AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE EVENTS IN THIS SECTION ALL TOOK PLACE IN 1986
THINGS ARE DIFFERENT NOW
THE BULK OF THE TEXT IS AS I WROTE IT THEN – SLIGHT ADJUSTMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN THE AID OF CLARITY NOW.

Wednesday, July 30th, 1986

Distance travelled 396 kilometres

Morning came far too soon, I was awoken by birdsong and blinding sunshine although it was still hideously early. I never get hangovers, but I could certainly have used more sleep than I had got and I felt less than human when I emerged into the light. The battery on my razor was long dead, but there were sockets in the amenities block and I had a good shave and a lovely hot, not merely warm, shower. I soon felt completely refreshed and ready to rock.

I packed up my gear, which took about a minute and waited outside the camp shop so I could buy some breakfast. At that moment the young receptionist appeared. She DID seem a little bit the worse for wear, but she not only sold me a couple of fresh (as in still warm) rolls, but also magicked up two mugs of extremely passable tea. Bliss.

Then, she dug my Passport out of the safe and I was off again, Budapest beckoned.

The roads in Hungary were the best I had been on for quite a while, some was almost proper motorway. Despite capping my speed a bit because of my bouncy suspension, I covered the two hundred and fifty kilometres (150 miles) to Budapest in about four hours including a stop for some lunch (I HAD to try Hungarian Goulash (which nearly took the roof off of my mouth !)) at a small restaurant near the main road at Szolnok.

As a person who grew up in the countryside on a smallholding, the rich darkness of the soil in the fields was intriguing. I was almost tempted to stop and run my fingers through it.

The city of Budapest itself, as I rolled in through the eastern suburbs of Pest was very drab and dirty. I was quite disappointed as, in my imagination, it had always had a sort of mystical place. The streets were narrow and clogged with cars, far more than I had seen anywhere since I had left Istanbul. I came to the mighty Danube and pulled up briefly to sit by the river as I was hot and sticky from fighting the traffic.

In the corner of my eye, I saw a Police car pull up behind my BMW, but nobody got out and a few minutes later it glided away.

I did not want any more attention, so I got back on the BMW and found my way over the river. Not on a ferry this time, but via the unusual, but faded elegance (it could have used a coat of paint), of the Szechenyi Lanchid or Chain Bridge. This put me into Buda (Budapest was once two twin cities, Buda and Pest, on either side of the Danube).

Where Pest had been largely flat, Buda was the opposite and, as I followed the signs for Bratislava in (the then) Czechoslovakia, the road led me quite steeply uphill.

As I droned up a long steep hill on some quite well-surfaced section of the motorway, the BMW’s engine note suddenly rose quite abruptly from a steady drone to something akin to a roar. I cursed to myself and quickly swerved to the hard shoulder. It only took about a second to realise that my right-hand silencer had just dropped off. I could see it, laying there in the centre of the carriageway, about four hundred metres back behind me. There was a lot of freight traffic, so I sprinted, in the slow lane, to recover it before it was crushed. I made it, grabbed it, dropped it because it was VERY hot, grabbed it again with my sleeves as opposed to hands and leapt swiftly onto the hard shoulder as the driver of a large approaching HGV let me know of his displeasure with a blast of his air-horns. As I walked up the hard shoulder, cuddling my silencer like a hot metal baby, another HGV indicated right and pulled up neatly between me and the bike. I noted that it was British registered and was from a haulage firm in Stockton-on-tees. As is my way, I automatically registered the fact that he was actually farther from “home” than I was.

As I walked up the inside, the cab door popped open and out hopped the driver. He looked at me, at the silencer and turned his head to the BMW. “It looks like you have a problem, son” he said that delightful Tees-side accent. “Fancy a cup of tea ?”. I guess my face must have implied that I did, as he quickly moved to a compartment under the load bed and produced a small stove, a kettle and a bottle of water. As the water warmed, we examined the bike together. The rear support bracket had sheared, probably during the crash in Turkey and the clip holding the silencer to the exhaust pipe must have finally given up the ghost and let go. Tim, for that was his name, pondered a moment and then walked back to his truck and rummaged in another cupboard under the load bed. He pulled out a couple of tin mugs, dropped a tea bag in each and added some boiling water. Then he opened yet another little cupboard (his truck seemed to have little cubby holes everywhere) and pulled out a pair of stout gloves, a small tool box and a couple of other things I could not really see. He walked back to me and I saw he was holding a Jubilee Clip and some wire. He knelt down, slipped the Jubilee Clip over the end of the silencer and slotted it back onto the exhaust pipe. Then he pulled a screwdriver out of the tool box and tightened it. The other thing he had been holding was a small spool of stiff, galvanised wire. He cut a length of wire with some pliers, tightened a loop around the broken bracket on the silencer and deftly attached it to the broken mount on the bike. He checked his work for solidity, nothing budged, so he put his tools away and stood up. All this took about two minutes. “Tea should be brewed” he said with a wink. So, we sat high up in his cab, drunk our tea and watched the world hum by. He was ex-army (REME) hence his incredible handiwork and was pleased to have been able to help a fellow Brit in distress. It felt weird, speaking in English to someone who really understood it. In the end, we had to be on our way, so I shook his hand and off he drove. I gave him a cheery wave when I eventually passed him on yet another incline and was treated to a blast of his air-horn too.

As an aside, I did have to buy a new left-side mirror when I got home (ouch !), a pair of shock absorbers (double ouch) and a new set of panniers too (triple ouch). I kept the bike for a further five years before I slipped a disc in my back and reluctantly sold it to my friend because I was told not to ride it. Tim’s Jubilee Clip and wire were still, firmly, securing the right-hand silencer as my friend rode my trusty steed out of my life.

All this stuff eats up time and it was darkening steadily as the border with Czechoslovakia approached. As I suspected that I would not be able to change my remaining Forints into anything worth having, I decide to try and stay a night in Hungary. I left the highway and found a small pension in a place called Mosonmagyarovar, which I liked because Magyar is the Hungarian word for Hungary, I think. It was certainly on their money – and they were happy to take some of it from me.

The pension was small, clean and comfortable, so I got a shower and a shave and a large and somewhat fiery meat dish for my supper. I slept like a dead person.