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.