Off the €uro track

In the last Nice vote, Dick Warner and his family were divided: hevoted No, his wife, Geraldine voted Yes. This time round research was called  for. With backpacks and guidebooks in hand, he set off with his wife and two teenage children to journey through the 12 countries looking to get into the EU

It wasn't really a marital row, more a luke-warm argument that grew to involve the entire family. It was based on the fact I had voted Yes in the first Nice referendum and my wife, Geraldine, voted No. One evening last spring it got to the stage of: "You don't know that. . ." "How can you possibly say that? . . ."

I decided to adopt that cool, Head-of-the-Household role that always gets up everybody's nose. I suggested none of us really knew what we were talking about. The Nice referendum was about allowing 12 countries to join the EU. The only one we had visited was Cyprus, and that was on a package holiday so long ago that the kids were only babies at the time. Luke is now 14, and claimed he remembered Cyprus. Sam is 13 and admitted he didn't.

It was Geraldine who suggested we visit as many of them as possible during the summer holidays. It was a particularly clever idea because it promised to solve a second family argument - the long-running litany of: "Let's go to Goa"; "no, I want to go to Disneyland"; "but I want to stay home and go to rugby camp."

I fetched an atlas from the bookshelf. Sam went on the Web. We discovered that, apart from the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Cyprus, all the applicant countries had previously been communist and they were all on the eastern border of the EU. They stretched in a line from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea in the south - a distance of about 2,000 km. With the exception of Slovenia, which was sandwiched between Austria and Italy, they all had common borders.

"We could do this all by surface transport - train, bus and ship," I suggested. "Starting with the ferry from Rosslare to Cherbourg." Geraldine added. "With backpacks and the Rough Guide or the Lonely Planet."

You see, we're ageing hippies and we don't believe that it's really travel unless you bring these accessories with you and battle with strange public transport systems, language barriers and beds with fleas in them.

I visited Iarnrod Éireann and got InterRail passes for all of us. They were a great buy. They allowed us to travel second class on practically any train in Europe for a month and they cost €365 for those of us under 26 and €508 for Geraldine and myself. We bought guide-books and maps and unearthed the backpacks. We organised three-and-a-half weeks clear of work and started getting excited.

"At least, when we get back you'll understand why we need these countries in Europe and why they need us."

"We'll see about that."

Sam joined in.

"What's the big deal about this Nice Treaty thing, anyway, Dad? Why are you two always arguing about it?"

"Well, you know you did that project in school about Bob Geldof and Live Aid? That was about helping starving people in Africa. But there are people in Europe in a bad way too and the best way to help them is to let them join the EU"

"But they're not starving, are they? There are no famines in Europe." "Some of them may be hungry but none of them is starving. But they are very poor - at least I think so - that's what we want to find out. Your mother and I went to Ethiopia before you were born to find out what was happening there."

Sam thought about this. "Okay, but I don't understand the arguments. If we can help these people by letting them join the EU, why not do it?" This one was directed at Geraldine.

"I voted No partly because of you two. I wanted Ireland to stay neutral. I was afraid that Europe would become a super power and you would be drafted into a European army and end up in a war. Also we live in the countryside and stuff I heard on the radio convinced me that Irish farmers would suffer if we let all the poverty-stricken farmers in Eastern Europe into the EU. I want to find out more about that when we go there."

So we went. In the train station in Cherbourg I inquired, in wildly inaccurate French, how a person in possession of an InterRail pass could travel to Paris.

The system was simple and pretty much the same all over Europe. You fill out the details of the journey you want to make on a form at the back of the pass. You hand this in at a ticket office and they give you a card with a train number, carriage number and seat number on it. There is a small charge for this - usually less than a euro. When the train arrives you just stroll along until you find the right numbers and you are guaranteed comfortable seats - smoking or non-smoking as you prefer. Why is Ireland the only one of 14 countries we visited this summer that does not have this system?

We reached the Gare de l'Est in time to have a beer at a pavement bar, to watch all the dowdy Parisian women going home from work and to wonder how Paris got its reputation for elegance.

After the beer I had the first episode of what was to become a recurrent nightmare. If you ever travel extensively by rail in Europe do your utmost to avoid using station toilets.

"Cabinet ou urinal, Monsieur?" When she was younger she had probably been the women's shot-putt champion of France.

"Comment?"

"Cabinet ou urinal?"

"Combien?"

French numbers can be a bit confusing when they are hurled at you by an 18- stone ogress. What other nation would call 98 "four-twenty-ten-eight", I ask you? I dumped a handful of change on the table, ducked under her right shoulder and fled into the malodorous, white-tiled cavern.

We found the train. I had managed to pre-book a "Wagon Lit". Unfortunately it only had three bunks and there were four of us. I got a bunk in a couchette in the next carriage. But the doors between the carriages were immediately locked for reasons of securité.

The next morning we changed on to the Bela Bartok Express in Munich - a nice train with air-conditioning. A long time later we crossed the border between Austria and Hungary.

I immediately noticed three things. The first was a Trabant car stopped at a level-crossing. Trabants were made in the former East Germany and they were probably the most ridiculous cars in automotive history. Noddy would not have accepted a lift from Big Ears in a Trabant. They were so hideous that they have now become Kitsch collectors' items in the West.

The second thing I noticed was the storks nesting on the chimneys and electricity poles in the villages. Storks are peculiar birds. They will not nest in towns or in the countryside - only in villages.

My third observation was that the landscape was becoming flat and uninteresting. Unfortunately, Hungary, though in many ways a wonderful country, is, well, flat and uninteresting. A 100-hectare field of maize followed by 100-hectares of sunflowers. All flat. A 100-hectare field of sunflowers in bloom is pretty spectacular - the first time you see it. After a couple of dozen times it gets quite boring. They call it the Hungarian Plain.

Unfortunately, we were to discover later it is bordered to the north by the Polish Plain - which is pretty much the same.

Eventually, the Bela Bartok ground to a halt at a rather obscure station in Budapest. The doors hissed open and a warm breeze smelling of paprika flowed in. We had arrived in Eastern Europe at last.

Luke and Sam seemed a little jaded by all the travel.

"So what's so great about Hungary they don't even take euros." "Can you buy Coke here?" "Where are we going next? Don't say another train." "Well, are we going to let them join Europe?"

We dumped a mound of rucksacks in a platform café and I went off to change money while Geraldine battled with a Hungarian public telephone to try to organise accommodation. Neither of us was very successful. I was ripped off by a bank and Geraldine failed to contact any of the cheap hotels in the guidebook.

When a train from the West arrives in a station in Eastern Europe it is met by people offering accommodation in several languages. Some offer rooms in their own private houses or apartments, others act as agents for hotels and hostels. We had treated them with suspicion, but now we were a bit stuck. One of the hustlers was sitting in the café. With my newly acquired Hungarian forints I was able to offer him a beer.

His name was Ihab. Not very Hungarian.

"Is that a Jewish name?"

"I was born in Jordan. I am half Arab and half Jew". He shrugged his shoulders at this ludicrous position. "So now I live in Hungary".

Ihab fascinated me. If he was a con-artist he was a superb one. Within seconds he had found out we were Irish and was comparing Roy Keane and Robbie Keane with Luke and Sam. His mobile phone solved all problems of accommodation and transport and the deals were good. He argued with the money people who had ripped us off and actually managed to get some money back. We paid him nothing - his commission came from hotels and taxi drivers. After checking in to the hotel we tipped him the small sum he had saved us in the currency exchange - he said it was unnecessary but he was extremely grateful. I decided to myself he was a 21st century Leopold Bloom and really started to enjoy his company. Then he was gone.

Private hotels are a recent phenomenon in the former communist countries. The Hotel Baross was more like an upmarket guesthouse than a Western hotel. Built round a courtyard full of window boxes, it had comfortable modern bedrooms, a breakfast-room and a small reception area. The receptionists were women in their 20s. They were computer literate, spoke at least three languages and, like almost all Hungarian women, dressed with great elegance. They earned the equivalent of €90 a week.

After some time sleeping, showering and generally recuperating, we went exploring. Like all first-time visitors to Budapest, we instantly fell in love with the place. The twin cities of Buda and Pest are laid out on a grand, imperial scale on a bend in the Danube. It is elegant and shabby, friendly and laid back, dynamic and cheap. A great town in need of a lick of paint.

After a couple of days, Geraldine and I has found a favourite restaurant within walking distance of the Hotel Baross. So did Luke and Sam - their's was McDonalds. Ours was old and dark and full of brown wood, waiters in white aprons and wonderful Hungarian wines. The set dinner for two, which was far more food than we could eat, with a bottle of champagne and coffees and brandies, came to €24. My wild boar was really wild, chewy and full of taste and quite unlike most wild boar, which comes from a wild boar farm.

We chatted up the young owner of the restaurant.

"Budapest is a very beautiful city."

He shrugged this off.

"Budapest is like Vienna 40 years ago. We have much to do to catch up."

I thought about this: 40 years ago I had been a young student in Vienna. It was only a few years after the Russians withdrew from the Austrian capital. They had left the same shabbiness and air of dereliction behind them. But he was being unfair to Budapest. It is a finer city and uses the river better.

I aksed the young restaurant owner about Hungary's application to join the EU. He was very passionate about it, though he seemed to have no notion that a small island off the west coast of the continent was the largest, single obstacle to his ambitions.

"We must join so that we can catch up. We are Europe. We are at the heart of it. What are we if we are not European? Are we Asian, or something"?

Geraldine joined in. "Are all Hungarians in favour of joining the EU?" The conversation began to involve a few more customers and staff. The fact that it was in English didn't seem to deter anyone. Hungarians are great linguists.

"No, there is a small number of people who are against our entry. And that number is growing. They are mostly farmers."

"What are they afraid of?"

"Land is cheap in Hungary. And we are still making the change from the Soviet-era state farms to private farms. Our food production is falling. The farmers are worried that rich people from countries to the west of us will come in and buy all the land."

I thought about that. When the Repiblic of Ireland joined the EU in 1973, we had the cheapest land in Europe. I thought about the Germans and Dutch, the British and French who bought property in west Cork, Connemara and Leitrim in the 1970s and 1980s. They mostly bought scenery not farmland. But we survived the experience and many of the foreigners are now selling their property because Ireland has become too expensive for them. I could understand how Hungarian farmers felt threatened by EU enlargement. I found it much harder to understand why Irish farmers felt threatened by it.

We didn't want to leave Budapest. But we knew we would be passing through again, heading south, on our way back from the Baltic. This was just as well as the train left early in the morning and a lot of our clothes had not arrived back from the laundry.

So, leaving a bag of western underwear behind, we boarded a train heading for Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland. We still had a daunting number of countries to visit and the days were ticking away.

The Warner Family's travels continue next week:

MONDAY Rural revelations on the long trek up to Poland

TUESDAY The family's travel plans go pear-shaped

WEDNESDAY Mutiny in the ranks before the final verdict