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