First of all, sorry it's taken so long for me to get in touch - it's been really difficult to find internet cafes on this trip which are not extortionately expensive. I've reached Bosnia now, and am heading back to Poland. After over 1000 miles on the bike, I've started to take buses and trains in order to hasten my return to Poland - term starts next week ! It's been a fantastic trip, and it's probably best if I write to you in parts about what we've done so far, it would take to long in one email.

I'll start at the beginning, back in the final week of August.

The trip started a bit inauspiciously, as we on our way to Krakow train station, my bike (which I had spent 50 quid repairing before the trip) decided to break (the first in a long line of breakdowns and cockups) - the chain somehow became impaled by the derailleur, and I spent most of the duration of a nighttrain to Budapest attempting to repair this (and failing). We arrived in Budapest on 26th August, and headed staright for a bike shop, whilst Henry wisely decided to explore the city. To cut a long story short, it took most of that day to find a bike shop and get it repaired, basically because there is a problem with the frame, which got bent in an accident whilst I was in Slovakia. Anyway, we spent a night in Buda, on the top of Castle Hill, which afforded amazing views of the city.

The next day, we headed down to Lake Balaton. Not a beautiful ride by any means, and hot, with a lot of traffic, so not much fun. The lake itself - the largest fresh water lake in Europe outside of Scandinavia - is basically just an inland series of beach resorts, with all the tourist trappings you would expect. Not a bad place, but nothing spectacular. Full of young Germans and Austrians looking for a cheap holiday. Whilst in the townof Kezethely on the northern shore, we visited a thermal pool called Heviz - one of the most impressive in Europe, apparently. This was really amazing, a lake about a mile in diameter which was thermally heated year round to about 35 degrees. It was beautifully relaxing. Unfortunately, this day sticks in my mind as the one on which Newcastle were knocked out of the Champions League, so my memory is a bit tnged with diappointment ! Henry remembers this day for a different reason - he found a baby scorpion in his beer that evening - probably the grossest moment of the trip.

We headed down to Croatia next. My friend Henry does a kind of circus performance with fire which is called 'poi', apparantly a skill which originated from the Maories in New Zealand. Anyway, he had a contact with a girl in a town called Virazdin in Northern Croatia, so we decided to head there (the offer of a free place to stay was too good to turn down !) The journey down there was fairly uneventful - the bike managed to behave and with the help of a train, we made it just as dusk fell. It's quite flat around there, and not too demanding. We hit town just as carnival had started, and there was a lot going on, very lively and interesting. Henry and Kiki (as she was called) did some street performance, and made quite a bit of money. We were introduced to a few Croatians, who were all very nice and spoke great English (as they all do around Croatia and Slovenia), and they showed us around town, also introducing us to Croatian beer and a speciality which became very familiar over the trip, a greasy pastry like food filled with cheese or meat called 'burek'. Thanks to this, despite the hundreds of miles I've cycled, I believe I've actually put on weight ! Much discussion of the history, politics and geography of Croatia and its place in the Balkans followed, and a lot of missing pieces in our knowledge of the area were filled in. (For example - the strange banana - like shape of the country - a result of the Turkish advance into Europe, and a demarcation line for Muslim Europe).

We stayed in Virazdin for two nights, and did a bit of sightseeing. Quite a pretty place, with a very impressive fortress and well - preserved old town, which felt typically Habsburg in character. We left on a rainy, cool Sunday afternoon with a gift of a CD from Kiki's boyfriend's rock band, and left for Zagreb - the capital. Zagreb came as a disappointment. Possibly arriving there on a rainy Sunday Night was part of the reason for this, also staying in a miserable and over-priced factory-type hostel (aptly dubbed 'the prison hostel' by some toilet graffitti) did not help. The fact was that it was boring. Very little nightlife, and not much to do by day. Luckily, I had the diversion of going to bikeshops there, looking for a new rear derailleur, as I decided the existing one was not going to withstand the approaching mountains of Slovenia. This I did, though the sage advice of the bike repair man that my bike would last "a week, ten days maximum in Slovenia" did not bode well. He shook his head sadly after working for an hour on the bike and said it was dead, and that I should get a new one. Nonsense, I thought. He had got it working, and I was confident.

After two uneventful days in Zagreb, we moved on again, this time west and over the border to Slovenia.