INDIA, ROMANIA, POLAND, FINLAND, RUSSIA, NORWAY

CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR IN INDIA: We spent three weeks touring India by train over Christmas and New Year. The journey began in Manchester, with the shuttle down to Heathrow and a non-stop direct flight to Delhi. Well, it would have been non-stop and direct if an engine hadn't gone down somewhere over southern Russia, approaching the Afghanistan border! The pilot throttled back to balance the missing engine, slowed down, lost height and turned back, overflying Moscow before landing in Copenhagen. It was good to see that the Danish firemen had come out to welcome us, but we didn't get to meet them that evening.

An overnight repair enabled us to proceed the next day, landing in Delhi just over 24 hours late. The long rattling snake of the Tamil Nadu Express swallowed 2,000 of us in Delhi, digested us for 34 hours and finally cast us off into the heat of Madras. A South Indian Christmas - flowers for Ian's grave by the Coombe River, fan-blown candle-lit midnight mass at St Andrew's Kirk, Fort St George in the heat of Christmas Day, time out in the temples of Mahabalipuram and Kanchipuram, reunions with old friends in the TTTI (how's old Venkata Subramaniam? and Rama Gopala Krishna Mani? Heard about S Ramachandran and Swami Nathan Pillai?), Hindu ritual and ceremony, help!

Railway lines led us unerringly to a New Year in Bangalore and then on to Bombay, Bhopal, Sanchi, Agra, Jaipur and back to Delhi. We photographed the Taj Mahal at sunset, reached the pink city of Jaipur in the rose-red light of dawn, searched Old Delhi Railway Station in the depths of night for an honest taxi driver, puked in the midday sun by the lake in Bhopal, felt dizzy at the top of a minaret, climbed an elephant, told countless polite enquiring strangers the most intimate secret of our ages, trusted everybody, were let down by no-one and bargained with thin, poorly dressed stall-holders, almost as decrepit as their wares, until they accepted more than they were asking for - the balance being used to pay off our uneasy consciences until we turned the next corner.

Our otherwise uneventful return to the UK was delayed for 3 days by a temporary North-Indian-cuisine-induced perturbation in Margaret's food-processing system (or Delhi-Belhi). India is too much - it was Margaret's first visit; Barry was on his sixth. Old hand or new, it's all too much. Punch drunk, we staggered through customs at Heathrow. 'Anything to declare?' 'Yes, we've brought back a large sense of proportion - we got it in the streets of a dozen Indian towns.' 'Is it worth anything?' 'Well, it is to us but we don't think it will be for anyone else. They'll have to go and get their own.' 'OK. Next!'

FEBRUARY AND A CONVOY TO ROMANIA: In February, we drove 3,000 miles to Romania and back in a Ford Transit Luton Box Van (loaned free of charge by Budget), taking 2 tons of relief supplies to orphanages and mountain villagers in and around Arad. We had cycled through western Romania during the summer of 1989 on our 2,500-mile ride to Istanbul, had passed through Arad and spent a night in Timisoara, and experienced first hand the desperate conditions in which people were living at that time - the worst we have seen in Europe. Conditions in the villages were mediaeval and the few shops we saw in the towns were literally empty. We were very glad to be able to go back after the December Revolution, to see the changes for ourselves and to do what we could to help.

In February, we joined a convoy of 24 assorted vehicles at the Hungarian/Romanian border. The convoy was organised by Venture Eastern Europe (VEE), an inter-denominational Christian group headed by the prominent water-colour artist, Alfred Eagers. Keith Durham of Grimsby College of Art and Technology travelled with us and we made use of Baptist contacts in Romania, set up by Dennis Harley, a student on the Sheffield course and an active member of VEE. He and Julia Harley had also been in Romania in the summer of 1989, visiting fellow Christians in and around Arad. They didn't stay long: in less than two days an informer had ensured that the Securitate (Secret Police) escorted them to the border with Hungary.

The convoy had left England early on Saturday 17 February, and we met them at the Romanian border at 10 am on Tuesday 20 February. We spent three days in Romania distributing our high quality relief supplies to orphan babies, mentally handicapped children, mountain villagers and the sick in and around Arad. The supplies included 700 kg of food, 100 kg of medicines, 75 kg of toiletries, 110 kg of shoes and boots and over 800 kg of clothing.

At 8 am on Monday 26 February, when we should have been in Hull and on our way back to work, we were still circling on the North Sea off Withernsea in 100 mph hurricane-force winds, unable to dock. In fact it was to be more than another day (and after 42 hours at sea) before two tugs nosed us into an unstable berth in Immingham and the wrong (ie Lincolnshire) side of the Humber. Phew!

EASTER BACK TO ROMANIA: During the Easter holiday, we returned to Romania, unaccompanied, with over 5 tons of relief supplies for orphanages and village churches in Moldavia, a remote and poor region in North-Eastern Romania. We left England on Sunday 8 April and returned on Sunday 22 April, travelling over 4,000 miles in 15 days in a 7.5 ton, 20 ft Box Truck loaned from British Road Services in Huddersfield. The supplies included nearly 1,132 kg of food, 143 kg of medicines, 649 kg of toiletries, 237 kg of shoes and boots, over 2,750 kg of clothing and 96 kg of books and paper. At 9 tons, we were well overloaded but no-one minded, although it must be said that we avoided asking the opinion of the German and Austrian border guards at Passau!

Along with Jonathan Side, a student at Huddersfield Polytechnic, and Paddington Bear, a refugee from the February convoy, we went initially to Arad and the home of Dan Fizedean, our host in February. There, in the dark, the lorry's silencer and its pipe parted company with the engine. The silencer box survived but the long pipe connecting it to the engine was in spaghetti loops. Romania has no garages or workshops; our only hope was Dan's Dad, Teodor, and his factory, where a long straight steel pipe was slowly persuaded to emulate the original pipe, with much sawing, heating, banging and smoking of duty-free cigarettes. Success at last: it was a Good Friday morning.

We left half a ton of supplies for Pastor John's people in the mountain villages above Arad and set off for Moldavia, only one ton overloaded! Just as well, as the scenery began to tilt upwards through Bistrita (in Transylvania and the setting for Bram Stoker's tale of Gothic horror - Dracula), the Birgau Pass (4,000 ft), Vatra Dornei and, between Iacobeni and Pojorita, a final pass at 3,500 ft.

Mircea Mitrofan and Cesar Popescu, contacts made at the Baptist church in Suceava, helped us to use Easter Monday to make deliveries to three baby-orphanages and a group of remote villages near the Russian border. Dr Petre was in charge at the 80-baby Leaganul de Copii, an orphanage in Suceava; Dr Mariana Dedeaga ran the nearby Casa de Copii Prescolari with 100 pre-school children aged 3-7 years and, finally, Anisoara Capmare and her 400 children aged 7-15 years greeted us at their Casa de Copii at Falticeni.

Mircea took us to the village of Dorohoi in the most deprived part of Moldavia. We left over a ton of food, clothes, shoes, tin openers, and toiletries at their Baptist church for distribution to seven church groups in the neighbouring villages of Alba, Tataraseni, Havirna, Stinca, Negreni, M Kogalniceanu and Dorohoi itself.

An uneventful 2,000 mile drive across Europe in an empty and almost sprightly lorry brought us back home, glad that, after all, we hadn't needed the spare wheel that we hadn't taken with us!

SPRING BANK AND A CYCLE RIDE IN BRITTANY: Work and Romania had taken up much of our time between February and April and we hadn't been able to ride our bikes. Their winter overhaul made them rather more ready than we were, when Spring Bank week gave us the chance of a 350-mile ride in Brittany, accompanied by Barry's son John. Leaving the car in Plymouth, we sailed overnight to Roscoff and, cabinless, we slept under a dining-room table. But France welcomes cyclists. France is for cyclists. The French understand the cycle; they have built exactly the right routes with the paysage, sol, vent, cafes, campings, pâtisseries and small rural hotels that cyclists need. No bicycle is ever asked to suffer the indignity of a night out on the wrong side of the street: 'Une place pour les vélos?' 'Mais oui. Pas de probleme.'

SUMMER FOR A SPONSORED RIDE TO THE ARCTIC CIRCLE: For 35 days during July and August, we rode our bicycles 2,000 miles from Hamburg in Western Germany to Tromso in the far north of Norway. We travelled across Germany (West and East, including Berlin), Poland (to Gdansk), Russia (Leningrad), Finland (from Helsinki), northern Sweden and Norway.

We crossed the Arctic Circle at Juoksenki in Finland on 10 August and continued north for over 600 miles in the remaining 10 days. The money raised through sponsorship of this ride was used to buy medicines for our next journey to Romania, which took place in October.

Here's some snapshots of the journey:

** The river Elbe, flowing south and east from Hamburg and into East Germany. The recently built and then abandoned border station near Kapern. The wide 'no-man's land' of the old border, wire dangling from the former electric fence.

** The uncanny mixture of the German and the East European in the worn out and uncared-for roads, cars, shops, people and houses of East Germany. Heads turning as foreign cyclists passed for the first time.

** An East German 'Herr Kutt' for Barry in Rathenow, the Karl Zeiss 'Stadt der Optik'.

** Mile upon mile of crowded, multi-storied Russian barracks lining Transit Road Number 5 to the border of West Berlin at Staaken.

** The Wall, seen for the first time as we entered West Berlin at Staaken, a lone bulldozer gnawing at its steel wire skeleton.

** West Berlin. A garish, crowded and ultra-affluent island in the grey sea of East Germany. The ritual posing for photographs before mining our own fragments of Wall. Riding through the suburbs of Spandau and Charlottenburg to the Europacenter next to the ruined Gedächtniskirche (Church of Remembrance).

** The Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, Potsdamer Platz (preparing for the Wall concert), the Column of Victory, 17 Juni Street, the Russian War Memorials - on and on - history translated into personal experience and memory.

** The Wall again, still standing in long stretches, the ideal canvas for the graffiti images and words of conflict and freedom. And the chip chip chip of chisels; bring your own or rent one - 15 minutes for DM 5!

** Rows of make-shift stalls, each with a Turkish Gastarbeiter, selling Relics of the True Wall in every shape, size and colour, Russian military badges, hats, coins, medals, coats. The Romanian gypsy beggar-woman by the Reichstag, in tears describing the loss of her child in Timisoara. Too much. Too many connections.

** Friedrichstrasse and the road East through the Brandenburg Gate (now the crossroads of Europe) into East Berlin, along Unter den Linden (closed to traffic by the East German army) and past the magnificent Baroque buildings echoing the days of Frederick the Great - the opera house, museums, art gallery - and the marvellous goose-stepping Changing of the Guard, which somehow managed to be both comic and spine-chilling.

** Frankfurt-an-der-Oder and the little bridge over this famous border river into Poland, closed to all but Poles and DDR-burgers. Finding that the alternative is to sit on the Bonn-Berlin-Warsaw-Moscow Express, talking to a woman from Hollywood whilst our bikes block the corridor, for the seven-mile ride to Kunowice, a tiny village just inside Poland.

** East to Gdansk through the quiet empty fields of Poland. The hugely impressive girder monument to dead hero-workers outside the famous shipyard gates. The gatekeeper who invited us in rather than keeping us out. Gaunt skeletons of ships and empty dry docks marking the decline of this place, which kept protest alive through the darkest days of Stalinist rule. Gdansk, where the Second World War began, has done most to ensure there will not be a Third.

** Ms POMERANIA of Polferries, crossing the Baltic to Helsinki, eating boiled sausages and dry bread. Calling at the Swedish island of Visby to collect a flock of returning blonde-haired cyclists.

** Leningrad. Past miles of grey flats, shops short of everything but queues, pot-holed roads enough to dent a Wolber rim. Three young musicians playing the National Anthem for us from tattered music by the cold river and dead Peter's Winter Palace.

** The Hermitage. A nightmare labyrinth of rooms, crammed with the Tsar's Art collection from every period and every country. A Finnish back-hander to a guard gets the bicycles safely stowed in a huge empty underground cloakroom. Leaving, we exchange visiting cards for Leningrad badges.

** Pleasure in the hard-boiled eggs and rolls acquired from the ship-borne breakfast buffet, eaten by the river.

** 5 Roubles last all day - enough for 2 ice creams, apple juices and chocolate in a hotel bar, drinks and buns at the circus and 8 badges from a kiosk. And still some change from 50p.

** Old women sitting behind weighing scales or selling water or weak juice from jugs; memories of the chah wallahs of India.

** The Leningrad Circus in a tattered big top tent with wooden benches on every side. High wire, trapeze artists, clowns, acrobats, tightrope walkers, performing poodles and dogs, three bears on horseback and - astonishingly - performing domestic cats.

** The E4 North through the forests and lakes of Finland. The forest began in the suburbs of Helsinki and continued for 1,000 miles until it petered out on the Arctic tundra, its green canopy interrupted only by blue and grey lakes.

** Camping by the lake at Viitasaari watching the O'Donnell Travelling Circus.

** 100 miles in one day, riding north from II (pronounced EE) on the Gulf of Bothnia to Vuennonkoski (near Matkakoski) on the River Tornealven, which separates Finland from Sweden.

** The Arctic Circle crossed at last at 12.30 pm on August 10 at Juoksenki in Finland, 4 weeks from Harwich, 1 week from Helsinki, 10 days to go.

** Reindeers run flat-footed on their snow-feet, shying on the hard dry road, unaccustomed to oil- smelling chain-driven round-footed migrating bipeds.

** 90 miles climbing through the mountains to the Norwegian border at Riksgransen. A night on the border in a deserted ski hotel.

** Freewheeling down to the sea at Narvik. Fiord country, black cold tunnels, long spindly bridges, remote wooden fishing villages. The sun, barely setting, already thinking of its long winter holiday in the south.

** The end of the ride in Tromso. A bitter-sweet moment as we board the coastal steamer (the Hurtegrute) for the 5-day sail back to England.

** North Shields on a fine sunny day. Fish and chips, the South Shields ferry, the ride down the coast and inland to Durham. Eve, Jim, Owen and the car waiting on Palace Green.

OCTOBER AND BACK TO ROMANIA: All the money we collected from the sponsored ride to the Arctic Circle was spent on medicines and hypodermic needles, which we took to Romania during our half-term holiday in October. We were given kitchen equipment, food, baby clothing and 60 bibles to take, and we also bought sweets and other gifts.

We left for Romania on Friday 19 October and returned on Monday 29 October. Altogether, Barry drove just over 4,000 miles, carrying the supplies in his Nissan Bluebird car. We bought fresh fruit and chocolate in Hungary before crossing into Romania at Nadlac/Nagylak, revisiting Timisoara before a reunion in Arad with Dan's parents, Teodor and Lucretia (Dan himself was on a visit to Russia). We left some bibles and other gifts for distribution by Pastor John and then drove 500 miles via Cluj and Bistrita over the snow-covered Carpathian Mountains to Moldavia in the north-eastern corner of Romania.

We went straight to the Dorohoi home of our excellent contact, French-speaking Gheorghe Axinte, a well-connected para-medical Baptist. First, he took us to Siret on the Russian border and the 900-bed home for mentally disturbed children. We made some good contacts there but reserved most of our supplies for what we knew would be institutions in greater need.

A puncture (repaired with a patched inner-tube) and the complete absence of petrol in Moldavia slowed us down, but Gheorghe eventually led us late one night along a dirt road to the small and remote community of Dersea and a convalescent home for 69 children (aged 3 to 6 years) with respiratory diseases - mainly TB. The children came from poor homes and it was immediately obvious that this home had not received any western aid. We saw the children in their dormitories sleeping two to a bed with very little bedding and the Cabinet de Medicaments was EMPTY. We were very sad to see that they had no drugs - after all, TB is now curable with antibiotics.

Gheorghe told us that there were many such sanatoria in Moldavia - a whole new area of need to relieve the unnecessary suffering of the poorest and sickest children. We left all the supplies we had and arranged that Keith Durham would visit Gheorghe during his visit to Romania with a Luton Box Van in November.

We travelled home via Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the freshly united Germany (including a night in Berlin to collect more Wall) and Holland, where we stayed in Arnhem. There were problems and delays in Hungary where we spent a day avoiding or talking our way through nine road blocks - a small sample of the many which had been set up throughout the country by taxi driver, striking against the steeply rising cost of petrol. But at least they had some!

Almost everything has been an anticlimax after these journeys, but we are looking forward to getting ourselves and our bikes back on the road this Christmas and New Year, exploring Andalucia in Southern Spain. We hear that the highest road in Europe lies waiting in the Sierra Nevada, between Granada and the sea - but that will be another story.