The curtain's down!

Bijoy uses his editorial rights to live out his Soviet Land dreams during the i10 drive.

Yakov Perelman, Soviet Land, Lada, Ivan the Great, Baba-Yaga... man, I owe a lot of what I am today to the stuff that got translated into Malayalam from Russian. The books published by the Soviet House were cheap, were colourful and were full of children with pink cheeks. The literature talked about how good life is in the Eastern Bloc, how Russian rockets were the only things that flew and so on. I even used to travel with Gagarin in my dreams. I loved it, lapped ’em all and grew up.

So it is always nice to drive through the “erstwhile” Iron Curtain countries, right? Well, the Hyundai i10 Drive to Paris presented an opportunity and I was quick to grab a seat in the Budapest to Frankfurt leg. Exactly ten years back, I drove through a bit of Slovenia, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria and it was a dream that came true. Now here was a chance to see what progress a decade, capitalism and democracy could do. Honestly, I was not surprised to see progress of another level altogether. Excellent roads (we saw a lot of that), care for architecture, culture and general love for good food and beer mean soon the world will be travelling to these countries. And countries like Hungary, Slovakia and Poland are growing by the day (okay, I did a bit of research).

So for three days, I woke up, drank coffee, ate a hearty breakfast, drove like a mad man (you will also do that if you are following another car with a stupid GPS system that gives the most stupid routes for days on end), filled fuel, ate steaks and fries, drank Coke Zeros, drove even more, ate chocolates, drove even more, gaped at beautiful old Skodas, Trabants and Polsky Fiats, cursed the man who brought along a GPS system, drove even more, tried to speak in Polish to pretty Slovenian store operators and vice-versa, reached nice hotels in nicer towns and slept like a baby.

The whole idea of bringing the cars safe to Frankfurt was done with élan. But the trip also rekindled my interest in that geographical area. Now that I am armed with a long-term Schengen visa and that most of these countries fall in the envelope, I shall soon return and I’ll not carry a GPS. And if you are still wondering who Yakov Perelman is, well, he wrote on some basic physics for children and his books taught me more than any of my text books ever did.

Alright, convertibles are happening in Eastern Europe. And if someone tells you that Budapest is all about dance bars, whack them. Because it is not — it is a beautiful city with splendid architecture, a nice and full river and lots of history. That’s where I landed to join the i10 drive to Paris. Sure, I expected more “Iron Bloc-ness”, so I was disappointed to see a city set to challenge Prague or Paris in stature.

The thing about a cross-continent drive is that you take the straightest possible route most of the time. And that means a brick on the accelerator, miles of expressways and total grease for lunch. But then out of the blue comes a picture postcard sent from heaven — this castle was spotted somewhere in Slovakia. We could hear Count Dracula snore... I swear by the vampire.

Wroclaw didn’t exist after the great war. It was apparently entirely re-built and renamed. But what a stunning job they did to the square! After leaving Budapest, we crossed over to Slovakia and drove steadily and well into the night for our stop in the Polish city. The receptionist at the hotel looked a bit stunned to see us at eleven in the night. She ought to, I reasoned, since some time back a bunch of foreigners walked in and took over the whole of Poland in five days flat. And by the time they got it back, the population was reduced by several million people.