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.