The eventual solution of bike problems sees the happy wanderers heading for the famous Hungarian wine town of Eger. Remember all that good value Bull's Blood you drank when you were students?

Hippy once again did a blinder on the navigation front and took us up the perfect biking road. Regrettably our memory for town names in foreign tongues lets us down but if you dig out your atlassaes and find Paszto in Hungary and look for a national park containing Galya-teto, you've just about got it. The winding roads went up through a forest of silver birch trees that in the autumn light and with appropriately autumnal leaf offerings gave the most surreal sensation as the movement of light impinged on the optic nerves. (Oh dear, Pat's lost the plot!) No, really, the views were unspectacular because of the mist and tree cover, but the forest itself was truely magical. The roads themselves were twisting to just the right degree for a fully laden German bruiser of a bike and we came away with gleeful grins.

Eger itself was uninspiring until we found the centre wherupon it was transformed into a little cracker. No pretensions at all. This must be a massive tourist pull in the season and one would expect the usual MacDonalds offerings and wall to wall West European department stores, but thankfully, there was a wholesomeness about the place. The hotel tried to charge us the same for parking as a car and I of course objected only to spend a sleepless night worrying about its vulnerability on the street front. We have no problem with paying a supplementary tax in hotels as tourists as we can readily perceive that even travelling on our savings, we are far better off than most of the locals, but I am starting a world cruisade for the fair treatment of motorcyclists in an autocentric world.

We were determined to make the most of our Hungarian money before moving on and so had a major blow out at a nice restaurant. Our fried everything meal for two arrived on a tree. We munched our way through it and ate everything from the roots up to the fairy on top. Returning to uor pad, Pat made to read from our current novel to Hippy who was engaged in knitting a replacement for the scarf nicked in Gniezno. After one chapter, he had to take a time out saying "wake me in a minute and I'll carry on". At 8 o' clock the next moning, he awoke and discovered a full length scarf, completed novel and the solution to all of the world's problems done by Hippy. OK so she'd finished the novel really.

The bike was still there!

A flat wind route accross the plains of Eastern Hungary took us in double quick time to the Romanian border. The Lonely Planet had advised that a two hour wait was likely which was possibly true for a car, although I would suggest rather longer than that. In our case, we were amazed to be activeley encouraged to "filter" through to the front of the queue. The border guards were unsmiling but not uncooperative. The Romanian one spent most of his time looking up at a sheet on the wall to try and work out whether we needed a visa or not. Eventually we were waved through to the customs official who was intrigued as to where we were going. I shortened the possible conversation by saying South Africa rather than the full story. His reply was to ask whether we were carrying arms or drugs. F... knows why we would be carrying drugs in an Easterly direction but we obliged him with an answer in the negative. In all, although we had had some worries about this, the first of our less than sophisticated border crossings, everthing went very smoothly.

Our first encounter with Romania was a guy who pipped the horn of his car withing 50 yards of the border and pulled us over. We thought maybe he had seen our GB plate in the queue and wanted the crack, but it was quite clear that he had some rip off scam up his sleeve when he pulled out a 1000 Lei note (currently worth one quarter of a p) and waffled on about needing some change. We sped off chuckling.

The arrival in Oradea was not too spectacular - a 3 mile striaght lined with both defunct and foul smelling factories. The difference in wealth is already apparent. We have just dined in a beautifully decorated restauant that clearly once catered for the favoured few of 'the party'. There were high windows with nice drapes and huge Versaille-like mirrors, custom made crockery and all that. Stroganoff, steak and egg, saland, bottle of rather nice pinot noir and coffee - seven pound fifty. Thankyou very much.

We find our selves writing in a cyber cafe playing "For twenty five years I've been living next to Eric - who the f...ing heck is Eric?" Bizarre or what?