept insisting that it wasn't for sale and held the bag up high but twice he made a grab for it and on the third go I let him have it and went back in the van. I couldn't move off because we were surrounded by stalls I knew when he'd opened it. He marched all around the van banging on the sides and shouting abuse at me but I kept the curtains closed. Alicja woke with a start -what's happening? I told her but she wasn't inclined to believe it until she saw the bag wedged under our windscreen wipers. Fifteen minutes later we left the van to the abuse of the man and most of the stall holders and spent the day walking around town until we could see that we'd be able to get the van out. Then, we quickly walked into the square, climbed into the van and left in a hurry.

We'd wasted a day and we followed the Danube for a while longer to a tiny town called Dobra and parked in the forest on it's outskirts. I was going to spend the rest of the daylight hours doing a few things to the van. It was here that I checked the van's brakes which didn't seem to be working as they should and to our great dismay found that the back axle had blown an oil seal and covered one of the brakes in oil. Further checking revealed that one of the front brakes wasn't working either and it was a tribute to Mercedes engineering that we hadn't been slithering all over the road every time the brakes were applied. We weren't sure what we should do, turn back to Belgrade where there was perhaps a slim chance of getting a new seal but losing a minimum of 2 days, or pressing on to Sophia in Bulgaria where there was next to no chance that we'd find one. If this was to be the case we'd have to go all the way to Istanbul before we could be sure of getting the job done.

We chose the reckless option, I.e. to press on, for two reasons. Firstly we didn't want to drive through all that horrible territory again and secondly, there's just not enough excitement in life these days. The main cause for worry was that there were a lot of high mountain ranges to descend between this place and Istanbul and with only one front and one back brake working it might call for some tricky steering. The following day driving towards the Bulgarian border we entered the mountains and things improved, mainly because of the lack of habitation, there were fewer people to throw polythene bags around. There was just the occasional small village and they were clean although again in poor condition in comparison to Hungary. Well designed and engineered though the van was, it was under powered on hills and I spent the day ascending them in first and second gear at a snails pace only to have to descend in second and third gear, because of our lack of brakes. By the end of the day I was so used to it that I could play the Brandenberg Concerto on the gearbox.

All the same, it was pleasant mountain countryside. The peasant farmers had used every available space and clearing (and there weren't many of them) to grow corn. Some patches were only 5 meters square and packed with corn and maize plants. Each and every house had a corn store next to it where they keep the stuff as winter feed for the animals. These stores or granaries are generally made of wood slats lined with wire netting and when they are full they look good with bursts of yellow colour hitting you in the eye as you pass through. Tall, long legged pigs, a dirty brown colour with hairy orange ears walked alongside the road, quite unattended they displayed much more road sense than the people who seemed completely oblivious to oncoming traffic and unwisely presumed every vehicle to have brakes.

The hay stacks were good too. They were conical in shape and very high and the hay was piled up around trees or poles driven into the ground. We saw the farmers building them, one at the bottom throwing the hay up to another with a long pitchfork, and when they complete a stack, they tie 4 logs about 2 metres long onto the central pole and let them hang down. The weight of the logs stops the hay from blowing away in the wind. Where the hay came from was a mystery for every clearing we saw was being used to grow maize and corn. We were sorry when in the evening we came down from the mountains back to the ugliness, this time the town of Negotin close to the Bulgarian border. Another wild west style town but with slight Mafia overtones, Negotin sits four square in one of the Worlds most extensive rubbish heaps. Full of shifty, suspicious looking individuals with swarthy skins who haven't shaved for a week - and the men were just as bad.

I've never seen such hairy women and I came across the first woman I'd seen a full beard since I saw a bearded lady in a fairground when I was a kid. She was only around forty years of age and what made her appearance all the more startling was that she wore brilliant red lipstick and a mini skirt. Couples promenaded down the main street in the cool, dust laden evening air, many of the men wearing identical 1970s style white, bell bottomed safari suits and trilby hats cocked at an angle, their hirsute companions dressed in Carnaby Street fashions of the Beatles era. The dusty shop windows displayed sun bleached yellowed toothpaste adverts which hadn't been changed for years. We drove up a narrow street with overhanging trees which scraped at the van roof looking for somewhere safe to park for the night but finding it to be a dead end we turned around to see, coming up the street towards us, a guy of about 30 on a bicycle, puffing and panting and waving two plastic water containers at us.

He was pointing to our roof rack and as far as we could make out, he was telling us that the water containers would be just the thing to sit up there warming in the sun. We told him that we didn't want to buy them but he was quite insistent and after much heated and animated discussion, which failed to dissuade him, I told him to fuck off. No matter what country one visits, no matter what language the natives speak they all understand these two English words and the water container salesman was clearly disturbed by them. He stood there astride his bike, water containers in his left hand and was just about to open his mouth again when I jumped in -fuck off, go on fuck off will you. With that I put the van in gear and we drove off.

It wasn't until later that evening when we parked for the night and went to get water that we found that they were OUR water containers. They'd fallen off of the roof rack and this poor sod had been pedaling his guts out to try and give them back to us.

Letter 10

The next morning found us at the Bulgarian border post of Bregovo. It was in the middle of nowhere. The whole border crossing complex on both sides only consisted of four small buildings and the office on the Jugoslavian side was unoccupied. In Warsaw we'd heard a lot of bad reports about Bulgarian customs officers, how they wouldn't let travellers into the country without a bribe, would confiscate things at will and be nasty for no reason at all. We made sure that we had a bottle of vodka displayed in a prominent place and a few packets of cigarettes laying around. We also made sure that only the cassette tapes we'd had enough of were visible because we'd heard that the customs officers often pocketed them if they saw them - especially Western cassettes.

Not a soul was in sight at the Bulgarian side of the border as we drew up to the line and switched off the engine. There was no sign of life inside the customs office either and we could have driven straight across, but for the fact that we knew we'd need a stamp in our passports to get out of the country at the other end, so we put the kettle on, made tea and waited for something to happen. After about 10 minutes a man in a well worn uniform sporting cheap white framed plastic sun glasses came waddling towards us down the middle of the road from the Jugoslavian side. He was grossly overweight, sweating profusely and the shoulders of his jacket were covered in dandruff - a slob.

He was very casual, didn't speak and just held his hand for our passports on the way past us continuing down the road into Bulgaria and disappearing out of sight around a bend in the road some fifty metres distant. There wasn't another soul in any of the buildings and no sign of life anywhere else although we presumed that there must be some kind of habitation around the bend. It was sweltering and we took our cups of tea outside and stood in the shade of the customs office verandah. It was a full thirty minutes before he came back, by which time we were wondering if he really was a border guard or merely a passport thief.

He ignored us and went into the office, stamped our passports without really looking at them and pushed them through a slit at the bottom of the window. I picked them up without speaking and got back in the van and started the engine at which point the barrier came down and I went back to the office to see if there was a problem. He indicated that he was only the passport control officer and we must now see the customs officer -kustom kontrol, kustom kontrol, he said waving his arm towards the next empty office. I tried to ask where Mr. Kustom Kontrol was. He knew what I was trying to say but he didn't want to help. Instead, he ignored me and closed the window.

Another 15 minutes passed before a dumpy little man with an even shabbier uniform made his appearance and took the passports from me. He studied them at length reading every entry and then turned to me pointing to my surname and indicated that I should pronounce it.

-McLaren, I said

-MutsLaren, MutsLaren, Muglaren?

-Near enough, I replied.

He looked up at me. I worried.

Then with a big smile he said -McLeod, Sherrrifff McLeod. Yew arrr Sherrrifff McLeod.

I agreed.

From then on we were good buddies, all laughs and back slapping. He didn't want to see inside the van or anything, he just wanted to talk about Sherrrifff McLeod which I assume must have been all the go in Bulgaria at the time. I'd never actually seen Sherif McLeod (apart from once when he got in the way when I was switching channels in a hotel room) but I put up a good show by shooting my pretend six gun and twiddling it around my index finger before putting it back in my pretend holster. And he loved it. Ten minutes and six episodes of Sherrrifff McLeod later I asked him to stamp our prepared customs declaration so that when we left the country, we'd be able to take all our stuff out with us. He looked at the list and said he wanted to see all the items on it to see that we really owned them and wouldn't get Bulgaria a bad name by claiming at a later date that they'd been stolen.

Out came the video camera, four still cameras, the computer, the computer printer, transistor radio and a number of other items rarely seen in most Bulgarian households and, for a second, his eyes lit up. Then they closed up to narrow, piggy like slits and he called the passport officer over to see it all. He'd already mentioned something about not giving Bulgaria a bad name and now I was worried that he would think that we were going to write and distribute anti government literature or something and it looked for a while as though we were going to have problems. He wanted to know why we travelled with a computer, were we going to sell it? I told him I was an author but couldn't make myself understood too well so I went to the shelf and came back with a travel book, I pointed to the computer and then to the book and made typing motions with my fingers - and he understood.

He understood that I'd written Frommers Guide to Eastern Europe on $25 a day and that I was a celebrity. Together they went through the book and although they didn't understand a thing in it, they obviously thought I'd made a rather good job of the maps and marveled that I'd managed to get the principal Bulgarian cities in the right places. They nodded approval and murmured complimentary things pronouncing it to be a very good book and told us to go which we did after promising to send him an autographed copy of Frommers Guide to Eastern Europe. We still hadn't had our customs declaration stamped but didn't want to push our good luck any further and so left them smiling as they stood in the middle of the road waving goodbye

So into Bulgaria we went. Bregovo, the village closest to the border crossing, unlike the towns and villages on the transit routes, seldom plays host to western vehicles. It's a tiny village tucked away in a kind of T junction formed by the borders of Romania, Jugoslavia and Bulgaria, well away from the regions most frequently visited by sane Westerners used to functional plumbing. We parked in the village square to pack away our camera equipment and everything else we'd taken out to show the officials at the border and that done, we sat in the front seats to study the map. I reached up to pull down the sun visor and out of the windscren saw that the population of Bregovo had turned out in force on the pavements to stare at us as though we were from another planet and, I suppose, we did present something of an unusual sight to them.

An unimaginably expensive clean, white Mercedes van topped by a home made Polish roof rack with all manner of things chained to it and bristling with padlocks. Four black water containers which we used for our showers at the end of the day hung down from the sides and an agricultural, pump up insecticide sprayer (our high pressure shower and van cleaner) hung off the back. At the front of the roof rack was a king sized, screw topped, plastic bucket which served as our washing machine - we looked like a travelling shop. And as we drove further into the back blocks of Bulgaria we realized that to see a Western vehicle of any description was a rare event let alone one with a couple of loonies dressed in shorts sitting in the front seats.

Mind you, their transport was just as much a curiosity to us. Flimsy, primitive looking carts with solid rubber tyres powered by donkeys rather than horses stood in a huddle in the village square under ancient grape vines planted in holes in the concrete. The most decrepit looking Russian motor bikes and side cars, the riders wearing leather flying helmets of WW1 vintage, coursed the streets and the few visible cars were without windscreens. There was also a collection of weird looking tractors with corrugated iron bonnets, some of which had open topped water jackets around their single cylinders and the water could be seen bubbling away and spilling onto the street as they moved. They were only one step up from the horse and buggy in that they had a bench seat where both driver and passenger could sit beside each other.

Home made motor cycle powered carts seemed to be very much in vogue and these were of a hybrid design which incorporated the front half of a motorcycle welded to the front of a regular horse cart. A two metre long chain drove the carts front wheels and the only brake was that of the front half of the motorcycle. I resolved to avoid them, especially when loaded with half a ton of sand or fifty bags of cement. The people here didn't come running up to us waving their hands and smiling like people in Hungarian villages, they just stood, open mouthed and stared. More people came out of the houses to look at us and they just stared as did the collection of donkeys in the square. The air was perfectly still not a leaf rustling on the vines, the only sign of movement was when a fly would land on someone's face and they'd wave a hand to move it away. It was as though aliens had landed and zapped the whole village into a kind of suspended animation a collection of peasanty Marcel Marceau's.

As we drove down the street on the way out of the village I blew the horn just to see if their heads turned. Only five minutes later we realized that we had no Bulgarian money so we had to go back through the village to the border post again to the official exchange counter. Most of the people in the village where still where we left them but the exchange counter was deserted. We left again twenty minutes later having exchanged US $50 and, once again, drove back through the village where, once again, the villagers were still standing in roughly the same positions as last time - we were obviously too quick for them.

Our dollar at the exchange counter had got us 2.5 Bulgarian leva and at the same time we bought coupons for 100 litres of diesel at 25 cents per litre. This made us somewhat sick as, according to two guide books, diesel was $1.00 per litre. Because of this we'd filled up our tanks and canister in Jugoslavia at 50 cents a litre thinking that we were going to save some money. As in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, fuel could only officially be bought with coupons purchased in Western currency and, therefore, at the official, low, exchange rate. By now we were becoming a little more streetwise and approached petrol pump attendants direct. They were not only willing to sell petrol but willing to sell it below the normal price to get their hands on some hard currency.

Exiting the village near the border a second time we found ourselves in yet more flat, boring country growing the same old corn and sunflowers that we'd seen in the last three countries, we we're getting sick to death of corn and bloody sunflowers. And here in Bulgaria I don't know why they bothered planting them at all, horrible stunted brain damaged looking things they were, all miserable and thirsty with weak necks. Forty kilometres inside the border two Polish registered cars were coming towards us and the driver of the lead car flashed his lights at us and stopped. We all pulled up at the side of the road and the Poles (two families) wanted to know the descriptions of the guards at the border we had just come through. We told them what the two men looked like and they were somewhat disappointed and agreed between them to park up somewhere and cross the border after 3pm when the next shift would be on.

We offered them tea and gave the kids an apple each and began talking about what we, and they, were doing in this out of the way part of Bulgaria. Our trip turned out to be far less of an adventure that theirs. They were on a trading holiday and they'd set off five weeks beforehand with less money than they needed to keep them going for a week. It seemed tremendously courageous to me who'd never have considered going on a holiday knowing that I didn't enough money to last the distance but they said that it was impossible on the wages they earned, to ever save enough money for a holiday and so had to do it this way. They'd taken a few things with them from Poland to sell in Czechoslovakia, bought something else with the proceeds to sell in Hungary and so on and were surviving on their wits and the knowledge of what sold, at what price, in different countries. In this fashion they'd already done five countries including Romania. They were also earning a living by changing money and they gave us 7 leva per dollar as compared to the official rate of 2.5. We found out later that the going black market rate was 10 but we didn't begrudge it because they're doing us a service and they had to make some money too.

Every year hundreds, maybe thousands of Poles travel Eastern Europe in this same fashion, some for holidays but most in order to earn more money than they could in a regular job in Poland. Something we learned from them is not to trust Eastern European maps when looking up places near borders - they are deliberately wrong for military purposes. This, to me, seems to smack at paranoia especially these days when spy satellites are able to photograph in such detail but in Poland, at least, it is illegal to photograph bridges, post offices and railway stations. I must add, however, that in all the time we spent in Poland we didn't see a bridge, post office or railway station that we thought our friends would like to see snaps of. Leaving them, we were soon in the mountains although which mountains we didn't know because of the lack of information on the map, but whatever they were, they were awfully steep and had the van labouring in first gear in some parts. They were nevertheless superb, covered in beech trees, and the glimpses we had of the valleys were stunning. We went up and up for close to an hour before reaching the top of one tree covered peak where the Bulgarian Government Tourist Guide booklet said there was a caravan park in a village.

It wasn't there! The village consisted of only four houses, a shop and a filling station and was surrounded by trees so it was hard to believe that a caravan park could have somehow been mislaid in such a small area. We parked at the back of the garage and went around to the front to ask. The man told us to go back where we'd just parked and we'd see it. We did...and we didn't. There was however, another man sitting on a log smoking a clay pipe so we asked him if he'd seen a caravan park. -Yes, he said. -See where that white van is parked - that's the caravan park. The official Bulgarian Tourist Organisation's caravan park was there alright. We were in the middle of it and there was room for at least another two cars - we were glad to have arrived early.

There was one saving grace, one thing that made our night's stay there worthwhile. At the back of the garage there was a toilet (footprints) and a shower. AND, the water was hot and limitless. We couldn't believe it. Hot water, the first real hot water service we'd seen in months. It was wood fired but plenty of logs were outside ready cut to fit in the hole in the furnace and within ten minutes of lighting it the safety valve was blowing great clouds of steam. We spent hours in there, showering, washing our hair, our clothes, the cups and plates, carpets, curtains and anything else washable we could lay our hands on including the outside of the van which we sprayed with our agricultural sprayer using hot water and washing up liquid.Another gem was the toilet, the first clean one we'd seen in a long time, in fact it was possibly the cleanest toilet I've ever seen, before or since! How come the cleanest toilet I've ever seen was located on top of a mountain in Bulgaria? - because the shower was over it! We had to stand with one foot on each side of the hole while we were showering - the shower drain was the toilet hole.

-What pack of brainless plumbers apprentices could have been responsible for such an idea? I asked Alicja. -The contents of their septic tank must be cooked.

-Don't knock it, she replied. -Even the Hilton doesn't offer the choice of a hot or cold toilet flushes.

The feeling of cleanliness made a great deal of difference to the way in which we viewed our surroundings and we sat outside in our Czechoslovakian collapsible chairs (the collapsibility of which was actually a production fault rather than a design feature) on the little patch of grass, kept mowed by half a dozen geese in need of toilet training. A few hours later a group of East Germans in two cars arrived. One of the cars, although brand new, had electrical problems which I tried to help them with and later they came over for a talk. One of them, an eighteen year old guy who was with his father, spoke near perfect English and we invited them in for a beer.

They told us a little about life in their country and I must say we didn't envy them one bit. Ernst, the father said how lucky we were to have a radio cassette player in the van and a $5 clip on electric light we'd bought in Czechoslovakia. They looked all around the inside of the van and were speechless at the luxury we were living in. To them our standard of mobile accommodation was something quite out of their reach, something it would have been silly to set their sights on and something which West Germans living only a hundred and fifty miles from his home could have bought with one month’s wages. As the conversation progressed I began to feel guilty at being so rich.

These people couldn't get out of their own country except to another in the Soviet bloc and even then there was no guarantee that they'd be issued with a passport even for that. They said to us that the trip we were doing could only be a dream for them, a totally unachievable ambition. When Ernst left to go back to the tent for the night, his son opened up to us and told us that he was going escape from East Germany. He said that the family had discussed it many times at home and that his Mother told him to go, and not worry about them. Ernst though, wouldn't say yes or no, only that he'd go along with his son's decision. I could see the fathers dilemma. His son could have a much better life in the West and every father would want that for his boy but if this happened, he'd never see him again and it would break his heart.

The boy said that he was going to make his escape to Austria from Hungary on the way home. He didn't exactly know how but said he'd reconnoitre the border for a few days before running across. This would be his last holiday with his parents and they would drop him off somewhere in Hungary, say goodbye and wish him luck. Imagine driving away from your son at the roadside somewhere in a strange country and looking at him through the rear view mirror knowing that you'd probably never see him again. He asked us about life in the west and if we thought that he could get a job and so forth and he was hoping for advice from us.

How can you advise someone to leave his family and head for a better life in the West. And just think of the holiday they must all have been having with all that on their minds. I felt so sorry for them all. He said that if he hadn't any family, he'd go like a shot but he didn't want to hurt them. I was glad that in my life I've never had to make such a decision. He said goodbye and went back to his tent and they were gone in the morning when we woke up but I know that I won't be able to forget the experience or his face, not ever.

From books I've read and from people I've talked to over the years, I thought that I understood what communism was about but to actually see it's effects in this way - people being imprisoned in their own countries - really drove home to me that I'm lucky to have been born in the West. I was here on their turf and they couldn't stand on mine. The same goes for flies too but we never really spend much time thinking about them do we? It was whilst sitting in my Czechoslovakian collapsible chair on top of this unmapped Bulgarian mountain with the cleanest toilet in Christendom that I began to philosophize about flies. I don't remember exactly how it started but it was probably something to do with the un toilet trained geese.

When we discovered the hot water and gave the van a spring clean, I opened the back doors and in so doing liberated into the clean, Bulgarian mountain air, a small swarm of flies which had been travelling with us for a considerable distance. It got me thinking. All the time, during the trip, we seemed to collect flies in the van and they were always difficult to catch because, unlike a car, there was so much room for them to move around in and every evening we would open the back door and shoo them away. By the end of a day's travel we would sometimes have flies in the van which had been with us for hundreds of kilometres and crossed international frontiers.

I thought deeply and profoundly about the problem from the fly’s point of view. There you are in the middle of the road minding somebody else's business, when along comes a big white thing on wheels and you try to move out of the way but WHOOSH, you find yourself being sucked through an open hole in the side of it. You buzz around for while until you think you've found the way out but there's something in the way, something sort of transparent which doesn't let you through no matter how hard you bang your head against it. Then, when your head is throbbing through banging on the windscreen for eight hours, a door opens and there you are in a strange country, strange smells from strange food and you can't find your buddies anywhere. The stuff in the garbage bins just doesn't smell right, even the manure heaps have a weird sort of tang about them and all the time there's this banging still going on in your head. You're worried, what if the local flies are hostile? you may be a capitalist fly and they could all be commies. -I'm sorry but you can't shit on that piece of meat if you're not a member of the workers co-operative. I think it must be a very stressful situation for them.....so I squash them.

In the morning we drove down these lovely mountains and on to Sofia. The outskirts were standard Soviet bloc. That is to say dull, dreary, uninspiring, slogans on hordings and hundreds of apartment blocks, until we came into the centre which was quite a surprise. The streets are uncommonly wide, most of them a generous 6 lanes with service roads at either side and yellow brick pavements. In fact it all looked unexpectedly modern and well laid out. It was Sunday and there was no traffic, not just no traffic but no traffic. I don't think we saw more than 40 cars in the whole drive through the capital. I wondered at first whether they were expecting an earthquake or something and they'd all left town but later in the week it wasn't a hell of a lot different. We drove around town until we ended up at the Alexander Nyevski church. We turned a corner and suddenly this thing was there, huge, enormous, massive, gigantic shit it was big. Stupendous seems like a good word but I wanted to save stupendous for the Aghia Sofia in Istanbul. I suppose you'd call it almost stupendous. Now I'm not one for churches, in fact we've studiously avoided most of them unless the book said there was one with something special, but this one is something on its' own.

It was built at the turn of the century as a memorial to 200,000 Russian soldiers who died in the Russo- Turkish war in 1877-78 and, according to the guide books, liberated Bulgaria from Turkish rule - some liberation? The roof line, covered in the domes typical of Eastern Orthodox religious architecture gave the appearance of a central grapefruit surrounded by a dozen or so egg yolks all covered with gold. Inside was an enormous domed ceiling (the inside of the grapefruit) and smack in the middle of it was a big painting of your actual God. You could tell he was God because he was much bigger than the rest of the sycophantic saints and angels surrounding him and anyway, he was sitting on a huge gilt covered commode. At ground level were three huge altars made by a Bulgarian, a Russian and a Czech and until we saw Aghia Sophia in Istanbul, it was undoubtedly the most awe inspiring religious edifice we'd ever walked around. Breath taking may be a better phrase but it could have been the candle smoke.

Only a couple of minutes walk away was a museum with a sign outside in English advertising ancient Roman relics and we bought a ticket hoping to catch a glimpse of Carlo Ponti. He wasn't there but the sarcophagi, busts, statues and seventeenth century religious icons more than made up for it but as we were strolling through the main room I heard English voices coming from a small ante room to our left.

-Wot 'appened to 'is 'ooter?

-They're all like it, look at 'em. It's the bit that sticks out most init, the nose. That's why they're all broken look.

I was taken aback - the sound of a couple of cockney's in a Sofia museum was the last thing we expected to hear - and we hurried through the doorway to get a look at them. A pretty young Bulgarian girl dressed in a uniform was showing around a bloated lobster of a man in his mid twenties dressed in shorts, socks and sandals and a black T shirt with a Tottenham Hotspurs slogan on it. Beside him in a tasteful, figure hugging, blue summer dress stood his stunningly attractive wife, guide book in hand, next to a statue of Octavian "sans 'ooter". I approached the lobster and we were invited walk around with them on their guided tour, for which they'd already paid the young Bulgarian guide.

Before we could get started he turned to me and asked.

-Ere, wot's necrofilleeyer?.

-Yeh, said his wife. -Wot is it? - she won't tell us.

I asked how the subject had arisen and they told us that there had been a statue in the previous room which the young guide had said was "necro summfin" and that in trying to explain the story which went with it, she'd mentioned the word necrophilia but wouldn't explain what it meant.

I wasn't sure how I should explain it either but began by saying -Necro? - from the Greek? - it means dead.

-Yeh?.

-Yes, necropolis? - a place for dead people, a cemetery?

-Yeh?.

The pretty young Bulgarian was now blushing.

-Necromancy? - communication with the dead?...necrosis - dead skin?.

-Oh yeh? so wot's necrofilleeyer then - dead somefin'?

The pretty young Bulgarian guide was now standing ten feet from us.

I drew him to one side.

-It means fucking dead people, I said.

-Ow dyah you mean fucking dead?.

-You must have heard the expression - I'll just slip into something cool?.

-Do wot?.

-Ok. I don't mean the people are fucking dead. Necrophilia means people having it off with other people who are dead.

-Jesus Christ. Hey Shirl' jew 'ear that? It means rumpy bumpy with corpses.

-Wot?.

-Necrofilleeyer - it means bonkin' dead people.

-Oh, that's understandable then.

-Understandable? wot jew meen understandable - shit!.

-No, I mean its understandable why she didn't want to tell us wot it meant..... ere, where's she gone?.

Den' and Shirl' were a great laugh and we enjoyed there company for the next couple of hours over lunch in their hotel where I asked them why they'd chosen Bulgaria for their holiday.

It had apparently been advertised at a discount in a Shepherds Bush travel agent's window and was a tour centred in Sofia with day excursions to places of archeological interest. They had found as soon as they got on the plane that their fellow vacationers weren't as much fun as the crowd they'd been to Spain with the year before and so were doing Sofia on their own. Neither of them knew where Bulgaria was, were disappointed because there was no swimming pool in their hotel (especially in view of the lack of beaches) and in Shirl's words -not much of a place really is it? The travel agent had, upon Den's enquiry, assured him that Bulgaria was sunny and Den', assuming all sunny places to be Spain, or at least similar, had booked on the spot. -Don't fink I'd come again though, he grinned, looking up at the flaking ceiling in the dining room.

We spent six days wandering around this deserted city wondering where all the people had gone and concluded that it must be Europe's most overbuilt city from the point of view of the people to space ratio. It was clean and quite modern but lacking in atmosphere because there weren't enough people on the streets (the exact opposite of Vienna) and because the shops were hidden behind such tiny windows. We checked into a camp-site only five kilometres from Sofia city centre which was enormous with literally hundreds of tents but the facilities were abysmal; only two cold showers were available for three hundred campers and the six toilets might as well have been non existent, they were of the footprint type and became blocked in no time - everybody visited an adjacent field which was strewn with paper.

When we checked in, the manager wanted to see the receipt for the money we changed on the border and he stamped the back of it with the date and how many nights we were staying. In this way the government makes sure that you at least change some money at the official exchange rate and don't go to the black market for all your needs. If you can't show a stamp for each night you spend in the country, you are fined 200 leva for each unrecorded night. 200 leva is a lot of money in Bulgarian terms, the average tradesman earns approximately 250 per month.

The camp-site cost us 24 leva per night but for people on Eastern European passports the charge was 5 leva. It wasn't bad value for money because of the free nightly entertainment which had us in fits. A band played old Englebert Humperdink songs while a woman with a voice like an opera singer with the shakes sang the chorus, one line ahead of them. "Please Release Me Let Me Go" took on a whole new meaning. Folk dancing too took up an hour of every evening and was performed by plaited virgins in national dress costumes and Doc Martins hob nail boots accompanied by effeminate looking restaurant waiter look alikes who no father would want his son to associate with - let alone his daughter.

The nightly finale however, wasn't to be missed. Two farm labourers, a man and a woman, walked through the burning embers of a fire in their bare feet to the accompaniment of a "musician" playing the Bulgarian bagpipes. The sound of the Bulgarian bagpipe is.... well, I'm unable to describe it. But when I was a kid, my father caught a hedgehog in a trap by mistake and the Bulgarian bagpipes sound very similar to the noise it made before we let it out, but with Middle Eastern overtones. An Italian couple told us that they'd seen the same show every night for two weeks. That there were only two sets of fire walkers who traversed the embers on alternate nights, and they could be seen at one of the chalets nursing their feet on their off days.

The subject of hedgehogs came up again while we were in Bulgaria. Alicja read a tourist book which said that on the Black Sea Coast, where the bulk of Bulgarian resorts are located, there had been a problem with snakes and the authorities had bought in two railway carriages of hedgehogs which had in a short space of time, wiped them all out. I wondered just how easy a task it would have been to catch two railway carriages full of hedgehogs. How many hedgehogs is two railway carriages full? Even if they were travelling first class with less hedgehogs per carriage it still must have presented quite a problem - we certainly didn't notice any hedgehog breeding establishments on our way through the country. That hedgehogs could even kill snakes was news to me. I did know that mongooses?...mongeese?...mongi?...oh stuff it! - those Indian mongy things - could kill them, but not hedgehogs.

We had the only Western car in the camp-site apart from three Italian campervans travelling together. A fascinating collection of Eastern block transport managed to struggle through the gates every evening though, Trabant, Muskvitch, Warszawa, Volga, Lada, Zis, Skoda, Sirena and some others that I couldn't identify because the names were in the Cyrillic alphabet. After the evening meal the owners would bury themselves up to the elbows under their bonnets in an effort to keep their vehicles going for another day or week. In fact car repairs were quite a social occasion and amateur mechanics would wander from one broken down car to another offering help and advice. A large number of hard to get spares changed hands too - everybody carries spares in his boot in Bulgaria.

Of course, we too still had a problem with our back axle oil seal and all the time, in the back of our minds, we had entertained the vague hope that we might be able to get it fixed in Sofia. Not being able to find a resident English speaker, we went to the British Embassy to ask if they knew of a place. I walked up to the reception desk and said to the man -I've got a problem. Without taking his eyes off me he pointed to Alicja and said -is that it? To me, there's something different about the British. Humour figures in practically every conversation and even though I've had the chance to observe many conversations between people of other nationalities, none seem to use so many funny, throw away lines as the Brits. Right in the middle of all this foreigness and officialdom there was a certain sanity in the insane humour of the man at the reception desk of British Embassy. He wasn't even trying to be funny, just using humour as a friendly ice breaker and to put us at ease, to let us know there was nothing to worry about. A sort of comedy routine followed in which we used well worn jokes from old Monty Python TV shows, modified to fit the situation, and it was all of five minutes before I actually got around to telling him about our problem.

-What a pity, our mechanic is on holiday, he said. -But if you can wait here a week until he comes back, I'm sure he will be able to get you out of trouble somehow. Anyway, we have plenty of tools here which are at your disposal. I'll get you the address of a place which holds stocks of parts for diplomatic cars and if you can get the part you're looking for, come around to my place after work and we'll have a go at it.

The meeting with this man, whose name I never got around to asking, and the time spent with Den' and Shirl', had put us in high spirits and we left the embassy on our search for an oil seal knowing that even if we didn't find one; even if the car broke down in Bulgaria; we'd still have someone to look after us. A separate book could be written on the two days we spent looking for the oil seal but suffice to say that there wasn't one in the country and it would take a month to get hold of one after lodging an exorbitant sum of money as a deposit. I mentioned it to a German guy at the camp site one evening who told me that he wasn't surprised; he couldn't even get parts for his bicycle! The German and his wife were doing a two year trip of Eastern Europe, Turkey and Syria on push-bikes, an expedition which made our little sojourn look like a Sunday afternoon drive.

We used the camp site as a base for exploring Sofia and the countryside round about and one day we went for lunch at the Sofia
Sheraton hotel - what a place to have lunch!. Exquisitely decorated and the service couldn't be faulted. Two extra large orange juices, entree of a salad with fetta cheese which just melted on the tongue, two of the best main courses on the menu, absolutely delicious cheesecake for desert and two pots of coffee set us back a whole $10 including a tip for the waiter. Just as with our 50 cent breakfast at the Warsaw Holiday Inn, it just didn't add up - a big international hotel charging $10 for a lunch for two which would have cost at least $50 in Australia. What else is Bulgaria giving the Sheraton? it sure isn't business because the cost of accommodation was a pittance too!

Finding shops in Sofia wasn't easy because they have tiny windows with practically no attempt at a window display and no signs on the outside to let prospective customers know that it's a shop. This may seem peculiar to Westerners but in a society where supply can never meet demand there's no need to advertise. And when it's the state that's responsible for the shortfall, they'd rather the customers didn't know where the shops were. One shop we went into appeared to be small, almost boutique size, but once inside it opened up to a big department store on four floors and took a couple of hours to get around. For this part of the World, it was well stocked with consumer goods mostly made in Russia, Latvia and Lithuania. As, by this time we'd had a fair bit of exposure to Russian goods, we knew roughly into what grade of crap to assign the various items we saw.

Things were certainly cheap enough. We saw an electric oven with two hotplates on top for $10 which although heavy appeared to be well constructed and we tossed up whether or not to buy it but decided in the end that we didn't have enough room in the van. The best atmosphere in Sofia was at the fruit and vegetable market which sold everything from Chinese mushrooms to salsify and colourful squashes, the likes of which we didn't see anywhere else in Europe or Turkey. Wizened old ladies wearing head scarves and with skin like leather sold all manner of vegetation; bundles of dandelion leaves, stinging nettles, sorrel, wild oregano, roka and other herbs picked from the fields and hedgerows.

There were people selling clay pots for olive oil and others with enormous skanes of dyed wool which hung up in lines of various colours giving the whole place a middle eastern rather than European feel to it. The metal workers occupied one corner of the market selling buckets and samovars and agricultural hand tools like scythes and mattocks. All of them squatted naturally on their haunches like Asians - Sofia was some sort of dividing line in this respect - from here on most people sat in this way.

For the non package tour Westerner, finding one's way around Bulgaria in a car presents something of a problem as the maps and road signs are in different alphabets. On all the maps issued by the Bulgarian Government Tourist Agency, the street and place names were in the Latin alphabet but these names bore no relation to the names on the road signs which were in Cyrillic. It would have been a simple matter to have printed major city names in both alphabets on the map but it seems that they just hadn't thought about it. The whole country uses the Cyrillic alphabet, in fact two Bulgarian monks invented it, and although Bulgaria is not noted for its profusion of road signs we'd have been in a lot of trouble if it hadn't been for the fact that Alicja had been compelled to learn this alphabet in school.

When car number plates, restaurant menus, no parking signs, toilet signs and everything else is in another alphabet and the second language is Russian, communication is severely limited for the Westerner but some of the sights to be seen in the country needed no explanation. As we travelled through the country away from the regular tourist spots we saw a way of life unchanged this century. Women in villages beating the family's clothes with clubs as they washed them in road side streams; they worked alongside the men in the fields, drove the donkey carts, threaded tobacco leaves onto long pieces of string and could be seen working as shepherdesses driving small flocks of sheep from place to place to find feed. In the mountains, bee hives dotted the landscape in amongst the olive trees and herds of black goats at intervals blocked the road.

Only fifty kilometres south west of Sofia we stopped to make tea and answer a call of nature and I walked up over a small hill to be confronted with a family, husband and wife and three children, surrounded by sheep and clad only in sheepskins. A scene from the middle ages which I thought had long disappeared from Europe. Their Jackets and leggings were sewn together with a criss cross of sinews, their vests were of coarsely knitted, un-dyed wool and upon their feet were shoes of birch bark. They had, as far as I could see, no dogs and each carried a long, straight pole and no baggage of any kind - perhaps they had a hut nearby?, I didn't find out. I was more startled than them but they were obviously wary of me and when I smiled and offered a cigarette none stepped forward to take it. I don't know why but I was frightened, perhaps it was because they didn't smile back at me, and I scurried back down to the road and the van. It seems such a small incident now, as I relate it on paper but, at the time, it shook me for it was the last thing I expected to see - almost like meeting cavemen.

I recalled a conversation we'd had with a lady in England who said that Bulgaria would surprise us. -You'll be surprised at just how up to date Bulgaria is, she said. She'd been on holiday to a resort on the Black Sea coast four years running where, of course, a totally different impression of the country presents itself. The communist government always put the acquisition of hard currency before looking after it's own people. One of Bulgaria's most vaunted but, by Westerners, seldom visited attractions is the Rila Monastery south of Sofia by 120 kilometres. Seldom visited, probably, because of its location which makes it a little too far from the capital to be on the list of one day bus excursions but without doubt it was, for us, the most spectacular sight since leaving England.

The setting for the monastery is unique and the approach to it through the tree covered mountains with their cool bubbling streams and quaint wooden bridges over the waterfalls is spectacular. The first glimpse of the place is from the top of a mountain almost level with four others which all slope down at a sharp angle to form an inverted cone. Slap bang in the middle, where all the tree covered slopes meet, is the stone walled monastery with its four golden domes. The original monastery was built in the tenth century and from the vantage point of the mountain top with the sun glinting on the domes its' hard to imagine that anything has changed since that time, not a single sign of human habitation - a truly breath taking scene from a bygone age.

The monastery is a large complex built something like a castle in that it is surrounded by high stone walls with huge wooden entrance doors. Once inside the courtyard the high outside walls form four storeyed arched wooden walkways with dozens of rooms leading off them and an Orthodox church sits in the middle. Inside the church, colourful religious frescoes covered every square inch of the ceilings and walls except for the wall behind the altar which was taken up with a gigantic carved wooden altar which took seven years to complete and another two to cover in gold leaf. In the monastery museum was a small wooden cross standing 16" high, said to be the most intricate wood carving in the World. It depicts 140 biblical scenes and has 1500 figures carved in it, most of them no larger than a grain of rice.

The cross took the Monk Raphael over 12 years to carve and the strain on his eyes eventually blinded him making him unable to complete the base. He must have had an incredibly steady hand and his implement could have been no larger than a pin. -Stop playing with your implement or you'll go blind. The museum was full of interesting things but one which caught my attention was a monks passport from the 1400s. The monks from Rila traveled great distances to monasteries in Russia, Jugoslavia and Greece and they carried with them a passport which was an elaborately decorated metal box which had upon the inside of the lid, a silver etching of the founder of the monastery.

I've never been one for the cold, colourless severity of Western churches and cathedrals where God is portrayed as being distant, miserable and unhappy. What I liked about the Rila Monastery was that it was a comfortable and happy place where although you knew you were in a sacred place, you could have farted and it would have been OK. Not like when you fart in English cathedrals and can't show your face in the souvenir shop afterwards. Or perhaps you don't fart in cathedrals? I do and get a great schoolboy kick out of it, in fact by the time we reached the Rila Monastery I'd already farted my way through some of the greatest cathedrals in Europe. These days only a handful of monks still live in the monastery and one of them, a shepherd, we saw every evening taking the sheep for a walk. They behaved like puppies running everywhere, stopping to grab a mouthful of grass and then in unison, they would all turn round to see that the monk was still following them and then run on again.

They felt insecure without him and when he took a turn off the track out of their sight, they all came running back bleating to look for him. To me, never having seen a natural sheep, it was strange to see their long thick tails reaching right down to the ground swaying back and forth as they ran. I had forgotten that sheep are long tailed animals. We had come to Rila for the day but were so impressed that we tried to book into its one and only hotel for a week. The standard wasn't too bad for Eastern Europe but there were no vacancies and, instead, we had lunch there. It was a government owned establishment built during communist times when they had no problem acquiring land in the most suitable places and this was indisputably the most suitable place.

The restaurant terrace afforded an unobstructed view all the way down the valley to the monastery which was the only building in sight. Having travelled to many countries in the course of my fifty years on the planet I can assure the reader that the view from this restaurant makes it one of the best places in the World to take a lousy lunch. But at $2.10 for the two of us we didn't complain. By now, being something of an expert on Eastern European toilets, I decided to check out the facilities in the hotel foyer. The toilet bowls were of Western style rather than footprints but the previous occupants had obviously all been Eastern as evidenced by the pedal bin in the corner which was full of restaurant serviettes which had been used in the absence of toilet paper. They could easily have been flushed down the toilet instead, but old footprint habits die hard - it stank.

Unable to get into the hotel we checked into the camp site next door and were more than happy with our surroundings on the banks of a river surrounded by the mountains and forest. The manager, a good looking man in his thirties spoke perfect English which he'd learned with the aid of tapes and books as well as having done a two season spell as a waiter in a Black Sea holiday resort. His accent was far better than mine! He was most apologetic about the condition of the facilities in his camp site explaining that he'd only been there for a few months and when he'd taken it over, things had been far worse. There had been no water on the site apart from the river and only 6 electric lights despite the fact that the site had been in operation for 25 years and that people made pilgrimages to Rila from all over the World. Like everything else in Bulgaria the camp-site was owned by the state and the state was broke.

Even now there was only one male and one female toilet block with a total of six toilets to serve seven hundred campers. The manager had had to pipe water from 500 metres up the mountain from the only accessible place where he could get a sufficient fall of water to give enough pressure. No pumps had been available to draw water from the river. The Government hadn't allocated any money whatsoever for the improvements he was making and he'd even had to steal the water pipes from a construction site. There was no money for flush toilets or even taps and he'd got around the problem by piping the water straight into the toilet bowls where a torrent of ice cold water, which only minutes before had been snow, raged out of control. Sitting on an ice cold, gurgling, continually flushing toilet/bidet (even taking into consideration the savings to be made on toilet paper) took more getting used to than we could stand and we used the hotel toilets just up the road.

As the only Westerners at the camping site we were accorded the status of royalty and the manager introduced us to two families, friends of his who spoke English and who told us stories about their lives under communism. They said it had always been common knowledge among the population that the fences which formed the borders with Turkey and Greece were all electrified and that anyone who touched one of them would be dead. It wasn't considered necessary to electrify the fences at the remaining borders with Romania and Jugoslavia because nobody wanted to escape to another communist governed country.

It was, at any rate, forbidden for anyone to go within 15 kilometres of a border fence, except at crossings where the guards wouldn't let them out anyway, and anyone caught near a border fence was put in jail. One of the men told us that he was in the army in a detachment guarding the border fence between Bulgaria and Greece. His detachment consisted of forty soldiers and NCOs, one military officer and one political officer. Every day they had a political lecture about how bad things were in Greece and how, in the West, workers were exploited by capitalists. After he'd been there a fortnight and was having yet another of these lectures, he asked the political officer how come the only instructions they received from the military officer were on how to stop Bulgarians crossing to Greece.

He wanted to know what to do if he should encounter any Greeks trying to escape to Bulgaria to get away from these terrible capitalists mentioned in the daily political lectures. The lecturer mumbled something about Bulgarians not having the protection of the Bulgarian government if they were in Western countries but nothing about Greeks entering Bulgaria and he was clearly embarrassed. The next day, Boris, our friend, was woken early and told to pack his things. He was moved to another detachment in another part of the country because they didn't want him infecting the rest of the soldiers with these thoughts. For some reason he still is unable to fathom, he was promoted to sergeant and had to stand all day guarding a flag with another sergeant in the middle of nowhere. The first thing he said upon meeting his counterpart under the flag was -how come you got this job. The other man replied -Oh, I was in this political lecture down on the Greek border and..........

A regular job here brings in 250 leva per month which can buy you 5 pairs of the lousiest quality shoes imaginable. A poor quality Russian Lada car which is a 1960s Fiat made under licence costs 4 1/3 that's four and one third years wages and the waiting list is 15 years long. If you don't want to wait that long, you can buy one from someone who's name has just come up after 15 years of waiting and the going rate is just under double i.e. 8 years wages and at the end of it you get a car that's always breaking down. On the other hand, if you are a high party official or your dad is one, things can be different. The government recently bought 600 new Mazdas from Japan and sold them to party officials and their kids for 5,000 leva each. The official reason for this was that the party officials are poor.

There's no freedom of speech in Bulgaria, say anything against the party or the system and you are in trouble. Our friend said that everyone has a friend or two who can be trusted but you never criticize the state when talking to a stranger because they could be a police informer. One night we asked about a camp-site about 7 kilometres from Rila which we'd seen in the current Bulgarian camping guide. It closed 15 years ago. In the week we spent at Rila we saw only two other Westerners and our van attracted an uncommon amount of attention. People stared quite openly and without embarrassment when we used the electric hot plate outside the door with the pressure cooker on it and would return to their tents and bring the rest of the family over to look at it too.

We felt sorry for them as they lived on bread, fetta cheese and water melons which was all they could get at the local shops and they didn't even have hot water unless they light a fire. I was sitting one evening at a portable table at the side of the van typing notes for this book on a lap top computer, a pack of Western cigarettes at my side on the ground and a steaming cup of coffee on the table in front of me. I heard a rustle and looked up to see that I had an audience of forty to fifty people. I didn't know what to do and was overcome with a feeling of disgusting and undeserved wealth. I didn't want to pack up and deprive them of their show nor did I want to stay and feel the embarrassment so I turned the lap top around to let them see the screen and beckoned them to come closer.

They all stood shy faced but not budging until one little boy looked up at his father and got the nod of approval. He came across to where I was sitting and then everybody followed. Nobody said a word but they all bent down to see the screen and then passed my ash tray and lighter around so that everybody could get a look at it. When they'd all seen the computer I shut it down and they retired to their tents. They'd been terribly shy and their shyness could easily have been taken for a kind of hostility because it was accompanied by solemn facial expressions and a refusal to smile. The evening before we left, we caused something of a sensation with our Polish agricultural sprayer. After filling it with warm water we took it down to the river to wash our hair, me standing in the river and pumping the bottle whilst spraying Alicja's hair and vice versa. (I'll say one thing about my wife, in all the time I've known her, she's never had a dirty vice versa). All the kids gathered round and a guy who had been fishing downstream moved up so that he could watch us. As word spread, the whole camp site turned out to watch us and we felt distinctly uncomfortable. Upwards of two hundred people stood on the banks staring at us and not one of them cracked a smile.

Letter 11

Half an hour after leaving the Rila mountains, we drove through miles of tobacco fields with whole families working, hoeing the soil and picking the leaves which were being transported to the drying sheds by donkey powered carts.

A peaceful scene, one which must have been going on for decades, if not centuries, but which was broken by the roar of an old bi plane flying so close to the ground that we stopped under a tree, worried that it was going to hit us. It looked as if nobody had told the pilot that WWI was over and we could see him quite clearly in his goggles and leather flying helmet as he turned the plane around and flew across the road so low that he really would have hit us if we'd been in the way. We didn't immediately realise that it was a crop dusting plane but this soon became apparent when its bowels opened up and dumped a great heap of brown powder right on top of two tobacco pickers.

One minute they had been working away picking tobacco and the next, they were covered from head to foot in fertilizer or something equally as nasty and it came down with such a force that it knocked one of the pickers off his feet. The amazing thing about the incident was that neither of the men even bothered to look up. They simply dusted themselves down and carried on working. Almost anywhere in the West it would have been an outrage, something to be featured on the news. The tobacco pickers would have been shouting the odds on TV about birth defects and long term carcinogenic effects but here, it seemed to be all in a days work.

Imagine it in a court in the West!

-I was working away in the fields your honour, when all of a sudden it hit me.

-What hit you?

-Twenty seven tons of pulverized goat shit your honour.

We were on our way to Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria. Plovdiv was supposed to have an old part of town which was worth seeing and true there were a few nice old houses but it wasn't worth going out of our way for. There was nothing in the way of food to buy except the same old Russian canned fish and pickled cauliflower and cucumbers which we'd seen everywhere. The only fresh vegetables to be had were tomatoes, paprika and onions. We saw the odd large supermarket but most of the shelves were empty and they carried no more variety than all the other shops - Sofia market, we soon came to understand, was an exception. We stayed the night at a camp-site just outside the city limits and in the morning, the person who ran the office didn't turn up for work. Of course, nobody else would dream of filling in for him and the office remained shut although people were standing in a queue waiting to get out of the place and get their passports back. The rest of the staff were not at all concerned and all questions put to them were deflected with a shrug of the shoulders - manning the office wasn't in their job specifications, and it wasn't their job to locate the person who was.

Tempers became frayed and the people who had trains to catch, or whose visas were expiring, opened up the office window and pushed their kids through to hunt for their passports. Other people were crowding around the window trying to do deals with the kids parents -I'll give you five dollars if you ask your kid to find my passport. One Belgian guy we were talking to managed to get his daughter through the window and she retrieved the whole family's passports and our own. I asked him what he planned to do at the border when the officials would look for the stamps in their passports to see that they had spent each night in a registered campsite. He said that he didn't care and he was prepared to pay the fines for his family of six because if he waited any longer, their visas would run out before they crossed the border. Over staying ones visa, apparently, can incur much heavier fines. So with our passports in hand, we moved out of Plovdiv wondering how we were going to get somebody at the next stop to put an extra stamp in them to show that we'd stayed at an official camp-site.

There's a contrast in Bulgarian scenery, the mountains are great but the flat country, no matter where one ventures seems to be parched and unattractive. On the flat you see the most ugly grain silos and wheat stores and farm machinery repair shops all rusty with junk around them. There are very few churches in the villages because the state religion is atheism and these villages are dusty disheveled looking places. Graves at the roadside don't have crosses on them and some of them are topped by a red star. Monuments and statues to the glories of communism are widely distributed across the country as in all Soviet satellites but they are more evident in Bulgaria than elsewhere. The odd one has some degree of artistic merit but, in general, they are crass images of Stalin or Lenin.

At the approaches to all towns of any size there are grotesque, elephantine pseudo artistic metal constructions with hordings on them to the glory of the coal miners or the metal workers. Great ugly stone women with heroic breasts, able to crush cannon balls between their buttocks adorn the facades of factories holding, or pointing to slogans or lists of production quotas reached. Every opportunity is taken to show the populace that production is increasing all the time, that production records are being continually broken. In reality, if there's one thing the system is lousy at, it's production. They can't produce anything in large enough quantities to satisfy consumer demand, that's why there are all the queues outside all the shops.

OK, so Plovdiv was a bummer but the next place, Koprivshtitsa (try saying that when you're pissed) was a gas.The village of Koprivshtitsa, south east of Sofia by half a day's slow van drive, is only around 150 years old but it looks much, much older and it's built in what they call Bulgarian National Revival style. All the houses are surrounded by stone walls with large gates in them and all the gates have a roof over the top made of those red terra-cotta Spanish style roof tiles which look like half drainpipes. The gates and their frames are all of heavily carved wood while the walls are built in three or four layers of stone separated by wooden sleepers twelve centimetres thick. One would think that the wood between stones would rot and the walls would come down but they have been standing a long time so far and they are still in good condition.

The walls undulate with the terrain of the earth which gives a sort of child's book, fairy tale appearance. Western thinking seems to dictate that if you don't either excavate or build up from the ground so that the foundation of a wall is level, it will fall down. I'm used to all the courses in brickwork or stonework being level and straight but in this village it's not the case and the result is much more attractive. The walls, which enclose every house and garden, simply follow the lie of the land up hill and down dale in a sort of higgledy piggledy style just like in a naive painting. The houses behind the walls are two storey, the first being of stone and the second in wood with carvings on the beams which protrude over the lower storey. Overhanging balconies are on practically every house in the village and the house wall facing the road is often faced with plaster, painted dark blue, pink or orange and finished off with decorative lines and motifs.

The village is something of a national monument but it's alive with a working population mostly of foresters and there are horses and carts running up and down the main street all day carrying loads of timber. I also saw mules here - another first for me. Again, as in most places in Bulgaria, we couldn't find the camp-site advertised in the tourist guide, a big one this time - suitable for 500 people. It turned out to be the village car-park, no facilities at all except a stand pipe for water, nevertheless it was necessary to book into it and get our papers stamped so as to avoid a fine when we left the country.

We were the only visitors to the village and the parking attendant was lonely - she said that she hadn't seen anybody the previous day either. We asked her in for coffee and she talked to us for almost half an hour in German and we couldn't make out why she seemed to think that we understood her. We understood the next day when we found that she had confused Australia with Austria when she took the numbers of our passports. When she looked inside my passport she was thrilled to discover that she and I were of the same vintage, she had children the same age as mine and we compared lives which in some ways were similar but the main differences were that it was me that was visiting her home ground and she had silver teeth while mine were plastic. Gold and silver teeth in this part of the World are status symbols and some people will have a perfectly good tooth extracted to have it replaced by a gold one.

We awoke the next morning to the sound of sheep bells and horses clip clopping along the road but when I looked outside, there was a heavy mist over the village obscuring all signs of civilization. The sheep slowly emerged from the mist followed by two men on horses and they passed by and became lost from view again like in a scene from a horror movie. While we were having breakfast two fifteen year old girls very shyly approached us and explained that they worked in the local museum and that they would like to give us a guided tour of the place and make us some coffee. They were both delightful but petrified of us and they were very worried when we said that we were going to Turkey. -You must not go there, one of them said. A short conversation on why we shouldn't go to Turkey ensued and it was obvious that they'd undergone a lot of brain-washing at school about their neighbouring country and how the people there were being exploited by nasty capitalists. They thought the same about Greece as well.

We had only intended to pass through, or at least only spend one night in Koprivshtitsa but we spent four days there staying until Sunday morning. We kept saying to each other that this was somewhere special, idyllic, away from all the communistic slogans and we couldn't see why it didn't seem to have been discovered. It wasn't at all like being anywhere else in Bulgaria, the restaurant even had food in it and the public toilets didn't stink. Everything was in such good condition, not only the buildings but the horses and carts - everything. Over the space of an hour on the Friday night our car park suddenly began to fill up with Western cars and on Saturday morning the whole village was buzzing with fat old men and beautiful young women. I asked our car park lady what was happening and she said that it was the same every weekend. Koprivshtitsa is one of the classiest little places in Bulgaria and it's where the high party officials go for dirty weekends with their secretaries.

Some 50 kilometres from Koprivshtitsa on the dry plains heading north east we saw a plum orchard which ran for some five kilometres on both sides of the road and at one point there was a place where the proletariat where loading plums into boxes and as we hadn't seen any plums in the shops I stopped and asked the foreman if we could buy some. It was a confusing encounter because he was saying yes but shaking his head and I didn't know whether to fill my bag or not. It was only by accident that we discovered head nodding and shaking is the exact reverse of that in the west and to say that this can lead to some misunderstandings is an understatement.

The head movements are quite definite, not just mild gestures and what can add to the confusion is that some Bulgarians make allowances for Westerners and reverse their gestures. I once approached a petrol pump attendant to ask if we could have some black market diesel and with all this nodding and shaking in amongst the general pantomime you go through when you can't communicate, I just couldn't make out whether she would let me have any or not. On another occasion we shook our heads to indicate that we didn't want a particular meal at a restaurant and ordered only a glass of water each, only to have the waiter serve the meal to us ten minutes later.

The meal in question was mixed grill with chopska salad and if I ever see that combination again I'll throw up. Chopska salad, which consists of cucumber, tomatoes, olive oil and fetta cheese, is delicious. However, mixed grill and chopska salad were all we could get in the entire country except for the Sofia Sheraton and Black Sea resorts. Some places had more than twenty different dishes on the menu but these only represented what the chef might be capable of cooking had he the ingredients - all they actually had was mixed grill and chopska salad. The stupid thing about nearly all Bulgarian waiters is that they hand you the menu and stand at the table with pencil and paper in hand as if waiting to write down your order when they know they've only got mixed grill and chopska salad. Even more stupid is that they don't tell you up front that they haven't got anything else.

We had great fun in most restaurants pointing at all the different items on the menu, deliberately skipping mixed grill and chopska salad and watching the waiter shake his head. We tried it in upwards of thirty restaurants in the course of a month and only on three or four occasions did the waiter pre-empt the process by telling us that he only had the one item on offer. We saw good things on Bulgarian restaurant menus too - fillet sailors, chicken hunters, Thurkish cuffee and panchakes.

I am aware of the fact that in these pages I have a number of times referred to cities as being "typical communist." I will here describe what I mean by a typical communist city, there are few exceptions in Europe although in places like Angola and Cuba they may well be different.

First, the outskirts. As you approach a communist city, you notice on the horizon, apartment blocks on both sides of the road. Not just a few blocks but small cities of them consisting of 50 to 100 slabs of buildings between five and twenty stories high. As you get nearer, you pass four large hoardings with slogans on them extolling the virtues of communism or hard work or propaganda concerning production quotas. Next you'll see a sizeable green area of gardens fenced in with rusty chain wire fencing. These are the allotments where the occupants of the apartments grow their fruit and vegetables and a few flowers. Most of these allotments have a garden shed where the gardeners keep their tools and sometimes sleep on summer weekends. These little patches of green are usually exceptionally well tended, it's something the state doesn't bother to exert much control over and a place in which a person can express himself.

Another kilometre and you draw alongside the apartments and you see that some are in the construction stage and the ground around them is littered with pieces of steelwork and small mountains of concrete which set before it was used. You'll then see the shoddiness of the completed flats, they are completed but it looks as though the workmen will be back next week to finish them off - you can see that they are finished already because there are curtains in the windows and the balconies (which they all have) are already being used as storage areas. Some of the balconies are already hanging on the buildings at a slight angle even though the blocks are still under construction.

The grass around the blocks is un-mowed and is 50 - 60 centimetres high and there are bare patches in it where the children play and tracks through it from the car-parks to the blocks. There are three wrecked cars in the car-park and there are two more with the wheels missing and oil stains all over the ground. Soon the tram lines start and the road surface deteriorates considerably, holes appear and the tram crossings shake the life out of the car as you cross them.

There is a railway alongside the road now which swings off and goes through the concrete plant and the coal generated electricity station. A little further and pavements start to appear at the sides of the roads with smoke blackened stunted trees growing out of them and all the buildings which front onto the pavements are flat fronted with no features and small windows sometimes with tiles underneath them. Many of these tiles have fallen off the wall but you kind of get the feeling that they fell off ten years ago and they aren't going to be replaced. It's here that it hits you that there's a pervading greyness about the place, perhaps it's the contrast with the green leaves of the trees that makes you realize it. It all looks filthy but in fact it isn't, it's as clean as a Western city but it looks a hundred times dirtier. Probably it's the brickwork exposed by the plaster which has fallen off the walls which gives it this dirty appearance and the fact that the buildings haven't been painted or maintained for years.

There is an almost total absence of colour here, no adverts for petrol or toothpaste, cigarettes or anything. There may be the odd red splash from a flower on a balcony but other than that, the dark blue of street signs at the corners are all the colour you'll see. Now we are approaching the area of small shops and small manufacturing industries. It's dusty, whether it's in a hot country or not, it's still dusty. The tiny shop windows give no indication of what's inside and the window displays, if there are any, have dust on them and the colours are faded. In the lace curtained office windows there is a rubber plant and a monsteria and a pot of some green and white long leaved striped plant, all near dead. You are depressed.

You look at the pavements now and you notice that they are uneven because cars park on them creating indentations, you see people tripping as they walk and there are paving slabs stacked up against a lamp post from some long abandoned repair job - the hole is still there in the pavement and it won't be patched up for years. At the bottom of the lamp posts the electrical inspection plates have been removed and wiring is exposed at the height where kids can touch it. Passing the tram stop, you will see that the weeds that grow all along the tramlines here are missing because of all the people who tread on them in this spot. And you see the queue of prospective passengers all with beaten, resigned, miserable faces but with something in the bottom of their brown, vinyl shopping bags, unlike the people in the queues at the butcher and baker shops whose bags were rolled up under their arms.

Then a long line of cars, maybe 20 maybe 40 including taxis. The drivers all out of their cars, leaning against the doors talking to each other. They are the lucky ones with their own transport and they are queuing for petrol, they'll be there for hours yet. The offices are now starting to appear along with the larger shops. Still the same small windows but more of them and there are more people walking around, each with a shopping bag, looking in the windows at the display which hasn't changed for weeks, maybe months. And the strip lights in the windows flicker but they won't be changed, not until they stop altogether. Next come the uninviting looking restaurants, some with their names in strip lights. The strip lights have letters missing and letters which have come unstuck and are hanging upside down. Gradually the civic buildings start to show. These buildings are set back from the road, they are big rectangular boxes with rectangular windows and a small flight of steps leading up to glass fronted doors.

The forecourts are done in grey concrete paving slabs and in the centre is a flower bed with a stone ledge encircling it. The flowers need water and the weeds are at their highest in the middle around the base of the flagpole. The stone ledge around the edge is chipped. On all sides the building is fenced off with rusty black wrought iron, and in a little hut at the side where the wrought iron gate is, sits a soldier who opens the gate for the officials. There is a soldier standing outside too with a gun, he's expressionless and bored. And then there you are in the city centre with it's palace of culture or revolution square in pride of place slap bang in the middle with a red flag sitting on top. It's ugly too, bloody ugly and designed by someone who obviously hasn't the slightest flair for, or interest in architecture. On all four sides are grotesque statues of men and women either standing, gun in hand, ever vigilant to protect the proletariat, or displaying their ability to work down coal mines for 48 hours at a stretch.

In front of the place is a larger than life statue of Lenin and the streets leading off of the square are named after Marx, Lenin, the first of May, the army and a local revolutionary leader who sided with the Russians at the outbreak of WW2 and later became the puppet party premier. Then there are the standard kiosks, one model throughout probably ten or more countries, selling bus tickets, newspapers, cigarettes and matches and a few other items. Some of the kiosks are closed with no explanation given as to why, or when they are likely to be open.

And the park, there's always a park. The park is scruffy, shabby, worn out, kids swings and slides half of them broken, a dirty sand pit. Two concrete ponds with fountains which haven't worked for years and the hedges have leaves on the top but nothing at the bottom. The grass is high and when it's cut, it's cut with a scythe and someone comes in with a horse and cart to take the grass away to feed his animals. You'll see three or middle aged women wearing headscarves and sandals with socks showing out of them, sweeping the walkways with brooms made of twigs. And all of a sudden you'll say to yourself -what the fuck did I come here for?

The next scheduled stop, and not many were, was at Veliko Turnovo and once again w



Dear reader I'm sorry for the interruption to this narrative but I'd like now to bring you into real time - I.e. what's happening right now, as I type. I'm sitting typing these words in a caravan park on the Black Sea Coast from notes taken over the last three days. Alicja is at the camp shop and I've just had a terrible fright. I was sitting in the back of the van looking at the screen when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye at the back window which was a few centimetres from my head. I turned to see, on the other side of the glass, a bear looking at me. Yes, a bear!

I jumped back and lapsed into involuntary profanity - Aaaaaaaaaagh Fuuuck, I said. I rushed to the side door of the van and slammed it shut and then looked out of the windows. Now, as I type, there's a gypsy out there playing the violin and he's got a bear on a piece of string dancing to the music. Yeah, where was I? Yes, Veliko Turnovo........you know, bears really seem to affect my concentration somehow. I'm having difficulties getting back into this.

Well, Veliko Turnovo is perhaps the most famous place in the country after Nesabar. It's got a famous castle which they've over restored and stuffed up - end of story. Wish we hadn't bothered and nothing will induce me to go there again. Oh Christ, it's leaning against the front of the van now, looking through the windscreen at me. Why's the thing so interested in our van and not the tents next door? Perhaps we've got honey in here or something. It's no use, I just can't type with bears outside. Where's the fags? Perhaps if I give him a dollar he'll piss off.

Over the next few days we wandered the back roads of Bulgaria saw a lot of sights, avoided a lot of mixed grills and chopska salads and enjoyed the experience no end but the bit we were mostly looking forward to now, was the Black Sea coast and that's where we pointed Raelene. The Black Sea coast is Eastern Europe's playground. They come here from all over the place including Russia and to an Eastern European who can't travel outside the Soviet bloc, this is his exotic holiday in the sun. Not only the eastern but also the slightly more adventurous western European holiday makers can get a package holiday to Varna or the Golden Sands at a very reasonable rate compared to Western Europe.

As we drove into Varna we could see western jets circling to land at the airport and we could feel that civilization was only a few minutes drive away. We wanted a swim in the sea, it had been such a long time and the weather has been hot enough to swim for six weeks now. We caught a glimpse of it through the trees, dropped off three fellow travellers to whom we'd given a lift and set off in search of somewhere to park the van for the few remaining days of our visa. The beaches at the Black Sea holiday towns are superb although in season crowded, but privacy can't be expected in season at a resort town anywhere and the Bulgarians have done everything pretty well for a cheap family holiday. Looking down on the beaches from the hills and cliffs, you are struck by all the sunshades, literally thousands of them all in perfectly straight lines like soldiers on parade. When you get in amongst it all, it's not too bad.

You can hire one of these permanently fixed umbrellas for a pittance along with a sun lounger, pair of flippers etc and you've got yourself a spot for the day in the shade that nobody's going to pinch. It's wasn't our cup of tea but families with young children can have a good cheap holiday in Varna and everything they could want is available, sailboard schools and hire, para sailing, restaurants mini golf, entertainment at night, horse riding, little tourist trains running up the streets, organized coach tours. It wasn't that different to a lot of Western European holiday resort towns but far cheaper and not as crowded. The best one of these places we saw was called Sunny Beach which had everything Varna had plus it had nice parks and gardens to walk around and I must say that in all these resort towns there was no litter to be seen and the general standard was good.

The other thing we liked was that you can get a good meal in a decent restaurant, if you don't mind classical violin music, for $5 for two, AND they have everything which they advertise on the menu. There may be shortages in the rest of the country but it wouldn't matter if the rest of the country was at starvation level, the Black Sea coast would still be well supplied because it generates so much foreign currency for the government. The food may have been good, the toilets clean, the hot water supply constant and the plumbing functional but it just wasn't our thing so we drove north up the coast looking for something a little more adventurous near the Romanian border where, according to the guidebook, things were quieter.

Things weren't quieter but they were certainly different and we spent the night at an absolutely ghastly camp-site which caters almost exclusively for Poles. All the signs, menus, everything were in Polish and even the waiters and shop assistants spoke Polish. Now, the Bulgarian government doesn't earn much money out of Poles who earn something like $40 per month and can't pay in hard currency, so it doesn't spend so much on facilities for Poles as it does on Westerners. This was an area on a cliff top which did have potential because of its views but in the many years it's been here not a cent has been spent on improvements. The grass had never been cut and it was half a meter high and dry as tinder and the Bulgarian campers, who earn less than the Poles and couldn't afford any kind of cookers, were lighting fires on the ground to cook with.

One stray spark and three hundred tents would have gone up if there had been any breeze at all. Fortunately, they were all very conscious of it and took great pains to see that it didn't happen but there wasn't so much as a blanket or a water bucket to fight any fire with. The shower and toilet block were fed by a thermal spring which was the only source of water on site and stank of sulphur. After a shower we needed a shower to remove the smell. Even in the restaurant where we ordered Pepsi, in case they made the coffee with this smelly stuff, they served it in glasses which had been washed in it and we couldn't drink it. There was a set of steps down to a salt water swimming pool which I can't imagine had ever been cleaned and it was impossible to see the bottom for green algae - even the Bulgarians avoided it. The beach was covered in rotting seaweed and there were pieces of rusty pipe and lumps of concrete laying around and the sea was a very murky looking brew. Nevertheless we swam in it to get rid of the smell of the water from the showers.

The restaurant where we had the sulphur flavoured Pepsi had a band playing in the evening. Their entire repertoire was in English - they sang songs like Around the World in Eighty Days - and the singer had learned the words from records without speaking the language which we found quite amusing. The Poles and Bulgarians have to watch their pennies and almost never eat out and I felt sorry for the band because the restaurant was nearly empty. After all, they were doing their best and the only audience they had was the two of us, who were killing ourselves laughing, and two others who were filling out their postcards and not listening at all.

We felt guilty at having to leave, and when we left we could still hear them playing to nobody as we walked back to the van, the postcard writers having beaten us to leaving. The Bulgarians staying at the camp-site were, to us, pitifully impoverished but at least they were on holiday, there must have been a lot more that weren't. Their tents were made of canvass and didn't have zippers but eyelets and string and separate groundsheets.

In the morning at five o'clock, it was bitterly cold and the family next to us were running around putting blankets and rags over the outside of their tent in order to keep warm and trying to keep them there with sticks. Later, they were all walking around the bushes looking for sticks to light a fire with. I gave the kids some chewing gum and they were overjoyed with it and brought us some roasted sunflower seeds. I offered the parents our cooker to cook their breakfast on but they were embarrassed and declined. To get away from the crowds and this appalling place, we decided to drive south to within 80 kilometres of the Turkish border where our travel books said it was sparsely populated, much quieter and easier to get a good space in a camp-site.

On the way we stopped off at Nesabar which is a small island, these days connected to the mainland by a causeway. In the 6th century bc. Nesabar was already minting its' own gold currency and the Romans administered it a few hundred years later and it is said to be the place where Bulgarian history most manifests itself. Rubbish - they had a jewel and they messed it up. We were so disappointed because we'd seen a documentary on the place on TV back in Australia in which it looked wonderful but there's scarcely an old building left and the modern buildings are to say the least, shoddy and unfinished. They've built horrible 1950s communist style public buildings in two places on the island and to cap it off, they are rebuilding Roman ruins there in modern building materials with lousy workmanship. They don't deserve the place. In both Bulgaria and Hungary they ruin the appearance of their castles and ancient buildings by filling in gaps in walls with concrete but in Nesabar it's worse than anywhere.

We arrived in the sparsely populated place we were looking for in the late afternoon - it was terribly over crowded. We called into one good looking hotel to see if we could get a room for two nights because we had too much Bulgarian money and we had to find a way to spend it, but they would only let us pay in dollars. At the reception the girl asked us where we were from, and when I told her, she shouted to everyone -they're Australian, they're Australian, and turning to us she said -oh I'm so happy, and she really meant it. She was jumping up and down and clapping her hands together. She said -Krokodill Dund and when I told her that he was my father I thought she was going to wet herself.

So that's why we ended up in the place with the bear on a piece of string, there wasn't anywhere else. Bears on pieces of string wandering around caravan parks with or without their violinist owners, doesn't seem to be the safest of methods for the provision of mass entertainment to me. There were lots of bear breakfast sized kids running about the place and although the bear had a muzzle on it's claws were still long. I'd never given the matter any thought but I suppose there are laws in Western countries to ensure that itinerant violinists tie their bears to the railings outside caravan parks before entering. This camp-site is easily the biggest we've seen. It has about 1,500 people staying in it and is like a penguin rookery but without any organisation whatsoever. You simply pay your money and take a chance that you be able to find a space. The manager, I'm sure, doesn't know to the nearest hundred how many people are staying here.

We went into the shop just after we arrived and saw bottled fruit juice on the back shelf so I asked for it. The assistant said that we couldn't have any because the water melons had been delivered. There wasn't any regulation prohibiting the sale of bottled fruit juice during the water melon season but a physical problem - she couldn't climb over the melons. There were hundreds of them and they'd just thrown them on the floor behind the counter. It was hard for the woman to stand up in the shop but she said that they couldn't put them outside as they'd be stolen in no time. Most of this shop's meagre supplies were behind the melons and nobody could buy anything until they'd been sold. It may sound funny but the people in the tent next door to us actually ran out of food and we gave them some of our foul tasting Jugoslavian tinned fish. Once again Raelene was the only Western vehicle in the whole place but by now we were getting used to being treated as zoo animals and the stares didn't bother us.

Looking around the camp-sites in Poland & Bulgaria and to a lesser extent in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, I noticed that the majority of parked cars didn't have any windscreen wipers. Most people park their cars, remove the wiper blades and lock them in the glove box because windscreen wipers are considered hot property and worth stealing. I don't know why communist bloc windscreen wiper factories can't keep up with demand but they evidently can't. The majority of car owners put a little bit of plastic tubing over the wiper arms to stop them scratching the windscreen if they should accidentally switch the wipers on. But the Hungarians to whom we gave the tinned Jugoslavian fish had small, clip on plastic devices with two tiny wheels which run back and forth across the glass. I thought about this and I just can't work out why Hungarian industry can't provide windscreen wipers when it can provide these

The recipients of the Jugoslavian tinned fish were a nice couple and had friends with them who spoke English and they acted as interpreters one night as a crowd of us sat by a fire drinking and swapping experiences. An East German couple there had come through Romania to get to Bulgaria and in several places came upon small kids standing in the middle of the road in groups. They demanded sweets and if they didn't get them they threw stones at all the glass on the car. The next morning I was shown the car. The windscreen had gone as had one of the front headlights and a side window and there were dents all over it. They were concerned because they had to go back through Romania again on the way home because they are not allowed to go through Jugoslavia.

The next day we were hoping to cross the Turkish border and start a new adventure in the promised land and before we turned in that night we reflected on our month in Bulgaria. It had been good fun, and extremely interesting and we wouldn't mind doing it again. It had also been unbelievably cheap - in four weeks we had only exchanged USD$350 and we still had $40 left!

Letter 12

When we tried to check out of the caravan park we found ourselves with a problem. Alicja tried to pay the man at reception but he told her that he wouldn't accept our money and stamp our receipt until we could prove that we'd exchanged enough money to pay for our stay. Of course, we'd exchanged most of our money on the black market and didn't have enough official receipts to cover the amount we now owed. I offered to pay a bribe in dollars but the man said that this wasn't the problem. He said that he'd be in trouble when, at the Turkish border, we showed his caravan park receipt and didn't have enough exchange receipts to cover it - he wasn't allowed to put his official stamp on a receipt without first checking that enough money had been exchanged in a state controlled exchange office.

We didn't want to exchange any more money into Bulgarian Leva because we already had too much and there was nothing in the shops to spend it on. But there was nothing for it, we'd have to exchange more or face the fines at the border. When we found the exchange bureau all the man behind the counter was interested in, was trying to get us to change dollars with him on the black market - this was the officially appointed government exchange man trying to persuade us to commit an illegal act. I asked him if he would care to do the black market deal in reverse I.e. I'd sell him Leva at a favourable rate in return for dollars but he wasn't at all interested.

We had queued for well over an hour at the exchange bureau and while we were there, people were queuing up at reception waiting to get out of the place but they wouldn't serve them until we were finished with. I thought we would be terribly unpopular with the people in the queue but they were so used to this sort of thing that they didn't bat an eyelid. The staff was, of course, bone idle, and could have served other people in line behind us while waiting for us to return from the exchange bureau but they were working within their job specifications.

It was a short trip to the Turkish border but before crossing into Turkey we wanted to spend our excess Bulgarian money so we stopped at the last town before the border but there was nothing to spend it on. All the shops had empty shelves and the only shop with anything at all interesting had a sign in the window saying that the shop assistant was in hospital. We found a hardware store in the back streets and bought eight electric hair curlers and a hammock, which we didn't want, but the only other choices in the shop were galvanised milking buckets scythes and rat traps.

At the border was a line of cars about 20 long and it looked as though we were in for a wait so the kettle went straight onto the stove and I grabbed a book. Soon afterwards, we got talking to some Poles who had been there for two hours and said that no cars had passed through the checkpoint while they had been there, so we wandered up to the front to have a look and found half a dozen border guards and customs officers just sitting around smoking. They were just being lazy and the Poles who did this trip every year, told us that you just have to wait until they feel like working. It might be an hour or it might be four hours depending on how they felt or when their card game finished. The border crossing we were at is called Malko Tarnovo and, because of it's location, is seldom used by Westerners. Hence, the service is much worse than on transit routes where there are hard currency bribes to be had.

Waiting at borders didn't concern us much anymore, we had no appointments to keep and could eat and sleep, read and listen to music in comfort. The computer, being 12 volt worked from the van battery and when we were held up at border crossings I would often sit and type notes for this book. It took a little over 2 hours before we saw any action at the crossing and only then because six truckloads of "Turkish Bulgarians" who were being expelled from the country, arrived. This meant that the border officials had work to do so they told us to get going. They didn't check anything at all.

The so called Turkish Bulgarians were being expelled because the Bulgarian government needed a scapegoat to explain it's ailing economy. It had announced that the Turkish minority were a drain on the country's resources and that they were largely responsible for the country's poverty. Suddenly this minority found that they had no jobs but could get passports to leave the country and an exodous was underway.

These people had been classified as a Turkish minority by the Bulgarian government but in effect they could hardly have been called Turkish. The only thing they had in common with the Turks was the Muslim religion. They didn't even speak Turkish because their ancestors had been in Bulgaria for four hundred years. Now, as refugees, they presented a pitiful sight, arriving at the border in tip trucks overflowing with their belongings hastily thrown in the back. Everything they owned, beds, wardrobes, sawbenches, farming tools were in the trucks and once they reached the border they had to unload it themselves and carry it across to the Turkish side.

Many of them are old and their sons hadn't been able to come with them because they were in the Bulgarian army which wouldn't let them go. We saw old men and women carrying wardrobes and other heavy loads across the no- mans land between the borders without any assistance at all from the Bulgarians. On the other side were the Turkish soldiers beckoning and shouting encouragement to them saying -come on, you can make it, don't give up. One old man with a wardrobe on his back sank to his knees only twenty or thirty metres from the line and his wife dropped what she was carrying and tried to lift the wardrobe to give him some relief. She could manage no more than to lift it enough for him to extricate himself from under it and they left it there in no mans land, picked up her bags and continued walking.

The soldiers couldn't step across the border to help them, all they could do was to shout words of encouragement to them. Once the refugees stepped onto Turkish territory there were dozens of strong young men to relieve them of their loads and I could hear them trying to communicate with each other. It was obvious that the two languages were totally different and that to classify the people streaming across the border as Turkish, was simply wrong. We were parked out side the customs office on the Turkish side and before going inside I couldn't help but notice the immediate difference between communism and capitalism.

On one side of the border were ugly looking grey trucks on their last legs and a bunch of miserable looking border guards watching old people bent double under heavy loads of furniture. On the other side were gaudily painted new Mercedes and British Leylands and a bunch of smartly dressed soldiers shouting encouragement. When we finally got to the Turkish side there was a do it yourself passport and immigration office, by which I mean that instead of coming to your car and taking the documents from you as they usually do everywhere else, they told everyone to park and go into a building where you fill out a form each and queue up at a counter to get the forms stamped. It was incredibly confusing what with people standing in the wrong line because they couldn't understand the signs and officials getting angry because of it, the whole thing took over an hour. This was a border post seldom used by Westerners but normally by the eastern bloc people, those lucky enough to have obtained passports that is.

We went into an office to see the customs man about bringing the car into Turkey on a permanent basis and Alicja noticed a sign in Polish on the wall which said "no camping or stopping within 200km of the border". She mentioned it to me because we were looking for somewhere to stop and get some sleep and she was overheard by the officer who said "don't worry, that doesn't apply to you, only to Polish people because they come here to sell things and they want to sell at the first village and go back to Poland to spend the money. This makes it a bit more difficult for them", I guess that this way, they at least have to buy some Turkish petrol. For the next two hours as we drove into Turkey we saw many truckloads of refugees and their belongings and at a couple of points there were lines of white conical tents with the Turkish flag painted on them in which the refugees were temporarily housed. The country changed after 50 kilometres or so and became drier with outcrops of rock all over the place in stark contrast to the areas close to both sides of the border which had been well watered forest country.

There wasn't much sign of habitation, just the odd mud brick house with a thatched roof, the inhabitants obviously not too well off and there were people riding donkeys with elaborately woven saddle bags. A bit further on, the first village hove into view just as dusk was descending and as we drove through it we suddenly realized that after a long trip, we were in civilization again. There were men sitting at tables drinking coffee and watching the traffic go by and what's more they were sitting under electric lights and not only that but nothing was painted grey. The roadside vegetable stalls were still open and we could see bananas, peaches, aubergines, carrots, grapes and all sorts of things we had forgotten about, and there were some signs advertising washing powder and Fanta and toothpaste and stuff. This may not seem big deal to you but you've no idea the effect it had on us, just the thought that we could walk into a shop and buy something.

Then we decided that we would really lash out and we spent the night in a cheap hotel with a bath at the first town we came to. It was a town of I'd say 30,000 population and they were having their annual festival that week and the place was all decked out in coloured lights and full of traffic. We drove around looking for a parking spot and found a place at the back of a hotel and as we were locking up, a soldier stepped out of the shadows with a rifle in his hand which at first sight had us worried but he gave us a broad smile and indicated that it was OK to park there.

So, with the military looking after Raelene we set out to look for a meal, moving very slowly down the street looking in all the shop windows at the clothes, washing machines and all the consumer goods we hadn't seen for so long. I never ever thought I would miss advertising, in fact it's one of my pet hates in the western world but it sure was good to see all that colour. As we passed a small restaurant, one of many, the proprietor came running out to entice us in, telling us which dishes he had and that everything was fresh today. He sold us and we went in. It was such a contrast to have someone try to sell us something, it just doesn't happen in the communist world where nobody gives a stuff if you buy the governments products or not. This guy was literally running up and down the restaurant giving good old fashioned service and he saw to it that all his clients weren't kept waiting for anything. Give me capitalism any day. We had a delicious meal with tastes we hadn't experienced since March when we last went into the Turkish restaurant which our friends have in Melbourne and it cost something like $6 for the two of us. With full bellies we staggered out onto the pavement and walked up and down the town twice just to make sure that it was all real.

There were people with tubs of boiling water on wheels pedaling along the streets selling sweet corn and others with charcoal grills selling toasted corn and there were all manner of things to eat being sold by these peddlers with little gas lights swinging above their wares. There was pop music coming out of the radio and record shops and a couple of illuminated mosques to look at and the whole thing had an air of excitement about it. We found a hotel for $15 for the night in a room on the fourth floor and out of the window we could see a party going on in the open air, they were playing traditional Turkish music which wasn't too easy on the ear but it was great to watch it all happening. They had a string of coloured lights under a palm tree and tables full of food and on the other side of the wall were the chickens, pigs and the donkey all walking about probably unable to sleep at this late hour because of the music and in the background was an illuminated minaret. It all seemed strange after what we'd seen of late but it also had an air of normality which had been missing in the places we have been lately.

In the morning we awoke to the wail of the muezzin, he's the man who calls the people to prayer from the top of the minaret and I opened the window to hear it more clearly only to find that it was a tape recorded message and there were four loudspeakers on the minaret. We left the hotel and went in search of breakfast which we found in a lovely neat and clean lokanta and I saw some of the locals consuming this porridge looking stuff so I thought I'd do as the Romans do and try some. The first problem was the language, I couldn't communicate with the waiter. In most places we've been we have been able to get by with Alicjas Polish and a few German words which are close to English but here the language is totally and utterly unlike any tongue I'd ever heard. And I say that bearing in mind that we have had a few Turkish lessons while living in Australia.

This wasn't a tourist town where most people know some English but to cut a long story short I got my porridge. And as most of you will know, my tastes are very cosmopolitan when it comes to food but this stuff was revolting. I think it was mutton soup and the guy who dished it up went to great pains to see that I got a spoonful of the fat which floated on top and appeared to be a delicacy. It stuck to the roof of the mouth or in my particular case the plastic of my false teeth pallet and I'd be hard pushed to say what it tasted like but I guess pterodactyl piss comes close to it. I just had to be rude and spit it out whilst grabbing for the water jug. I've since described this stuff to our Turkish friends but they can't imagine what it was.

Istanbul was the place we most wanted to see after reading so much about it and this is where we set sail for after buying some peaches to take away the taste of breakfast. It was only 9am but already the fruit stalls at the roadside had been open for two hours and some of them were quite sizeable with eight or ten stall holders grouped together in the middle of nowhere in lay bys. The displays are worth photographing and it must take a long time to set them up but most of all, the quality and the taste are the things that get you. Turkey has the best quality fruit and vegetables on the planet in my opinion and Turks refuse to buy anything that isn't fresh. The stall holder was very friendly and wished us a happy stay in the country and as he could see that we intended to eat the fruit straight away, he washed it for us without being asked.

The drive down to Istanbul wasn't very nice, lots of industry, dust and mad drivers. The Turks have a bad reputation as drivers and it's warranted, they're bloody mad. Someone in Melbourne told me that he read in the paper that last year, they issued licences to seventeen people who were later found to be clinically blind and I believe it. They have little or no road sense and overtake when they can't see a clear road ahead, they just pull out and hope for the best on corners and before the crests of hills. They all use the horn all the time and never fail to beep you when they are passing and it seems that their thought is that provided they blow the horn to let you know that they are there, then you will brake to let them in. The buses have extremely loud musical horns and horns which make a loud whistle and they draw alongside you and press the button so that you know they're passing. It still frightens the shit out of me.

The bus service in Turkey according to the travel books ranks amongst the best in the world and it certainly seems believable. There are thousands of them criss-crossing the country all day and all night. They are all big, powerful locally made Mercedes and faster than most cars, particularly on the long hauls because they don't have to stop so often for re-fueling. They are air conditioned and serve free cologne to freshen up with and always free cold bottled water. The long distance ones serve free coke and tea as well. The fares are dirt cheap and it's a good way to see Turkey, going from one place to another and staying at hotels. A lot of people do it this way.

We drew into the outskirts of Istanbul and tried to find the brother of some friends we have in Melbourne but it wasn't easy. We asked different people the way and found that they are unbelievably helpful but if you can't understand what they are saying, it's not much good. Eventually we stopped outside a shop and I asked a passer by and showed him the address we had. He didn't speak English but he took me into the shop and got the shop owner to telephone the people for me and then told me to stay right where we were because Hakan’s brother was sending someone to pick us up.

Nothing happened for half an hour and then the shop owner came over to see us again and explained that the number we had given him was a business number and someone else had been ringing around trying to contact the person for us and found out that he was out of town on vacation. As far as I could make out, chasing this man had involved five or six people, only two of which I had actually spoken too. This sort of thing has happened to us time and time again in Turkey, I've never met such helpful people. Eventually we drove into Istanbul and the traffic was a nightmare, I've driven in a lot of cities in many different countries but it was all child’s play compared to driving in Istanbul. They have a saying here which says that red lights are just a dark shade of green and it seems as though everyone goes by it. Get in the wrong lane and you're stuck there for ages as you watch your destination go by and wonder how the hell you are going to get back there.

We parked, after driving around town three times, slap bang outside the Blue Mosque about 200 metres from the Aghia Sophia and we were in a line of something like 200 campervans from all over the World. It's quite a sight to see, all this history surrounded on all four sides by campervans. The city council charge $2.50 per night to let you stay there and there is a public toilet where you can wash and shave right next door. It must be one of the most spectacular places to park your van anywhere in the world. As you look out of the van at night you can see these wonderful minaretes all lit up like something out of a fairy tale. The Blue Mosque, Aghia Sophia and Topkapi Palace are three places which everyone should see before they die, it's a sin not to see them and this city as far as I'm concerned is THE city in the World. Lots of books have been written about it and I've read a few but this is a city you have to experience, it's simply the best there is.

While we were there, we were walking down the street when we saw a sign which said that under the ground there was an ancient water cistern to see. We thought that we should have a look at it so we paid our 50 cents and down we went. What a sight! This used to be the city’s' water supply and was built by the Romans and it has been restored, although it didn't need much restoring. It has been drained so that you can go into it and it has a metre or so of water in the bottom. There are 364 Roman columns holding up an enormous vaulted ceiling and the authorities have built walkways so that you can get around the place and have illuminated the bottoms of these columns from under the water. It's fantastic and at the bottoms of two columns the bases are sculpted into the heads of women.

Probably some goddess who I've never heard of, but the point is that being under water for so long, they have escaped the ravages of time and vandals and they are still in perfect nick. There they are staring at you just as they appeared all those years ago without a blemish. I've seen ancient Greek stuff and I've seen the temples down in Mexico and Guatemala but this is the first time I've seen something of this size completely undamaged and it's so good that if the sculptor had even put one pimple on the nose, it would still be there. It wasn't any better when he finished the job and went home for the night. Yeah.

I read in a guide book that this cistern had been completely forgotten for centuries until a Swiss traveller in the early nineteen hundreds noticed that a man near where he was staying, used to sell fresh fish every day outside his house and the traveller noticed that they were fresh water fish so he asked the man where he got them and was told that they were caught through a hole in the cellar floor which of course turned out to be the cistern. When I was off getting water one day, Alicja was approached by a slick eleven year old postcard salesman who after loosing the sale asked if she had any children. She said that no, she didn't have any, and he must have quickly put two and two together and thought to himself that I couldn't be much of a man because his next sales spiel was "you, me make sex, you have baby" and he went on to boast that he had fathered two already.

Topkapi palace is astounding. In it's hey day 5,000 people lived in it and the jewellery collection, said to be the largest, most valuable in the world is just too much to take in. The various sultans had presents sent to them from all over the empire and other parts of the world and they've all been kept in perfect condition. These presents include books, ceramics, precious stones, jewellery, weapons and all sorts of things. As you wander around the display, you get so blaze about it after a while -"oh yea, look it's the biggest emerald in the world and there's another one of those diamond encrusted dagger things, shall we look for the coffee shop"? No kidding, it makes the crown jewels in the tower of London look pretty insignificant and they have another large warehouse full of stuff that they don't have room to display. There was a hair from Mohammed’s' beard and one of his footprints cast in cement or some such substance and the paintings on the walls and ceilings are so intricate as to be indescribable. There is also a restaurant there where you can sit with your cup of coffee overlooking the Bosphoros and the Golden Horn and watch the ships and ferries go by. For me, I can't think of a better place to have a cup of coffee. The coffee is lousy but that's got sod all to do with it.

The Blue Mosque and Aghia Sophia - well I've run out of superlatives. Westminster Abbey, Notre dam, Cologne Cathedral eat your hearts out. There just isn't anything in Europe to compare with these two places of worship. Istanbul, although mostly on the European side of Turkey is an Asian city but unlike all the other Asian cities we've seen, it doesn't smell like an Asian city, in fact it doesn't have a distinctive smell at all. I rather expected some parts of it to stink but it wasn't any worse than London. Around parts of Singapore, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur as well as a thousand places in Asia there is this same smell, slightly unpleasant but not stomach turning. I can never quite make out what it is but as soon as I smell it, I identify it with Asia straight away. We call this smell "Asian drains" but it doesn't exist in Istanbul.

The grand bazaar is big, very big, almost overwhelmingly huge, generous in its' immensity, enormously huge - its a fucking great place. It's old, very old, almost overwh..... oh never mind. There are over four thousand shops in it. Have you ever seen a shopping centre with four thousand shops in it? Well just let me say this, it's big, very bi.......how do you spell de ja vu?

There are banks and mosques inside it and enough gold jewellery to fill Imelda Marcos's shoe cupboard, carpet stores, tea houses guys beating the shit out of bits of tin and copper and making kettles and things - you just have to see it. And it's all done in the best poh sible taste. We walked for miles in that city I said I wouldn't go on about, and the first night while we were walking, we came across a small two man take away food shop selling small take away food, so in our extremely broken Turkish we ordered two of them. Two what? I hear you cry. Well we don't know either but it tasted good. We were about to walk away from the counter when we were motioned to sit inside at the only table which at that moment was being used by one of the proprietors. As we were getting stuck into this lovely food thing we'd bought, one of them came up and gave us a can of beer each.

I was very wary to start with because I thought it was some kind of con' and they would show us a menu afterwards with a $20 price on the stuff but they were genuine guys just trying to be friendly to a couple of western tourists. They gave us hazel nuts afterwards and a handful of them to go on our way with and they didn't charge us for the beer. Admittedly this was in a side street rather than next to MacDonald’s in the centre but all the same it was in Istanbul, not some remote country village. I've never been treated like this before, I like it. People, as I mentioned before are so helpful, in fact it's a basic tenet of the religion that they have to look after a visitor because any visitor is a gift from God. This means that if you are hungry, you can knock on any door and they will take you in and feed you. It doesn't seem fair really does it? I mean, they think I'm a gift from God but in fact I come from Dibden Purlieu in 'ampshire.

Of course there are a lot of hustlers trying to sell you postcards and wooden flutes and things but if you say no, they don't push. Their standard approach is "where are you from?", and when you tell them, they tell you that Australia or wherever is a very good country and then the conversation leads onto you buying what they have to offer. I told one of them when he asked, that I was from Iceland. He said "Iceland very good country" I said " no, not good" he said "why" I said "too many political prisoners" and he said "that's OK, everywhere same". I told another that I was from Tristan da Cunah and it really had him stuffed. He asked what language we spoke and I said Nahual. He said "what's that" I said "it's a language" and went on to tell him that we Tristan da Cunah people are very proud of our language and its' continued use was helping to preserve our national identity. He said "so you don't speak English then", I told him that no I didn't and he shook my hand and left. All the time we had been speaking in English but he didn't seem to notice.

Unfortunately we had to cut our stay short in Istanbul because Alicja became ill. Sickness is one of the biggest headaches when you are traveling and it had us worried because the only two families we knew in Turkey were both over 1,000km away. However I met a carpet salesman a few days previous to this who said that if we needed help with anything, we were to call him so now was the time to see if he was genuine about his offer. I went to his shop and told him that we needed a doctor who spoke English, I had already told him previously that we didn't want to buy a carpet. His name was Seyfi and he spent nearly the whole day with us running around in taxis (which he wouldn't let me pay for) from clinic to clinic and waiting for an hour in one waiting room while the doctor was out on a call. We eventually saw a doctor who had worked in Canada for a few years and spoke perfect English. He gave Alicja a thorough checkup and a prescription for medicines and said that she had to have two weeks rest without traveling.

We had a job to get out of his clinic because he wanted to talk about our trip and give us advice and he kept ordering tea to be sent in. All the time Seyfi was waiting patiently in the waiting room to take us back to the van and he wasn't at all worried about the time it was taking, he kept saying "take your time". I was sure that there must be a catch in it somewhere but I couldn't figure out what. Maybe he was going to take us down some small alleyway and rob us or something or maybe his friends were already going through the van!
In the end he took us back to the van where we left Alicja in bed and then he telephoned our friends in Mersin for me and found out that they were on holiday in Kusadasi which was only a day’s drive away. Only problem was that there was no address. Seyfi wouldn't even let me buy him lunch, he was just trying to help a foreigner who had a problem. His boss at the carpet shop didn't mind him taking the time off work and in fact he shook my hand and wished us all the best. It was terrific, the doctor had also given us his home address in case we had any problems and told us to ring any time day or night.

We left Istanbul at five in the morning because I just couldn't face driving in the city during the waking hours, especially without a navigator, and that evening we reached Izmir which is about two hours drive from Kusadasi. Alicja stayed in bed for most of the journey which was unbearably hot and at 6pm we arrived at the address of Farouk, the brother of our friend. He wasn't in. I didn't know what to do so I went down to the local shop and tried to ask if the proprietor knew Farouk and what time he would be back home. The shop owner didn't speak English but he made a few phone calls and said that he thought Farouk would return at 7pm so I told him that we would get some sleep in the van outside his shop and try later.

When we woke up, Farouk hadn't shown up but the shop owner had telephoned an English teacher who had come to the shop and had been there waiting for an hour to talk to us. They didn't know where our man was so I got the address of a hotel and told them that if they saw Farouk, would they please tell him that we would be staying at the hotel. It's a very long story but Farouk wasn't living at the address we were given and when he found out that there was an Australian looking for him (he'd never heard of us) he spent hours trying to find us, going to the wrong hotels etc.

I was having a meal in the hotel restaurant when he arrived and Alicja was sleeping in bed. He had brought with him his own family and also his brother in laws family, one of whom could speak English. It was a very cumbersome conversation through the interpreter and when I finally got the message across that I desperately wanted to see Ahmet, his brother, he said that he didn't know that Ahmet was on vacation in Kusadasi. It took him an hour and a half of telephone calls to find where Ahmet and family were staying and when he found out he also learned that Ahmet didn't have a telephone at the holiday house. He said that the next day at two o'clock he would come and collect me and drive me to where Ahmet was staying, a three hour drive

I felt a little bit guilty for having caused so much trouble but they didn't mind a bit. We got to know Ahmet, Toulay and their kids when they lived in Melbourne and the last thing Ahmet said to me when he left Australia was "when you arrive in Turkey, just ring me and I'll come to wherever you are". Well, first thing in the morning when I was cleaning out the van, he arrived. Apparently one of the people that Farouk had phoned had contacted Ahmet and he came straight away to help us. What I didn't know was that he didn't have a car and was staying in a place where there was no public transport. He had set out before daylight and walked a couple of kilometres, hitched a ride, caught a taxi, got on a bus and then hired another cab at the other end, and there he was smiling at me and telling me that all our troubles were over. We all left for Kusadasi a few hours later and spent two weeks with them in a lovely house by the sea while Alicja got the rest which the doctor had recommended.

It worked out well because they didn't have transport and would have been stuck in the same spot for two weeks but as it turned out we were able to go on a few outings with them. Kusadasi is a lovely little holiday town on the Agean coast, very touristic but with lots of character what with its' boating marina and the bazaar and the Friday market which is great to walk around for an hour or two and there's even a castle there which dates from the fourteenth century. The castle used to be on an Island which is now connected to the land by a causeway and at night it is illuminated and you can sit at a waterfront cafe on the mainland with your glass of beer looking out over the perfectly calm water at this castle which is bathed in an orange light and you just want to stay there for ever.

There are dozens of restaurants and cafes along the waterfront in Kusadasi and they are very cheap for a tourist town and outside one of them one night was a display of a big, locally caught fish with an orange in its' mouth. There was a waiter standing next to it talking to an American couple and the husband was really interested in this fish. He said "can you tell me what kind of fish this is?" "yes" was the reply. It went on. "But what kind is it, what species is it"? "Yes, this one call him big fish. Over there, that one small fish". "Is it a Tunny?" "Yes, this one we make him good, cheese sauce we make him called mornay and sometime cook him in garlic butter but not call him mornay". This Yank must have been incredibly thick because he still kept on asking questions about what kind of fish it was and it was obvious that he could stand there all night and still not find out.

Something which still seems strange to me after living for twenty years in a "mans country" is seeing men walking around holding hands. In England and Australia, men aren't allowed to show their feelings for each other for fear of being labeled homosexual. It's drummed into us when we're kids, girls can hold hands but not boys, girls can dance together but not boys. Here, if you have a friend that you get along with it's perfectly legit to walk down the street with him arm in arm and no one takes a blind bit of notice. You often see soldiers walking like this or with their arms around each others shoulders. I think it's great but I couldn't do it, firstly because I've already been programmed against it and secondly because no one likes me that much. Sad isn't it?

Storks are dying out in this country because they eat frogs and people in Turkey catch the frogs to sell them to the French for eating. It's a shame really that scientists haven't developed the legless frog yet because then it wouldn't be worth catching them if there was nothing on them to eat. The storks would get fatter too because it would be easier for them to catch frogs without legs. I suppose that it would be a difficult project though, because they would have to re locate the frogs ears. Frogs ears are in their legs you see. Isaac Newton found that out by simple deduction, I do so admire Isaac Newton. He found out that if you take a frog and poke it with a stick and say "jump", it jumps. If, however you cut the legs off of the frog (or as the Hungarian menu writers say, the forg) and poke it with a stick and say "jump", it doesn't move. "This then", said Isaac Newton "proves conclusively that the frogs ears are located in the general mid to upper thigh area" (that's where he poked the stick). No not that Isaac Newton, Isaac Newton the milkman in St Kilda. No - the other one was Jewish.

Hungarian restaurant menus were funny but so are the Turkish ones. At one place yesterday they had: Wedding soup, lamps on a skewer, mixed of dried fruits, cigarette pie w/minced balls, fired aubergine, sheep’s cheese in crocket, brain on frying pan and tentil soup. I had the cheese pie just to be on the safe side.

Keep taking the stress tablets


Alicja & Pete.

Letter 13

Empty

Carry on to Letter 23

Letter 14

Empty

Carry on to Letter 23

Letter 22

Letter 23

Dear Clare, Sarah and Mortgage Payers


We're now into February and we will be leaving Bodrum next week to move to Eceabat on the European shore of the Dardanelles. We'll miss this place and the people a lot but we're resolved to visit here every winter because we've made so many friends and it's a place where we feel at home. Alicja organised a club for foreigners while we were here and last night we had a St Valentines day party at the marina bar and 120 people turned up. When we were trying to think of a name for this foreigners club I wanted to call it "The Salman Rushdie Appreciation Society" but I was out voted on it.

The atmosphere was just great and we didn't realise how many people we knew until we saw them all together. The great thing about all these people is that none of them are boring, boring people stay at home in the security of their own countries I think, and the types that try somewhere as off beat as Turkey are usually fairly adventurous. Not many of them decided on Turkey without seeing it as we did, but the majority of them came here for a holiday and fell in love with a Turk and ended up marrying and staying here. Our English friends Helen & Malcolm came here for a holiday and like quite a few people at the party they didn't want to go back. They both had good jobs with well above average pay in the advertising industry but like us, they felt that life was passing by outside the window somewhere while they were inside working.

They bought a carpet while they were here on vacation and Ali the shop owner spoke English, so after a couple of days they went back to him and told him they wanted to live here and as he was the only person they could communicate with, would he answer a few questions for them. That was two years ago and Ali still hasn't stopped answering questions yet but now Helen & Malcolm have a real estate agency and they are keeping their heads above water and getting more out of life than when they were working in England. The funny thing is that neither of them had ever had anything whatsoever to do with real estate before. I do admire people like that who are prepared to have a go at a different life instead of stagnating in the same old rut.

Others we know have just come here hoping to find something eventually and everyone has got something or the other going in the end. Russell is an American writer friend of ours and he makes enough to live on by writing articles for travel magazines about the Bodrum area. This guy didn't have any job to come to when he decided to come to Turkey and he's only got one leg which limits the chances of employment considerably but it didn't stop him from having a go. Actually, when we were at the party I told him that we were moving to Eceabat and he asked me if I would go to the hospital up there and speak to an English speaking husband and wife doctor team for him. I thought he was going to get me to ask them when his other leg would be finished but he just wanted us to give them his regards.

Mid May 1990

Yes, it’s been a long time since I put computer ribbon to paper but we've been incredibly busy and even now I don't really have the time but we have a large pile of half read, unanswered letters and we feel guilty. We were due to leave Bodrum on a Sunday but on the Saturday of the previous week, my sister arrived out of the blue. It gave me quite a shock to come down the stairs at work and find her sitting in a chair in front of me. It was great to see her and so we took the week off and showed her around. She fell in love with it all and one day she wants to live here.

Unfortunately, it put us back a week but we figured that we'd be able to catch up on it before opening the restaurant if we got stuck into the work and put in a few extra hours. We couldn't have been more wrong. A truck was supposed to come down from Eceabat on a regular monthly run and the driver was going to take our furniture back with him. After waiting another week with a promise of tomorrow, tomorrow, we finally had to hire a truck in Bodrum and pay a small fortune for transport. When the driver arrived we showed him what was to be moved before setting off and I lifted the mattress from the bed. We had bought the bed and mattress from the people who moved out of the flat when we moved in and we had never really paid any attention to it at all. Now, when I came to move it I found that they had put a full length polythene sheet between the mattress and the base of the bed and when I lifted the mattress we found that there was about two gallons of water laying on the polythene and the bottom of the mattress was rotten. It was all very embarrassing in front of the truck driver as it all ran onto the floor

We were to meet the truck at the other end of the ten hour journey to Eceabat but as we drove out of the field in which Raelene was parked, disaster struck. The van was heavily loaded and we struck a piece of ancient Greek stonework with the fuel tank and the diesel started to pour out. We didn't find out until we had traveled six or seven kilometres and gradually started to smell the diesel. There was no alternative but to head back to Bodrum. This was at six in the morning and so we drove straight to Helen & Malcolm’s place and got them out of bed.

It had only been six hours since we had said our goodbyes to them. They had cooked us a magnificent going away dinner and the last thing Malcolm had said to me was "remember, if there's anything you need...". Well now was the time to take the poor bugger at his word and he ran back & forth with different sized bits of wood and other objects, which he tried in vain to block up the hole with, while I sat there with my finger covering it. Eventually, with the aid of Methi, our solicitor, Malcolm located a guy who it was rumoured could do the job and we drove straight to his garage while we still had diesel left. At that hour of the morning the place was shut and we parked the van outside and went back to have breakfast. A couple of hours later we returned to the garage to see the proprietor who was looking a little disgruntled because his premises (shack with tin roof and earth floor) were downstream of the van. I didn't know that the van held so much diesel but now his floor was one soggy diesely mess and his inspection pit had two centimetres of diesel in it too.

He agreed to do the job which under the circumstances I thought was very generous because I'd have told me to piss off and never come back. It took hours and we eventually got away at three that afternoon. Something was telling us not to leave Bodrum, all the signs were there and we should have taken note of them. At three in the morning we arrived at the ferry crossing on the Asian side of the Dardanelles, we were only twenty five minutes away from our new home but the ferries had stopped running for the night and we slept in the van so that we would be able to catch the first ferry at five thirty am. At precisely five thirty am we were awakened not by our alarm clock but by the ferryboat's fog horn as it left the quay and us behind.

I struggled into some tracksuit pants and opened the door to look for a place to pee and was immediately accosted by a T shirt salesman. These guys sell Turkish imitation La Coste tops to the unsuspecting tourist but at five thirty in the morning I wasn't quite prepared for a broken German T shirt sales spiel and said "Oh piss off will you?" and he said "yes sir thank you very much". I found breakfast. It was called a "Bomba" and it consisted of a three or four inch lump of bread cut in half and a fried egg and some spicy herbs placed inside. This was then put into a funny looking contraption which toasted it and injected steam at the same time. With the use of the steam they can use yesterday’s bread and you can't tell the difference, anyway it was a good breakfast and one that I'd recommend as long as you don't look at the steaming/toasting machine which is always decidedly unhygienic in its appearance.

The ferries across the Dardanelles are first class, they hold a number of trucks, buses, cars, handcarts, donkey carts, goats, chickens, sheep and ladies with headscarves. We even saw a man with a big brown bear on a piece of string walk off one a few weeks later. You can buy coffee and tea on them and they are clean and warm in the winter and they have telephones on them from which you can call anywhere in the world if you have enough jetons. On the other side we watched Eceabat draw closer and I was just a little worried that Alicja would throw up on sight but she coped with it rather well and we drove off the ferry around to what was going to be the restaurant and as I got out of the car, the truck from Bodrum arrived. The driver had had troubles too and was late and had caught the same ferry as us.

I went around to get Huseyin & Jane out of bed and we unloaded everything at Huseyin's sisters house. Even at such an early hour all the neighbours turned out and stood around the back of the truck to see our belongings which although meager looked expensive to them. It's a peasant's village you see and even if they have money they don't go in for things like bookcases and 1951 model washing machines. They were all very impressed and some of the people actually came up and felt some of our things as they came off of the truck, that is until the decomposing mattress was unloaded. That seemed to set the seal of approval on it all, we seemed much more acceptable with a rotting mattress.

We all went around to the future restaurant where Jane & Huseyin had already knocked out a wall between the kitchen and a black hole and started some of the renovations. The restaurant is part of a hotel, originally the hotel restaurant but it didn't pay too well and since then it has seen a variety of tenants, the last one being a bank. There was a problem, several problems actually but the most immediate one was water coming through the ceiling which wasn't happening when we first inspected the place and there were two leaking radiators dripping water all over the floor. Huseyin had asked Rafet the owner to fix the problem on many occasions but nothing had been done. Drastic action was called for. I waited for Rafet to turn up in the morning and I pounced. It didn't occur to me that I couldn't speak Turkish and when I cornered him I then realised that I couldn't communicate so taking him by the arm I took him in to the premises and showed him the ceiling. He was most apologetic and said that he wasn't aware of the problem but a plumber would be around at nine the next morning.

I thought that Huseyin would be suitably impressed with the way I handled the big man but he didn't say anything. The next afternoon I cornered Rafet again, "Oh the plumber's busy, he'll be here today". He wasn't, so back to Rafet I went. I was experiencing what we now call the “Turkish Tomorrow”; the guys at the Australian Embassy call it TITS - (This Is Turkey Son). Rafet dragged it out for three weeks, he wasn't being difficult either, he was just behaving in the normal, accepted Turkish way. We wrote him letters got a solicitor onto him, ranted & raved at him, said nasty things about his parentage but no, it was all done the Turkish way - late, and you're not expected to get angry about it. You should just allow three times as long as your estimate for everything and sit back and drink tea until it happens.

Every morning we would paddle into the restaurant and sweep the water out of the door before cooking our breakfast and we carefully positioned the table so as not to get drips in the butter. We tried to shame Rafet at first by putting signs in the window "The New Eceabat Aquarium" in Turkish but to no avail. Next we put up a sign offering swimming lessons in the "New Eceabat Pool" and we drew a big level indicator on a piece of cardboard and we increased the level every day with a red texta but we had to curtail this activity when one afternoon a man knocked at the door and wanted to enrol his daughter for swimming lessons and was quite agitated at finding that it was all a joke. Rumours were rampant concerning what the shop was going to be and after three weeks we had to go and see the Mayor and tell him our real intentions because he'd sent a message to us indicating that we didn't have a license for an aquarium and he was concerned that we might want to import Piranhas or something.

Alicja and I couldn't find a flat to live in and we had to stay at Rafet's flea ridden hotel for five weeks. It was a dirty disgusting dive of a place. Within half a metre of our window was a chimney, under which was a wood fired boiler which provided the hot water and so ventilating the room was impossible. We didn't open the window for the whole five weeks and the air in there was foul. We tried to move the single beds together but underneath them was at least ten years worth of cigarette butts, toffee papers and other miscellaneous rubbish and the hotel didn't possess a vacuum cleaner. I tried to plug in our little electric heater but the socket fell out of the wall. We used our own blankets and sheets and we washed them out every week and hung them in the restaurant to dry because the hotel bedding was filthy. I must add here that Rafet wasn't charging us for the room.

There was a shower on our floor which was shared between three rooms and it too hadn't been cleaned for a number of years. We scrubbed it with disinfectant and used it for a week until I discovered that every time we showered, a wet patch appeared on our restaurant ceiling below. The drainage was the usual Turkish standard and took an hour or so for the water to drain away. We would go up to bed dog tired at one in the morning after a hard days work in the restaurant painting or plastering or whatever only to find that someone had just used the shower and we would have to wait for the water to drain away. Then one night Alicja was in the bathroom and out of the drain popped a big ball of pubic hair (Turks often shave themselves all over) which was obviously the cause of the drainage problem and had been there for a very long time.

We complained and from then on the staff let us use whatever room was free to shower in which was thoroughly decent of them but over the next couple of weeks we used every shower in the place and they were all the same. One night I was shaving when the plumbing from the wash basin fell on my feet. I looked underneath and saw that it had been held in place by a piece of string which had rotted through. Showering in the different rooms gave us a chance to look at the place and it was appalling. In the three luxury suites there were headboards on the beds made from polystyrene which had come from the cartons used for packing refrigerators and people had scratched big holes in them, spilt orange juice over them etc. and quite often there were half eaten meals on the bedside tables. The windows were caked with so many years of cigarette smoke that it was difficult to see through them.

We never saw the cheapest rooms because they didn't have showers and as we were westerners they thought that we should only see the best in the place. We lived out of a suitcase literally because the wardrobes were too foul to put our clothes in. Life does of course have its brighter moments but we didn't see any of them for a few weeks. While we were staying at Rafet's "Ece Hotel" Jane, Alicja and I drove to Greece in the van to buy Nescafe and bacon. Nescafe is about one third of the price in Greece and bacon in Turkey is of course hard to come by. We have a habit of visiting Greece on public holidays and we arrived in Alexandropoulis to find the majority of the shops shut but managed to get most of what we were looking for.

Upon arrival at the Turkish border however, I was told that they wouldn't let the van into the country because the German Zolle plates and registration were only valid for one entry into Turkey and only for fifteen days. Bullshit I said, I've been living in Bodrum for months and I've been out of the country twice to the Greek island of Cos and it’s never been a problem, "you can see from my passport that I'm telling the truth". They told me rather firmly that they couldn't care less what they did in Bodrum but here at Ipsala they did things right and the car must be locked up until I took it out of the country permanently or registered it in another country. Now I've done a lot of research on this subject and spoken to all the customs officials in Bodrum about it and I was sure that I was on firm ground when I told them that they didn't know the law and that I would get a solicitor onto it and they were going to have to pay me compensation and so on.

They didn't budge so I rang my solicitor who rang them and tore them off a strip, then he spoke to me and said that the customs people seemed fairly sure of what they were doing and that I should go along with them for the moment until he had enough time to check into the matter. After all a solicitor can't be an expert on every subject at the drop of a hat but he was almost sure that they were wrong because of the Bodrum customs people letting foreigners go to Greece and come back every three months.

I put the phone down and said "OK you win, what do I do now". By this time four or five hours had elapsed and I'd made the fatal mistake of being angry with them. If you ever come to Turkey bear in mind that you must never but never get angry with an official of any sort, you must exhibit infinite patience. Luckily they had changed shifts by then and a new crew were on duty and Alicja had calmed me down a little. They told me that the first crew were right in locking the van up but they didn't want the van at the border and I would have to take it to Canakkale and have it impounded there. I agreed at once because Canakkale is only a ferry ride away from the restaurant and I'd be able to visit the van, start the engine now and again and keep an eye on it. I also pointed out to them that the van was our home and that as we couldn't afford any other form of accommodation we would need to sleep in the customs pound.

They said that we would be able to sleep in it alright and we set off for Canakkale, accompanied by a customs official who came along to see that we didn't disappear. We had to pay 130,000 Turkish lira for this guy's bus fare back to Ipsala and for his board in Rafet's crumby hotel and on the way we had to wait while he went into a restaurant for his evening meal. When he came out I informed him that I needed diesel for the van and as he had my 130,000 lira I could proceed no further unless he gave me some of the money back. This wasn't in the rules and with no previous precedent being set for giving foreigners some of their money back he didn't know what to do. He took a long time to make up his mind but finally he realised that we were in the middle of nowhere and he couldn't leave us unguarded to go back to Ipsala to sort it out. He handed over the cash and I filled up with fuel.

This done, I told him that we had a change of plan and we were now going back through Ipsala and on to Greece, and, he couldn't stop us from leaving the country. My plan was to drive back into Greece and then enter Turkey through another border post and try my luck. Up until then he had been quite a nice person but now he turned really nasty and after talking to the girls I was persuaded to do the sensible thing and proceed to Canakkale. We arrived in Eceabat and I thought that we would have to get the ferry to Canakkale straight away but the customs official didn't want to, he wanted to drag it out and stay in a hotel for the night so we stopped at the restaurant which at the time looked more like a building site than anything else but in one corner we had the cooker and an old table and chairs. I invited the customs man to sit down and asked him if he'd like a cup of coffee or tea and he couldn't seem to adjust to the fact that although we had a few arguments in the last few hours, I was still prepared to be civil enough to offer him a drink - after all, it wasn't a personal thing.

He at first declined but a few minutes later said that he would have a cup of coffee but he would make it himself. our kettle which we bought in Austria is a standard western type kettle, not electric but the type that you put on the gas stove and it has a whistle on top just like the old fashioned things that everyone's parents used to use (that is if you're over forty). The customs man hadn't seen anything like this before and when the whistle went off it quite alarmed him and he momentarily panicked until I stood up and turned the gas off. I motioned to lift the kettle but he was still sulking and moved my hand aside to let me know that he was perfectly capable of making his own coffee without my help. But he wasn't.

He put the coffee and sugar in the cup and then proceeded to pour the water in the cup with the whistle still on the kettle and when it was slow to come out, he started to use it like a vinegar shaker. After about three minutes of shaking he had about half a cupful but then the whistle came off of the end and the resulting gush of boiling water knocked the cup over, filled the sugar dish and ruined all his paperwork which he'd left on the table. I didn't laugh, at least not outwardly but it was difficult not to. As for our new found friend, he said I'll see you at ten in the morning and went off to book into Rafet's hotel.

In the morning Huseyin, the customs man and I set off on the ferry to get the van impounded in the Canakkale customs pound. I had to pay the 20,000 lira fare for the van and I also had to pay for the Mustaffa's ticket which wasn't exactly fair considering that they had taken 130,000 lira from me for his transport & accommodation but TITS I thought. It took seven hours to sort things out in Canakkale what with long discussions, filling out numerous forms in quadruplicate and so on but in the end they came up with the answer - "you must take the car back to Ipsala and leave it there" they said. And do you know what? I smiled the whole time and even though I hated doing it, it's the only thing to do.

If I'd shown the slightest sign of irritation it wouldn't have gone half as well. As it was, they kindly offered to impound my car free of charge for up to four months (after which they would confiscate it) but if I'd caused trouble they could have charged me whatever they liked for the storage of the van. At the time of writing, it has been there for two months and I can't figure a way of getting it out without paying nearly five thousand American dollars. Yes, I know that you are all saying to yourselves "he can simply do this or do that" but believe me we're bloody experts on this now and it just isn't that simple.

My solicitor finally found that the customs department' sticking as they were to the strict letter of the law, were legally right in impounding the van. Bodrum is more relaxed, it's a tourist town and they get most of their revenue from tourism and therefore turn a blind eye to the comings and goings of foreigners in cars. The Bodrum customs department are prevailed upon by the town council and the tourism department to take it easy on foreigners because if foreigners start complaining to travel magazines, newspapers and so on, then Bodrum's tourist revenue could drop and they don't want that to happen, but at Ipsala they don't care about this sort of thing and they apply the law. I've spoken to a lot of truck drivers now (at the time of writing, the restaurant is open) and they all tell me that the customs people here are far worse than places like Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Enough about the van and the customs people, our problems were now about to start. Two weeks later we had a telegram from Poland to say that Alicja's Mum was very ill and in hospital. She had to leave straight away and fly to Warsaw and it was quite a blow to us because it was just at a time when we needed her skills and her level headed approach to problems. None of us had realised just how valuable her input was until she had gone, I was completely lost and didn't cope at all well with the day to day irritations which Turkey presents a foreigner with when trying to establish a business.

Things now become a little jumbled and disjointed because I can't remember what happened at what time, all we did was to set up a small time hamburger bar come pub which could have been done inside six weeks in Australia but here it has been going on for nearly six months and it's still not finished as far as all the legal work is concerned. One night while Alicja was away, we sat down and went through a list of 58 items which we had either purchased or had custom made for us by carpenters, welders etc and we could count only three which had been right first time.

It was about this time that I finally moved into an apartment. It took something like two months to find a landlord who would rent anything to us. We found out later that this was the first time that a foreigner had come to live in Eceabat and everyone was wary of us. There is a German couple here living three doors down from us but the husband's father used to employ people from Eceabat in his factory in Germany and Martin, the son, already knew the locals through frequent trips here for years before he settled here so everyone was familiar with him but with us it was different.

There were lots of empty houses and flats in the village but nobody would rent one to us. Every day Huseyin would go out looking for a place for us but returned each time with the stock answer that "they don't want to rent to strange people". In the end he found us a reasonably good flat by Eceabat standards and it is owned by a fisherman who is shunned by most of the villagers. The reason for this is that he is blind in one eye and a couple of years ago he killed a child when he was driving his car. He shouldn't have had a license to start with but that's easy in Turkey - all you do is bribe the policeman. His penalty for killing the child was I think, two weeks in jail and now he is driving around, still with his license.

One day I was standing outside the restaurant with Huseyin and two local policemen when a man on a motor bike went wobbling up the road, clearly very drunk. The policemen thought this was a great laugh and they were imitating him by swaying from side to side. I said to Huseyin that this was to me a very strange state of affairs and he said that this guy is permanently pissed and goes up the street like this every day and the police always laugh about it. I said "what if you had a child and he ran over it and killed it". Huseyin said "then I kill him". This is the general way that Turks think, they wouldn't think of locking the guy up so that he couldn't run anyone over.

Back to the flat. Jane & Huseyin were staying at his parents place in cramped conditions and so they moved in with me and I was glad of the company. We were told that the flat was ready but the electricity would be turned on the next day so if we cared to move in, we could use an extension lead from the landlord Emin's place downstairs. We quickly rigged this up and spent the night sleeping in relative comfort after what seemed like ages. The next night we came home but the electric situation was exactly the same. This went on with various excuses for over a month.

The electricity inspector had looked at the place and said that although it was a new flat, the electrics were all wrong and needed some more work before the flat would meet the required standard. The inspector had up until two months before, been the local police commissioner and had held that post for fifteen years, he knew bugger all about electricity but told the landlord that for a price, he would do it himself. I made a few enquiries about the inspector and found that he'd had no experience whatsoever with wiring houses, it hadn't ever been his hobby or anything, but if he did the job then the landlord would have no trouble in getting the required certificate to say all was electrically safe.

As I said, it took over a month and the guy worked every day on it, I don't know what happened to his regular inspecting work. He had no tools at all and used whatever was hanging around the house like kitchen knives and scissors and Sellotape instead of insulation tape. He dug holes in the walls with my screwdrivers and then using our bread knife, mixed plaster on our kitchen table to fill them back in again. Some days we would come home and find that a power point that worked yesterday, worked no longer and we would have to tell the landlord who didn't want to upset the bloke. On other days we could have two lights on but switching on a third caused a blackout. I had a very close call one night when the lights went out though. I just happened to have a plastic handled knife in my hand when we had a blackout and I went to the fuse box to have a look. The fuse box/meter box is made of metal with a metal door and I just touched the door with the knife. The lights came on again.

I realised at once that there was a serious problem so I went and got a plastic handled screwdriver and carefully opened the metal door. There were two bare wires inside touching the unpainted meter box door which was acting as a piece of wire itself and completing the circuit that was giving us light. If I'd touched it with my bare hands I doubt if I'd still be alive because I was standing in water at the time because it had been raining and our roof leaks. Finally I gave up complaining and said he could leave it as it was but even now some of the power points don't work and others will only power light bulbs but nothing else.

I spoke to the electrician who was wiring our restaurant at the time and he told me that this is the general standard here, that people in villages aren't used to electricity yet although its been here a long time and every year there are lots of accidents through peoples ignorance of what electricity can do to them if it isn't handled in the right way. He is the only decent tradesman I've so far come across here and even he told me that he's had no formal training at all and has picked up all his knowledge from books. Now he has a license to do just about anything electrical in the village and he's never had to take an examination.

When we bought an electric chip cooker and plugged it in, we all received a hefty electric shock from it so we sent for Ciad the electrician and he told us that the hotel (which we are a part of) wasn't earthed at all and that he would have to bury a big metal plate under the ground and earth the hotel to it before he could guarantee that we would receive no further shocks, he also added that well over 80% of the houses in Eceabat are not earthed or at least, not by design.

Four or five paragraphs ago I wrote "back to the flat" didn't I? - Sorry. Apart from the lack of electricity there was another reason why there was a delay in our moving in and that was that there was no outside access to the place. They had built this upstairs flat with a door but had neglected to build steps up to the door and as it's an upstairs flat, well, TITS. Eventually a builder was found who quoted the right price and the concrete steps were built but I'm sure that a handrail will never turn up, it isn't considered important. When Turks paint walls they seldom put any covering on the floor to catch the spilled paint and when Turks paint, there's a lot of it. I've seen it time and again, the floor has to be cleaned anyway so why bother. Unless I take a wire brush to the tiles which cover the entire floor area it will be some months before the paint will wear off of them.

OK so the standard is low but we're not in Australia and we can't expect the same standard can we?. But think of this - in the bathroom there are two washing machine taps but they're both connected to the cold water and there's no power point to plug a machine into anyway. There's also a hole for a flue in one of the bathroom walls. This is so that your wood hot water heater can get rid of its smoke and exhaust gasses. That's OK I suppose but we asked politely if Emin would mind if we put an electric hot water heater in. He wasn't sure if the electricity authorities would approve such a thing so we settled for a bottled gas one. When we came to install the thing however, we found that the water connections were at a higher level than the flue hole and the hot exhaust gasses were forced to go down instead of up. It would have been worse still with the wood fired heater because it's a lot taller than a gas one. There are lots of other things wrong with the bathroom but TITS.

The kitchen, lounge room and one of the bedrooms have round holes in the walls which are covered with metal inserts. These are the entrances to the chimneys and you are supposed to install your wood burning stove and run the flue into one of these holes. The problem is that these chimneys are also used by the people downstairs and when they decide to light their heater, cooker or water heater, the smoke belches out into our lounge room too and we have a big brown stain down the lounge room wall because every time it rains, it dissolves the soot in the chimney and it runs out of these holes in the wall. The chimneys don't have a bend in them you see, so the rain runs straight in.

When we moved in, I opened the door to the hall and was confronted with another door only six centimetres in front of me. I don't know what went through the mind of the carpenter when he was doing the job but in my book he rates as a non thinking bloody idiot. Who needs two doors six centimetres apart? It was like indoor double glazing. The whole place is like this but I shouldn't complain because as Jane pointed out yesterday we have the best flat in Eceabat.

I must tell you a little story which I am absolutely sure is true but in this day and age seems unbelievable. There is a guy here of about thirty years of age and he has a nickname which equates to "he who has had carnal knowledge of a dog". I thought this was a bit of an insult and I asked why people should call him such a thing, especially to his face as they do. It came about a little over two years ago. The guy had managed to get himself laid by a tourist and he caught some kind of venereal disease and so he went to the doctor who advised him to have sexual intercourse with a dog. One night his friends all helped him find a dog and stood around in a circle with their backs to him so that nobody could see him perform the act but alas he couldn't get it up. They let the dog go and a few minutes later he found that the dog wasn't a bad sort after all and his wedding tackle was working OK and they had to chase the poor animal through the streets until they found it again.

The peculiar thing is that there's no shame attached to this episode at all, in fact a Turkish friend of mine who lives in Bodrum and came up here over the ANZAC week and is well traveled in Turkey told me that the belief that sex with an animal is the best cure for venereal diseases is not unusual in out of the way Turkish villages. Anyway this guy is now called dog fucker to his face and he doesn't mind in the slightest. I enquired as to whether his problem was cured by his canine friend and the reply was a shrug of the shoulders and "well, he's alright now".

I don't suppose that all of you are familiar with Ramazan, it's a religious month of observance during which Muslims do not smoke, eat or drink between the hours of sunrise and sunset. A lot of people lose weight over this period of semi fasting and I would think that it probably does them the world of good. When were renovating the premises, the two chefs would cook us a lovely Turkish meal and we would sit at the tables and eat it but these two guys would sit in the kitchen and eat by themselves. I kept on at them, telling them that there was no distinction between bosses and workers in this company and that they should come and sit with us. They made excuses every day that they were more comfortable sitting in the kitchen on top of the gas bottles and so on until one day at breakfast when there was only myself and Mehmet present and I told him that I felt uncomfortable sitting at the table while he sat in the kitchen,

It was then that he explained to me "there are 4,000 people in this village and 3,500 of them observe ramazan and if they see me eating, I'll be very unpopular". I apologised for being so ignorant - what a twit. It was around about then, when Huseyin & Jane were staying with me that I had this terrible dream. There was all this banging going on in my head and it reminded me of the noise that I had heard when I was under a gas anaesthetic as a kid while having a tooth extracted. It went on for a long time and I woke up. The noise was still going on though and I gradually realised that it was three o'clock in the morning and there was some idiot somewhere beating the shit out of a drum.

I was disorientated and I got up and looked out of the window and to my complete wonderment there was this guy right outside the window staring up into the air and banging for all he was worth on one of those big drums like the man who dresses in a bearskin uses in Scottish military parade bands. I shouted to him to stop the racket but he couldn't hear me and after a while he wandered off down the street still drumming. In the morning I said to Huseyin "did you hear that nutcase outside the window last night, he was wandering around beating a drum". "Oh yes, he replied, that's to wake everyone up before sunrise so that they can have breakfast". A couple of days later he came around again in broad daylight giving a repeat performance, this was so that everyone could rush out and pay him for waking them up. I'd willingly have paid him double to stay away from our street because he came every second night.

It became obvious after a while that Eceabat was part of the real Turkey and Bodrum wasn't. Bodrum is a tourist town and the people and the officials are used to foreigners. In Eceabat, no foreigner had ever tried to start a business before let alone a foreigner with a bona fide tourist company. They didn't understand the law as it applies to tourist companies and I didn't understand that designated tourist towns have a different set of rules in Turkey to non tourist towns.

We had visited the mayor and the police commissioner of the town when we were first considering renting the premises because we wanted to make sure that we would be able to obtain an alcohol license. They had both told us that alcohol was out of the question because the premises were within 100 metres of the new mosque which was still under construction but with a little further discussion the Mayor had said "that is unless you have a tourist company, then you can sell alcohol right under a mosque". "OK" we said "we'll form a tourist company". "OK" said the Mayor and the police commissioner, "we'll give you a license as soon as you show us that you have a tourist company".

Two months later we arrived with the required papers and they told us that we couldn't sell alcohol. We asked them why but all they could do was say that it wasn't up to them, the decision was up to the Kaymakam who is the politically appointed governor of the district and a very important man. We went to see him but he said that the decision wasn't up to him but an alcohol license was definitely not on and that he could only give us one if a minister from Ankara informed him in writing that he should give us permission. "Anyway'" he said "people have tried to get an alcohol license for that place before and one of them was very well connected and he got the minister to phone me and instruct me to give the necessary permission but he wouldn't put it in writing so I couldn't do it because if anything went wrong, I could get my arse kicked instead of the minister".

This political football went on for weeks and at one stage I had managed to get the man above the Kaymakam to recommend to him that he fix us up with a licence. We were summoned to the Kaymakam's office and told in no uncertain terms that he couldn't make an exception for us. We pointed out that it was different in our case because we had a legally registered tourism company and that our restaurant was going to be on Australian television and in international newspapers and what would people from other countries think of this pub with no beer? It was all futile; the guy just didn't understand that his town was going to be the international centre of attraction for three days on the 75th anniversary of ANZAC day.

He added as we were on the way out though that he had a friend in Ankara who would be able to grant us a license for a bribe - the bastard was after money and there was no friend in Ankara at all. I discussed it with Huseyin but he didn't know how to go about taking up the offer and we gave up on it. I think that the Kaymakam must have come under a little pressure from the man above him a few days later because he came in and told us that he would be visiting us the next morning to present us with the long awaited license.

Nothing happened and so the next day we contacted him an he told us that he had driven by our premises and had seen a foreigner sitting outside at one of our tables drinking beer and that meant that we were already selling it and so we wouldn't be getting a license and if we didn't stop the practice straight away, the police would shut us down. It was a lie, or if it wasn't, we had certainly never sold the guy a beer and we invited the Kaymakam to inspect the restaurant so that he could see for himself that we didn't have any alcohol whatsoever in the place. He replied that by the time he arrived, we would have hidden all the beer. He was just hanging out for his bribe.

Eventually, after we had been open for a week with literally hundreds of beer swilling Aussies walking in and asking why THE BOB HAWKE PUB didn't sell beer, a journalist arrived and said that he wanted to do a story on us.

I said that I had a rather good story and related to him all the problems we were having. The story appeared in the paper the next morning and we were given a licence straight away, the police commissioner rang and told us to come and collect it. We were very busy that morning and didn't have time to go and pick it up apart from the fact that we couldn't get any beer delivered until the next day so there was no hurry. Half an hour later the police commissioner rang back and pleaded with us to come and pick up our license because he'd be in trouble if we didn't. I'm sorry to say that this is what Turkey is like. While all this wrangling was going on, there were other shops selling beer right next to and under the bloody mosque. Every step of the way we had been refused a license on religious grounds so whether or not they changed the religion I don't know.

Had the door of the new mosque been on the far side of the building we would have been outside the 100 metre limit and have qualified for an alcohol license immediately. I pointed out to all the bureaucratic twits who mattered in the place that in other towns in Turkey beer wines and spirits were sold within 20 metres of mosques and it didn't seem to bother anyone and I quoted instances and offered to follow it up with photographs but the stock answer to this and other attempts was "that's OK in a tourist town but not in Eceabat".

One night we sat down and talked about all this and Huseyin said "the mosque is no good anyway and it can't really be used as a mosque". I asked why and he said "because my friend fuck one tourist in there and it says in the Koran that once a thing like this happens, it can't be used anymore". I asked what happened to his friend and was told that the police beat him up very badly for his misdeed.

They didn't like the idea of a foreigner being in town from the outset really, and put all the obstacles in our way that they possibly could. We bought a roll of plastic grass like they put down on indoor tennis courts. We'd seen it on the pavements in plenty of other places in Turkey and thought it would brighten the place up a bit but the Mayor thought differently and told us that "we could under no circumstances put it out on the pavement in this town". They limited us to a maximum of three outside tables in spite of the fact that everybody else had four or six. There were literally twenty or more incidents similar to this and I must admit that it tried our patience a little and we became ratty with each other.

They wouldn't let us use water from a hose to clean the pavement despite the fact that every other shop in town uses this method to clean the council’s pavement. One day a council worker came along and painted the kerbstones white. He did it with a floor brush and it was a pretty scruffy job so I went out with a paint brush to tidy it up but the police came along and stopped me because they said that it would make the Mayor angry.

By law we had to purchase a cash register but in Turkey it's not that easy. As we formed the company hundreds of kilometres away in Bodrum, the cash register had to be purchased in Bodrum and the tax department had to play with it for a day to see that it hadn't been doctored because here, the cash register is a legal thing. Every hour while it's switched on, it computes a total of the tax you have to pay at the end of the month and once the tax department is happy with the way it performs it has to be sealed so that you can't fiddle it. Then it has to be taken to a notary and he writes something or the other about it and officially stamps it as being ready for use.

After all this crap it had to come back from Bodrum and the local tax department in Canakkale started the process all over again. All the company books which deal with the day’s takings etc. have to be taken to the notary and he stamps every single page of them. A person from the tax department comes around every day and they just order a cup of coffee and sit in the place to observe how much business you are doing and whether you are putting it through the register. He sits there for an hour or more and it's not always the same guy so that you can't get used to him and know who he is and bribe him. These guys note the time and how much money you took so that they can compare it with the cash register roll later on and see if you are lying about your takings. If they consider that you've made a false declaration, they don't fine you but instead they shut you down for a few days.

One morning I was approached by Tancur, one of the hotel workers, and he asked if I would teach him English and I readily agreed because he was a nice guy and I got on well with him. During the course of the day other people got to hear about it and I ended up with something like twenty people all wanting to learn. Three of them explained that they were illiterate and only wanted conversational English - no books. All they wanted was to be able to communicate with tourists so that it would make it easier to sell T shirts, pottery etc.

I thought it was a great idea, they'd learn English, I'd get to learn Turkish from it and perhaps from this I would get to meet more people and perhaps they would all stop looking at me sideways when I walked down the street. I said that although we wouldn't bother with books we would need a room with a blackboard because my Turkish is practically non existent and when stuck for a word, I could draw a diagram. No problem they all assured me. School finishes next week and the Kaymakam will let us have one of the school rooms.

The Kaymakam came in for his regular free cup of coffee an hour later and through Huseyin I told him about all these guys wanting to learn English. "No they don't" he said. "They are all having a joke with you". I persisted although I could see that Huseyin as my interpreter was looking a little uncomfortable. "Listen to me" said the big chief. There's a free government English course over in Canakkale and they can all go over and attend it if they're so keen to learn English.

I asked Huseyin to explain that some of these guys were illiterate in Turkish and couldn't handle the book work. "Then they can attend a free literacy class, they don't need you" he said. Huseyin then said to me that he thought it wise not to push things any further because the Kaymakam is not the person to fall out with, "he can cause no end of trouble if he has it in for you".

On another occasion I was taking photographs of the guys across the road from us who sell food from street barrows to the tourists who are queuing up to get on the ferry boat. The Kaymakam turned up again for his free coffee and said something to Huseyin. Huseyin approached me and told me that the Kaymakam would like to look through the view-finder of my camera so I handed it over. The next question was "how much did it cost". I told him that with that particular telephoto lens, the whole thing would have been something like seven hundred dollars. He handed it back to me and said to Huseyin that he wasn't stupid, I shouldn't lie to him like that and for seven hundred dollars it was possible to buy a much, much bigger camera. This was the sort of mentality which prevailed in Eceabat and this was the top man talking.

About two weeks before we opened and were trying to find our way through this bureaucratic minefield, both of our partners came to me independently and said that they were having problems with each other and didn't want to get married anymore so I took on the role of marriage guidance counselor and was quite successful at it for a while but I don't know how long my advice will be effective for. We had already tried to make as much mileage out of their wedding as possible with the press because a Turk marrying an Aussie on the 75th anniversary of ANZAC day was quite a thing and the press loved it.

Unfortunately it was during this period that Alicja's mother died in Poland, if I wasn't depressed already, this was the end and I was ready to lock the doors and just run away from Turkey altogether. Alicja and I hadn't seen each other for about three weeks at this stage and I was very worried about her and couldn't always get a phone connection between Turkey and Poland. Alicja went through a tough time trying to get her mother buried, there being no available cemetery space left in Warsaw and all in all it was one of the lowest and loneliest points in both of our lives. Throughout this period I had only one person to talk to who understood exactly what was going on and what I was trying to achieve and he was in Bodrum. It was our English speaking solicitor, Methi. This guy is extremely clever and I owe him a big debt of gratitude. Practically every day I'd ring him with a problem and he'd sort it out.

On the day when our partners had told me that they wanted to call the marriage off I sent them home to my flat with a bottle of whisky and told them to talk things over. This left me alone in a half completed restaurant in a Turkish village where the authorities were hostile to me and I didn't have a single soul with whom I could communicate. I considered my position. What if my partners decided to break off their relationship and go their own separate ways? I'd already overheard Jane on the phone asking about the price of a one way ticket to Australia. I went out and bought myself a bottle of raki and drunk the lot. I was a babbling idiot an hour later when I rang Methi and the next day I felt terrible at having rang him whilst I was in that state.

Isn't this letter just the most depressing thing you've ever read?

We finally opened on 20th April, five days before ANZAC day after Huseyin had chased around a million government departments getting rubber stamps on pieces of paper and it was a great success. We were full to overflowing for ten days and made a lot of money. Huseyin appeared live on Adelaide radio, we were on TV in England and Australia and in newspapers and magazines in three countries. The whole of Eceabat stood still for us, none of the restaurants had any business at all worth speaking of and there were people outside our place sitting all over the pavement and so far out into the road that the police had to move them to get the traffic through.

The 26th of April was fun at last. That was the day of the great sewerage flood. Yes folks, it ain't all over yet. It was about five in the evening when a truck pulled up outside and connected up to the sewerage system of the hotel next door. We share a common drainage system with the hotel and this truck had arrived to pump out the septic tank underneath the ground. The truck was already half full of effluent from some place else when the driver connected the suction hose to the delivery end of the pump. It was the day after ANZAC day and the second busiest day of the year for us and Eceabat.

He started the pump and blew shit, tampons, condoms and assorted other nasties out of our toilets so hard that it hit the roof, it also came out of our kitchen sinks. The restaurant was full at the time when this wall of water came flowing through the place and the first I knew of it was when all the ladies started screaming and running out. The doorway proved to be inadequate to cope with this volume of traffic and so some people with shit all over their shoes ran back into the place and leapt up on the chairs and tables. I don't know how close you've ever come to a nervous breakdown but for me the time was fast approaching. I just burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter like a bloody maniac.

We all grabbed mops and tea towels on sticks and things and started trying to push this stuff out of the door amidst both cheers and screams from the onlookers and all these people had their video cameras running and there were flashes going off as they all took photographs. It was then, as I was pushing a load out of the door, that a guy I'd seen in town on a couple of occasions previously, came up to me and said "Oh Peter I'm from the Australian embassy and this is Fred Smith (I forget the name) from the Melbourne Age newspaper who'd like to do an article on the business". "Sorry Fred" I said "I'm in the shit at the moment, can you come back a little later?" "Yes" said Fred "no problems at all". He never showed up again though.

Throughout this whole episode there were four Aussie soldiers sitting calmly discussing football in one corner. Everyone else had fled in panic leaving behind cameras, handbags and so forth but these guys just sat here with shit floating around their boots as if it happened to them every day. I paddled over to them and said "sorry about all this boys" and one of them looked up and quietly said "no worries, we said we were going out for a night on the piss anyhow".

It sure was a quick way to clear the place out though, better than shouting fire or anything - trouble was that they didn't come back again.

The one bright spot during this period was Mehmet. Mehmet turned up looking for a job one day and I didn't want to take him on because he didn't speak one word of English. Huseyin however assured me that he was a hard worker and that he would learn English quickly. I wasn't convinced but as we desperately needed someone and the rest of Eceabat, though mostly unemployed, didn't want to work for us, I agreed. He was twenty three years of age with red hair and an awful looking Ghengis Khan moustache which I insisted that he shave off before starting with us and he was so short that he could hardly see over the bar. Mehmet had been the proud owner of the moustache for two years but said "you're the boss, is there anything else that you don't like about me?" "Yes" I said," your fingernails". "What's wrong with them" he said. "They're bloody filthy, that's what's wrong with them" I replied. "OK you're the boss" he repeated.

The next day he turned up for his first days work with cuts all over his upper lip and fingernails which he or some member of his family had bitten down to the quick. But he was all smiles and that was a big change for me - people in Eceabat don't smile a hell of a lot. I immediately set about teaching him English and he immediately set about learning with the result that within two weeks he was serving behind the bar and doing a very good job of it too. On the third day he looked at me for a few seconds and went away. I watched him, he was looking at a piece of paper. He returned and boldly stated "Mr Peter, I love you". It just broke me up and made me laugh the whole day.

Shortly after he started, he was sweeping the floor and I showed him the vacuum cleaner and explained that I would like him to use it instead because of the dust that he was causing with the brush. He looked at it and said that he could manage OK with the brush but thanked me for thinking of him. I couldn't get the message through so I waited for Huseyin who told him that I didn't want him to use the brush but he also told me that he doubted that Mehmet had actually seen a vacuum cleaner before except maybe in a shop window and that he didn't know of the existence of a vacuum cleaner in any home in Eceabat.

The next day I produced the vacuum cleaner from the cupboard and used it for a few minutes and invited Mehmet to have a go at it. He was clearly scared of it but got used to the idea and then there was no stopping him. I told him that he could use the brush outside on the pavement but no, he wanted to do the pavement with it as well. I didn't object and pretty soon Mehmet was out there acting like some sort of professor of electronics explaining the workings of it to all his friends.

He wasn't used to it completely though and I watched him at breakfast in the morning as he carefully swept up three piles of dust with the broom and then sucked them up with the vac'. Some time later he came to me and told me that the vacuum cleaner was all finished and kaput and we'd have to get another one. On investigation I found that the bag was full, I hadn't told him about the bag. I asked him to follow me and we went across the other side of the road to the big council rubbish bin and I showed him the bag and showed him how to empty it. He was very impressed.

That was on the Thursday. On the following Sunday, he got a piece of paper stuck in the hose, immediately thought to himself that the bag was full and opened it up in the middle of the restaurant and with bag in hand set off for the rubbish bin. He tripped over one of the chair legs and fell headlong on the floor, covering two breakfast customers in clouds of dust. He stood up with his face, hair and eyebrows covered in dust and said to the elderly German couple "It's my pleasure, don't mention it".

First I had to explain that we were teaching Mehmet English and he didn't really mean that it was his pleasure to fill their coffee cups with vacuum cleaner dust, then I had to explain to Mehmet that his choice of English phrases was incorrect and then get him to cook these people two new breakfasts. He was very upset that I was displeased with him and insisted that he should vacuum the customers clothes off but they'd had enough and left with their new breakfasts only half eaten.

Mehmet is now the expert on the vacuum cleaner and uses it for everything, we don't have a speck of dust in the place at any time, he's read and re read the instruction manual, discussed it at length with the village electrician and is a dab hand at plucking flies off the wall with it. He's used the warm exhaust from it to re shape plastic plumbing fixtures for the toilets and to freshen the previous days bread rolls on one occasion when the baker delivered late. This last application for a vacuum cleaner was ingenious. We were in at six in the morning and the bread was late. "No problems he assured me" and took a polythene bag and half a dozen rolls which he had sprinkled with water. He then made a few holes for the air to escape and put the vacuum cleaner exhaust into it. In five minutes the rolls were as fresh as they had been when they were delivered the previous day.

I borrowed an electric drill from Martin our German neighbour and it came complete with a very smart looking box of thirty drill bits of all types, metal, masonry and wood drills. I didn't think to ask Mehmet if he'd ever used an electric drill before and I gave him a number of little jobs to do with it and he was pleased that I had the confidence in him to trust him with the drill. My confidence was misplaced however.

To hang a mirror in the ladies toilet he had used one of Martin's wood drills to drill into the masonry. Not only that but he had the drill running in reverse for ten minutes or so and it melted the end of the drill bit. I looked at all the other drills and eight or nine of them were completely ruined. I returned them to Martin a week later after trying in vain to replace them and offered to buy him a new set if he could get them sent over from Germany. Martin was very understanding, said that he'd lived in Eceabat for a while now and wasn't surprised in the least. Mehmet isn't silly, to the contrary he is bright; he just hasn't been exposed to things like this before.

I don't think that he's ever had a girlfriend and in that regard isn't at all unusual in this area where arranged marriages still go on. Turkey is still full of thirty to forty year old virgins and most of them haven't so much as held hands with a girl. One day our other worker Bayram, who is far from virginal was going up to Istanbul to meet a girl and he arranged to take Mehmet with him on a blind date to meet this 16 year old schoolgirl. He instantly fell in love and has been moping around now for weeks. It seems that this girl has been promised to another and she prefers our Mehmet. She told him over the phone that if she has to marry this guy she will kill herself and now he's a permanent wreck through worrying about the situation.

Bayram is a different sort of guy altogether and has hung around Eceabat for years trying to get foreign girls to fall in love with him so that he can get a passport out of Turkey. He's not well liked in the village because of this and his general western ways but he doesn't care a damn what others think of him. He's very handsome and absolutely charming and polite but one of the vainest people I've yet come across and goes to body building because he thinks that all western girls are hooked on men's bodies. He keeps telling me that once he gets to Australia and walks around the beach, all the girls will fall in love with him.

He's not without disasters either but he speaks good English and works like a Trojan, he might even be one - Troy is only 30 minutes up the road. When he first started I asked him to paint the walls on the outside of the restaurant and gave him a roller and all the necessary equipment. He said that he understood the writing on the outside of the can about diluting it with water but he didn't understand at all and diluted it to the whitewash consistency that Turks use to paint their houses.

It was about as runny as milk. He dipped the roller in it and ran it up the wall. Of course as the roller spun around it splattered him with white paint and he panicked. He wanted to ask me what to do and he forgot to put the roller down first. He came charging through the restaurant with roller in hand dripping paint all over the floor and then realised what he'd done and hesitated in the middle, he then made up his mind to carry on into the kitchen and made a run for the sink but when he got there it was full of dishes so he spun around twice and ran back out again. He looked just like Manuel out of Fawlty Towers and I couldn't help laughing although we spent at least an hour cleaning the floor afterwards.

On another occasion I did an unusual thing, I had a hamburger for lunch. It was revolting. I looked into it and found that instead of lettuce they were using endive. They didn't know the difference, I asked how long they had been using it and they told me a week.

I went around to the butchers with Alicja to get a kilo of minced beef one afternoon. She wouldn't tell me why she wanted me to come but she'd been asking me for a long time so off we went. I couldn't help laughing; he must have been a lousy shot with the meat axe because the poor man didn't have any fingers at all on his right hand. He cut a lump of meat off of the side of a cow with one hand and one elbow and placed it in the mincer. He then proceeded to use the stump of his right hand as a ramrod to push the meat into the mincer and every time he pulled it out of the machine it looked as though it had only just swallowed up his fingers especially when he put it through the second time and the stump came out covered in blood. I could just imagine it happening at Safeways meat counter in Melbourne.

I can just see him applying for the job.

Hasan. The advert didn't say anything about having two hands

Personnel Manager. Well we er um didn't expect any unidexters to apply

Hasan. I've been a butcher for twenty five years; I can do the job as well as anyone

Personnel Manager. Well,- we did really want someone, shall we say a little more ambidextrous. But rest assured that if no two handed butchers apply I can safely say that you've got yourself a job.

One evening as the muezzin called the faithful to prayer I suddenly thought to myself that I'd go to the service because the troublesome mosque had been completed in time for the ANZAC day celebrations. It was a beautiful building inside and the service was interesting and attended by six old men. Afterwards they all came up and spoke to me and were friendly. They didn't realise that I was the person who had caused such a stink over the alcohol license and I asked them a few questions. I asked why the rosary type beads which they all carried and fondled so lovingly during the service came in groups of thirty three. I thought that like freemasonry, there was one for every year of Christs life. (Your actual Jesus figures quite prominently in the Koran) None of them had a clue.

I'd been reading the Koran and I asked them all some quite elementary questions which I already knew the answers to but they were all struck dumb, they didn't know anything at all about their religion. I'm a bloody atheist and I knew more about it than the whole lot of them put together. I asked what was the normal attendance of these services and they said that these days there were only ten regulars, all advanced in years, and the young people these days were no longer interested in religion. I said that I supposed that most people still used the old mosque but was told that no they were the crowd from the old mosque and that they had all recently moved here to worship.

So all this trouble over the alcohol license had been to satisfy this handful of geriatric old religious farts who already had a perfectly good mosque to start with and knew bugger all about their religion anyway. TITS.

That's enough for now but I can tell you that our experiences in Eceabat over a three month period would fill a few books.


Bye for now


Alicja & Peter

Letter 24

Dear Clare, Sarah and all

Great news!

We've got our van back, at least for a while. An old friend came to the rescue and registered Raelene for us in Zambia, at least we like to think that it's registered but we don't know whether the papers are forgeries or not. He posted the papers to us along with the registration plates and we went up to the border at Ipsala to collect the car. It was essential that we leave the country on the same plates we entered on so we arrived at the customs with our new plates carefully hidden in our suitcases. We took lots of luggage to make it appear that we were leaving Turkey for a long time and allay suspicion that we might be returning the same day through another border post. They told us that we couldn't bring the car back in again for another six months because it had already been in the country for six months and that was all that was allowed in one calendar year. I wanted to point out that for two of those months, the car had been in the customs pound and therefore wasn't technically in the country but I'm sure that it would have caused a lot of hassle and I didn't want any of the customs officers to remember me so I just kept quiet.

I was surprised to find that the engine started straight away, a branch from a tree had fallen on the roof and made a dent in it but I wasn't particularly worried about that and I drove it out of the pound. It was covered in dust and dirt and Alicja asked if they had a brush but they insisted on washing it for us. This was so that we'd give them a tip of course but we didn't mind and gave them 20,000 lira to keep them happy. They asked me to drive over to the customs point but being nervous as we were, I struck the kerb and burst a tyre. They insisted on putting the spare on for us and we paid another 20,000 lira. Then at the customs point, a conversation took place between the director and the manager and although we couldn't understand all of it, we could tell that the manager wanted to charge us for the storage of the vehicle.

The director who I thought was a thoroughly good chap, was adamant that we shouldn't pay anything and he got his way. The paperwork took a further hour and we were all ready to go, all legally signed and everything. I asked for my passport back and they told me to go and see the director. We went over to him and said that we were now ready to go and please could we have my passport. "Yes" he said and asked us both to get into the van and drive over to this little sentry box affair. It was only 20 metres away and I said that we could walk but he insisted that we drive so the three of us got into the van whereupon he asked us blatantly for a bribe. This divested us of a further 50,000 lira which again we were more than happy to pay just to get out of the place. He wished us a pleasant trip and got out of the car. We headed across the border to Greece to confront the next round of problems. As you enter Greece they stamp your car details in your passport so that they can see that you have left the country with the vehicle and haven't sold it. We had then planned to drive North into Bulgaria where they don't take your car details and there we would swap number plates and enter Turkey again on my British passport. We couldn't go back legally on an Aussie passport with the same van for six months.

Surprise surprise, the Greeks forgot to enter the car in my passport. We wouldn't have to go to Bulgaria now and we could find another Greece/Turkey border crossing and go back into Turkey. The only small snag we could see was that I had entered Greece on my Australian passport and wanted to exit Greece on my British passport. This was essential to the plan because upon going back to Turkey, we couldn't let them see that we had only been out of the country for one day. One day isn't long enough to drive to Zambia and register a car and it isn't long enough either for us to have sold a car and come back with another one.

I suppose that I should admit here my geographical ignorance and tell you that I haven't a bloody clue where Zambia is but I think it’s just up the page a bit from South Africa and slightly to the left. One thing I was willing to bet on at the time though, was that most of the border guards in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey would be hard pressed to say which continent it was on. We drove around until we found a secluded spot, swapped number plates and then hid my Aussie passport. Then we drove straight to a small border crossing in an attempt to get back into Turkey before the Ipsala customs people would have had a chance to enter my name on the computer because we had heard that the computer information is shared between all the Turkish customs points which border Greece.

We had to alter our Zambian registration papers which showed the same engine numbers etc as the one previous time that the car was entered in my British passport and we bought a Green Card with our new plate number on it. So far so good. We arrived at the Greek side only to find that this small border only opens for two hours a day between nine and eleven in the morning so we went for a drive for the rest of the day and arrived back there at 9:30 pm to spend the night in the van at the customs post. I got friendly with the caretaker who also performs some official function from 9 to 11 in the morning and I offered him a cigarette.

"You from Australia"

S