9/8/99

I was awoken at about 7:30 by the sweltering heat in the tent, only to discover that I felt utterly awful. A few dashes to the toilet and half a bottle of caolin later I was feeling mildly better. Well, at least I felt it was safe to venture more than a few meters from the toilet block. The heat was mounting up and soon enough it must have been well into the thirties. Sure enough, shortly after we set off we were told it was 36 in the shade. I was really struggling in the heat and the riding consisted mainly of shooting off ahead of the group then stopping to dose up on water whilst waiting.

Soon we were at the Hungarian border where were forced to wait for ages to enter Hungary. Apart from an exciting moment when the guard accidentally waved his gun at Marvin we all got across fine.

After lunch me and Liam dropped off the back of the group for an extra rest and then played catch up through some very twisty and crap roads. This was soon to be my undoing when I was caught out by a particularly naff cobbled approach to a 90 degree left. I managed to lock both wheels and then hit the Armco - thankfully I had the presence of mind to dive over the barrier and landed softly in the ditch.

Locals seemed to appear out of nowhere and were extremely helpful in sorting the bike out which, thankfully, only suffered cosmetic damage. After the police had been and gone (you need a form to leave Hungary with a damaged vehicle) we headed off to the local town to ponder the situation and get some food. Two of us managed to have a full meal for the bargain price of about 4quid.  Feeling revitalised I decided I had to carry on and we pressed on to Szeged to catch the rest of the group. We bumped into them on a bridge in town as they headed out to eat. We found the hotel, unpacked and headed out to join the rest. Szeged is a lovely town, in the traditional sense it's all centred around a huge river. In the more important sense it's FULL of beautiful women.