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
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Letter 7
CHAPTER 7
This is chapter um….7 I think it was? It’s so confusing writing a book. You have to remember where you filed things and what you called them and what you wrote about in the last chapter. It’s so stressful and your short-term memory suffers. Then you…. um…….. you……… Oh shit, I think I’ve developed a writer’s block. I can’t think of a single thing to write about….. Did I tell you the one about the two electrons who walked into a bar and the bar tender said there’s no charge for you and one of them said are you positive? …. No, that’s not how it went. There were two horses who walked into a bar and one said to the other “that hurt didn’t it?”…. no, I think I already told you about that in chapter three – or was that in the other book I’m writing, the one about porcupine taxidermy for fun and profit and how to stop your fingertips from bleeding? Truth is, I just can’t remember.
But wait, wait….Oooh! I can feel that old creative spark tingling in me gum boots right now, slowly oozing up me legs, past me nether regions, up through me spleen, around by me bile duct and now a sort of fizzing sensation mounting up to a creative explosion at the end of me typing digits – BOOM! God, that’s good, I needed that! Clears the old system out like a good sneeze it does.
This here is chapter 7 folks and we’re still in Hungary although we’ve left the Danube bend and all those fucking yurts. Yurt this, yurt that, every bloody thing was yurtypoos. I’m beginning to look like a fucking yurt, losing hair and the top of my head rounding off like that. It’s a good job I’ve grown a beard I suppose. Mind you, being bald headed with a beard may not be the safe way to go. I was at the bowling alley in downtown Budapest a couple of nights ago and I saw a man up at the refreshment counter who was completely bald apart from this great big beard. It looked as if he had his head stuck on upside down. I felt sorry for him when he sat down though. Somebody walked up to him, stuck two fingers up his nostrils and threw him down one of the lanes.
We’ve moved up to the north east to a town called Eger. For the last 30 kilometres on the way into the town we drove past fields of tobacco, sweet corn and sunflowers and on past countless small vineyards and plots of opium poppies. The city of Eger has turned out to be rather unique in that it seems to be permanently out of focus or, at least, fuzzy around the edges. We’ve been here for 5 days now and it seems to become progressively more blurred with each passing hour. I’ve worked out why it is. Eger has, according to the guidebook, two thousand private wine cellars. We’ve only covered about forty of them to date but we’re sleeping well when we can locate the van. Most of the wine cellars we’ve visited so far are small and under private houses or in root cellars in farmyards but what they lack in décor and professionalism is more than made up for by the hospitality of their proprietors. They don’t seem to do any work and just want to hang around drinking their wine at our expense.
No matter which winery we choose to visit the pattern is almost invariably the same. We arrive at the farmhouse gate and wait until the barking of the dog attracts the owners. They come to the gate, smile at us in between a tirade of curses aimed at the said dog, open the gate and motion to us to drive around to the house door. Then we disembark whilst the owner chases the dog around the van to stop it attacking us and we run the gauntlet from the van to the farmhouse door.
Once inside they take us to the cellar to see the bottles and discuss the finer points of their contents. They probably talk about botrytus and acid content and bouquets and such and we nod and pick the bottle with the most dust on it and ask how much. It’s always cheap, always fair to good in quality and ever undrinkable although we did have a bottle of white with a shriveled looking caterpillar in it. It just lay there belly up and flopped from side to side after each filling of the glasses but we were so drunk at the time that it didn’t seem to matter. We discussed it the next morning when we woke up but neither of us could remember who drank it or what happened to it.
Much more enjoyable than the wine is the company and the atmosphere. They feed us slices of salami and stuffed peppers and help us drink our wine as they show us black and white photographs of deceased relatives, World War II partisans and members of the lumpen proletariat who probably fall into both categories. They point out who these various people were killed or imprisoned by and we nod knowingly and roundly denounce the Russians or the Germans or whoever we think they’re telling us about. Quite a few of these farmer/ winemakers have relatives in Transylvanian Romania where they tell us that the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu treats them badly. I’ve found that after a couple of glasses of red, if one calls out the name of Mr. Ceausescu, turns sideways on the chair and spits on the kitchen floor, it meets with a very good reception and sometimes can even get one a free bottle for the road.
Anyway, this all works very well for a couple of visits but it becomes progressively more difficult as the day wears on and we’ve spent the last four nights sleeping in the van in the gardens and courtyards of farmhouses. At one place the farmer had a magnificent field of sunflowers in full bloom and I admired them and indicated that I wanted to take a photograph of him and his wife standing amid the sea of yellow. Both the farmer and I were three parts pissed and I don’t know what went wrong but he got a tarpaulin out of the barn and laid it in the field under the sunflowers and invited us to sleep on it. I barely remember him staggering off in the direction of the house as we collapsed on the tarpaulin. We awoke an hour before dusk with mosquito bites all over us and dragged the tarpaulin back to the house where he was asleep in a chair but his wife had cooked us a huge meal of pork shanks and some delicious dumplingy things which were so laden with paprika that I had cause to feel their heat again the next day. I think I could do this for quite a long period of time. In fact I never want to leave here. At the very next post office I’m going to apply to be a Hungarian.
Apart from its two thousand private wine cellars Eger, amongst other attractions, has some quaint old buildings and a fantastic collection of doors. Yes, doors; all carved in different patterns as though there’s a door competition going on in town. A number of very large double doors, which would admirably befit small English castles, are to be encountered on the city sidewalks which open up to reveal shady courtyards where families sit and eat their midday and evening meals. There's the mandatory castle and cathedral of course, and lots of little boutiques and beer houses with outside tables where you can sit and watch the German tourists huffing on their tea spoons and cleaning them with Kleenex tissues before they’ll stir their coffee with them.
It was in Eger that we bought a product that has changed our lives. It's an electric hotplate and it cost $8.00. Now we can save our gas by using the electricity in caravan parks and cook outside when the weather allows because cooking makes the van unpleasantly hot even on cool days when the sun is shining. Another bonus is that we use it as a heater at night. Back in West Germany we bought a good quality pressure cooker which cut our gas consumption down by about half and we wouldn’t now want to be without it.
After spending a week in Eger it took two more weeks to decide to leave the place. When we finally left at around 5am one warm sultry morning we took the back roads and headed for Aggtelek to see what the guidebooks described as possibly the most beautiful cave complex in Europe. We didn’t care how long it took us to get there; we’d stocked up on food, wine and fruit juice and we were carrying our accommodation with us like tortoises. We found the smallest roads on the map and then took every road we came to that didn’t appear on the map as long as it headed in what we thought was the right direction. Now we felt that we were seeing the real Hungary. We were used to kids waving at us as we went through villages but now we were in territory where the adults waved at us too.
We drove along mile after mile of lush green valley floors with mountains rising on either side of us and through small villages which would suddenly happen upon us at fifteen-minute intervals. As if taken straight out of postcards the tiny houses invariably had bowed rooflines and doors that were leaning over at an angle. All were newly whitewashed or painted in an orangey colour with window surrounds in contrasting colours and grapes growing over them. Geese and chickens wandered across the roads and the sheds and barns with thatched roofs looked as though they were a hundred years old. I pondered the parallelogram shaped doors in their parallelogram shaped doorframes. They looked great and I wondered how they came to be like that. Did the door and the frame gradually lean over together during the course of decades? If they did the occupants must have put up with years of sticking doors before both door and frame settled into their out-of-square shapes. Or were they just lousy carpenters who couldn’t cut straight? To my Anglo Saxon way of thinking everything must be dead square but it obviously isn’t that important. Nevertheless, if you build an out-of-square house it must be a real hassle when you come to put the roof on.
Funny what goes through the mind of a tourist isn’t it? I mean, I’m on holiday for God’s sake. Why am I spending time thinking about out-of-square Hungarian peasant’s doors? Only yesterday I was in a farmer’s kitchen enjoying a white knuckle drinking session and railing about president Ceau–bloody-sescu.
Almost every house had a well and these wells were covered by little house come dog kennel constructions in different styles, some of them were thatched and they covered the winding mechanisms used to lift the buckets. Some villages had four or five storks nests atop chimneys and lamp posts. I really like the look of storks because, like seagulls, they’re so clean looking with never a feather out of place. Australian kookaburras, by contrast, are unkempt, and to my mind, raggedy looking things always in need of a feathercut. Storks nests though, are a mess. Big round shambolic looking cylindrical constructions over a meter across and up to about a meter high with great big sticks poking out of them. If I was a stork and I made friends with a wren or an oriole, for example, I could never take them home to show them where I was born. I’d be so ashamed, worried that they’d tell everyone I came from a slum.
Villagers consider themselves lucky if a stork chooses their village in which to nest and every effort is made to induce the birds to stay and build. Some families place large wire platforms on top of chimneys for them to build on and others put car tires on platforms atop lamp posts and make artificial nests hoping to fool the storks into thinking they’ve come across a “renovators dream”. Storks quite like all this attention and have adapted to village life so well that you'd be hard pressed to find a storks nest in a tree anymore.
In two villages we saw purveyors of LPG bottled gas doing their deliveries in horse drawn carts. The houses had fridges and cookers powered by bottled gas. It was kind of surreal to me to see these two technologies placed so incongruously. (Shit that’s a good word isn’t it, incongruously? surreal wasn’t bad either). The automobile came about 50 years before the good Lord gave us bottled gas so I could only imagine bottled gas being delivered by mechanized transport. If God had have meant us to have bottled gas he wouldn’t have given us the horse would he?
In one village where we stopped to take photographs we were followed up the street by about 30 giggling kids. If I’d have had a penny whistle and a multi colored jump suit I’m sure I could have led them all up into the hills. I checked the street sign to see we weren’t in Hamlyn and I may go back and see if I can get the rat catcher’s contract next year. The house at the end of the only street belonged to a beekeeper and he had his hives right next to the house in a sort of pigeon loft. The hives were all made of straw, which had been twisted into rope and then wound round into a conical Chelsea bun shape. I remember as a kid in England seeing a honey jar with a picture of the same type of hive on it.
We arrived in Aggtelek camping ground in the early evening and from a distance it looked quite attractive with a little lake in the middle. It was only as we drew closer that we saw the tents in the middle of the lake. They’d had a flood. There were people sitting in their cars with their bedding on the roof looking awfully miserable and in the morning when I went to the toilet block I saw some of them sleeping out in the open with just a piece of foam rubber underneath them and a wet blanket on top.
Talking about toilet blocks, the shorts which are fashionable these days seldom have a zip fly in them and, depending on how long they are, it can be a difficult decision to make when it comes to whether to pee over the top of the waistband or lift them up and pee out of the bottom of the leg. Well, I was in a toilet block the other evening when a man came and stood next to me at the urinal and he had his toothbrush and toothpaste in his left hand and decided to pee "over the top" with his right hand. I don't mean he peed with his hand of course, Hungarians aren't that different. Anyway, when you pee over the top with your right hand, it means that you have to hold the top of your shorts down with the left hand. He let go of the waistband, which sprang up, and he peed all over his toothbrush. I looked at him with a half smile, half smirk and he felt like a real idiot. I got outside and burst out laughing it was just like one of those Mr. Bean sketches.
We were up bright and early next morning to go down the caves. The Lets Go Europe book said that the sights were stupendous and another book said that there is a 14 kilometre long cave down there and a gigantic lake measuring something like 2 kilometres if my memory serves me correctly. The whole area is riddled with caves stretching into Czechoslovakia and at some times of the year you can go on a 6 hour guided tour around them.
Our tour lasted for one hour and even that was 50 minutes too long. I found, as Alicja had already told me, that caves are not the most exciting places to be in. The guide only spoke Hungarian anyway which didn't help any. It was damp and dark and there were things hanging from the roof which looked like cheese that had been left in the microwave for 10 seconds too long and lots of German tourists taking photo's with compact flash cameras. I guess that cave buffs would find it all fascinating but once I’d seen one piece of over-microwaved cheese I’d pretty well seen them all.
When we emerged into the sunlight, it was a relief, and we went down the hill to the cafe for coffee. It wasn't a very plush looking establishment and although they had a coffee machine the coffee was pre made, cold in a jug, and as it was ordered they poured it into a cup and heated it with one of those electric elements which are sold to travelers to use in hotel rooms. I asked for milk and couldn't make myself understood too well but eventually the waiter produced a bottle with "Milky" printed on the label. " Yes" I said "that's the stuff". And great stuff it turned out to be. It was a kind of milk/coffee flavored liqueur and when stirred into the coffee the result was at least the equal of any coffee I’ve ever tasted. We were instantaneously hooked on the stuff, we had another coffee each to celebrate, and then bought all the bottles of Milky he could spare us. Twenty-three bottles of Milky took a bit of storing in our over-provisioned campervan and those which touched jingled on bumpy roads through another three countries.
The food here is superb, that's the only word I can think of to describe it, and it's so affordable for us. The cold meats especially are available in great variety and we've been trying everything we can lay our hands on. We met a retired Austrian couple in Eger who earn a modest living by visiting Hungary every weekend, filling their car boot up with Hungarian sausages, fruit and vegetables and selling them to their neighbors back in Austria. Practically every day we buy a kilo of peaches and kilo of apricots and we've had peach pancakes, peach fruit salad, peach juice and peach flavored yogurt. In fact we're publishing a book called 1001 Things To Do With a Spare Peach and it should be in your bookstores shortly. For those of you who are into kinky sex I'd recommend No 27 but first make sure that your peach isn't over ripe and that the chandelier is secured firmly to the ceiling.
Next we thought we'd check out Lake Balaton which is a large body of warmish water (over 100 km long) which serves as Hungary's seaside. Balaton is probably the biggest attraction in the country and pretty well all of its shoreline has been developed into resorts and caravan parks. It was school holiday time and we couldn't get in anywhere. A long day’s drive all the way along the north shore of the lake looking for a campsite found us exhausted and it seemed pointless to carry on looking. Receptionists at camping sites told us that people from all over Europe book their summer holidays on Balaton a year in advance. Sun ripened looking Germans, Swedes and Danes were to be seen in every nook and cranny of the lakeshore and could be heard every time we wound the windows down. These are the nationalities I class collectively as the YaYa people. All conversations with Germans, Swedes and Danes seem to be peppered with YA Ya and Ya Ya Ya.
I was very impressed with the everyday architecture in Hungary. Resorts restaurants, hotels, snack bars, swimming pools and even town halls displayed the most imaginative designs that either of us have seen for a long time. They build such incredibly tasteful and well-designed houses that sometimes you just have to stop and say "look at that". I don’t know why Anglo Saxon architects seem so tied and constricted when it comes to house design. Here they have fantastic rooflines in different shapes covered in thatch or shingles with whitewashed walls and brown Tudor type beams and everywhere are these big carved doors.
Despite communism the West Germans and Austrians have been coming here for years, and it's easy to see why. The whole country is exceptionally clean, which for a German is a prime consideration, but apart from that the Hungarians cater to them so well. At every restaurant, museum or place of interest, they address all foreigners in German and the restaurant menu's are in German as well. There is even a radio station called Radio Danubis which broadcasts all day and probably all night too in the German language. It plays pop music most of the time but gives out tourist information at regular intervals and the German news. Well, I suppose it’s German but I guess it could be another language that sounds like German. It could be like that Austrian Bayerish or whatever they call it. Anyway, they say things like “untflashendenbanguntminefingerburnen” which I think is German for some sort of electrical appliance.
Compared with other socialist/communist countries in the region Hungary’s public buildings are in good condition. In Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany churches, town halls and the like are in a shocking state of disrepair. We were walking around Pecs, another beautiful city, this time in the South, and I was saying to Alicja that it's a pity that the Poles just can't seem to restore and look after their old buildings like the Hungarians who most obviously have the craftsmen.
We stopped to admire an old Turkish built theatre in Pecs when we saw a gang of workmen restoring some of the gargoyles on the ground and I tried to strike up a conversation with them. I wasn't getting anywhere when one of them asked if I spoke Polish. They told us that most of the guys who do building restorations in Hungary and Czechoslovakia are Polish. The Polish government doesn't have the desire or the money to spend on the restoration of its own buildings and they hire out their tradesmen to other countries and take a cut from their wages. Looking up at the building they were working on, one of them said "yes, the Turks built it, the Poles restored it and the Hungarians will earn money out of German tourists with it". It’s not at all uncommon to come across Hungarian churches that began life as mosques and have been converted. Minarets and other relics of the Turkish occupation make the countryside just that little bit more interesting than in, say Czechoslovakia.
Hungary also abounds in thermal springs and there are thermal pools all over the place which are said to cure various ailments (I was going to say rheumatism but I can't spell it) and make you live longer. We booked into a camping site which had a thermal pool right next door so we thought we'd give it a shot. I had visions of a hot spring bubbling out of the ground into a natural rock pool, all clear and sparkling with little seats around the edge, rather like a giant hot tub I guess.
I’d conjured up the wrong vision. It was a regular sized full-blown swimming pool, the water was a murky brown color, it stunk of sulfur or some such farty smelling element from the bowels of the Hungarian earth and was considerably hotter than I like to take my baths. It was full up with people; chock a block full of wild thrashing Hungarians and the water was bubbling like it was full of Piranhas during a feeding frenzy. There were kids leaping off the sides into spaces the size of a teacup between other people. Central and Eastern Europeans have a much closer personal space than us Anglo types and it often bothers Westerners having people so close to them, invading their space so closely that they can smell the other person’s breath. Not so with me, I got used to it years ago. Or so I thought.
In this thermal pool people were so close that they were touching, rubbing bodies against each other. I could see a couple of women on the other side of the pool I would have paid money to have rubbed my body against but the place was so packed that I had no hope of maneuvering myself into position without exiting the pool and getting back in again which would have looked a bit too obvious. Instead, I continued to stand next to the Russian woman with the artificial leg, two gold teeth and shabby underwear. She was so big that I looked like her lunch. By that time I’d been pushed further towards the center of the pool and I had to battle to get back to the edge where I could get out. We ran away back to the van and drank coffee with Milky in it. I guess that if you live in a country with no coastline a thermal pool is a good place to take you kids for the day as they were catered for with playground equipment and there were a couple of reasonable restaurants around the pool.
I'm listening to the German language Hungarian radio station as I'm typing the words you see before you and I've just realized that all day it's been playing English language pop music. Have you ever noticed that English is the language of both pop music and T-shirts? There are tourists from all over Europe and the Soviet bloc here and their T-shirts, almost without exception, are in English. Most of the people wearing them I'm sure don't have a clue what's written on them.
I can't understand why Esperanto never took off. Wouldn't it be great for travelers if we could all communicate because we'd learned Esperanto at school? We've had some rather surprising meals just because we couldn't speak the language. That leads me quite seamlessly into spelling. You may have been wondering how come I'm such a good speller? Well it's easy. This word processing program I’m using has a dictionary of 80,000 words in it. Once you've typed your letter, you tell it to check the spelling and if it and it comes across a word it doesn't have in its dickshonree, it suggests half a dozen words for you to choose from. It was in this way that I found that the words wank and fuck were in it.
It must be someone's job somewhere in a programming development office to decide which swearwords go into the program and which ones don't. I bet they have fun. I can just imagine some of the inter-office correspondence:
---------------------------------------------------------------
Inter Office Memo
Memo To: Tony Lanfranschi Manager. Program Development
From: Chuck Martin Programmer Dictionary Dep't
Dear Tony,
Can I have Bollocks?
--------------------------------
Reply: Yeah Chuck, fine with me as long as you don't charge the cost of the operation to the company.
------------------------------------------------------------------
We went into a restaurant in Pecs which offered Kangaroo tail soup and Forgs legs. We’re not quite sure what a forg is but if they’re native to Hungary we hope they don’t bite. And today we heard on the short wave radio that East Germany is going to limit the number of people that it allows to travel to Hungary because too many of them are escaping through Hungary to Austria and then on to West Germany. It made us think of the guy we met when we first entered the country who asked us if we could take him across. I hope he made it.
We never cease to be amazed that Hungarians, Czechs and Poles just can't seem to put a slope on a concrete floor that will drain the water away in the shower and toilet blocks. We've seen the ultimate now, it was here in Hungary and both the Men’s and Women's shower blocks had drains in the middle of the floor at the highest point. The whole floor sloped upwards to the drain and there was stagnant water all around the edges.
We’re leaving Hungary tomorrow to go to Jugoslavia and we were a little sorry.
This is chapter um….7 I think it was? It’s so confusing writing a book. You have to remember where you filed things and what you called them and what you wrote about in the last chapter. It’s so stressful and your short-term memory suffers. Then you…. um…….. you……… Oh shit, I think I’ve developed a writer’s block. I can’t think of a single thing to write about….. Did I tell you the one about the two electrons who walked into a bar and the bar tender said there’s no charge for you and one of them said are you positive? …. No, that’s not how it went. There were two horses who walked into a bar and one said to the other “that hurt didn’t it?”…. no, I think I already told you about that in chapter three – or was that in the other book I’m writing, the one about porcupine taxidermy for fun and profit and how to stop your fingertips from bleeding? Truth is, I just can’t remember.
But wait, wait….Oooh! I can feel that old creative spark tingling in me gum boots right now, slowly oozing up me legs, past me nether regions, up through me spleen, around by me bile duct and now a sort of fizzing sensation mounting up to a creative explosion at the end of me typing digits – BOOM! God, that’s good, I needed that! Clears the old system out like a good sneeze it does.
This here is chapter 7 folks and we’re still in Hungary although we’ve left the Danube bend and all those fucking yurts. Yurt this, yurt that, every bloody thing was yurtypoos. I’m beginning to look like a fucking yurt, losing hair and the top of my head rounding off like that. It’s a good job I’ve grown a beard I suppose. Mind you, being bald headed with a beard may not be the safe way to go. I was at the bowling alley in downtown Budapest a couple of nights ago and I saw a man up at the refreshment counter who was completely bald apart from this great big beard. It looked as if he had his head stuck on upside down. I felt sorry for him when he sat down though. Somebody walked up to him, stuck two fingers up his nostrils and threw him down one of the lanes.
We’ve moved up to the north east to a town called Eger. For the last 30 kilometres on the way into the town we drove past fields of tobacco, sweet corn and sunflowers and on past countless small vineyards and plots of opium poppies. The city of Eger has turned out to be rather unique in that it seems to be permanently out of focus or, at least, fuzzy around the edges. We’ve been here for 5 days now and it seems to become progressively more blurred with each passing hour. I’ve worked out why it is. Eger has, according to the guidebook, two thousand private wine cellars. We’ve only covered about forty of them to date but we’re sleeping well when we can locate the van. Most of the wine cellars we’ve visited so far are small and under private houses or in root cellars in farmyards but what they lack in décor and professionalism is more than made up for by the hospitality of their proprietors. They don’t seem to do any work and just want to hang around drinking their wine at our expense.
No matter which winery we choose to visit the pattern is almost invariably the same. We arrive at the farmhouse gate and wait until the barking of the dog attracts the owners. They come to the gate, smile at us in between a tirade of curses aimed at the said dog, open the gate and motion to us to drive around to the house door. Then we disembark whilst the owner chases the dog around the van to stop it attacking us and we run the gauntlet from the van to the farmhouse door.
Once inside they take us to the cellar to see the bottles and discuss the finer points of their contents. They probably talk about botrytus and acid content and bouquets and such and we nod and pick the bottle with the most dust on it and ask how much. It’s always cheap, always fair to good in quality and ever undrinkable although we did have a bottle of white with a shriveled looking caterpillar in it. It just lay there belly up and flopped from side to side after each filling of the glasses but we were so drunk at the time that it didn’t seem to matter. We discussed it the next morning when we woke up but neither of us could remember who drank it or what happened to it.
Much more enjoyable than the wine is the company and the atmosphere. They feed us slices of salami and stuffed peppers and help us drink our wine as they show us black and white photographs of deceased relatives, World War II partisans and members of the lumpen proletariat who probably fall into both categories. They point out who these various people were killed or imprisoned by and we nod knowingly and roundly denounce the Russians or the Germans or whoever we think they’re telling us about. Quite a few of these farmer/ winemakers have relatives in Transylvanian Romania where they tell us that the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu treats them badly. I’ve found that after a couple of glasses of red, if one calls out the name of Mr. Ceausescu, turns sideways on the chair and spits on the kitchen floor, it meets with a very good reception and sometimes can even get one a free bottle for the road.
Anyway, this all works very well for a couple of visits but it becomes progressively more difficult as the day wears on and we’ve spent the last four nights sleeping in the van in the gardens and courtyards of farmhouses. At one place the farmer had a magnificent field of sunflowers in full bloom and I admired them and indicated that I wanted to take a photograph of him and his wife standing amid the sea of yellow. Both the farmer and I were three parts pissed and I don’t know what went wrong but he got a tarpaulin out of the barn and laid it in the field under the sunflowers and invited us to sleep on it. I barely remember him staggering off in the direction of the house as we collapsed on the tarpaulin. We awoke an hour before dusk with mosquito bites all over us and dragged the tarpaulin back to the house where he was asleep in a chair but his wife had cooked us a huge meal of pork shanks and some delicious dumplingy things which were so laden with paprika that I had cause to feel their heat again the next day. I think I could do this for quite a long period of time. In fact I never want to leave here. At the very next post office I’m going to apply to be a Hungarian.
Apart from its two thousand private wine cellars Eger, amongst other attractions, has some quaint old buildings and a fantastic collection of doors. Yes, doors; all carved in different patterns as though there’s a door competition going on in town. A number of very large double doors, which would admirably befit small English castles, are to be encountered on the city sidewalks which open up to reveal shady courtyards where families sit and eat their midday and evening meals. There's the mandatory castle and cathedral of course, and lots of little boutiques and beer houses with outside tables where you can sit and watch the German tourists huffing on their tea spoons and cleaning them with Kleenex tissues before they’ll stir their coffee with them.
It was in Eger that we bought a product that has changed our lives. It's an electric hotplate and it cost $8.00. Now we can save our gas by using the electricity in caravan parks and cook outside when the weather allows because cooking makes the van unpleasantly hot even on cool days when the sun is shining. Another bonus is that we use it as a heater at night. Back in West Germany we bought a good quality pressure cooker which cut our gas consumption down by about half and we wouldn’t now want to be without it.
After spending a week in Eger it took two more weeks to decide to leave the place. When we finally left at around 5am one warm sultry morning we took the back roads and headed for Aggtelek to see what the guidebooks described as possibly the most beautiful cave complex in Europe. We didn’t care how long it took us to get there; we’d stocked up on food, wine and fruit juice and we were carrying our accommodation with us like tortoises. We found the smallest roads on the map and then took every road we came to that didn’t appear on the map as long as it headed in what we thought was the right direction. Now we felt that we were seeing the real Hungary. We were used to kids waving at us as we went through villages but now we were in territory where the adults waved at us too.
We drove along mile after mile of lush green valley floors with mountains rising on either side of us and through small villages which would suddenly happen upon us at fifteen-minute intervals. As if taken straight out of postcards the tiny houses invariably had bowed rooflines and doors that were leaning over at an angle. All were newly whitewashed or painted in an orangey colour with window surrounds in contrasting colours and grapes growing over them. Geese and chickens wandered across the roads and the sheds and barns with thatched roofs looked as though they were a hundred years old. I pondered the parallelogram shaped doors in their parallelogram shaped doorframes. They looked great and I wondered how they came to be like that. Did the door and the frame gradually lean over together during the course of decades? If they did the occupants must have put up with years of sticking doors before both door and frame settled into their out-of-square shapes. Or were they just lousy carpenters who couldn’t cut straight? To my Anglo Saxon way of thinking everything must be dead square but it obviously isn’t that important. Nevertheless, if you build an out-of-square house it must be a real hassle when you come to put the roof on.
Funny what goes through the mind of a tourist isn’t it? I mean, I’m on holiday for God’s sake. Why am I spending time thinking about out-of-square Hungarian peasant’s doors? Only yesterday I was in a farmer’s kitchen enjoying a white knuckle drinking session and railing about president Ceau–bloody-sescu.
Almost every house had a well and these wells were covered by little house come dog kennel constructions in different styles, some of them were thatched and they covered the winding mechanisms used to lift the buckets. Some villages had four or five storks nests atop chimneys and lamp posts. I really like the look of storks because, like seagulls, they’re so clean looking with never a feather out of place. Australian kookaburras, by contrast, are unkempt, and to my mind, raggedy looking things always in need of a feathercut. Storks nests though, are a mess. Big round shambolic looking cylindrical constructions over a meter across and up to about a meter high with great big sticks poking out of them. If I was a stork and I made friends with a wren or an oriole, for example, I could never take them home to show them where I was born. I’d be so ashamed, worried that they’d tell everyone I came from a slum.
Villagers consider themselves lucky if a stork chooses their village in which to nest and every effort is made to induce the birds to stay and build. Some families place large wire platforms on top of chimneys for them to build on and others put car tires on platforms atop lamp posts and make artificial nests hoping to fool the storks into thinking they’ve come across a “renovators dream”. Storks quite like all this attention and have adapted to village life so well that you'd be hard pressed to find a storks nest in a tree anymore.
In two villages we saw purveyors of LPG bottled gas doing their deliveries in horse drawn carts. The houses had fridges and cookers powered by bottled gas. It was kind of surreal to me to see these two technologies placed so incongruously. (Shit that’s a good word isn’t it, incongruously? surreal wasn’t bad either). The automobile came about 50 years before the good Lord gave us bottled gas so I could only imagine bottled gas being delivered by mechanized transport. If God had have meant us to have bottled gas he wouldn’t have given us the horse would he?
In one village where we stopped to take photographs we were followed up the street by about 30 giggling kids. If I’d have had a penny whistle and a multi colored jump suit I’m sure I could have led them all up into the hills. I checked the street sign to see we weren’t in Hamlyn and I may go back and see if I can get the rat catcher’s contract next year. The house at the end of the only street belonged to a beekeeper and he had his hives right next to the house in a sort of pigeon loft. The hives were all made of straw, which had been twisted into rope and then wound round into a conical Chelsea bun shape. I remember as a kid in England seeing a honey jar with a picture of the same type of hive on it.
We arrived in Aggtelek camping ground in the early evening and from a distance it looked quite attractive with a little lake in the middle. It was only as we drew closer that we saw the tents in the middle of the lake. They’d had a flood. There were people sitting in their cars with their bedding on the roof looking awfully miserable and in the morning when I went to the toilet block I saw some of them sleeping out in the open with just a piece of foam rubber underneath them and a wet blanket on top.
Talking about toilet blocks, the shorts which are fashionable these days seldom have a zip fly in them and, depending on how long they are, it can be a difficult decision to make when it comes to whether to pee over the top of the waistband or lift them up and pee out of the bottom of the leg. Well, I was in a toilet block the other evening when a man came and stood next to me at the urinal and he had his toothbrush and toothpaste in his left hand and decided to pee "over the top" with his right hand. I don't mean he peed with his hand of course, Hungarians aren't that different. Anyway, when you pee over the top with your right hand, it means that you have to hold the top of your shorts down with the left hand. He let go of the waistband, which sprang up, and he peed all over his toothbrush. I looked at him with a half smile, half smirk and he felt like a real idiot. I got outside and burst out laughing it was just like one of those Mr. Bean sketches.
We were up bright and early next morning to go down the caves. The Lets Go Europe book said that the sights were stupendous and another book said that there is a 14 kilometre long cave down there and a gigantic lake measuring something like 2 kilometres if my memory serves me correctly. The whole area is riddled with caves stretching into Czechoslovakia and at some times of the year you can go on a 6 hour guided tour around them.
Our tour lasted for one hour and even that was 50 minutes too long. I found, as Alicja had already told me, that caves are not the most exciting places to be in. The guide only spoke Hungarian anyway which didn't help any. It was damp and dark and there were things hanging from the roof which looked like cheese that had been left in the microwave for 10 seconds too long and lots of German tourists taking photo's with compact flash cameras. I guess that cave buffs would find it all fascinating but once I’d seen one piece of over-microwaved cheese I’d pretty well seen them all.
When we emerged into the sunlight, it was a relief, and we went down the hill to the cafe for coffee. It wasn't a very plush looking establishment and although they had a coffee machine the coffee was pre made, cold in a jug, and as it was ordered they poured it into a cup and heated it with one of those electric elements which are sold to travelers to use in hotel rooms. I asked for milk and couldn't make myself understood too well but eventually the waiter produced a bottle with "Milky" printed on the label. " Yes" I said "that's the stuff". And great stuff it turned out to be. It was a kind of milk/coffee flavored liqueur and when stirred into the coffee the result was at least the equal of any coffee I’ve ever tasted. We were instantaneously hooked on the stuff, we had another coffee each to celebrate, and then bought all the bottles of Milky he could spare us. Twenty-three bottles of Milky took a bit of storing in our over-provisioned campervan and those which touched jingled on bumpy roads through another three countries.
The food here is superb, that's the only word I can think of to describe it, and it's so affordable for us. The cold meats especially are available in great variety and we've been trying everything we can lay our hands on. We met a retired Austrian couple in Eger who earn a modest living by visiting Hungary every weekend, filling their car boot up with Hungarian sausages, fruit and vegetables and selling them to their neighbors back in Austria. Practically every day we buy a kilo of peaches and kilo of apricots and we've had peach pancakes, peach fruit salad, peach juice and peach flavored yogurt. In fact we're publishing a book called 1001 Things To Do With a Spare Peach and it should be in your bookstores shortly. For those of you who are into kinky sex I'd recommend No 27 but first make sure that your peach isn't over ripe and that the chandelier is secured firmly to the ceiling.
Next we thought we'd check out Lake Balaton which is a large body of warmish water (over 100 km long) which serves as Hungary's seaside. Balaton is probably the biggest attraction in the country and pretty well all of its shoreline has been developed into resorts and caravan parks. It was school holiday time and we couldn't get in anywhere. A long day’s drive all the way along the north shore of the lake looking for a campsite found us exhausted and it seemed pointless to carry on looking. Receptionists at camping sites told us that people from all over Europe book their summer holidays on Balaton a year in advance. Sun ripened looking Germans, Swedes and Danes were to be seen in every nook and cranny of the lakeshore and could be heard every time we wound the windows down. These are the nationalities I class collectively as the YaYa people. All conversations with Germans, Swedes and Danes seem to be peppered with YA Ya and Ya Ya Ya.
I was very impressed with the everyday architecture in Hungary. Resorts restaurants, hotels, snack bars, swimming pools and even town halls displayed the most imaginative designs that either of us have seen for a long time. They build such incredibly tasteful and well-designed houses that sometimes you just have to stop and say "look at that". I don’t know why Anglo Saxon architects seem so tied and constricted when it comes to house design. Here they have fantastic rooflines in different shapes covered in thatch or shingles with whitewashed walls and brown Tudor type beams and everywhere are these big carved doors.
Despite communism the West Germans and Austrians have been coming here for years, and it's easy to see why. The whole country is exceptionally clean, which for a German is a prime consideration, but apart from that the Hungarians cater to them so well. At every restaurant, museum or place of interest, they address all foreigners in German and the restaurant menu's are in German as well. There is even a radio station called Radio Danubis which broadcasts all day and probably all night too in the German language. It plays pop music most of the time but gives out tourist information at regular intervals and the German news. Well, I suppose it’s German but I guess it could be another language that sounds like German. It could be like that Austrian Bayerish or whatever they call it. Anyway, they say things like “untflashendenbanguntminefingerburnen” which I think is German for some sort of electrical appliance.
Compared with other socialist/communist countries in the region Hungary’s public buildings are in good condition. In Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany churches, town halls and the like are in a shocking state of disrepair. We were walking around Pecs, another beautiful city, this time in the South, and I was saying to Alicja that it's a pity that the Poles just can't seem to restore and look after their old buildings like the Hungarians who most obviously have the craftsmen.
We stopped to admire an old Turkish built theatre in Pecs when we saw a gang of workmen restoring some of the gargoyles on the ground and I tried to strike up a conversation with them. I wasn't getting anywhere when one of them asked if I spoke Polish. They told us that most of the guys who do building restorations in Hungary and Czechoslovakia are Polish. The Polish government doesn't have the desire or the money to spend on the restoration of its own buildings and they hire out their tradesmen to other countries and take a cut from their wages. Looking up at the building they were working on, one of them said "yes, the Turks built it, the Poles restored it and the Hungarians will earn money out of German tourists with it". It’s not at all uncommon to come across Hungarian churches that began life as mosques and have been converted. Minarets and other relics of the Turkish occupation make the countryside just that little bit more interesting than in, say Czechoslovakia.
Hungary also abounds in thermal springs and there are thermal pools all over the place which are said to cure various ailments (I was going to say rheumatism but I can't spell it) and make you live longer. We booked into a camping site which had a thermal pool right next door so we thought we'd give it a shot. I had visions of a hot spring bubbling out of the ground into a natural rock pool, all clear and sparkling with little seats around the edge, rather like a giant hot tub I guess.
I’d conjured up the wrong vision. It was a regular sized full-blown swimming pool, the water was a murky brown color, it stunk of sulfur or some such farty smelling element from the bowels of the Hungarian earth and was considerably hotter than I like to take my baths. It was full up with people; chock a block full of wild thrashing Hungarians and the water was bubbling like it was full of Piranhas during a feeding frenzy. There were kids leaping off the sides into spaces the size of a teacup between other people. Central and Eastern Europeans have a much closer personal space than us Anglo types and it often bothers Westerners having people so close to them, invading their space so closely that they can smell the other person’s breath. Not so with me, I got used to it years ago. Or so I thought.
In this thermal pool people were so close that they were touching, rubbing bodies against each other. I could see a couple of women on the other side of the pool I would have paid money to have rubbed my body against but the place was so packed that I had no hope of maneuvering myself into position without exiting the pool and getting back in again which would have looked a bit too obvious. Instead, I continued to stand next to the Russian woman with the artificial leg, two gold teeth and shabby underwear. She was so big that I looked like her lunch. By that time I’d been pushed further towards the center of the pool and I had to battle to get back to the edge where I could get out. We ran away back to the van and drank coffee with Milky in it. I guess that if you live in a country with no coastline a thermal pool is a good place to take you kids for the day as they were catered for with playground equipment and there were a couple of reasonable restaurants around the pool.
I'm listening to the German language Hungarian radio station as I'm typing the words you see before you and I've just realized that all day it's been playing English language pop music. Have you ever noticed that English is the language of both pop music and T-shirts? There are tourists from all over Europe and the Soviet bloc here and their T-shirts, almost without exception, are in English. Most of the people wearing them I'm sure don't have a clue what's written on them.
I can't understand why Esperanto never took off. Wouldn't it be great for travelers if we could all communicate because we'd learned Esperanto at school? We've had some rather surprising meals just because we couldn't speak the language. That leads me quite seamlessly into spelling. You may have been wondering how come I'm such a good speller? Well it's easy. This word processing program I’m using has a dictionary of 80,000 words in it. Once you've typed your letter, you tell it to check the spelling and if it and it comes across a word it doesn't have in its dickshonree, it suggests half a dozen words for you to choose from. It was in this way that I found that the words wank and fuck were in it.
It must be someone's job somewhere in a programming development office to decide which swearwords go into the program and which ones don't. I bet they have fun. I can just imagine some of the inter-office correspondence:
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Inter Office Memo
Memo To: Tony Lanfranschi Manager. Program Development
From: Chuck Martin Programmer Dictionary Dep't
Dear Tony,
Can I have Bollocks?
--------------------------------
Reply: Yeah Chuck, fine with me as long as you don't charge the cost of the operation to the company.
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We went into a restaurant in Pecs which offered Kangaroo tail soup and Forgs legs. We’re not quite sure what a forg is but if they’re native to Hungary we hope they don’t bite. And today we heard on the short wave radio that East Germany is going to limit the number of people that it allows to travel to Hungary because too many of them are escaping through Hungary to Austria and then on to West Germany. It made us think of the guy we met when we first entered the country who asked us if we could take him across. I hope he made it.
We never cease to be amazed that Hungarians, Czechs and Poles just can't seem to put a slope on a concrete floor that will drain the water away in the shower and toilet blocks. We've seen the ultimate now, it was here in Hungary and both the Men’s and Women's shower blocks had drains in the middle of the floor at the highest point. The whole floor sloped upwards to the drain and there was stagnant water all around the edges.
We’re leaving Hungary tomorrow to go to Jugoslavia and we were a little sorry.
Letter 8
With some reluctance we left Jurta Tabor knowing that wherever else we were likely to stay in Hungary wouldn't compete and headed up into the North East of the country towards a town named Eger. For the last 30 kilometres on the way into the town we drove through fields of tobacco, sweet corn and sunflowers and mile upon mile of vineyards stretching out of sight over gently rolling hills.
Eger was a great place with, amongst other attractions, two thousand private wine cellars, some quaint old buildings and a fantastic collection of doors. Yes, doors. Eger contains a number of large old houses with shaded courtyards in which the locals sit all day, play chess, drink coffee and eat their meals. Each courtyard has an enormous pair of carved double doors and every one is different. In fact we came across a door making workshop in which upwards of a dozen carpenters were hard at it making new doors and repairing pre loved models any of which wouldn't have looked out of place on a Scottish castle.
There's the mandatory castle and cathedral of course but lots of little boutiques and beer houses with tables where one can sit outside and watch the Austrian tourists go by. As soon as we parked in the car park in Eger there was a tap on the window. It was a Polish black market money changer offering good rates so we had cheap money to spend before we even got out of the van and we went shopping straight away. We bought two products which changed our lives. A portable electric hotplate for the grand sum of eight dollars and a good quality German pressure cooker.
With an extension lead the hot plate enabled us to cook outside when the weather was good and it served as a heater at night. The pressure cooker cut our gas consumption down by about half. The cost of the gas was nothing to worry about but locating a gas sales establishment could sometimes take us the best part of a day and different countries had different fittings on their bottles. We parked just out of sight of the road in a large forest a little way out of Eger that night and were woken by the grunting and snorting of wild boars. Niether of us had ever seen wild boars before and when we pulled the curtains back and shone the torch on them they didn't bat an eyelid.
This was fine with us and we enjoyed watching them for a while but they were noisy and wouldn't go away until we put the car alarm on. In the morning when we went outside we saw that they had rooted up a large area of ground all around the van and defecated on our plastic water containers. After breakfast we took the back roads on the way to Aggtelek to see what the guidebooks describe as possibly the most beautiful cave system in Europe.
The way was mountainous with broad flat bottomed fertile valleys in which most of the villages were situated and we felt that at last we were seeing the real Hungary. In many villages up to this point the kids had come out to wave at us but now that we were in the little visited backwoods the adults were waving too. A campervan must have been a rare sight. The tiny hamlets were scenes straight from postcards, little houses with sagging roof lines and doors that were leaning over at an angle all nicely whitewashed or painted in an orangey colour with window surrounds in contrasting colours and grapes growing over them. Geese and chickens everywhere and old sheds and barns with thatched roofs which looked as though they were a hundred years old.
Almost every house had a well in the yard covered by little thatched house come dog kennel structures in different styles which covered the winding mechanisms used to lift the buckets. Some villages had up to four storks nests crowning the chimneys and lamp posts, scruffy ill defined constructions, more like a giant, flattened grenadier guards busby after a few hours in a spin dryer than a birds nest. Storks are considered lucky in this part of the World and every effort is made to induce the birds to stay and build their nests, including the placement of large wire constructions on top of chimneys, car tyres atop lamp posts and man made nests of twigs. Of the hundreds of storks nests we saw throughout Eastern Europe not one was in a tree or located more than fifty metres from a house.
We stopped in one village to change our gas bottles, not from a shop but from the gas delivery man who was doing the rounds in a horse and cart. He was standing outside the house of a bee keeper who's hives were kept in what looked like pigeon lofts and were made of straw which had been twisted into a rope and then wound round like a Chelsea bun into a conical shaped hive. I remember as a kid in England seeing a honey jar with a picture of the same type of hive on it. We arrived at the Aggtelek camping ground in the late afternoon and were suitably impressed with its appearance, especially the lake in the middle which was surrounded by tents and backed by steep hills. It was only as we drew closer that we saw the tops of a few other tents in the middle of the lake.
There had been a flash flood that morning when many of the campers were away from the camping ground and we were able to see the looks of horror on their faces when they returned later in the afternoon to find that they needed submarines to locate their holiday accommodation. Others were sitting in their cars with their bedding on the roof looking as though they'd had better holidays and in the morning when I went to the toilet block I saw some of them sleeping out in the open with just a piece of foam rubber underneath them and a wet blanket on top.
Inside the toilet block I stood next to a small, white skinned Hungarian sporting a pair of long, multi coloured shorts with Hugo Boss emblazoned on the left buttock. Long shorts these days don't have a zip fly and depending on how tight they are, a difficult decision confronts the "end" user as to whether one should pee over the top of the waistband or lift one of the legs. The small Hungarian had his toothbrush and toothpaste in his left hand and decided to pee "over the top" with his right hand. (by this I do not mean to convey to the reader that he peed with his hand of course, Hungarians aren't that different). When one decides to pee "over the top" with one's right hand, it means that one must hold down the waistband of one's shorts with the left hand. He did so - and peed all over his toothbrush. I laughed, he didn't.
We were up bright and early in the morning to go down the famous Aggtelek caves which the "The Lets Go Europe" book said were stupendous. One cave was said to be 14 kilometres long and a gigantic subterranean lake measuring some 2 kilometres in length awaited the intrepid visitor. The whole area around Aggtelek is riddled with caves stretching into neighbouring Czechoslovakia and six hour guided tours were on offer. We took a one hour tour which we later estimated to have taken approximately 50 minutes too long. I found, as Alicja had already told me, that caves are not the most exciting places to be in and as the guide spoke only Hungarian and no literature in English was available we may just as well have spent the time talking to our accountant.
Deep within the damp, dank, gloomy bowels of the earth there were things hanging from the ceiling which looked for all the World like cheese which had spent fifteen seconds too long in a microwave oven and a gaggle of Austrian tourists with compact flash cameras shooting off photo's out of flash range. When at last we emerged blinking into the sunlight it was with some relief that in front of us stood a cafe to which we repaired at speed for a cup of coffee before the party of Austrians could beat us to it.
It was run by a rotund, brown, bare chested man with a rotund brown, bare head widening out at the jowls. In the reflection of the coffee machine, which was unfortunately awaiting a service call, I inspected his gleaming pate for cracks just to be sure that I hadn't come face to face with the original Humpty Dumpty. The coffee was pre made, cold in a jug, and as it was ordered he poured it into a cup and heated it with one of those electric elements of the type commonly used by itinerant fruit pickers in dormitories. The milk jug too was awaiting a service call from the milkman but we were offered a substitute from a bottle labeled "Milky", a superb local coffee liqueur which we became instantaneously hooked on and thereafter scoured the countryside seeking to buy a stock of.
Hungarian food was superb, although perhaps some would find it a tad peppery, and so easily affordable that we embarked on a gourmet tour of the country sampling regional specialities, sitting in open air restaurants for hours on end gorging ourselves and watching the people go by. The shops too were full of an astonishing array of smoked and cured cold meats. Practically every day we would buy two kilos of peaches which we used in every imaginable way as they were so cheap. Peach pancakes, peach juice and peach flavoured yogurt for breakfast every morning and peach flavoured ice cream before going to bed.
What we didn't know about peaches by the time we left Hungary wasn't worth knowing and readers should keep an eye on the book shops for my next book "1001 Things To Do With a Leftover Peach." For those of you who are into kinky sex I'd recommend No 669 but first make sure that your peach isn't over ripe and that the chandelier is secured firmly to the ceiling.
According to the guide books, no trip to Hungary could be said to be complete without a visit to Lake Balaton. A huge body of landlocked water some one hundred kilometres long, it serves as Hungary's seaside and is the biggest attraction in the country, almost all of its shore line smothered in holiday resorts. So many holiday resorts on Lake Balaton were advertised in Hungarian tourist brochures that we decided not to drive into the first reasonable place that presented itself but to spend a while choosing the most suitable hotel with the best facilities.
We were by this time feeling somewhat shabby after such a long time in the van and were looking forward to a stay in a hotel with real baths and a laundry service where we could catch up on some washing. Alicja had already worked out that we'd get the seat covers, duvet, curtains and anything else we could easily detach, properly laundered together with all our machine washable clothes. We were unaware that it was school holiday time when every Hungarian, his kids, pets and a few hundred thousand Austrians descend upon this watery piece of paradise and no accommodation of any kind was available. It took two full days to cover the entire circumference of Lake Balaton stopping at dozens of hotel and camping sites only to hear the same story at each place, -you should have booked last year. The Swedes, Danes and Germans book two years in advance.
We finally gave up and headed for the area around Pecs further south in a quest to find a caravan park with one of the much vaunted thermal springs, Hungary being the therapeutic thermal spring capital of Europe with waters said to cure every unpronounceable ailment and rheumatism. This time we were in luck and managed to book in to a decent caravan park with a thermal pool within walking distance and set off hot foot (later to become even hotter), towels in hand for our first thermal pool experience. The vision in our minds was one of hot springs bubbling out of the ground into a natural rock pool, all clear and sparkling with little seats around the edge, rather like a giant hot tub. The reality was a little different.
It was a regular sized, full blown swimming pool full to the brim with a murky brown liquid hotter than any bath we'd ever taken. Perhaps it hadn't been filled to the brim at the start of the day but Archimedes Law had made it that way. It was chock a block full of wild thrashing Hungarians, the water bubbling like it was full of Piranhas during a feeding frenzy and kids leaping off the sides into spaces which weren't there until they landed. It was a first come first served event and as nobody was coming out, we slid in between the rest of them and stayed there for a full five minutes before coming to the conclusion that we couldn't stand the pace or the heat. It was an unusual experience for me, a first time communal bather, and I couldn't understand why people of all ages had to jump up and down like pogo stick passengers rubbing themselves against their neighbours.
I could see on the far side of the pool a couple of people I wouldn't have minded jumping up and down and rubbing myself against but my immediate pogo stickers were somewhat obese septuagenarians and the whole experience was lost on me. I'm pleased to say that we weren't put off by the occasion and over the following fortnight we visited several more thermal pools and found that it's one thing that is done well in Hungary. They were usually well maintained with attractive gardens, clean restaurants and toilet facilities and I suppose that if you live in a country without a coastline it's a good place to take the kids for the day.
It was while staying at a thermal pool park that I discovered that my word processing program had a spell checking feature, a marvellous idea which, once I found out how to operate it, saved me hours of work. Even more time would have been saved if I'd bought a legal copy of the software which would have come complete with a manual but as it was I sat up for hours experimenting with it. I could only wonder at the minds of the programmers far away in an office somewhere in California who seemed to have thought of every swear-word in the English language.
I was unable to stump it and it got me thinking. It must be someone's job somewhere in a programming development department to decide which swear-words go into the program and which ones don't. I wonder who it is that has the ultimate say on whether words like "fucker" can be included in a software package - probably the boss? Imagine the conversations and the correspondence which flies around the Microsoft building in such situations.
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MICROSOFT
Date......
Inter Office Memo
MEMO TO: Bill Gates CEO
FROM: Chuck Martin Programmer, Dictionary Dep't
Dear Bill,
Can I have Bollocks?
--------------------------------
REPLY: Yeah Chuck, fine with me as long as you don't charge the cost of the operation to the company.
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The West Germans and Austrians have been coming to Hungary for years and it's easy to see why. The whole country is exceptionally clean, which for a German is a prime consideration to start with, but apart from that, the Hungarians cater to them so well. At every restaurant, museum or place of interest they address all foreigners in German, all the restaurant menu's are in German as are the day to day signs at the entrances to places of interest.
A radio station called Radio Danubis broadcasts all day and probably all night too in the German language. It plays pop music most of the time but gives out tourist information at regular intervals and the German news. Hungary must earn a lot of foreign currency from tourism and deservedly too because they do a lot of things right. In the city of Pecs in the south there was much restoration of old buildings going on and I remarked to Alicja that it was a pity that the Poles just can't seem to restore and look after their old buildings like the Hungarians who most obviously have the craftsmen. We stopped to admire an old theatre which was built in Pecs by the Turks and we saw a gang of workmen restoring some of the decorative friezes which they had removed to the ground.
I tried to strike up a conversation with them in the hope of getting an authentic photograph of these Hungarian artisans at work. I wasn't getting anywhere until Alicja heard one of them say to another in Polish -I can't understand a fucking word of German, I don't know what he's asking me. Much to their embarrassment Alicja answered them in Polish and we ended up buying a take away pizza and coffee each and having lunch with them in their mess hut. They were interesting guys and told us that there was little work for them in Poland and that working in Hungary paid about three times as much. The Polish government doesn't have the money to spend on the restoration of its own buildings so they hire out their tradesmen to other countries and take a cut from their wages. Looking up at the building they were working on, one of them said -yes,the Turks built it, the Poles restored it and the Hungarians earn money out of German tourists with it.
It's hard to say exactly what combination of ingredients made us like Hungary so much but the whole package was very appealing and we felt at home there. Hungarians seem to have a certain style which we didn't see elsewhere in Europe, the architecture, hotels, restaurants, food, the people, it all left an impression on us and we were in a way sad when the time came to leave and head across the border to war torn Jugoslavia. On our last night we eat at a restaurant in Pecs which boasted a menu containing kangaroo tail soup and "forgs legs." I'm not quite sure about the forg but I've an idea that they're big things like chickens and a sort of paprika colour.
when we got back to the van we heard on the radio that East Germany is going to limit the number of people that it allows to travel to Hungary because too many of them are escaping through Hungary to Austria and then on to West Germany. It made us think of the guy we met when we first entered the country who asked us if we could take him across the border. I hope he made it.
Letter 9
Driving south west from the Hungarian city of Szeged we entered Jugoslavia from the North at a small crossing where we weren't asked a single pertinent question by the surly unshaven border guards. The only thing they wanted to know was if we had any Western cigarettes. Jugoslavian inflation was, at the time, running at over 1,200% per annum and when we changed US$50 at the border, I thought the least they could have done would have been to give us a paper bag to take the money away in.
We ended up with close on a million Dinari as the exchange rate was 19,800 to the dollar. It's not easy to calculate the prices of things in your mind when you see something in the shops at 323,876 dinari and think to yourself, now, how many 19,800s go into that. Things in the shops all had about five prices on them because they have to alter them every few days. The shop assistants, as you might imagine, are by now quite adept at mathematics and very fast with it. Ever since the start of the trip we'd been swapping currencies which could have been highly confusing but for a going away present from one of my daughters. It was a brilliantly designed Japanese currency exchange calculator in which two exchange rates could be kept at any one time with instant reference to their worth against the currency we were travelling in. All that was necessary was to dial in the price seen in the shop and hit the "home" button to get the price in our own currency.
Also incorporated was a small map of the World showing the time zones and it featured both a calculator and an alarm clock. I understand that next years model will have breakfast making capabilities, tell the user what time the tide comes in, in the Seychelles on St Valentines Day and that the battery will be the size of a helium atom. Nevertheless, this little packet of technology was pretty well useless to us in Jugoslavia because the exchange rate varied so much from day to day. One shop we went into had a wire cage full of cabbages with prices written on them with a black marker. Alongside it the floor was strewn with detached cabbage leaves with the previous days prices on them.
Jugoslavia, like Bulgaria, was always one of those countries where communism hadn't worked but the bulk of package holiday tourists thought that it had. Bulgaria used to pour money into its Black Sea resorts in order to bring in hard currency and Jugoslavia did the same with the Dalmatian coastal resorts around Split and Dubrovnik to the detriment of the rest of the country, and it would seem, its population. The north of the country, through which our route would take us, is still, as it has ever been, an area to transit at the quickest possible pace. As soon as one enters Jugoslavia from the Hungarian border in the north it can be seen within the first 15 kilometres that Jugoslavians just don't care as much as the Hungarians. It's flat country and it grows the same corn and sunflowers as Hungary but the condition of the crops is poor, the stunted sunflowers fight the weeds for their existence and the corn looks undernourished with extensive bare patches in the fields where nothing grows.
The standard method of waste disposal in the villages of northern Jugoslavia is to fill up a truck with the village refuse, drive 2 kilometres up the road and dump it. The sides of the roads were scruffy and strewn with polythene bags and old tins with starved looking dogs eking out an existence amongst the mounds of reeking refuse. In all probability there are more dead and decaying dogs on the roads of northern Jugoslavia than the rest Europe combined. Outside one small town we stopped for a cup of tea at a designated parking area and while the kettle was boiling, I took a look at the toilets. They were of the "footprint" (middle eastern) type and full to the point that there was actually a mound of the stuff above ground level. How the last occupant performed his bodily functions could only be guessed at unless he hung from the ceiling. Footprints, for those yet to experience the pleasure, are used throughout the Middle East, in Asia and can occasionally be found as far West as France. There is no toilet seat, just two depressions in the shape of feet on either side of a sunken toilet bowl the top of which ends at ground level.
Advocates of this system point out that it is theoretically more hygienic because bums don't come into contact with seats on which less hygienic bums have been sitting. But in practice it isn't so. The modus operandi when confronted with footprints is to head for the bushes instead, but assuming that there is no alternative the user must be careful. To begin with it's not a bad idea to remove your jeans and hang them up above ground level for three very good reasons. Firstly, if you leave your jeans on and sit down in this position, the money in your pockets disappears down the small hole and unless you are absolutely broke the method of retrieval is out of the question. The second reason for the removal of your jeans is that the hole in the sunken toilet bowl is only about a third of the diameter of western style toilet bowls and they block up easily. Hence, when the chain is pulled the water and the material you were trying to dispose of tends to swirl around your feet. Feet are more easily washable than jeans. Thirdly, when crouched in the required position in western style clothes (as opposed to a flowing robe sans knicks) it's almost impossible not to pee in the back of your jeans as both hands are being used to support yourself in an effort to prevent you falling backwards into the hole. Because the holes in these things are so small that four sheets of toilet paper forms an effective seal, the managers and proprietors of the establishments in which footprints are located often provide a small pedal bin for used toilet paper which attracts the flies from the other side of town. To put footprints in their proper perspective, they are really designed for use by people with different toilet habits to the Westerner as evidenced by a jug and a water tap in each closet and no toilet paper.
The town of Novi Sad was the first place we stopped at and if the reader is ever in these parts..... avoid it. As Jugoslavia is another of these countries where it is illegal to free camp, we booked into a large camp-site. We walked into reception and were greeted by a Jugoslav/Aussie who had been in Australia for 16 years and returned here for a holiday in January and decided to stay......avoid him as well.
His wife told us that they were living like Kings on a disability pension from Australia.
Did his disability cause him any discomfort? I asked
-No, she said, -there's nothing wrong with him at all, there never was.
-So how come he managed to wangle a disability pension?
-He bribed a Jugoslav doctor in Melbourne who invented a back injury for him, she said looking at him proudly.
-All me mates was doin' da same fing?, the husband volunteered.
Had he in fact been disabled, it could perhaps have gone some way to excusing the disgusting state of his caravan park which was by far the worst we stayed in on our entire trip.
Filthy toilets, smelly drains, rubbish bins overflowing the grass un-mowed and everything in need of a coat of paint, we just used their electricity to boil water so that we could wash in the van and tried to avoid all contact with our surroundings. It was expensive too at $11 compared with a much better standard in Hungary for only $3 - $4. The toilets were so bad that people had taken to shitting amongst the trees at the back of the park and the area was full of the soiled newspaper they'd used as toilet paper - toilet paper being a hard to come by commodity in the shops. There was though, one redeeming feature about it - the proprietor spoke English and I talked him well into the night. What did he think about the possibility of ethnic strife rearing it's head in Jugoslavia, the Croats, the Serbs, the Muslims? I asked. The Serbs and Croats even in Melbourne seemed to be carrying on their ethnic squabbles.
-Couldn't give a fuck. They're all bloody mad, he said
What about the future, did he anticipate returning to Australia?
-This is the future, I'm fuckin' retired at thirty eight, don't 'ave to do nothin' an the money keeps comin' in. I can't think of a better future can you?
What about the caravan park, did he have plans, was he going to do any renovations, expand, splash a little paint around perhaps?
-What for? It's the only caravan park 'ere, people 'ave to stop. It's illegal to park up at the side of the road and you'd be bloody stupid to anyway.
-Yes, but what if someone else opens up a new caravan park in the area?
-Anyone investin' any money anywhere in Jugoslavia in the next fifty years would 'ave to be fuckin nuts.
I returned to the van late where Alicja was still reading in bed.
-What's he like?
-Well, It takes all sorts....and he was one.
In the morning the Jugoslav/Aussie proprietor showed me on the map how to get to the market. We wanted to have a go at selling the Polish goods we'd bought in Warsaw which were still stashed away in the box on the van roof. It was a large country market on a piece of open ground and it was full of Polish, Russian and Romanian traders standing around in the dust and thistles with their goods laid out on blankets on the ground and across the bonnets of their cars. First we went looking for the Poles who told us what to charge for our torches, irons and other odds and ends and offered to buy everything from us in one hit at a discount. We didn't want to sell everything to a middleman, mostly because we'd never been market traders before and we wanted the experience.
The Polish traders however, kept telling us that it could take two days to get rid of all that we had so we decided to try selling the stuff ourselves for a couple of hours and if unsuccessful, we'd then think about getting rid of it in one hit. Back at the van we set up our folding table and I went up on the roof to open the box and hand the goodies down to Alicja who within seconds was besieged with people wanting to buy the folding table. It was like an auction with people bidding against each other in a language we couldn't understand and they flocked to us like chickens when the corn is thrown out. As soon as I began to hand down the irons, we were engulfed and all ten of them went in as many minutes. The torches which we were told were only saleable in Bulgaria proved to be even more popular and so many people were arguing about them that Alicja couldn't keep track of the situation and gave them back to me and I auctioned them one at a time from the safety of the van roof.
In all we had, I suppose, about one hundred items for sale varying from milk jugs to men's socks but it was all sold in twenty minutes and they deserted us leaving us bewildered standing in the middle of the car park with hands full of money and wondering what to do next. The most sought after items had been things we didn't want to sell. Things like our sun glasses, my jumper, the van's outside mirrors, Alicja's bracelet and one man wanted to buy the van itself offering to run us to the Hungarian border as part of the deal.
Because Bulgaria, the next country en route, was said to be practically devoid of anything good to eat, and we wanted to spend a month or so there, we wanted to stock the van to the rafters in Jugoslavia. Unfortunately there was very little on offer except tinned fish and beans but we bought a large quantity of both in the hope that we'd be able to swap some of it for something more appetizing further down the track. Not being able to get all that we needed in the market, we took ourselves off to the shops where we realised our mistake as first time market traders. Our irons and torches were already on sale for twice the price we'd sold them for and our fishing rods were being sold at the check-out as we walked in, with their price quadrupled When our turn at the check-out came we found that the Jugoslavian money we'd received in exchange for the US$50 we'd changed at the border when entering the country, was a year out of date and the shop wouldn't take it.
An hour later we were on our way again and at around midday we pulled off the highway and into a small town to look for diesel. The road into it was strewn with rubbish, but once in among the buildings the scene presenting itself was like the qualifying round for Dantes Inferno - the pits. The whole town was covered in dust, the wind blew polythene bags around which stuck to the TV aerials and the chimneys of the tumbledown houses. Dirty, half starved sheep, goats, cats and dogs wandered around and old ladies struggled up the street bent double under large loads of cardboard boxes and other burnable material gleaned from the smoking rubbish heaps just outside the town. Some carried even higher loads of folded cardboard boxes which I suppose they burned to keep warm or block the holes in their broken windows although, at the time, the heat was sweltering. The people who were a bit better off were walking around with wheelbarrows full of cardboard boxes and firewood.
This place, however, had us worried. Our white coloured campervan stood out in all this mess like a washing powder commercial, a white tornado cutting a swath down the main street, and we were stared at as strangers in wild west movies are stared at when they drift into town. Then, as we slowed down at the approach to the petrol station, men ran up on either side of us and began banging on the windows and trying to open the doors. We drove straight on through the town and used the spare diesel in our canister hoping to find another filling station further on, petrol was sometimes hard to come by but diesel was available everywhere. As we moved along the road we saw carts and ploughs drawn by oxen which I thought had gone out of date in this part of the World. It added an incongruously Asian look to the countryside but something else which struck us was the complete absence of churches and castles. Everywhere we'd been so far, churches and to a lesser extent castles, were landmarks on the horizon but here they were noticeably absent.
That night we looked for a camp ground which according to the map and the Jugoslavian camping book, was a large one which accommodated some 1,500 people. It wasn't there. We asked the police where the place was and after looking at our book they were as mystified as we were, said they'd never heard of it and that it must have once been planned but never built. They reminded us that it was illegal to spend the night anywhere except in government authorized camping sites and told us too that it wasn't safe to leave the van unattended. We asked what options that left us given that there was no camp site and no hotels in town and were told that we'd just have to keep on driving. As we turned to go, one of the policemen called out to us and we turned around to see him demonstrate what was likely to happen to us if we camped at the side of the road. He drew his hand across his throat in a slicing motion!
Alicja threw the Welcome to Jugoslavia book back in the dash pocket and we drove north towards the Danube and spent the night parked in a small patch of trees alongside the river without incident. The next morning we headed down to Belgrade. Belgrade was described in one of our guidebooks as "Grim Belgrade" and for once the information was dead on. It is without doubt the most uninteresting capitol city I've seen, greyer than Warsaw. We only went there to buy slide film which we couldn't find anywhere in the smaller cities but there was nothing their either. We walked for hours in the city on a quest for the elusive slide film and we stopped at a restaurant and sat outside and drank coffee. We and found ourselves being hassled by a flower seller, trying to make me feel guilty for not buying a rose for Alicja. She was incredibly persistent and made her approach in German and a couple of other languages.
She was about eight years old with some Gipsy blood in her and once she worked out that it was English we were speaking, she started saying pleeeease over and over again in a most heart wrenching tone and I gave her some money to get rid of her. She didn't thank me and slouched over to another table to begin all over again with a French couple. The man, feeling embarrassed by her constant pleadings, bought a rose and the little girl tried to make off with his wifes sun glasses. He caught her, re-possessed the sun glasses and told her off in French but she was completely unaffected as were the staff of the restaurant who turned a blind eye to all that was going on. We were glad to get out of the capitol and back into the relatively clean air of the countryside again and drove around for the remainder of that day, and the next, looking for something - anything - interesting. We failed miserably and after looking for three non existent caravan parks advertised in Jugoslavian camping guide we entered the small town of Golubac hard up against the Danube which formed the border with Romania. Too tired to eat, we parked under the only street light in a scruffy, littered overgrown piece of ground, had a quick cup of tea and went to bed.
I got up first in the morning while Alicja was still asleep. I had breakfast and, knowing that there were no bushes outside, used the trusty plastic bucket toilet with plastic bag and newspaper. I stepped outside the van, plastic bag in hand to find that overnight, a market had grown up around us and as I turned to go back a man wanted to know what was in the bag. I tried to tell him that it was just rubbish but whatever it was he was still keen to buy it. I kept insisting that it wasn't for sale and held the bag up high but twice he made a grab for it and on the third go I let him have it and went back in the van. I couldn't move off because we were surrounded by stalls I knew when he'd opened it. He marched all around the van banging on the sides and shouting abuse at me but I kept the curtains closed. Alicja woke with a start -what's happening? I told her but she wasn't inclined to believe it until she saw the bag wedged under our windscreen wipers. Fifteen minutes later we left the van to the abuse of the man and most of the stall holders and spent the day walking around town until we could see that we'd be able to get the van out. Then, we quickly walked into the square, climbed into the van and left in a hurry.
We'd wasted a day and we followed the Danube for a while longer to a tiny town called Dobra and parked in the forest on it's outskirts. I was going to spend the rest of the daylight hours doing a few things to the van. It was here that I checked the van's brakes which didn't seem to be working as they should and to our great dismay found that the back axle had blown an oil seal and covered one of the brakes in oil. Further checking revealed that one of the front brakes wasn't working either and it was a tribute to Mercedes engineering that we hadn't been slithering all over the road every time the brakes were applied. We weren't sure what we should do, turn back to Belgrade where there was perhaps a slim chance of getting a new seal but losing a minimum of 2 days, or pressing on to Sophia in Bulgaria where there was next to no chance that we'd find one. If this was to be the case we'd have to go all the way to Istanbul before we could be sure of getting the job done.
We chose the reckless option, I.e. to press on, for two reasons. Firstly we didn't want to drive through all that horrible territory again and secondly, there's just not enough excitement in life these days. The main cause for worry was that there were a lot of high mountain ranges to descend between this place and Istanbul and with only one front and one back brake working it might call for some tricky steering. The following day driving towards the Bulgarian border we entered the mountains and things improved, mainly because of the lack of habitation, there were fewer people to throw polythene bags around. There was just the occasional small village and they were clean although again in poor condition in comparison to Hungary. Well designed and engineered though the van was, it was under powered on hills and I spent the day ascending them in first and second gear at a snails pace only to have to descend in second and third gear, because of our lack of brakes. By the end of the day I was so used to it that I could play the Brandenberg Concerto on the gearbox.
All the same, it was pleasant mountain countryside. The peasant farmers had used every available space and clearing (and there weren't many of them) to grow corn. Some patches were only 5 meters square and packed with corn and maize plants. Each and every house had a corn store next to it where they keep the stuff as winter feed for the animals. These stores or granaries are generally made of wood slats lined with wire netting and when they are full they look good with bursts of yellow colour hitting you in the eye as you pass through. Tall, long legged pigs, a dirty brown colour with hairy orange ears walked alongside the road, quite unattended they displayed much more road sense than the people who seemed completely oblivious to oncoming traffic and unwisely presumed every vehicle to have brakes.
The hay stacks were good too. They were conical in shape and very high and the hay was piled up around trees or poles driven into the ground. We saw the farmers building them, one at the bottom throwing the hay up to another with a long pitchfork, and when they complete a stack, they tie 4 logs about 2 metres long onto the central pole and let them hang down. The weight of the logs stops the hay from blowing away in the wind. Where the hay came from was a mystery for every clearing we saw was being used to grow maize and corn. We were sorry when in the evening we came down from the mountains back to the ugliness, this time the town of Negotin close to the Bulgarian border. Another wild west style town but with slight Mafia overtones, Negotin sits four square in one of the Worlds most extensive rubbish heaps. Full of shifty, suspicious looking individuals with swarthy skins who haven't shaved for a week - and the men were just as bad.
I've never seen such hairy women and I came across the first woman I'd seen a full beard since I saw a bearded lady in a fairground when I was a kid. She was only around forty years of age and what made her appearance all the more startling was that she wore brilliant red lipstick and a mini skirt. Couples promenaded down the main street in the cool, dust laden evening air, many of the men wearing identical 1970s style white, bell bottomed safari suits and trilby hats cocked at an angle, their hirsute companions dressed in Carnaby Street fashions of the Beatles era. The dusty shop windows displayed sun bleached yellowed toothpaste adverts which hadn't been changed for years. We drove up a narrow street with overhanging trees which scraped at the van roof looking for somewhere safe to park for the night but finding it to be a dead end we turned around to see, coming up the street towards us, a guy of about 30 on a bicycle, puffing and panting and waving two plastic water containers at us.
He was pointing to our roof rack and as far as we could make out, he was telling us that the water containers would be just the thing to sit up there warming in the sun. We told him that we didn't want to buy them but he was quite insistent and after much heated and animated discussion, which failed to dissuade him, I told him to fuck off. No matter what country one visits, no matter what language the natives speak they all understand these two English words and the water container salesman was clearly disturbed by them. He stood there astride his bike, water containers in his left hand and was just about to open his mouth again when I jumped in -fuck off, go on fuck off will you. With that I put the van in gear and we drove off.
It wasn't until later that evening when we parked for the night and went to get water that we found that they were OUR water containers. They'd fallen off of the roof rack and this poor sod had been pedaling his guts out to try and give them back to us.
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.
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