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.