After having a walk round the church we followed a road that should have joined us up with the nice smooth motorway out of Prague towards Slovakia. After 2 hours however, the road we were on ended in roadworks, leaving us to try and find our way on roads that were not on our map. A van driver picked us up and told us to follow him, we had no choice and instead of leading us to our deaths, we soon found our way back onto the motorway, which somehow had a bizarre ridged road surface which made everything in the van clatter. We were pulled over 10k from the Slovak border by the most gorgeous police woman in the world!
We had neglected to buy a Czech tax disk, the penalty being a £40 fine. We eventually, through cunning use of flattery and getting her and her attractive colleague to sign the van, bartered the fine down to £15. Result!
We whizzed through Slovakia in a couple of hours, and in Hungary we stopped to help out a team of Irish girls broken down in a micra near Budapest. We waited with them untill the tow truck came, and carried on.
Budapest sunset
It started raining. Hard. So we parked up by the side of the road, in territory that was looking distictly more soviet for some sleep.
I woke up at around 7 in the morning to pouring rain, rain pouring into my lap, all down my front! We had drilled various holes in the roof of the van, for the hammock, to attatch our mascot, Bacon
, and the drivers side window frame was broken, so water gushed through that too. I rigged up a system of plastic sheeting to direct this water ingress through a large rust hole in the floor, which allowed me to get another couple of hours sleep.
We started driving early, heading for the Ukraine. The Ukraine border was a faff on, arsey guards, numerous searches and horrible weather. But we were through. I had thought up untill then that Czech, Slovakia etc were fairly soviet and different, but it was nothing compared to the Ukraine. Literally, as we drove over the border bridge, we all felt extremely vunerable. We had left the other Bedfords after the Czech party, so had done the last 2 and a half days alone and we felt very very alone. The place was bleak, grey and very backwards. Huge soviet trucks blazed past us, ladas and moskovichs were battered and there were people walking cows and sheep on bits of string.
We pulled into a petrol station and to our complete delight we saw the others. None of us could believe it, after 60hours we had stopped at the same fuel station in the Ukraine. It felt so good to be back with people we knew.
In these countries there was always someone who filled your car up for you, and this fuel station obviously had a scam going where the attendant filled the cars up with the wrong fuel, so the bambi had a tank of diesel, while another Hungarian man had a tank of petrol in his diesel truck. They were obviously taking advantage of the fact that no-one understood cyrillic.
We carried on through the greyest countryside I have ever seen, and started climbing up and into the mountains. Once above the cloud layer, the weather was better, and the scenery beautiful and mountainous. We stopped every couple of hours for coffee and Shasklik, a tasty lamb kebab served with spicy tomato sauce.
From left to right Al, Paul, Jim, Me Rob, Rob and Dave
We carried on driving all day and when we came down from the mountains we encountered the worse roads yet. They were either flooded from the torrential rain, or had huge ruts in them, similar to the tramlines you get on british motorways, only 5-6 inches deep.
That night, after more depressing driving, we booked into a beatiful new lodge in the middle of this awful grey town. The lodge was £12 a night, had a funny coloured swimming pool and a downstairs bar. We had a meal, meat in pancakes, and a few beers. A great night. We were all so relieved at having found each other and glad to be having a good time after the depressing day driving.
Edited by Elfie, 24 September 2008 - 12:41 PM.
