AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE EVENTS IN THIS SECTION ALL TOOK PLACE IN 1986
THINGS ARE DIFFERENT NOW
ALL THE COUNTRIES VISITED (EXCEPT TURKEY) ARE IN THE EU NOW (2024) – NO VISAS ARE REQUIRED
THE BULK OF THE TEXT IS AS I WROTE IT THEN – SLIGHT ADJUSTMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN THE AID OF CLARITY NOW.

Thursday, July 31st, 1986

Distance travelled 214 kilometres

It is a weird thing to say but, this was a day which I talk about regularly even (at the time of writing) thirty-eight years later. I think it is fair to say that it contributed to changing my entire life.

I woke up feeling good. I was relaxed, shaved and clean. Even the slightly odd breakfast (mainly various types of suspicious looking sausages and sweet stuff and I do mean SWEET) did nothing to dampen my spirits.

I set off early, only a few minutes after seven, in warm sunshine, for the Czechoslovak border, which was probably around fifteen kilometres away.

Leaving Hungary was a breeze, the guards seemed not to care less. My Passport was scrutinized, sure, but not in any meaningful way. Up went the pole and I entered Czechoslovak control. Note, NOT Czechoslovakia itself, merely its control.

It started as was usual. I passed my Passport through the slot and waited. After about twenty minutes, a guard came out and gestured me to a side area where there were two chairs and a table and left me there. After a further, protracted wait, two other guards came out and gestured for me to unpack my panniers onto the table. They looked at my stuff and one wandered off, coming back a few minutes later with a typewriter. Then, they sat down and, after a discussion of some sort about each individual item, they typed a description of it onto a form. They took turns typing, but it was one finger stuff, with numerous requirements to do a correction. Every article took a minimum of ten minutes to discuss and describe. Most took longer. After a couple of hours of this, with the “in” pile scarcely diminished, they both got up, walked away and disappeared for over half an hour. A tea break, I supposed. They came back and wearily resumed their labours and another couple of hours dragged slowly past. Then up they got again and disappeared, this time for over an hour. Maybe a lunch break, who knows. Then it was into what I assumed was the final leg, but I was wrong. With only about three or four items left, they took yet another half hour break.

It was during this lull in the proceedings that all hell broke loose. A siren went and some olive green vehicles with blue lights shot away up a track. They returned before my typing pool did, swinging into an open area. Several AK-47 toting guards formed a semi-circle round the back of one van, the doors opened and three young guys, with their hands handcuffed behind them, were more or less thrown out and roughly marched past me and into the main building. I will add, out of accuracy, rather than prurience, that one had wet himself. I have no idea what they had done, but I suspect it may have been trying to escape from Czechoslovakia into less oppressive Hungary.

When the furore died down, my typists returned and took an inordinately long time to write up my few remaining items. Then, they took away the typewriter and returned, indicating I could pack. I was VERY good at that by then, so it took about a minute. Not that it gained me anything, because the typed list was then taken away – and returned about twenty minutes later, with an official stamp.

Another wait for my Passport and it was returned to me with the list inside. Then, I had to go and change money, for my three projected days in the country. This was, I think, USD 150. In any event, I was given a huge handful of notes which I stuffed into my pocket. At long last, I got on my trusty BMW, up went the pole and, although the sun was still up, I entered the land of darkness. It had taken over eight hours.

Author’s note: I recently drove from Budapest to Prague in my car (!) To cover the same distance, at exactly the same crossing point, took somewhat less than eight SECONDS.

It is easy enough, when you are feeling put upon, to employ hyperbole, but if I had thought thought that the Police in Bulgaria and Romania were bad, what on earth was the term I was going to use here. The best way I can describe it is that, in the first two countries the Police seemed, at least, to believe they were protecting the State. In Czechoslovakia, all the Police officers with which I had contact (which, as you will hear, was closer to two hundred than one hundred) seemed only intent upon reminding me that I was wholly insignificant and it was they who held the power – and, of course, the guns.

I had not even gone a kilometre when a Policeman stepped out of a car parked beside the road and held up a hand containing the white circle and red centre on a handle that meant STOP. The car was yellow, with a white doors bearing the letters VB in black and I was to come to hate the very sight of them. In case you care VB meant “Veřejná bezpečnost” (Pubic Security). So it was that, although I could still see the border post behind them as they slowly went through the list, checking it against the contents of my panniers in a laborious process that took over twenty minutes.

In the twenty or so kilometres (12 miles) before I arrived in Bratislava, this happened a further four times.

I still remember my first sight of Bratislava. The late evening sun, glinting off of the endless rows of paneláks (panel houses), many of which were pastel coloured, made it look like Toy Town.

But the bad toys were haunting its environs. I crossed the Danube, yet again, on a formidable bridge that seemed to have lookout positions on top of its support towers and made my way, with only one stop by the Police, to the motorway upon which Prague was now signposted.

The motorway was concrete and with two lanes in each direction. The inside lane, where freight would normally be expected to drive was corrugated and designed, presumably, to create enough noise to keep truckers from nodding off. For comfort, I drove mostly in the outside lane which was not a problem as there was hardly any traffic at all. That said, most entry ramps seemed to have a VB car parked on them, at least until I passed by. Then they were behind me in an instant and it was tick the list time again ……. In the one hundred and thirty odd kilometres between Bratislava and leaving Brno, I got to play “tick” on six further occasions. Yes, by then, I WAS counting.

Finally, as I got about fifty kilometres out of Brno, I felt that I had just about had it. It was full dark now and, apart from myself, there was no traffic, so I slowed to a crawl and I turned off my lights. As the next junction approached, pointing to a town called Velké Meziříčí, I accelerated and then killed the engine as I sped up the off ramp. At the top, I turned left without stopping and did not restart until I was a few hundred metres down the road. I will never know if there was a VB car lurking on the “on slope” but there were none to be seen up there. I crept along with the lights off until I found a small road leading into the woods. I went far enough along it to be out of sight of the more major road. For some reason, there was a bench beside the road, so I stopped there.

Then it was out with the poly-bag, onto the grass and into dreamland.