A Humorous Adventure Trip Through Communist Eastern Europe and Turkey

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & DEDICATIONS

None. That's right, no acknowledgments. This is all mine I'll have you know. Each grammatical error, spelling mistake and politically incorrect statement; every time I wrote naughty and disgusting things, it’s all me, it’s all as I saw it.

I don't have to acknowledge anyone.“A dedication maybe?” I thought about it and decided against it. I never read that bit in a book anyway. You know - the bit where the author lists everyone in his family and then drops names he thinks readers might have heard of. If I was to dedicate or acknowledge I guess it would be to Raelene, our trusty Mercedes Benz 207D campervan which was already 10 years old when we started out from Frankfurt and after nearly 80,000 kilometres it/ she had only cost us $27 in repairs. But, I mean, you can’t dedicate a book to an inanimate object can you? Can you? Oh what the hell. I hereby acknowledge and dedicate this book to Raelene, temporary home, fun platform, peasant observation deck, shelter from the storm, hide from which to spy on topless young ladies (when my wife wasn’t in) and..Oh yes – transport.

And thank you to all the guys at the Mercedes Benz factory for putting Raelene together so well, and the people who made the screws used to hold Raelene’s dashboard on and the people who made the comfortable drivers seat and…..I could go on and on. There was that Polish guy at the Bulgarian border who sold me a whole bag full of marijuana for only 50 bucks. That really brightened up an otherwise grey country that had little else going for it.

Introduction

This book probably won’t ever make it to publication. One reason is that chapters 13 – 22 were lost when a couple of Bulgarian border guards decided to turn our campervan inside out in the hope that we’d call a halt to the proceedings by offering them a bribe. We did, and they stopped throwing things out of the van door, but not before the bulk of the ten missing chapters blew away into Yugoslavia.

It took us 4 hours to get through the border crossing and, once inside Yugoslavia, we went looking for the missing sheets of my manuscript but the Yugoslavians wouldn’t let us search the forests so close to the border. They pointed guns at us and told us to move on.The writing is in the form of a series of letters that I sent to my family and friends while travelling with Alicja through Communist Eastern Europe and Turkey. My intention was to use them as the notes upon which to base a book but, alas, few of the letters reached their destination and those that did have since been lost.

This "book" is about an adventure; an adventure that can never be duplicated or recreated by anybody because Communism no longer exists in the countries through which we travelled. The political situations in the old Yugoslavia, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary have now changed. As Communism disappeared from those countries; with it went the vast majority of the nasty, petty officials in Government offices, police stations, border crossings, caravan parks and public toilets that used to delight in making life difficult for Westerners.

It tells the story of an Australian couple who, fed up with their daily, stressful 9 to 5 office existence, went looking for another country to live in. So, it isn't a travel book but a collection of observations, conversations and incidents made as we traveled around. The majority of them were written in Raelene (our van) in the evenings. Some were written in people’s houses, others on ferryboats, in amphitheaters, at the beach and in one case, perched on an upturned olive oil can underneath a street light at two o'clock in the morning. I think it’s a good read and I hope you think so too.

Peter McLaren

P.S. If you're a publisher and like what you read here, please contact me.

Letter 1

Well we've done it - sold everything, thrown our briefcases in the rubbish bin, and given our business clothes to a charity. No jobs, no prospects and so far no worries. We have enough money to last us for a couple of years providing that we go easy with it and we're going to see what happens. I'm sitting under a palm tree on the grass next to our chalet on Tioman Island trying to figure out how this word processor works so that I can write this book. I think this island is an atoll but I'm not sure. Whatever it is, I like it.

It's in the South China Sea just off the coast of Malaysia and it's the kind of place we've always dreamt of spending a holiday - coral reefs, jungle, dusky maidens (I hope) palm fringed sandy beaches and warm water - in the sea that is - I haven't tried the taps yet.

Half an hour ago we checked into our chalet at the resort, unpacked our things, and sat down to a cup of tea made with one of those portable electric water boiler things which are sold in travel shops to people like us who don't want the management to know that they’ve been making tea in their rooms. I wandered out to the little veranda with my tea to look at the palm trees, and observe the nasty stinging insects which my Dad had always told me inhabited tropical climes, when I was approached by one of the locals carrying a walkie talkie. He looked like a sales representative. He was absolutely immaculate in his blue shirt, blue tie, blue trousers brown face and matching brown feet.

“I'm with Secure a Tea Service” he said with a broad white ventriloquists smile. What a concept I thought? back home we've got your Dial a Pizza services and telephone sex and you can get ladies of the night to come and visit your motel room, but here was this nice man, this chocolate coloured purveyor of the porcelain, offering to secure a tea service for me. Now, although we didn't really need a tea service, I thought I'd find out the going rate for a 36 piece, duty free Willow Pattern, or perhaps even a Ming? I've never seen a Ming tea set but they must be good because they're so famous aren't they? I mean, everyone's heard of the Ming Dinners/Tea.

I was about to open my mouth when the gentleman, inclining his head towards my shoes which were outside the door, suggested that I put them inside – “in case somebody takes a shine to them.” I thought to myself that if anyone did take a shine to them it would have been the fist time in a long while but I didn’t say anything. And anyway, they were suede. This was my first Malaysian/English conversation and after a little chat regarding the type of people who steal other people’s shoes, it transpired that he wasn't selling tea services at all. No - he was with (the) Security Service.

But back to this word processor. I should have taken some instruction on it when I first bought the lap top and had the salesman load the program for me because I must admit that it's got me absolutely xpxp *** ked .njnj@ czspx## **@ the.#....'king thing.


Normal service will be resumed as soon as the writer works out how to save his work to the hard disk.


Yes, where was I? Oh yes - it's got me absolutely befuddled - that's the word - befuddled. Funny word befuddled, don't you think? I wonder if there's such a word as fuddled? Perhaps I'm flummoxed or beflummoxed. If I was, I'm not now because I've found out how to work this thing - unbeflummoxed that's what I am now. I should have bought a dictionary along with me too I suppose. No more interruptions from now on, I promise - I'm now a fully-fledged word processor operator. Got fledge all over me, covered in fledge I am, even in the nether regions.

We were sitting in a little open-air restaurant on the second morning here when I glanced up at the palm trees and noticed a huge lizard, motionless, about ten metres from the ground. We looked around at a few more trees and saw three more of them measuring anything up to two metres long from head to tail - lizards that is - the palm trees here are much taller. I immediately made enquiries with the waiter as to the sure footedness of these reptiles because I didn't want to spend the rest of the vacation worrying about lizards loosing their grip and falling on our heads, in our breakfast etc. He told me that they are very shy, scared of humans and that they climb trees to steal baby birds and eggs. He didn't say anything about them being sure footed. After a quick scan of the menu to determine that they didn't serve baby birds, we ordered the fish. I wouldn't have minded the omelet but Alicja thought that the lizards, while they probably couldn't visually identify the eggs in an omelet, might still be able to smell them and home in on our plates.

Tioman Island is a place where you have to be careful of other things falling on your head too. I guess we've all had dreams of laying on a tropical island under the swaying coconut palms? Well, I'd never thought about it before but coconuts are big, heavy objects and if one fell on your head while you were laying on the beach in your reflective sun-glasses eyeing the exposed buttocks of the female tourists, it could change forever your future outlook on life - and make quite a mess of your reflective sun-glasses to boot.

So there I was laying on this beautiful beach watching beautiful young girls buttocks when I looked up and saw all these green coconut bombs just waiting to Isaac Newton their way towards my thinking apparatus. We'd only been on holiday for four days and already I'd encountered a stressful situation so when we got back to reception I asked the gentleman behind the counter if any of their guests had ever had the misfortune to have been metabolically disadvantaged by falling coconuts.

He was very reassuring and told me that the coconuts were the property of a man with a trained monkey who was given them in return for his (and the monkey's) services in ensuring that all the insecure nuts were removed from the tree well before they were ready to drop.

“How do the man and the monkey actually do the work?” I enquired.

“Excuse me sir?”

“How do they work together – the man and the monkey?”

“Yes sir, very well generally speaking but sometimes the monkey is little bit, how do you say…recalcitrant, and then they have problems and the man has to beat the monkey”

“I mean the method, the way they get the coconuts from the tree to the ground. How do they actually pick the coconuts?”

“Yes sir. You see sir; first he sends the monkey on an investigatory trip so to speak you see sir”

“You mean up the tree?”

“Yes sir. That’s what he does. The monkey is on a long string sir, and when the man commands him, he runs up and twists his [the man’s] nuts until they fall off. Then he inspects his stalks to see if they’re green and then…”

“Shit”, I found myself whispering to Alicja “I hope the bloody thing doesn't mistake me for its owner, I'd hate to be metabollockly disadvantaged by a trained monkey”.

Tropical Islands, if Tioman was typical, weren’t shaping up to be quite what I was expecting. In fact, this one seemed to have to potential to be downright dangerous. One morning we struck up a conversation with two French girls who were busy photographing a large spider and I asked if they had seen the big lizards yet.

“Yes”, they said, and went on to explain that at the place they were staying, there were "snacks."

“What, lizard snacks”? I said. –“Yes” they assured me, “lizard snacks”. I asked what kind of snacks they had, thinking to myself that perhaps we might go for the Lizard Mornay on toast or Lizard Wellington or something.

“Pythons” came the reply. How did they ever get Concord built, I wondered, if French/English communication could be so confusing? I mean…I’m surprised the bloody thing had any bracks to stop with.

It turned out that a large python had been found at the place they were staying and I asked exactly where it was that they were staying - it turned out that they were staying in the same place as us! Not having a snapshot of a genuine wild python in my album, and thinking that a good shot of one would impress the hell out of people, I visited the resort office again and saw the man who told me the one about the monkey and the mans nuts. I asked if I could see the said snack. He told me he didn't know anything about it, had never heard of pythons being found on the premises and that pythons lived in the jungle and didn't venture into the resort.

“Anyway” they said, “pythons are a protected species.” This news didn't exactly serve to put Alicja's mind at rest and she voiced the opinion that if any species on Tioman Island needed protecting it would probably be a good idea to start with the tourists. The next morning I asked a man who was doing the garden outside our chalet if he knew anything about the mysterious python and he was much more forthcoming than the people up at reception. He charged me two dollars and took me to the cool room where the python was coiled up on the concrete under a few damp sacks. It wasn’t huge. It just looked like a coil of condemned garden hose but thicker. I took a couple of photographs and he told me that pythons were sighted in the resort gardens every month or so and that they like to live close to human habitation where they can steal chickens.

On the fourth day of our stay we hired a fishing boat to take us around the island. Rahim Nordon Singh was the name of the skipper and proprietor of this once proud hulk and his mate was called Ali. Ali was a nice guy. He was dressed in a MacDonald’s sun visor and a pair of bright pink shorts and he had a face like a clumsy beekeeper. We were hoping that we'd have a romantic day under sail but there was hardly any wind so we had to settle for the chugging of the diesel engine. As we cruised along the coastline we worked out that it was running at around one chug per palm tree and it made a horrible knocking sound once it had warmed up. I wouldn’t have put to sea with an engine banging like a dunny door in a gale but it didn’t seem to bother Rahim and Ali. They didn’t seem to hear it.

I told Rahim that we wanted to go snorkeling and he said he knew just the place. Ten minutes later we stopped in a patch of sea and they threw down the anchor. “Snorkeling this one place” Ali said. Alicja, ever cautious, asked if there were any sharks in these waters and pointing towards a little island some 2 or 3 kilometres away Ali said that the sharks lived over there. I was quite happy about the situation because, after all, he must have known because he lived there. It occurred to Alicja however, that sharks were really good at swimming and she wouldn't go over the side which disappointed me because she'd agreed to go with me when we were at breakfast.

Suitably attired with goggles and snorkel I jumped in and started to look around. It was an awe-inspiring sight. I’d never had so much awe. Brimming with awe, I was. I was awful. I was also very struck with….. awestruck, that’s the word. See, if you look for a word for long enough it just comes to you doesn’t it? Just like that! Acres of coloured corals, shoals of colourful fish going back and forth in unison (no corn plasters like in the municipal pool back home) and the water was so clear that it was as if I was floating in the sky. It was so deep that I experienced a sort of vertiginous sensation. Didn’t know ver-to-go. It was far too deep for me to attempt to swim to the bottom and so I just lay there on top of the water watching it all go on. There was so much life to look at that I'd never seen before and it was so quiet and relaxing that I became totally wrapped up in it and forgot the rest of the world existed for a few minutes. The only thing missing was David Attenborough.

I would have been content just to float there for hours if it hadn't been for a big splash on top of the water. I bobbed up to see a life buoy on a rope next to me and Alicja screaming at me to get back in the boat pronto so I grabbed hold of the life buoy and was towed back to the boat at high speed by the two men. It was probably only a matter of seconds until I was at the side of the boat but a second can seem like an hour when the word shark is being shouted. As Ali and Rahim leaned over the side to pull me up on deck my heart was banging like a diesel driven doughnut and I was coughing as a result of swallowing water in my panic. Alicja pointed behind me and sure enough there was a shark about 3 metres in length cruising around about 20 metres from where I had been snorkeling.

Alicja had seen it first and raised the alarm but the crew just told her that it wasn't going to come over our way and when she finally started shrieking, they couldn't see what all the fuss was about. I told them that I thought myself very lucky but Rahim dismissed it with a wave of his hand telling me that the shark wasn't hungry. “Much faster dis shaak wen im ungry. Just wunna luk atcha no problem.” I indicated to him that I, the client, had a problem with snorkeling in shark infested waters and suggested that we continue with our cruise. Rounding the next headland we caught sight of a lovely, secluded bay with an old thatched roofed, wooden bungalow situated right on the beach. There was a flat area of a hectare or so around it backed by a thick belt of coconut palms and behind this, a steep, cloud topped mountain covered in jungle. It looked like the sort of place I have always imagined myself living in ever since I started reading National Geographics in Doctor Ford's surgery when I was a kid and I asked if we could go in a little closer to shore for me to take photographs.

Rahim just smiled and ran the boat right up to the little landing jetty and tied up. Ali whistled and out came the owner and his wife and invited us in. Well, not exactly in but to a table outside the door of the house through which we tried to sneak glances when they weren't looking. They gave us coconut milk which we didn't much care for and
I had a few words with the man. He didn’t understand either of them. My Malaysian, being in its formative stages, wasn’t quite up to his level of English, which was almost half as good as Rahim’s. Rahim interpreted for us and although he wasn't a lot of good at it we got by.

The couple who owned this little shack seemed to have it made. The man's grandfather had planted the coconut trees and ever since his father died, the plantation has been his. The grandfather had to wait for years before he saw any return from his work but his grandson is reaping the benefits. He told us that there was absolutely nothing he could do to promote the growth of the coconuts, they don't need pruning or spraying and you can't even pick them, they just fall when they're ripe. All he had to do was pick them up from the ground and, as most of them are growing on a slope, they roll towards the house when they fall. He said that once a year before they fell he walked around with a machete cutting the undergrowth back and that was about all he had to do apart from transporting them to his little jetty ready for collection by a boat from the mainland. He was paid for them on the spot and it provided enough to live on for the rest of the year. On reflection I think it's the best lifestyle I've yet to come across.

We didn't actually get to see the inside of the house but from the doorways we could see that there wasn't much in the way of mod cons and no electricity, but the setting was exceptional. A small stream ran through the property close to the house and although there wasn't a garden, nature had done a great job with flowers, bananas and a green lawn kept down by a humped back cow. The only contact these people had with the outside world was by boat because the jungle was impenetrable. They didn't even have a boat of their own; they just stood on the beach and flagged one down. The husband asked what I did for a living and I've had so many jobs that I didn't know which one to pick.The last one I'd had was as a marketing manager in a computer software house and I didn't fancy trying to explain that to a person who didn't even have electricity so the profession I chose was that of carpenter.

I don't know why, because I've never been one, but I suppose I thought that it would be easy to explain. I should have chosen software manager though because he took me all around the outside of the house and verandah asking me advice on how to repair the bloody place. I didn't have a clue and I was glad that Rahim's English wasn't too hot because we finally agreed that it was all too difficult to translate. I don't know how I missed being a carpenter in all those jobs, perhaps I'll take it up sometime between holidays.

We said our goodbyes and continued our circumnavigation of the island which now had to be done in a hurry because we'd spent so much time talking to the coconut couple. All these beautiful secluded beaches without a soul on them would be just the place for dark, sensual, dusky maidens dressed in sarongs, seductively showing lots of leg and half their boobs like you see in reproduction prints above the fireplaces of English council houses opposite the flying ducks. Alas they're all Muslims and the women cover themselves from head to foot even when they go in the water, which isn't often, and I suppose explains the absence of a Sufi Muslim women’s Olympic swimming team.

Nothing eventful happened for the next 3 hours as we cruised the coast looking at the beaches, palm trees and mountains. I shouldn't think this place has changed much since Europeans first came here and, with perhaps the exception of the introduction of a small number of rubber trees, it must look pretty much the same as it did 300 years ago. It would have been a wonderful experience to have come across somewhere like this all those years ago – to have been the first one to discover and name it. It put me in mind of the Intercourse Islands which, I think, are down in the Pacific somewhere near Australia. I don't know how the Intercourse Islands got their name but I can guess. I reckon that years ago, after they'd been at sea for three months out of sight of land, the look-out sighted the yet to be named Intercourse Islands and started bellowing "land ho". And this big, unshaven, sweaty chef came up from down below, wiped his forehead and said “where the fuck are we?”

So, we chugged around the island until at last we were in sight of the village of Tekek where we would be disembarking. Just then the engine, which I'd entirely forgotten about, chugged its last chug. I scrambled down to the stern and peered down into the engine room/pit/black hole where Ali and Rahim were both sitting on their haunches looking down in the dumps. The dumps is a nautical term for the place wherein the engine resideth. There was a big hole in the crankcase and a twisted connecting rod sticking out of the side.

“That's the end of your engine” I told them.

“No” said Rahim “tomorrow fix him, fix ‘im good”

I told him that this sort of thing was not fixable and he'd have to get another engine although perhaps he could salvage some parts from this one. He picked up a rag and wiped the other side of the crankcase down revealing a six-inch square sheet metal patch riveted there where it had happened once before and I had to admit that it was possible to fix ‘im good – well, fix ‘im temporary anyway. It was only after I walked back to the bow to tell Alicja what had happened, that I realised that we were in a bit of a spot. We were becalmed with no engine, no wind for the sails and a couple of kilometres from land. I asked Rahim what we were going to do but he wasn't at all phased by the situation. “We wait til nudderwun boat come long” he said. I asked when he thought "nudderwun boat" would actually come long, to which he replied that he didn't know but that we might as well pass the time with a spot of fishing. He passed the fishing gear around and baited the hooks for us and we all sat there fishing for about 20 minutes when "nudderwun fishing boat" did indeed come past and towed us in to the jetty.

Everything about these people was so casual and if something of this magnitude had occurred in the office only three weeks ago I would have had a panic attack. So would the cleaners come to think of it – would have made a real mess of the carpet. I must admit that my immediate concern when we broke down was not so much that we might be stranded but that it might be a while before I got to a toilet. Something I'd eaten hadn't agreed with me and I had diarrhea so as soon as we hit the land I left Alicja to pay Rahim and ran for the jungle. I'd never been caught short in a jungle before and didn't know what to look out for. I was hoping that none of those big, egg eating lizards or nut twisting monkeys on strings would come along while I was in a vulnerable position.

While I'm on the subject of diarrhoea I must here relate what happened to this English guy Andrew we met here who had just been on an organised tour to India with his wife. He said that when they came down for breakfast one morning only half the group had turned up because the other half had all got the dreaded Delhi belly and were on the toilet for the day. This was the day they were all due to visit the Taj Mahal and they would only get the one chance as the next day they were due to go somewhere up country. His wife Julie had always wanted to see the Taj Mahal since she was a kid and visiting this place was half the reason that they'd chosen India as part of their holiday.

They were both feeling perfectly well and since they'd followed religiously the travel agents advice "drink only bottled water" he thought that this was the reason. As they got on the bus for the trip he remarked to his wife that all those silly sods back at the hotel should have known better and that everyone knew that the drinking water in India was not to be trusted. They travelled out to the Taj Mahal and he was standing with the group listening to the guide when it suddenly hit him that he had express diarrhoea in proportions industrial. He reckoned that he only had 30 seconds to find a toilet or do it in his pants.

He said they were on the lawn right in front of the Taj' when he left the party and started running around in circles looking for a bush or anything to hide behind. There was nothing but grass. It was all over in no time, he just couldn't hang on and he pulled his trousers down and shat on the lawn right there in front of the Taj Mahal, which his wife had always wanted to visit. He said that there were hundreds of tourists walking around and elegant Indian ladies strolling past in beautiful saris and if his nails had been long enough he would have burrowed into the ground and hid in the hole. It was the most embarrassing time in his entire life and he had no paper so he took off his T-shirt and wiped his bum thinking that he could throw it into the first rubbish bin they came across.

He eventually stood up and turned around to face the rest of the group, who were all looking horrified, when he noticed a Japanese tourist standing a few yards away who was just putting his video camera back in its case after having filmed the event. His wife almost died of shame and refused to walk around the Taj Mahal. She got straight back on the bus and waited for the rest of the party to return. She hardly spoke to poor old Andrew for the rest of the week they were in India and the rest of the group didn't want to be seen with him. The final humiliation came a couple of days later when they were all in a restaurant somewhere and on his way back from the toilets he glanced over someone's shoulder and saw that they were all looking at a photograph of him evacuating on the grass with the Taj Mahal in the background.

He said that although there were hundreds of people walking about on the day, the photograph was taken from a low angle and all that could be seen was the Taj' with this tranquil pond in front of it and him in the foreground shitting on the grass.

Letter 2

Oh dear, chapter two has arrived. Chapter one ended a bit abruptly I thought but I just couldn’t think of what else to write about. I’m sure that by the end of this chapter I will be such an experienced writer that the transition to chapter three will be much smoother. I did think about including the scenes of incest and sodomy we witnessed one day when we were trekking along a jungle trail in the middle of the island. Unfortunately though, I just couldn’t bring myself to write about such depravity so you’ll just have to imagine it. Suffice it to say that it was overt in the extreme and it had us fascinated. It fascinated another onlooker too! I nudged Alicja,

“look over there” he’s having a wank”

“Where, where, where?”

“To the left of the big tree with the creepers”

“He’s not is he, d’you think that’s his dick?”

“What else would it be, a tumor? It’d have to be a bloody itchy one too if he’s got to scratch it like that”

We watched the monkeys for another five minutes or so until a much bigger one came along and chased the others off. Very entertaining it was though and I went back the next day at the same time with the video camera but there was no repeat performance. The jungle was still. I remember when my father caught me masturbating. He told me what every boy’s Dad of that era told his son, that I’d go blind. I looked at Tugger Wilson at school, the next day and he had glasses. That’ll do me, I thought. I’ll just do it a little bit and wear glasses like Tugger Wilson. Poor old Dad. He’s been gone a long time…he should be there by now. I’ll always remember his last words “Fuck, a Bus, AAAAARGH!!!” He taught me to swim did Dad – getting out of the sack was the hard part.

Two days after the monkey peep show our stay on the island came to an end and although I wanted to get on with our trip I was sorry to leave. It was such a good place that I’d have liked to have stayed until I got fed up with it. We boarded a tiny plane on a grass runway in what was no more than a clearing in the jungle. The captain announced that it was the shortest runway in Asia and I believed him because I remember landing on it. It had frightened the hell out of me as the angle of descent was so steep that I realized why the word kamikaze in Japanese translates to “divine wind”. I was heading for the next stage past wind although there would have been nothing too divine about it.

But now we were taking off and I was confident that the pilot knew what he was about. Even so we rushed towards the thick green wall of jungle at an alarming rate and didn’t clear the trees by much as we headed skywards pressed back in the seats. In no time we were up aloft and heading for Kaula Lumpur where we would catch our plane to Heathrow.The view from the plane window was stunning. The waters of the South China Sea were so clear that we could see that Tioman and its accompanying islands were just the tops of mountains rising up from the ocean floor. In Tioman's case the whole mountain from its base on the seabed could be seen, the island being just the green summit encircled by a ring of sandy beach where it joined the water.

We landed at Kuala Lumpur Airport with 10 hours to spare before catching our connecting flight so we caught a taxi to the city for a look around. We were hoping to find a traditional Asian bazaar in Kuala Lumpur but its modernity surprised us. Like Singapore the city is full of up to the minute clothes, perfume and jewelry shops. None of that interested us so we found a large supermarket to walk around in.

I loved it. Much more fun than perfume shops and the smells were better. We cruised the shelves and counters looking at all the different spices on sale, picked up things we’d never seen before and felt them and smelled them and then we came to a wall of fish tanks. The whole wall was taken up by some twenty or so of these tanks, all full of brightly colored tropical fish. It was very soothing to the eye, calming and tranquil and so we stood for a while to watch them. My doctor’s surgery back in Melbourne had a big aquarium, which, Doctor Andrews told me, made his patients relax while they were waiting to see him. I must admit that I’d always been in too much of a hurry to spend time watching Doctor Andrews’ fish but the display in this Kuala Lumpur supermarket was so much bigger and really did have a calming effect. Birds and animals get all stressed and dart about but fish just glide around changing direction with hardly any perceptible movement, all serene like.

Suddenly a hand appeared in one of the tanks and dashed around until it grabbed a large, pretty blue and yellow striped fish and the fish and the hand disappeared. It all happened so quickly, and I was feeling so relaxed and laid back, that my tiny brain couldn’t quite work out what was going on but I knew that the hand was too big to have been on the end of a kid. The rest of the fishes in the tank didn’t look at all serene now; they were left spinning around like they’d been sucked into a whirlpool. The water was all misty and they were banging against the sides. I was just thinking about telling the guy who was stacking the long white radishy things with blotches on the shelves when, around the edge of the aquarium wall, I saw a "fish butcher" whack the head off of our nice blue and yellow striped fish with an axe. He popped it into a plastic bag and threw it on the scales, slapped a price tag on it and handed it across the counter to a lady who stood in line at the checkout with the unfortunate creature still flapping its last throes.

I got to thinking about how we view fish, or is the plural fishes? They’re not terribly warm and friendly creatures as far as we humans are concerned but they’re still sentient – they still feel pain. But fish don’t scream when you chop their heads off do they? Like…if you fancied a lump of pork for dinner you wouldn’t just lop the head off a pug would you? Of course you wouldn’t. It was a spelling mistake. It should have read pig. Pigs would scream like hell while their heads were still attached and we’d feel sorry for them. Pugs too for that matter. But if you’re a voiceless fish, who gives a toss about you. I’d never thought about it before but I will in future – every time I sprinkle the salt and vinegar on one.

Oh yes, where was I? Kuala Lumpur wasn’t it? Well, that’s all about Kuala Lumpur because I lost my notes. Our flight from K.L to England was with Royal Jordanian Airlines and I must say that we weren't looking forward to it after hearing various stories about Arab airlines in the past from friends. Royal Jordanian however, offered the cheapest fares because, according to the travel agent, many Westerners are scared to use them. By this we presumed he meant the sort of people with missile allergies and so forth but he told us that it was because Arab airlines "tend to be noisy" - so we booked at once.

At the airport as we started to queue up for boarding we began to see what the travel agent was getting at. There were men with entourages of six or seven accompanying ladies loaded down with transistor radios, portable televisions and one with a huge, white plastic hippopotamus measuring about a meter in height. There was arguing, laughing, joking, smiling, yelling, screaming and loud discordant Arabic, almost musical, sounds coming from the transistor radios. I smiled at the ladies, the men scowled at me and I looked away. We had to spend 45 minutes in the queue with me trying not to look at any of the Arab ladies while two very serious looking security guards went through all the hand luggage in microscopic detail. The lady directly in front of me looked like a cross between a Dalek and a post box. She was completely covered in a bright red gown and headscarf and there was a horizontal slot in the front of her matching red veil.

When it was our turn to front up to the security guards things began to look decidedly nasty as I refused to let my films go through the X-ray machine. They kept pointing to the "film safe" sticker on the front of the machine and I tried to explain that the effect of one x-ray machine was OK but the films had already been through two previous machines and the effect was cumulative. I stood my ground and won the day but they did seem intimidating and they removed the batteries from my camera. I didn’t mind about the camera batteries as the last thing I wanted to do was point the camera at one of the Daleks and end up buried under a whole load of Royal Jordanians. Once we took off things improved considerably. We didn't hear a peep out of the Jordanians and we both agreed that it was the best airline we'd ever used. The cabin crew were magnificent, nothing was too much trouble and the food was really cool. The coffee was hot though.

Part of the cheap air fare deal was that we would have to stop over in Aman (the capital of Royal Jordania) for six hours and we envisaged having to lay around on airport seats. But when we arrived we were issued with transit visas and whisked off to a palatial hotel some five kilometers from the airport, given a free breakfast and a double room with a shower. A wake up call was all part of the service and we left on the last leg feeling completely refreshed. This time we had some English hostesses on board and the difference was all too evident. Pained expressions, a feeling that everything was too much trouble and they were cold, terribly cold. I thought they should all have had second vaginas fitted to go with their holier than though attitudes. We couldn't help but notice the contrast between them and the Jordanian girls, who quickly got to know their passengers, had a laugh and a joke with them and exuded personality.

Upon disembarking at Heathrow, a smiling young Royal Jordanian girl was waiting at the door with a tray containing the radios and camera batteries taken from the passengers at Kuala Lumpur. Unfortunately somebody in front of us had already taken mine. Losing a couple of camera batteries was no big deal so we went down to the luggage retrieval roundabout to pick up our suitcases and waited until all the luggage and passengers had gone. There was only one suitcase left - it was identical to mine - and it didn't take a genius to figure out what had happened. But where was he, the silly sod who'd taken mine? So there we were in the airport lounge at Heathrow with only the tracksuit I stood up in, no spare underpants and storm raging outside the doors - welcome to England.

We were picked up by my sister Pauline and her husband Jack and taken to their farm near Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds in a draughty Land Rover in freezing temperatures. I’d never met Jack and on the way I eyed him up and down to see if any of his clothes would fit me. Only the socks, I thought. It was a Sunday. The shops were shut. I couldn’t go out and buy clothes and by the time we arrived at the farm two small lumps had appeared behind my ears. I was delighted - the disappearance of my testicles had been giving me cause for concern.

We'd only been in the house for a few minutes when we had a telephone call from a man at Luton airport. He had my suitcase and was organizing a courier to send it over to us. I was thankful that Alicja had gone to so much trouble with the labeling of our luggage. She’d thought to include Pauline's telephone number. I hadn’t seen my sister since she moved to the Cotswolds. The whole area was like one great big model village, the stuff that fairy tales are made of. Quaint little stone houses with little stone walls dividing the fields, little old ladies in little quilted polyester jackets and little old Agatha Christie tea shops serving little scones with strawberry jam in little dollops from little spoons.

Chipping Norton, I’m sure, is the little old lady center of Great Britain. The little old ladies all have the same white permed hair and blue framed glasses and it's impossible to tell one from another, just as if they all came out of a mould in a Terry Gilliam cartoon. There's an inordinate number of them and they all seem to congregate in Chipping Norton which, but for the blue and white colors, from the air resembles a penguin rookery. It also seemed to be the quilted polyester clothing center of the world. It’s just as if Chairman Mao had decreed that everyone over the age of forty must wear quilted polyester jackets. And on warmer days, quilted polyester sleeveless waistcoats.

I was asked to bring along the video camera to film a fiftieth wedding anniversary which Pauline had been seconded to organize in the village hall. There were sausage rolls and sandwiches, cups of tea and fairy cakes and hordes of little old ladies engaged in a sort of little old ladies feeding frenzy. The highlight of the evening was the Freddie Dix dance band, fresh out of retirement just for the occasion. The Freddie Dix dance band was fresh out of everything, wind, music, tune, you name it. Apparently they used to play at all the local dances when all these septuagenarians were young and, as if that wasn't enough, they had the original vocalist with them.

She was seventy-five if she was a day and I'd put her at around fourteen stone (if indeed a fourteen stone old time music hall vocalist is putable anywhere). Anyway, we'd never heard anything remotely approaching the vocal gymnastics of this musical matriarch, who, it seemed, had a set of bagpipes built into her vocal chords. She was out of tune and, most of the time, was singing a different tune to the band who were also out of tune. Meanwhile, I was supposed to video the whole proceedings without laughing - a task I just wasn't up to. At the interlude the Chipping Norton Male Voice Choir entertained us (or at least that was presumably their intention) with some interminable funeral dirge and I think that, all in all, it was probably the most comprehensive assault on our ear drums to date.

So how does one go about filming an event like this? I filmed Freddie Dix and his septuagenarian syncopaters. I filmed each table of little old ladies and little old men gumming the crusts off little triangular sandwiches. I filmed the people preparing the sandwiches, Freddie Dix again then all the people at the tables again and I still hadn't taken up 15 minutes of video film. Only the occasional foot tapping loosely under a table served to remind us that we were not at the Chipping Norton annual taxidermy exhibition.

Then, suddenly, it was all over well before I thought it had started and they all left the hall in one great seething mass of brown and blue polyester like a Barry Manilow audience at a working mans club upon being told that the meat and potato pies were now being served at the bar. We stood at the door and watched them as they moved in a wave up the street like a tsunami full of surfing lemmings or, perhaps, an outback Australian mice plague. And suddenly, silently they were gone. We had intended to present the happy couple with the video tape at the end of the party but decided to watch it ourselves first and edit out the unkind remarks made by one of the lady sandwich makers concerning the musical dexterity, or lack thereof, of Freddie Dix's vocalist. "When Fred 'an me wus first wed we'm used to live on a pig farm down Rollright way 'an we 'eard a racket like that'n evry time they filled the bluddy troff."

For the past fifteen years my sister Pauline has worked with mentally handicapped adults and really enjoyed it. Like many people who adopt similar professions she finds it totally fulfilling rather than frustrating and enjoys the company of her patients. She sometimes takes them home to the farm at weekends and she organizes all sorts of outings for them. She tells the most hilarious stories about some of the things which go wrong on these excursions and I have asked her to write a book on the subject but she's totally involved in the work and never has the time.

She told me how last year she took a group of fifteen to London’s Hyde Park where they were all intrigued by a man who was feeding the birds and was covered from head to foot in sparrows. Upon seeing Pauline's charges so intently watching him, he lined them all up alongside each other and gave them each a piece of stale bread so that they could attract the birds too. When he got to the end of the line handing out the bread he turned around with a smile on his face. The smile quickly faded. The bread had all gone - they'd eaten it.

On another occasion, she took them all to the Barbican Centre and they had to go up to the first floor. It wasn't until she stepped off of the escalator at the other end that she realized that none of them had ever been on an escalator before in their lives. The first two reached the top and fell over and the next two fell on top of them. The next two fell on top of them again and still they kept coming in waves, all bolt upright like shop dummies, until they were all piled up in a great screaming heap blocking the escalator.

Of course, when it came to going down again there was no way they'd get back on the escalator and there were no stairs. In the end, they had to open up the fire escape and let them walk down. This was something which the authorities were reluctant to do because there was an IRA bomb threat on the place and they had to arrange security from the police department first. Meanwhile Pauline's charges wanted to use the toilet, which they couldn't do because the toilets were on the ground floor.

One of Pauline’s patients, Andrew, a man in his early thirties, was a kleptomaniac and even though she always kept an eye on him she would still find all sorts of things hidden in his room after each outing. She'd long since given up on trying to modify what was most obviously an incurable condition in Andrew. Before taking her clients on outings in the village Pauline would telephone building societies and banks and explain that this man had a need to steal things and that she'd be taking them all on a walk around town the next day. Could they perhaps drop in and say hello to the staff behind the counters? The managers of these establishments were, without exception, most understanding and would place out of date free brochures on the counters for Andrew to steal. The manager of one bank used to stand at the door as they all left and he’d hand out brochures to them all. Andrew would be most upset when this happened as he’d gone to the trouble of stealing his share when they first walked in.

Andrew was well aware of his condition but just couldn't help himself and after each outing would present himself to Pauline to be searched. Pauline and Jack had moved house shortly before we arrived and there was a truck load of unwanted odds and ends at their old house which Pauline thought would come in useful at work and so took the works minibus and four of her patients, including Andrew, to collect them. As they left the house and prepared to board the minibus Pauline began her routine search of Andrew but upon putting her hand in his right hand trouser pocket she came into contact with something warm and clammy. She recoiled with a start and told him off - he smiled weakly and produced a sausage which he'd stolen from the fridge.

It was good to be in England again after such a long absence. There were so many things about the place which I'd forgotten - the pubs, the humor, the lush green of the countryside. Even so, I couldn't help thinking that a large, daily dose of sunshine would do the place the World of good. England is so well looked after, everything is so neat and cared for, but without that Germanic sort of sterility and thoroughness. The hedges in the Cotswolds are all neatly cut, the grass at the sides of the roads is kept down and people look after their gardens and do things purely for decorations sake. A nation of analy retentive manicurists on a grand scale.

In accordance with our plan it was soon time to start looking for a left hand drive minibus and we spent two weeks scanning the papers and making phone calls but there was nothing suitable to be had so we decided to head for Belgium where, the guide books said, they were easy to find and cheaper than anywhere else in Europe. Before leaving England I rang the Belgian consulate and they mailed me the addresses of four large car parks where pre abused minibuses and vans were bought and sold privately on Sundays. At last we knew where to go. Not being able to find a van in England had been something of a disappointment mainly because we had so much luggage with us. We’d sent two suitcases ahead of us from Australia and a heavy box of tools which were much cheaper to send than to buy again in England.

We booked tickets on a bus and hovercraft service and were puzzled to find that it cost less to go to Belgium from Chipping Norton than to go by train up to London and back in the rush hour. The trip across the channel was uneventful and the landing was unexpectedly smooth. The hovercraft travels at quite a lick and doesn’t slow down much as it approaches the land. From my position in the front of the craft it was disconcerting to see the land looming up so fast and the hovercraft still going at full speed. I braced for the bump but nothing happened as it glided smoothly up the beach. We eventually got off the bus in Brussels with four suitcases, a tool box and two big bags. In all it weighed in excess of 100 kilos - practically all we thought we'd need for a trip of approximately a year's duration. I had already pre booked into a youth hostel, which, as it turned out, was less than a hundred meters away but at the time, we didn't know it.

We couldn't possibly carry all the luggage any distance so we looked around for a taxi. The driver and I had a difficult job fitting everything into the car and when we eventually sat inside and gave him the address, he was far from happy at putting in so much effort for such a short trip. He threw his arms up in the air and uttered what I took to be a few run of the mill Belgian curses and we drove just up the road and stopped outside the Jacques Brell Youth Hostel. We unloaded, paid him and he spat on the ground at Alicja's feet and left blaming us for his having lost his place in the taxi rank for nothing.

We registered at the hostel and received a room on the fifth floor which normally would have been nothing to bother about but in this case the lift had broken down and we had to carry over a hundred kilo's of baggage up the stairs. Nothing daunted we got up early the next day, bought a newspaper and went off to look for a van - and had the camera stolen while we were reading the newspaper on a railway station bench. It all happened in a few seconds and we were doubly annoyed because we'd only had it for six weeks and it had been bought especially for the trip. Needless to say, it wasn't insured and the police couldn't have given a damn.

We wandered the streets of Brussels in the rain for 4 days looking for a van, both catching extremely heavy colds or the flu, or something equally nasty, in the process but found nothing remotely suitable. We'd been told that Brussels was the cheapest place in Europe to buy a car and it's true that the prices were incredibly low but the availability of vans was just about zilch. As for the Belgian Consulate's four addresses - they were all two years out of date. Brussels was not a happy experience for us and everything was very expensive, especially eating, but it certainly is a beautiful city with a large square in the center called The Grand Place. The architecture and atmosphere have to be seen and felt, you can't describe it. The buildings around the square, the town hall, the cathedral etc. were all built in the 1600's and are so well preserved and maintained that it was hard to believe that they were anywhere near that old. Ornate Gargoyles were everywhere and lots of Turkish people - don't know why I thought of Turkish people after typing gargoyles? Some of my best friends are gargoyles - honestly.

Anyway, according to our guide book, Victor Hugo is supposed to have said that Brussels had the best city square in all of Europe, but then again, I don't suppose he had his camera nicked, caught the flu and had a taxi driver spit at his feet while he was there. Brussels has one area of narrow cobbled streets with fish restaurants on either side where the rich people and those on EEC expense accounts sit and eat dinner in the evenings. The displays of seafood outside the restaurants were nothing short of spectacular and should be classified as an art form in their own right. None of your Kuala Lumpur style whack its head off with an axe and shove it in a bag here. No, these fish had all been dispatched by slow suffocation.

We wandered up and down looking in restaurant windows at overweight, balding, middle aged Euro civil servants accompanied by tall, beautiful, long haired, blond women eating their beautiful food and drinking their expensive wines and it made us hungry. So we found a Lebanese take away food stall run by a short, fat, greasy haired, unshaven, Lebanese gentleman with a wart on his nose and a scar cheek, ordered a sharwarma (the cheapest thing on his menu) and went to bed back at the youth hostel with a packet of flu' tablets.

Unable to find the minibus of our dreams after ten rainy, influenza packed days in Brussels, we caught the train to Germany where a friendly, English speaking chemist told us that we hadn't been taking flu' tablets at all but something for allergies. We got off at Frankfurt (on Main) after a very pleasant ride and everything, for some reason, immediately felt better than Brussels. For one thing all the road signs were in one language we didn’t understand. This, in stark contrast to Belgium where they were in both Flemish and French (two languages we didn’t understand) and quite frequently one’s map is in one language whilst the name of the street you are looking for is in the other.

The first thing we did was to put the luggage into the railway station safety lockup so that we had a reasonable degree of mobility. Then, with "Lets Go Europe" in hand (a great publication) we chose a cheap hotel and telephoned them. “Yah vee godda room vor vive niyts” he said and so ve godda taxi unt vent zere. It was called The Pension Lohman and was a spotlessly clean no frills guest house in Stuttgartner Strasse just 3 minutes from the station and the prices were ridiculously low. Herr Lohman, the proprietor, helped us a lot, reading the classified ad's in the paper for us and telephoning people who had vans for sale, advising us on prices and telling us what trains to catch to get to places. All told he probably saved us a week's van hunting time.

In the evenings he regaled us with stories about when he was a young man in Hitler's army on the Russian front. He was most careful to point out that he was in a green uniform not a brown one. I didn't know what he meant but I pretended I did. Maybe the extra nasty SS Nazi types were dressed in brown? He told me at breakfast one morning that he had only just met his wife when “I levt her behind to go to ze front” - at least I think that was how it was meant. However, as I didn't get a glimpse of her behind I couldn't assess how big a loss this would have been to him at the time. Time had, however, taken its toll on her front.

When we told him that we would be going through East Germany he told us how he happened to end up on the Western side of the Berlin Wall. He lived with his family in East Berlin and managed to get himself a job interview in Frankfurt. He attended the interview and stayed the night with relatives, returning home on the evening of the following day. It was too late. The wall was already in place and he was cut off from his family. It took him almost a year of writing letters before he finally received a reply from his brother but he eventually established regular contact and has been sending them a monthly remittance ever since. "Only forty marks you understand. It's nothing to me but a fortune to them and if they knew how well I was doing they probably think I was stingy."

We enjoyed Frankfurt, it was clean and tidy, there were some good walks to be had down by the river and it had a palmengarten - an enormous building containing all kinds of palm trees and tropical plants. What was in some respects dismaying, was that it made most British cities look decidedly shabby by comparison, especially London, and the Metro was far better looked after than the tardy looking London underground. The food was inexpensive and first class and we ate most of the time at the railway station restaurants where the variety was outstanding and the service fast. Frankfurt Central station has at least 50 shops in it, restaurants and take-aways, a supermarket, fruit stalls, newsagents, shoe menders, perfumeries, photo shops and a whole lot more as well as a tourist information centre with a permanent staff of four around the clock. A very different concept in railway stations to what we were used to.

We eventually found the second hand van we had been looking for. Finding a van in Frankfurt was no trouble at all, there were lots to choose from and we became the proud owners of a 1980 Mercedes 207D diesel engined van. It was high enough to stand up in and we could walk through from the cabin - something we considered essential, especially on rainy days. There was already a sink, a cooker and a bed in it but it all needed re arranging before it would be suitable for the trip we had in mind and this task was reserved for Poland, where labor was cheap. We spent two days running around Frankfurt buying everything we thought would be difficult to buy in the communist countries before heading east at 4am on a grey, drizzly Wednesday morning with the van piled so high that we couldn't see out of the back windows.

We drove for a couple of hours before stopping at a petrol station for a few last minute Western supplies but when we went to move off, the starter wouldn't work. The petrol station had no mechanic and my tools were buried under mountains of supplies so we ended up getting a push from a couple of truck drivers and resolved not to stop the engine, unless parked on a slope, until we arrived in Warsaw.

Letter 3

Gee this is going to be a good book. See how smoothly chapter two has just blended seamlessly into chapter three. I found out how you do it. You type a whole load of pages and then just plonk the cursor down anywhere and call it a new chapter. Fredrick Forsyth told me about it and he should know. After all, he made a great job of that Ulysses book didn’t he? Perfect punctuation in that last chapter about Molly Bloom’s dream Perfect too was the West German countryside. A bit too perfect for my liking really. It wasn’t so terribly different to England, apart from the architecture of house and church, but it was all in such good condition that I thought it somewhat sterile. Everything just had to be perfectly painted and the flowers in the window boxes had to be just so. Old buildings were all restored so well that they had little character and a missing roof slate or a weed ridden garden now and again would have gone some way towards giving me the feeling that there were humans living in the houses. If the English were a race of anally retentive manicurists as I described them, then the Germans were a race of anally retentive engineers. Their gardens were well engineered with rows of flowers looking like their owners only had them in the garden because they couldn’t afford bricks. The roads were perfect, the telegraph poles were perfect and kids standing at the school bus stops were as well dressed as Hansel and bleedin’ Gretel are in the fairy story books.

Perhaps I shouldn’t criticize it because the people are probably perfect too. But I’d already seen enough of that sort of thing, that sort of culture. I was eager to set my eyes on East Germany again where the customs officers were some of the nastiest pieces of work on the planet and everything is falling to bits. The border hove into sight (notice the word hove. Not bad is it? I might use it again later) after a few hours and after passing through the West German side we drove a kilometer or so and rounded a corner only to see a queue of cars at least half a kilometer long. We knew at once that we were entering a communist or, as they like to call it, a socialist country - queues are a distinguishing feature of them all.

It was obvious that this was going to take a while so it gave us a chance to try out our campervanning skills for the first time. We re-arranged all the boxes so that we could reach the gas cooker, made a cup of tea and a sandwich and just sat there in the queue with the heater and the radio on, sitting high up above all the little motorbike engined Polish Fiats and the plastic bodied two stroke Trabants. We were the center of much attention and discussion amongst the other drivers who all stood around with long faces pushing their toy cars along in the queue to save their precious petrol which they'd all queued so long to get. We must indeed have looked like rich Western tourists sitting in our Mercedes with the engine running all the time. Little did they know that we couldn't switch the thing off without having to push start it.

An official approached us, took our passports, visas and car papers and put them on a long, covered conveyor belt to send them down to the officers in little glass booths who would process them. The men in the glass booths could stop and start the belt as they wanted and it was strange sitting in the van further down the queue and watching our documents go past us. Upon reaching customs it was a welcome relief to find that they weren't as nasty as they had been the last time we were here, although they didn't seem to like their customers very much. They asked a few questions in a gruff sort of manner and wanted to know if we were carrying a radiotelephone or firearms. I opened the side door of the van and asked the inspector to take a look inside. He knew exactly what I'd invited him in for. I held up a carton of cigarettes, he took them, stuffed them inside his jacket and left without a word. Then they ran a trolley with a mirror on it under the car and told us to go. Apart from the long wait it wasn't a bad experience at all although nothing like the West German border guards who wished us a good trip and smiled a lot.

As we drove off we saw others who hadn't come off as lightly as us. Three cars were outside the customs sheds being systematically dismantled, their owners watching and waiting impassively. The seats were out on the ground, petrol tanks removed and pieces strewn all over the place. There were very strict rules for transit tourists traveling through East Germany. You were not allowed to stop anywhere except at designated petrol stations and shops, where they tried to extract much needed Western currency from you. They also checked your speed constantly with radar and fined you in West German marks if you were driving at above 100 kilometers per hour. It seemed to me to be an admission that something in their economy wasn’t working if they wouldn’t accept their own East German currency for speeding fines.

If you stopped and engaged anyone in conversation or deviated from the transit route they would catch up with you and put you through a makeshift roadside court after which they also fined you in West German Marks. The name of the game was to get as much hard currency out of you as possible while you were passing through. At each road junction where it's possible to turn off the transit route, there was an observation tower occupied by two men with binoculars who kept the police informed by radio. Of course, the transit route through the country was the showpiece so that tourists wouldn’t get too bad an impression of the place but even so, the road surface was very bad by Western standards and the countryside looked as though the farmers all went on strike ten years ago and hadn’t returned.

The petrol stations were grey, grimy places in bad repair and stinking of diesel, with petrol pumps in need of painting and holes in the concrete of their forecourts. Nearly all had cracked windows held together with sticky tape, no water to wash windscreens with and everything made of metal was rusting to pieces. The toilets at these places didn’t have paper in them or locks on the doors. They stank too and needed a coat of paint, although I doubted if they’d get it in a hurry, and when they did it would probably have been in the ever-popular communist gray. There was an all-pervading sense of grayness which matched the weather perfectly. For some reason gray was the most used color in East Germany. Service stations and factories, cars, trucks and agricultural machinery - all gray. If almost everything had to be painted in the one color I wondered why it had to be gray? Why not pink or blue? - gray’s miserable. Perhaps all their battleships had been sunk but nobody had told the paint factory.

The roads on which we were travelling were Hitler's original autobahns laid all those years ago in concrete sections and even now, some fifty years later, still waiting for a surfacing of asphalt. As we traveled over these big slabs of concrete the tires made a regular clicking sound like being in a train. From time to time we drove through small strips of forest - larches and silver birch trees - they made a welcome break from the monotony and I found myself wishing they'd go on for a little longer. The contrast with West Germany is not worth describing. Communism just doesn’t work and one day soon it has to fall in a heap because it simply can’t keep up. Nowhere is this more evident than in the difference between the two Germanys where, if you didn’t know, you would say that the inhabitants of the two countries were from two completely different races.

Much more interesting than the countryside were the various forms of transport which we shared the road with. For some unknown reason all cars and particularly trucks from Eastern Bloc countries are ugly. I'm sure that the general populace doesn't find them attractive and their designers know what good looking cars look like so why it is that communism produces such gross ugliness in automobile designs I am at a loss to understand. Where are the commie designed Ferrari, Porsche or Jaguar equivalents I wonder? Good looking design, regardless of manufacturing quality, costs no extra so why? Perhaps the system destroys the artistic and the creative instincts in people.

Most remarkable were the Polish cars in East Germany, or rather, what was in them. Poles are perhaps the world’s most active independent trader\smugglers and nowhere are they more active than on the route between Poland and West Berlin. It’s the only Western city they don’t need a visa to visit and they can complete the round trip from the Polish border to West Berlin and back in a day. In West Berlin they can sell agricultural produce such as meat, eggs, tomatoes and so forth at markets or direct to shops at eight to ten times the price they could get for it in Poland. Even so, by West Berlin’s standards, the prices of the goods they smuggle in are still dirt-cheap. In Warsaw meat is rationed and you have to bribe the butcher with a bottle of vodka to get a decent cut but in West Berlin you can buy all the Polish meat you want.

On the return trip they take all sorts of things, some of it sheer rubbish. They go around car wrecking yards and pick up old tires which are worth nothing in the west but which people back home have to wait months to get hold of. They even take home and sell ordinary free supermarket bags because it’s a commodity the system in Poland can’t produce in any quantity and certainly not with any quality. It’s considered quite trendy to be seen carrying a Western supermarket bag around in Warsaw. Generally, Poles buy the cheapest, worst quality western goods possible because they’re still better quality than anything produced anywhere in the Eastern Bloc and there’s a ready market for them back home.

The tiny 625cc motorcycle engined Polish Fiats we passed along the road were, without exception, loaded to the gunwales. We saw one car with literally thousands of small, individual cartons of orange juice covering every square inch of space but the driver’s seat. The roof rack also was stacked high with orange juice too and its overall weight was evidenced by the sparks, which flew from the back of it as it scraped the ground on the bumps. I looked in the mirror as we passed it and even the right hand side of windscreen was covered in orange juice drink cartons. The driver couldn’t possibly have seen anything behind him. He was completely cocooned in the stuff and if he he’d had a collision he would have made headlines.

“Man Drowns In Orange Juice in His Own Car”

Just imagine running into the back of this mobile orange juice pool. There’d be a big bang and suddenly your whole world would turn orange as it splashed across your windscreen. It would be like driving into the navel of the world, a citrus mega-flora heaven where they play Scott Walker records all day and you lay around bombed out on LSD listening to Al Ginsberg and Timothy Leary lectures. Some cars carried all manner of unidentifiable rusting metallic junk in such quantities that, from behind, you wouldn’t have known there was a car and trailer under it all. None of it looked useable to me but Alicja said that it was the raw material they wanted – Polish steel mills turned out crap and any Western steel was worth having.

Other cars had roof racks and trailers loaded down with engine parts, gearboxes and car wheels. Weeks later, in Poland, we decided that it would be a good idea to carry a second spare wheel for the van. We bought a used one from one of these traders who’d bought it at a wrecker’s yard in Germany. We had to pay twice the price we would have paid for a new one in Germany but there was no option. He was the only guy who had one. I estimate that he made at least a month’s Polish wages on the deal but it was cheaper than going out to the West to buy one.

But back to East Germany. We drove at the legal limit of 100kph all the way through it and weren’t overtaken once because everyone was either driving to conserve petrol or was so loaded down with contraband that they couldn't go any faster. When we reached the Polish border there was a queue of about three-kilometers for trucks and half a kilometer for cars. More sandwiches and coffee. The queues were moving very slowly and we kept the engine running because we knew we wouldn’t be able to start it again. After a while a customs officer asked us to turn it off because of the diesel fumes. We explained that our starter was broken, thinking that maybe they would get on and clear us through customs quickly just to get rid of us. They didn't, and we waited.

There were three booths in a line, one after another which we thought were all Polish because they were all painted the same color (you guessed it, gray). The first one turned out to be East German and the official who processed our papers asked us in Polish if we had any vitamins for him. We didn't know what he was talking about and asked him what he meant.

"You don't have any vitamins for me"?

"I don't think so", said Alicja. "We have a few aspirins and stuff in the van."

"These vitamins could have a percentage", he said

Alicja looked blankly at him and he opened the door of his booth so that we could see the bottles of booze on the floor he'd been given by the people before us. I'd already seen the person in front of us giving him what looked like two wristwatches. We had no alcohol so we gave him a carton of cigarettes and he waved us on to the next booth. Customs officials throughout Central & Eastern Europe are, without exception, on the take and the most expedient thing to do is to accommodate them with a bribe of some sort. You can stick to your guns and insist that you are not obliged to pay anything but you may have to wait for hours while they go through your car. Worse still, they simply keep you waiting and hand you onto the next shift. I’ve known people who have waited for 2 days because they had nothing to give to the customs officials but the customs officials thought that they had.

Having got past the East German side we moved up to the Polish booth where the officer told us to stop the engine because he couldn't breathe for diesel fumes. When we said we couldn't stop it because we'd never start it again, he replied that he couldn't let the car through because our papers were not in order and anyway, if we couldn't start the van, then it was unroadworthy and we could on no account enter Poland with it. He didn’t even look at our papers! He told us to go to the side of the road, park up and “switch the fucking old antique of a thing off”. As he walked away he muttered that he didn't have time to mess about with us and he'd maybe come over and attend to us when he finished his shift. He probably thought we’d capitulate quickly with a bribe as Westerners are notoriously impatient but we thought we’d have some fun and wait him out.

We weren't worried at all. It was a nice sunny day, I needed a rest from driving and we didn't have any appointments to keep. I’d made sure to park on a slope so I could get the van started again and we drank tea, rearranged the boxes once more and tried to get some sleep. He came over about three hours later and apologized saying that he'd had a very hard, stressful day because two of his colleagues were on leave and the work load was heavier than usual. We waited for him to finish and then, without a word between us, I opened the dash pocket. There was nothing inside it but a packet of cigarettes with an American ten-dollar note sticking out of the top of it. I inclined my head towards the cigarettes but he looked for me to hand them to him. I didn’t make any move towards them so he pulled a stamp and inkpad out of his pocket and put his hand out for our documents. I handed him the cigarettes and our passports, which he stamped and walked back to his booth. I ran the van down the slope a little way and started it in gear, looked in the mirror and let out a big screaming WHOOOOP! I’d cut the ten-dollar note in half and I still had the other half for the next greedy bastard customs officer we came across. I vowed next time to run a horsehair through each cigarette with a needle too because apparently it makes you cough like a Russian delivery van.

To put these bribes into perspective for those readers who are not familiar with the ways of the Eastern bloc, a Polish customs officer at the time earned the equivalent of fifteen American dollars per month and if I’d have been straight he would just have taken ten from us. Poles who go to West Berlin to sell their illegal meat, butter and eggs make something like twenty-five dollars per trip. Depending on how close to the border they live and the availability of produce to sell they can do three trips a week. In this way they can earn themselves something like five times the customs officer’s monthly wage in just a week! Faced with this enormous financial disparity the customs officer can search their car and confiscate their goods or he can do the smart thing and take a few dollars from the driver in return for his turning a blind eye.

It seems to me that when a country pays its customs officials so little in relation to what most of the people he interviews each day earn from smuggling, that country is inviting bribery and can’t expect it’s officials to remain incorruptible. No matter how well principled the customs man is, sooner or later his kids are going to want new shoes or something and he's going to take what the driver offers him. It's ironic that all across Poland there is an acute shortage of meat while every day vast quantities of it cross the border into Germany in private cars. Heading south it was immediately apparent that Poland was a little more human, a little warmer to a visitor than East Germany albeit still very austere. Driving through the place felt much safer to us than East Germany because Alicja speaks the language and we have our relations here to help us if we run into problems. It was by now late afternoon and we had hopes of reaching Warsaw and a welcome meal and a bed at around midnight.

East Germany for the most part suffers from the effects of collective farming and we didn't see anything which you could call a farm there at all, just the odd corrugated iron tractor shed and fields of the same crop stretching for miles into the distance, all very boring. But in Poland we drove through dozens of villages with little mixed farms with a few ducks, cows, geese, chickens scratching around, maybe a couple of pigs and always a horse or two. We drove on past duck ponds, haystacks, and fruit orchards. In the villages the peasants were returning from the fields carrying their scythes over their shoulders, dogs following at their owners heels. Old women with wizened faces and headscarves stood talking on the pavements or sat on wooden benches in the gardens. And as the light began to fade we could see candles flickering in the village cemeteries.

The road, although narrow, was surprisingly well surfaced and we were making good time but as darkness came upon us we realized that the roads had no reflectors of any sort. There were no cats’ eyes in the middle of the road, no white lines, no arrows on bends and it was difficult to tell where the roadsides ended and the fields began. Shortly after dusk we began to come up behind horses and carts all of which were dark in color and not one of them had a reflector or rear light. By the time we reached the city of Poznan it had come on to rain. Poznan was a large city which did have a few dim street lights around the place but it also had large holes in the road which were filled with road colored water and I couldn’t see them. Had the streetlights have been over the holes it wouldn't have been so bad but as it was, driving was dangerous. We gave up our hopes of reaching Warsaw that night; I'd been driving and waiting at border posts for 15 hours and figured it was time to throw in the towel.

We looked for somewhere on a slope to park for the night. A hotel was out of the question; we had to sleep inside the van to avoid having our gear stolen. The land all around was flat as a bottle of Bulgarian lemonade so we found a muddy lay by at the side of the road and reasoned that for a packet of fags we'd be able to get a tow in the morning. I slipped a blank into the pistol we’d bought in Germany to scare off would-be muggers and we went to sleep on the boxes in the back. Awake at five thirty, I put the kettle on for coffee and found that our milk had gone off.

“Fuck”
“Why are you swearing?”
“Because the fucking milk’s gone off”
“I thought you weren’t going to get annoyed at small things anymore now that you’re not working”
“You’re absolutely right my dear”
“So?”
“So, I’m looking forward to a lovely cup of black coffee”
“That’s it; see…not difficult is it?”

She was right. I made the coffee and sat sipping it in the driver’s seat.

“Oh shit”
“What’s up?”
“That portable toilet chemical stuff we bought has leaked all over the bottom of my coat”
“How come?”
“Oh shit shit shit”
“What?”
“Look at it. It’s all over the bottom of my shoes”
“I thought you weren’t going to get annoyed at small things anymore”
“That wasn’t me that was you. Look at it, I’m fucking annoyed”
“Look, here comes a truck, ask him if he can give us a tow to get started”
“You ask him”
“I don’t speak Polish”
“Yes you do, you speak enough to ask for a tow”
I got out of the van and walked up to where the truck had stopped. The driver wound the window down and raised his eyebrows. I couldn’t think of the word for tow and so I asked him if he thought the weather was going to be fine. He said that the radio was the best place to find that sort of information. I agreed and looked at my boots. He asked if that was my van over there and I told him that it was but that it was a bad product. I knew it was a stupid thing to say but my conversation was limited by my small vocabulary. Then I asked him if he could start the van for me and he looked at me kind of suspicious like and wound the window back up. I didn’t know what to do so I went back and told Alicja who thought it was hilarious. I was still telling her about it when we heard the guy start up and drive off. It was another hour before a garbage truck came along and agreed to give us a pull to start but the thing was too light and the wheels spun in the mud. After the garbage collectors had left I tried the starter and the engine burst into life. I hadn’t thought about trying it before and we found, subsequently, that it would always start first thing in the morning when it was cold.

We eventually arrived in a grim looking Warsaw at eleven in the morning feeling tired and dirty. We hadn’t told Alicja’s mother exactly when we would be arriving, only that it would be in spring and we wanted to surprise her. Had she known our exact ETA she would have stood in queues for a week all over Warsaw trying to get extra food. We’d bought boxes full of food with us from Germany. A surprise it was, but more for us than her. She'd rented out the spare room, in which we were intending to stay, and we had nowhere to sleep. The lodger, a young woman from the country who was studying in Warsaw, was at home when we arrived and we could see that she was worried about being thrown out with nowhere to go. She went off to her room and a few minutes later we could hear her sobbing her heart out. We tried to reassure her by saying that we’d sleep on the floor that night and then find a relative to stay with but she said she’d feel guilty for being there in the middle of a family reunion and lots of other Polish stuff I couldn’t understand.

After an hour, during which Alicja's mother telephoned everyone she knew, the lodger was placed with friends on the understanding that she could return when we’d gone. I ran her and her luggage to the new place in the van and we paid a hundred American dollars inconvenience money to the people who were going to house her. I wondered out loud about inconveniencing these people but Alicja’s mum said it was a Godsend to them as the whole family didn’t earn that much in a month. We no longer needed the suitcases we’d been lugging about for so long and we gave them to the girl. They weren’t anything special and the wheels no longer worked but she was thrilled to bits. I saw why later, hers were made of papier mache.

When we returned to Alicja's Mum's apartment we had to carry the entire contents of the van up six flights of stairs because the lift was out of order and her mum was adamant that the van would be gutted by thieves in no time if anything was left in it. I was getting utterly sick of carrying our things up stairs. The last time was in Brussels when the lift had been broken in the Jaques Brell Youth Hostel. This time we had a big van full to the brim, I was dog-tired and it took the best part of two hours. At last there was time to relax and we both took a welcome bath. I was glad we did because the hot water went off the next day and only made the occasional brief appearance over the next six weeks. A year later we were still getting letters from my Mother in Law saying “we had hot water for a whole month”. Yes this was Poland all right, land of the occasional hot water and pre-loved scaffolding. We remembered experiencing exactly the same situation 4 years before when we were here. As soon as we found that the water was hot, everyone took a bath because they never knew when they'd get the next one.

The hot water supply in Polish cities is not an individual thing, you don't have your own hot water service, it comes from a great big central water heating plant usually located on the outskirts of town. It’s is pumped through underground pipes to the apartment and office blocks all around the city and to see steam rising from manhole covers in the middle the roads is a familiar sight. The city councils are forever renewing the pipes and, as they don't have the money required to buy good quality Western pipes, they quickly disintegrate in the corrosive hot water and they have to do it all over again. Hot water is not a service to be taken for granted in Polish cities - it's a sporadic thing.

For those fortunate enough to have telephones it’s common practice all over Polish cities to call friends and family and ask if you can come over and have a bath at their place. People seldom refuse these requests because they knew that it can be their turn not to have hot water next time. If you don’t have a telephone you either just turn up at your relatives apartment with your towel or you stay at home and heat water on the gas stove in pots and pans. The hot water that heats all the apartment and office radiators works on the same principle and when that goes off people have to be resourceful. I’ve seen people heat half a dozen house bricks on the gas stove and place them on two cold bricks on the floor and rotate heaps of these hot bricks around their apartments to keep warm. The person who’s actually heating the bricks on the stove has the warmest job but he/she nearly suffocates from carbon monoxide poisoning because of all the gas being burnt in the kitchen.

As for the pre loved scaffolding, it looks as though it’s been in service since before the Bolshevik Revolution. No, I’m wrong – before the Industrial Revolution. You don't see scaffolding in this sort of condition in the West because workmen would refuse to use it. No insurance company would insure people working on it. It’s all bent and rusty and the clamps which hold it together are on their last legs. When you see it erected on the side of a building it looks like a heap of rust colored sticks just blew up against a wall in a hurricane. There's no such thing as new scaffolding so, as it falls by the wayside, it's replaced by wooden saplings of varying lengths taken straight out of the forest and nailed together.

On our second night in Warsaw we went out to eat at a Vietnamese restaurant which offered, on the menu, such imaginative delicacies as Roast Piggy, Chicken with bamboo and Goat in fire. In Australia we were frequent visitors to Vietnamese restaurants and we knew what Vietnamese food should taste like. This wasn’t remotely like it and included things like beetroot, Polish sausage, turnips and pickled cucumber. The restaurant staff was all North Vietnamese who had been sent to Poland to study mechanical engineering, had married Polish girls and applied to stay here. They were interesting guys and, as we were their only customers at the time, they entertained us.

They told us that they'd been given an intensive Polish language course when they first arrived and this was something that had equipped them for living in Poland afterwards. When they were officially given permission to stay in Poland the regulations didn’t allow them to hold work permits but there was no law to prevent them from opening a business. They'd spent a considerable amount of time wondering what kind of business they could go into with limited funds and they finally decided on a restaurant but there were problems - none of them had ever cooked before, they didn't have any recipes and couldn't find woks to cook in.

Being mechanical engineers, designing and making the woks had been within their realm of expertise but, from my observations, they could have done with a few lessons in carpentry - the hand whittled chopsticks were a trifle lumpy and tasted of, I believe, pine sap. The next stage in their project had been to comb every grocery shop and market in Warsaw looking for authentic ingredients but they only found one - rice. This explained to our complete satisfaction the distant tang of burnt cabbage which hung around in the background of each dish we sampled. When combined with the fact that it had been cooked by mechanical engineers in home made woks, who hadn’t visited Vietnam in years and had no culinary training whatsoever, I would venture to say that we had experienced a Vietnamese culinary delight without parallel in its country of origin.

Things were ridiculously cheap for us in Poland and we ate out at the very best restaurants every day even though, in a city of one and a half million, there were only a handful of restaurants worthy of the name. One night we went to a very formal and posh place where the waiters spoke English. They didn't have a table for us as they were fully booked but said that we could get a meal in the other room at the grill. We sat down at the bar\grill and the waiter\chef told us that they only had one meal on the menu, steak and chips. We ordered one each. Mine was a pretty good steak but it was a little underdone, so having checked the price, which was a whole $1.50, I asked for another one.

"Another steak please, well done." "Thank you very much sir", he said, thinking I was complimenting him on his cooking of the last steak rather than giving him an order for the next one. I ate two underdone steaks that evening.

Inflation here, they say, is running at something like 80% p.a. and it really brings it home to you when you get into a taxi and there is a little piece of paper informing you that you must multiply the meter reading by 13 to get the current fare. We bought a few odds and ends for the van one day and they came to a price which was too much for the cash register. The shop assistant had to divide the price by four and ring it up four times on the cash register which was made for service in times when the currency was stable.

Alicja's Mum had had a fridge on order for over a year and was still waiting for notification that one had come into stock for her. The next time we were passing the shop we went in to inquire about it. The manager found the paperwork but told us that he had no idea when a fridge would be allocated, what size it would be or whether it would be of Polish or Russian manufacture. “It's the luck of the draw”, he said. “I have no control over it”. We thought we'd try cutting through all the crap and offer a bribe. There wasn't much beating about the bush. I showed him a ten-dollar note, he asked us to choose which fridge we wanted from the storeroom and we had it delivered immediately. This, of course, meant that someone else's mother who'd had a fridge on order for God knows how long, would miss out for a while longer. The cost of the fridge was the surprising part of the deal, it was $22, it looked good and it worked when we plugged it in.

Things generally were better than on our visit four years previously, the shops were better stocked, there were a few Western cars on the streets and, in Warsaw, the odd splash of color on buildings. Diesel for the van cost 3.35 cents per litre and we made arrangements to have long-range fuel tanks made and fitted. Commercials had just started to appear on Polish television. They were terribly amateurish but what else could be expected? They were the first form of advertising ever to appear on Polish TV. We saw a sign one-day in the city. It was for the film Dirty Dancing but had been translated into Polish as "Rotating Sex.

In the subway in Central Warsaw every day were some old buskers, pensioners supplementing their income, not just the odd one but a whole orchestra. They sounded good too, much better than Freddie Dix of Chipping Norton fame. On May the First, a big day throughout the Soviet Union, we watched a Polish country and western group perform in the street singing in English with American accents -down south American accents. They were word perfect although they probably didn't speak a word of English. Next came a very passable trad' jazz band, again singing in English, "everybody wanz mah babbee but mah babbee dun wanz nobbudy budmee" I felt a little sorry for them because they were good and lively but no one in the audience seemed to be entirely with it, no foot tapping and no applauding the solos and only a small attempt at applause at the end.

Photocopying too had just found its way to Warsaw but there were only about ten photocopiers in the whole of the city. You still had to fill in your name and address on a slip of paper so that you could be traced in case you were duplicating subversive literature, but nevertheless, four years ago there was not one commercial copying outfit in Warsaw.

A few days later I disgraced myself when we attended a Polish military funeral. It was for a man who had been an army Colonel and which, apart from the family, was attended by four busloads of army personnel. They were tall young soldiers with straight backs, razor sharp creases in their trousers and bags of spit and Polish or was it…pol?. This may need clarification. I didn’t mean Polish. I didn’t mean to imply here that they were Polish and carried bags of spit. Heavens no - I don’t know what they were carrying in their bags!

The coffin arrived in a gray van just like the regular vans you see driving around Warsaw - no distinguishing features at all to let one know that it was a hearse. The coffin was placed on a gun carriage and a mournful sounding military band led the way with the slow marching soldiers behind them, followed by the coffin with friends and relatives bringing up the rear. At first I had the impression that it was going to be an impersonal affair with the army taking over the proceedings and the family being somewhat left out of it. But it was well organized and when we arrived at the grave, the army stood in line to one side and let the family go to the front. They had organized a microphone for the two speakers and throughout the entire proceedings, three soldiers stood at the grave side straight as ramrods holding red cushions on which were displayed the man's medals. The army's demeanor in the event was respectful and dignified. In fact I formed the impression that it was a good way to run things because people weren't left wondering what to do, what protocol should be observed, and so forth.

There were, at various intervals, orders being given to the dozen or so soldiers who were standing behind me - orders which I couldn't understand, and when the order came to fire the salute, I didn't know what had been said. Suddenly, very suddenly, from out of the gray, an officer standing in front of me bellowed out a word, there was an enormous bang, I screamed "FUUUUCK" and hit the ground. I thought he'd seen a bomb dropping or something.

When I opened my eyes and took my hands away from over my ears I was lying on a heap of freshly dug mud staring over the edge of the grave straight at the coffin. I was dressed in my brother-in-law’s suit which now had mud all down the front of it and his cuff links were all gummed up with mud too. Of course, I did know that this wasn't exactly the way in which I should deport myself at such an occasion, but it was automatic. I looked up to see if anyone was left standing. Of course, everyone was. Although they didn't speak English I was sure they were all familiar with the word fuck - it's international. I got to my knees. They were all horrified at my behavior and stood there looking down at me with gaping mouths. All, that is, except for this one guy of about thirty years of age who started giggling under his breath and had to excuse himself. I saw him standing at the gate smoking as we were on our way out and he took one look at me, turned away, and started laughing again.

The cemetery was beautiful, covered in trees, it was like being in a forest and quite unlike Anglo Saxon burial places which by comparison seem cold and reserved and lack feeling. There were small bench seats at the ends of many graves that had obviously been built by the relations so that they could come, sit quietly and remember. There was a touch of unruliness about the place that seems to me to reflect the Polish spirit. I don't mean scruffiness, no, it was more cared for than most Anglo Saxon style cemeteries. It was more a naturalness, a wildness, a few weeds, primroses, lily-of-the-valley, forget-me-nots and that sort of thing.

One thing which did strike me as being unusual was that there were a number of newish graves on the headstones of which there was a persons name and birth date but no date of death. I was told that they had already been built, bought and paid for by people who are still alive but presumably don't want their death to be a burden on others. I regarded it as plain morbid and defeatist and I wanted to kick the owners up the ass and tell them to start living again because people with that kind of mindset are already a burden to others. Anyway, when I was at the cemetery I saw a peculiar thing. In amongst all these strange Slavic names on the headstones, some in the Cyrillic alphabet, one stood out. His name was Edmond Russell and I wondered how come he ended up there. Perhaps he was a tourist like me who went through a red light or maybe he'd been at a military funeral and had a heart attack when they'd fired the guns. I want to meet him when I get to heaven. I want to get pissed with him and have a good laugh about Polish cemeteries.

Alicja's uncle and aunt recently bought a farm about 40 km from Warsaw. It has an enormous barn with a concrete floor and electricity - ideal for messing around under cars - so we’ve been going down there to work on the campervan. On the way there is a road sign saying Moscow 1200 km and every time I see it I am reminded that we are only two days drive (if the roads are any good) from the capitol of Gorbyland. It seems very exotic to me.

Funny how Russians have this way of honoring their politicians and leaders by naming cities after them isn't it? And then sometimes they finally get around to admitting that the guy was a real bastard and rename it after someone who's in vogue at the time. I mean, there's Ho Chi Minh City, St Petersburg, Stalingrad, Leningrad, etc. etc. Us good guys don't have Nixonville, Churchilltown, Reagan City or Thatcherville etc. do we? I'm sure that one day, when all these poor sods have finally got color television and hot running water, and the rest of the World is living on the moon, there'll be a Gorbograd or Gorboburg or something.