We arrive in Budapest in high spirits and enjoy our stay at camping Orion. The neighbouring cafe with a live singing organist adds to the fun. Next task is getting out of Budapest safely. Should we cycle around it, straight through it, or should we take the subway out? Cycling around the city would mean more than 30 kilometers extra, the subway is too crowded, so we decide to cycle through the city centre. It's hard to fall asleep that night. We both think about our experience riding through the city centre of Vienna. It was very hectic and not very enjoyable at all.

Cycling out of Budapest is not as hard as we thought it would be. Everything is going o.k. and before we know it we are out of the centre and riding through the suburbs of Budapest. We reach the starting point of road 5 that is supposed to take us to Tiszakeckse towards the south of Hungary. Suddenly signs indicating that cycling is forbidden show up along the road. Great! What can we do? We can't get off the road, so we have to cycle on. The traffic is getting heavier and heavier, and we definitely feel that we don't belong here. Suddenly a cardriver hits Suzan on her shoulder with a plastic bottle. We don't know why Suzan was hit, but to us it's clear that we have to find a way out. Luckily we find a smaller road and soon we cycle through the beautiful Hungarian countryside. After two days of great cycling we reach the Romanian border. In spite of the bottle incident we stand by our claim that Hungary is a great country for cycling.

We're nervous about Romania. What will it be like, what can we expect? We know that it is very poor and that it has suffered immensely under the Ceaucescu regime. Tooour surprise things go very well at the border. There is a long line of cars but the Romanian guards invite us to come to the front immediately. They are so fascinated by the bikes that they take us through the formalities very quickly. When we walk away wheeling our bikes the guards stop us. Have we done something wrong? It turns out that they expect a little show from us in return for the quick service.They want to see us cycle on our bikes. We are happy to oblige the guards and in grand style we're waved off into Romania.

We drive through a desolate landscape. It's completely flat and barren. The small town we pass shocks us, everything is ruined. The houses that once must have been beautiful have all fallen apart. There are so many animals roaming free. We have to dodge herds of geese, cows, chicken, ducks, dogs and donkeys. We've never seen anything like it. The Romanians, on their part, have never seen anything like us. Every town simply explodes when we ride through it. People are pointing at us, shouting at us, and running after us. Some boys grab their bikes and try to follow us. Sometimes they overtake us and ride in front of us for a while. At first we are a bit frightened. But it's all very friendly and soon we find ourselves shouting 'Buna Zhiwa!' (good day) all the time. This increases their enthusiasm even more and we almost start to feel like celebreties. However, the poverty we see around us is extreme. The contrast between our wealth and their misfortune is so immense that we arefeeling out of place on our expensive bikes.

We reach the town of Sinnecolau Mare and decide to stop in the town square to change some money. We are immediately engulfed by people. They all want to know where we are coming from and where we are going to. When they hear that we have cycled all the way from Holland they are amazed and stare at us in disbelief. They think that it is wonderful that we are cycling through their country and urge us to stay in Romania as long as possible. 'Please don't go to further into Bulgaria or Turkey, it's full of bad people that will kill you! Better to stay in Romania where there are many good people', they tell us. Finally we have to come round to business and head for the bank to get some Romanian Lei. Unfortunately the bank is just closing. The bankmanager advises us to change our money on the street with the 'schwartz business people' as they will give us a better rate that he can anyway. He points out a good schwartzbusiness money changer and before we know it we are changing Hungarian Florints into Romanian Lei. With our pockets full of Romanian Lei we head outagain. Schwartzbusiness is good!

There are more and more horsedrawn carts on the road as we are approaching the city of Timisoara. We are getting somewhat worried by the fact that some of the horses seem to get frightened by the sight of us. Suddenly, a horse drawning a cart with two men and their crop freezes as he sees us approaching. The horse points its ears straight up, and runs off the road into a ditch, and off into the fields. The two men fall off the cart and so does their crop. We see one of the farmers get up, and run towards us shouting. We are completely shocked and cycle away very fast. It takes a while before the adrenaline fades away and we are able to review what has just happened. We feel very bad about riding on. Shouldn't we have stopped to help those farmers. Were they o.k? What if one of them is hurt? From a moral point of view we should have stopped to help. But what about our feeling that we ourselves might have gotten hurt if we would have stopped? We are not able to come to a conclusion on what we should have done. For lack of anything else we decide to at least take our flags down as we suspect that these startle the horses the most. After this we are doing better, but we still have to make frequent stops when we see a horse getting nervous by the sight of us. It's been a first day in Romania that has left deep impressions, and we are happy when we finally reach the campsite in Timisoara.

Our further days in Romania are filled with very friendly and hospitable people, beautiful mountains, poverty, gipsy kids begging for Lei, and us trying to learn some Romanian. The roads are surpsisingly good, and there is little traffic. Most of the cars are Dacia's (Trabant style) that are not much faster than we are. We speed along and follow the Donau again towards the Black Sea through the 'Walachei' region.

We are starting to get worn out as we have not had a single day's rest since Budapest. We are determined however to keep cycling until we reach the Black Sea and decide not to take any rest. This proves to be a very stupid decision. Exhausted we cross the Bulgarian and Romanian border at the town of Ruse. We have a hard time falling asleep that night. Cycling through Romania was a multi facetted experience that we have to digest. The people were so poor - at least poverty that we have never seen before - and yet so friendly. Coming from a high crime area like the city of Amsterdam we were constantly expecting that somebody would try to steal our bike or rob us. Especially the gypsies that appear even poorer then the average Romanian frightened us in that respect. But, to our surprise, nobody seemed interested in stealing our possessions.

Bulgaria appears to be in a much better state then Romania financially and we rejoice at all the different types of food that we can buy. Our diet in Romania was very limited. We come to the conclusion that we must take at least one rest day in Ruse. Not fully rested we leave again the next day.

Cycling through Bulgaria turns into a very difficult struggle for us. The roads are extremely bad, there are very steep mountains everywhere, we can't read the cyrillic script and the people don't look very happy at all. Whereas in Romania we were greeted with cheers and laughter in every town, in Bulgaria people only stare at us in silence. Nobody is smiling. Our map of Bulgaria is in cyrillic script and the indicated hotels or campsites on several occasions turn out to be a pile of rubble forcing us to cycle 'heroic distances' to the next town.

Finally we reach the Black Sea at the town of Burgas.This is where the former Eastblock spends their summer holiday. We are happy to have reached this milestone, but we are really too tired to enjoy the moment. All we want to do is sleep. It's time to rest. We rent a bungalow on a campsite near Burgas and decide to stay a few days. After one day we both get ill and it takes us six days to get going again. We suspect that the Bulgarian 'chopska salad' got us, and we are spending an afwul lot of time running to the toilet. We learn again an important lesson. Lesson 7: don't be heroic, rest as much as you can.

After our sick days we head for the Turkish border. It's very hard going, and we still cannot believe how bad the roads are. We climb and climb and finally reach the bordertown of Malko Tarnovo. This is where the iron curtain used to be and it shows. Malko Tarnovo is utterly depressing and we are once again forced to stay in a former state hotel and endure their disgraceful rooms. We are completely fed up with the former eastblock 'vibe' and for the first time think of giving up. We decide that if Turkey is like Bulgaria we will not be able to make it. We think back to the slogan that was often used by the peace movement during the time that cruise missiles were to be placed in Holland at the end of the cold war. It went: 'better to have a Russian in my kitchen then a cruisemissile in my garden'. After having cycled through Romania and Bulgaria we decide that we would have preferred the cruise missile.

The evening suddenly takes a turn for the better when we are invited by a group of Bulgarians that are also staying in the hotel to join them in an evening of singing and drinking. They pass a guitar round the table and are all able to produce the most beautiful Bulgarian folk songs. Our glasses are constantly being filled with some kind of extremely alcoholic local brew. No longer accustomed to alcohol it doesn't take very long for us to get drunk. We stagger back to our hotelroom. The next morning we are very hung over and vow never to drink again. With pounding headaches we reach the border. The borderformalities are done quickly. We look at the red Turkish flag with the white halfmoon and realise that for the first time in our lives we are in an islamic country. We have left Christian civilisation!