Ranulph Fiennes
I REMEMBER the discomfort of parching thirst in the heat of the Dhofar nej'd, the nag of septic boils in the monsoon forests of Brunei, panic after breaking through Arctic sea-ice at –47°C, unease when baited close-range by a polar bear . . . each a sharp vignette filed away like a colour slide. But my honeymoon in 1970 provided my least favourite journey, a month-long tour of East Europe.
I had loved Ginnie, a childhood neigh- bour, for years by then but the jailer-clasp of our wedding vows worked an awesome, almost overnight change in our relations, which deteriorated like a plunging thermo- meter throughout that baleful journey.
My MGB hatch-back, the joy of my life, sped us via the autobahn route to Munich. `Why do you do all the driving?' Ginnie demanded. 'It's my car.' Only two days ago you promised to share everything.' The ensuing conflagration ended as a blue `Munchen 6 Km' sign flashed past and Ginnie bade me drop her at the main station.
Only when she took her suitcase from the boot outside the entrance hall of the cavernous hauptbahnhof, did I surrender. (For the last 17 years we have happily shared the driving but at the time I felt shamefully emasculated.) At Split in Yugoslavia the hotel was a concrete mausoleum peopled by solemn, silent staff. The sun seldom shone yet the hotel beach seethed with oiled and bloated seals in bikinis, aging Yugos who frowned at our skinny bodies when we picked our seaward way through their blubbery ranks. Perhaps, I decided, Ginnie wants some culture. But a southerly detour to the Acropolis kindled no enthusiasm.
On a dual carriageway with Ginnie at the wheel we overtook a pantechnicon on a hairpin bend, came face to face with an oncoming Fiat and narrowly escaped com- pression under the truck's rear wheels. As it was, the MBG's nearside flank was dented and the wing buckled into the front wheel. For three hours we struggled to free the wheel and not long after doing so we heard an alarming clatter as the entire exhaust system detached itself from the engine.
Three noisy and embarrassing days and six hundred miles later we found the garage of one Janoc who professed to be an approved British Leyland servicing and repairs agent. He failed to respond to French, German, Arabic, Spanish and Latin and spent nine hours replacing the exhaust pipe. He would not accept our AA repayment guarantee chitties and deman- ded a flagrantly unfair amount of cash. I refused to pay. A big policeman arrived on a Vespa. I paid up.
Nothing improved in Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia or East Germany. The weather remained forever grey, the border officials (especially in post-Dubcek Czechoslovakia) were consistently boorish and our honeymoon spirit continued to nose inexorably downwards.
Vienna, I decided, would snap us out of the nightmare. Ginnie had long wanted to visit the wonderful Lippizaner horses and their Vienna-based Spanish riding school.
She had also professed a longing to experi- ence an evening of magic at the world famous opera house. Resolved, despite a by now serious shortage of funds, to allow no hitches to this last and cure-all evening of our honeymoon, I booked us into a two-star hotel rather than the normal cheap motel and took a cab to the Riding School. As the cabbie drew up at our destination he mentioned: 'No horses to- day.' Sure enough the school was firmly closed. Not even a whiff of manure. The Lippizaners were enjoying their annual holiday in Spain.
Back at the hotel we changed into smart kit for the first time that month, deter- mined to savour the opera to the full. The opera house, a round building with en- trance doors on all sides, offered a feast of Vivaldi. We joined an excited queue. We had not eaten since breakfast so I went in search of a snack whilst Ginnie kept our place. In a neighbouring square I de- scended via two escalators to a shopping mall and bought two magnificent cornets of chocolate ice cream.
Somehow I lost my bearings and, via different escalators, reached the opera house by a strange route. Ginnie was nowhere to be found. The ice cream began to dribble down my shirtsleeves. The queues tailed off as everyone entered the atrium. When at length I found my furious wife — in an entrance I had somehow overlooked — all doors were closed, for the opera had begun. The comets were soggy brown suppositories.
Unable to find a cab, we trudged silently back to the hotel. Vienna had not saved the honeymoon from unmitigated disaster. Our marriage and all subsequent travels could only improve.
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