Three Up & East
Tuesday, July 6, 1999: "Danubia…"
By Donald Massyn

Route for Day 4:

Tat (N 47°44,978’ E 018°37,920’)

Komárom/HU-SK Border (N 47°45,221’ E 018°07,301’)

Komárno (N 47°46,278’ E 018°07,152’)

Nove Zámky (N 47°59,297’ E 018°10,118’)

Sered (N 48°16,930’ E 017°44,410’)

Trnava (N 48°22,203’ E 017°34,523’)

Senica (N 48°40,660’ E 017°21,833’)

Holič/SK-CZ Border (N 48°49,655’ E 017°08,322’)

Hodonin (N 48°51,207’ E 017°07,661’)

Towards Breclav (N 48°45,275’ E 016°53,654’)

Hustopeče

Brno (N 49°09,994’ E 016°36,680’)

Vienna Interchange (N 49°27,084’ E 015°36,739’)

Janovského 36/919, Prague 7 (N 50°06,149’ E 014°26,001’)

Distance covered = 511 km

Mark handed over the keys to the bike then silently climbed into the passenger seat of the Skoda. It was hard to see behind the sunglasses, but I would say he was feeling the same as I was this morning. Last nights bottles of wine and gin were still rattling heavily in my mind. It was time to go home.
Last evening the romance of the riding into the sunset along the Danube had filled the air. In the light of day the road to the border at Komárno was a little less romantic. Slow heavy trucks belched smoke into my face as I swayed back and forth looking for an opportunity to pass. The road followed the Danube closely, hardly a straight stretch the entire way to the border, making it even harder to pass. Every time I managed to get past a truck I needed to slow down and wait for Debbie to get past in the car. The 30 km’s to the border seemed to go on forever, but finally arrived on the Hungarian side and I pulled over to hand the bike over to Mark to get it past the border.

Something seemed to have happened that was making the border officials a little more vigilant than usual. The queue of cars waiting to get over the border was longer than I had been used to. Who knows what was happening, as long as they let us go. More than that I really didn’t want to know. Debbie was driving, she had the license, I was lying back in the passenger seat wondering if a cold drink would make me feel any better. I saw black men walking around, well, not black men, I mean I saw men dressed in black walking around. Slovakian Customs, that’s what the back of their black T-shirts said. Hmm, "The Men in Black". The were taking too long with the passports.
"Pull over, please. Park there. Please, out of the car. Open the back. This is all your luggage. Please take it all out". You have to be joking. Was this really happening? Feeling the way I was, I was in no mood to argue. Just co-operate with them and they’ll soon get bored.
Two large trolleys were wheeled over next to the car. I started to unpack all the luggage from the boot while Debbie unpacked the contents of the interior of the car into the second trolley. At first their main interest was the spare wheel in the back of the hatchback. Traveller’s Tip: Don’t hide your drugs in the spare wheel, that’s the first place they will look. They didn’t seem interested in why the tyre was damaged and the rim badly dented. Pity about that, I could have kept them busy with an interesting story about how I was driving along a narrow Hungarian road that suddenly got narrower. Then again they didn’t seem to speak English that well so they probably wouldn’t have understood anyway.
Next, a lazy looking Alsatian sniffed the car inside and out. I assumed it was for drugs or possibly weapons. I began to wonder what it was about us that made them decide to search us. Three slightly hungover, bleary eyed Africans on a motorbike and a borrowed company car. What could have it have been that raised their suspicions.
From now on I was assigned my personal customs official whose job it would be to carefully inspect each of my possessions. We began with my large brown rucksack. Slowly and methodically we went through each item in the bag. Lots of dirty laundry, tourist brochures from the National Gallery in London, the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, Slot Lowenstein, just across the river from Gorinchem in Holland. My official program from the Glastonbury music festival, my tent, which I’d brought all the way from home just for the music festival. Somehow it didn’t seem like the right time to get nostalgic about the past three weeks that I’d spent in Europe. As for my personal inspector, he was busy disgorging the contents of my toiletry bag. Travellers Tip #2 : Don’t hide the drugs in the toiletry bag, that’s the second place they look.

Innocent as I was, it was the contents of the toiletry bag that took the most explaining on my behalf; with a little help from Debbie. First came the headache tablets. Easy enough, "headache" I said rubbing my head. Next, my special emergency hangover pills, which in all honesty I should have taken this morning before we left. "Hangover", I said, rubbing my head again. "No, tell him it’s for your stomach" Debbie whispered from behind me. I turned around to see her rubbing her stomach. I turned around and gave a look as if to say, "Well, you heard the lady. Those pills are for a bad stomach". Next, and these were the ones I’d been dreading ever since he’d dumped everything out onto the trolley, Malaria tablets, left over from a trip to Sodwana Bay on the Indian Ocean. "Malaria" I said, not knowing exactly what to rub. I smiled the cheesiest smile I could muster, all the time thinking to myself, "Just don’t ask me to explain what Malaria tablets are and why I have some in my bag" I really didn’t want to spend half an hour explaining. I guess the smile did if for him, after a momentary interest in a bag a vacuum packed tea from Harrod’s (a gift for someone back home), the man in black decided that if I was hiding anything then it was probably not illegal. Without a word, he turned around and walked back to his cabin. My smile turned to a grin, "You silly little bastard, aren’t you just the disappointed one".
Debbie had also been assigned a personal baggage inspector, although hers seemed at least to have a sense of humour. I arrived just as he was opening up Mark’s bag of Hungarian wineland soil. "You have no sand in Africa?", He joked, running his hand through the bag of soil. Debbie had the feminine advantage and seemed to have adopted the "Dumb Blonde Approach" to the whole situation. She just smiled nicely and laughed at the man’s little joke.
I walked back to my trolley and started packing everything back into my bags. It was becoming clear that they were getting bored with the whole affair. Unfortunately for them, their headline-making, career-advancing drug-bust of some high rolling African drug dealers wasn’t going to happen today. Without really asking we packed our bags back in the car, retrieved our passports and drove off into Slovakia. Stopping at the first filling station we found, we recounted our various stories of the search over a nice cold drink.
After the rude welcome to Slovakia the whole place started looking a bit more tarnished to me. But at least our little ordeal was over and we’d have a story to tell to our grandkids when we were old about how we almost got arrested for drug smuggling in Slovakia back in the summer of ‘99. And anyway, every kilometre we travelled from now on would be a kilometre closer to home. I was feeling good again, my spirits were lifting.
Mark suddenly got bitten by the off-roading bug and headed off a side road toward what looked like a large dam, the bike hadn’t been off the tarmac too much during the trip. The dam never appeared other than on the map I was reading. Debbie had asked me to estimate how far it was to the Czech border. The little Skoda’s on-board computer was saying we had a little less than 200 km’s of fuel left in the tank. Taking a careful look at the map, I estimated a little less than 200 km’s to the border.
Somehow we’d contrived to end up with very little Slovak currency. In the end we stopped at a filling station and emptied our pockets of their loose change to come up with enough to put in a couple of litres of fuel. Mark and I swapped vehicles again for the second time today. He was clearly being generous today. Except for the change to get over the Czech border I would be driving the bike for the rest of the day.
There was not that much riding left to do. Total distance to Prague from the border was about 250 km’s. Past Brno, (site of the Czech Grand Prix) and then on to the long straight concrete slab back home. It’s a soulless stretch of highway, which can only be improved on by riding on a bike. The sky was looking a bit ominous, grey clouds gathering above growing darker the nearer we got to Prague. As the sky grew blacker and blacker the throttle twisted further and further toward me but the inevitable downpour finally arrived about an hour away from home. We pulled over at the next service station for some shelter. With some Red Bull’s to keep the senses alert we paged though some of the..."racy"...magazines on the rack inside the shop to keep us occupied. As the skies started to clear Mark decided he needed some reading material on the road back home and dashed back inside to buy a couple of the magazines we’d been reading.
Soon the Prague skyline rose up in front of me and Debbie pulled ahead of me to lead us back to the flat in Janovského. After negotiating the wet cobblestones through the town centre I was glad to get back home. We unpacked the car and carried everything back up to the flat where my bed was waiting for me.
Of course it wasn’t really my home or my bed, but since I’d first arrived Mark and Debbie had made me feel as though I was home. Every journey has its memories both good and bad. I’ll always remember that night on the balcony in the Hotel Tatra, sipping Spanish Brandy and puffing on Cuban Cigars. I’d have to make an effort to forget about the flat tyre. But eventually every journey ends and when it does, there’s no better feeling than getting back home and flopping down in your very own bed.

TRIP STATISTICS

Total trip 1,471.8 km

Don Massyn did 692.7 km (47.06%)

Mark Pautz did 662.8 km (45.03%)

Mark & Passengers did 116.3 km (7,90%)

We used 76,0 litres of 91 octane fuel at a total cost of US$ 49.00.

Average cost of US$ 0.64 per litre.

Average cost of US$ 0.04 per kilometre.

An average of 17.82 kilometres per litre.

An average of 5.66 litres per 100 km.

We used 200 ml of 15W40 oil.

Oil consumption was thus at a rate of 112.25 ml per 1,000 km.