Bratislava was interesting. We decided to camp in a field just outside the city and seconds after trundling down the dirt track we got monumentally stuck! It had been raining all day and the track was like a deadly bog which was hungry for our car. Not quite sure why we decided it would be a good idea, but anyhow after about half an hour of shoving rocks under the wheels, twisting and turning and pulling the car with the tow rope we eventually manages to wriggle free. The car now looks like this:
It definitely looks like a rally car now! Although we are getting some strange looks still being in very well paved Europe..
Anyhow, since then we've stopped off in Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia but I must admit I am glazing over at the thought of Churches, Chapels and Monuments now...
Trundling down the motorway yesterday we had our first run in with the Police! We were in Bulgaria and they pulled us over with their little stick resembling a giant lolly from Charlie and the Chocolate factory. The Policeman didn't speak any English but knew 'Passports' which we gave to him. He had a good look over them, then muttered something in Bulgarian. We shrugged and he made some hand gestures that I assume meant either 'slow down' or 'do more press ups'. We will bear both in mind.
We have had to make a slight detour to Greece and are currently hanging out in Thessaloniki. To try and cut a long story short we are going to Asia after the Rally and obviously need to have Malaria tablets, but 'someone' didn't get the prescription until the afternoon before we were supposed to leave the country and funnily enough we couldn't find any pharmacies within about 100 miles of our route from Cambridge to Dover that had 440 Doxycycline tablets stocked and ready to go. So we had to leave the prescriptions at home in the hope that the drugs could be sent on to us at some point on the journey. We thought that they could be sent directly to Ulaanbaatar which would give them plenty of time to arrive before we got there, however, we have now discovered that it would be near impossible to ship such a large amount of drugs outside the EU so we need to collect them before we leave Europe. We thought it might be nice to spend a couple of days on the Greek coast so asked if they could be shipped to Komotini in Greece where we should be able to pick it up on route to Istanbul. The package left England on Saturday and should be winging its way to us now but it's not that easy... In order for us to safely receive the package without being detained for importing copious amounts of drugs into the country we need to contact the national drug administrator in Greece to get them to issue us with a document that we can provide to customs should the drugs get held up. Unfortunately typing 'National Drug Administrator Greece' into Google doesn't show anything useful, so we have been on the phone to the British Embassy in Greece who appeared slightly suspicious ('why did you have to leave the country so quickly', 'why can't you stay in one place to wait for the prescriptions', 'why do you need so many!') but they have promised us a call back today, so hopefully they will have some good news, otherwise our slight detour might last longer than anticipated.
Car: Still going strong, except the muddy escapades in the field outside Bratislava have caused the passenger window to seize up so it needs to be nursed up and down by hand.
Current thought: I hope customs don't confiscate our drugs!
Country Count: 11 (6 below plus Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece)
Miles: Not sure exactly but over 2,000
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