Rural life in the former communist country is a revelation as Dick Warner and his family continue their trip to some EU applicant countries.
The people who devise railway timetables, world over, love scheduling trains to depart at 06.47. Our teenage sons Sam and Luke love to get up at around 11.30. This was to be a recurrent problem on our travels round Europe.
They were grumpy but the weather was lovely and we were travelling through the first bit of attractive landscape we'd seen in Hungary. Soon after we left Budapest the railway had dipped into the valley of the Danube and started to hug the eastern bank of the river. There were picturesque villages, hill-top monasteries and quite a lot of shipping on the water.
Unexpectedly, the public address system on the train crackled into life and a woman's voice welcomed us, in four languages, to the Republic of Slovakia.
Somewhere high in the Carpathian Mountains there must be a secret school for border guards from all over Eastern Europe where they teach them to scowl and bark things at you in incomprehensible languages while they finger their side-arms. The Slovakians were the one exception. They tapped on the compartment door, smiled and said: "Dobry Den" - this, or something like it, means "Good Day" in most Slavonic languages.
Slovakia is one of the youngest countries in Europe. Czechoslovakia finally shook off communism in 1989. But the so-called Velvet Divorce, when it separated amicably into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, did not happen until 1993. Slovakians are still visibly excited and proud about their independence.
The train stopped in the capital city of Bratislava. Sam and Luke had overcome their early morning grumpiness and remembered they were on a mission.
"Are we going to let Slovakia into the EU? They seem like very nice people?"
"The trouble is it may be a bit too young. It was always the sleepier part of Czechoslovakia and it hasn't really developed a Western-style economy yet. Did you see all the state farms from the train window - the combine harvesters cutting the huge fields of wheat and rye?"
Bratislava has a slightly provincial feel to it and remarkably few tourists. The outskirts are hideous - Soviet-era high-rise apartment blocks, decrepit factories and lots of dirty concrete. There is a nice old town stuck in the middle with some attractive bars. But we couldn't stay long enough to explore it fully. We had too many other countries to visit.
Back on the train I gazed longingly towards the north-east.
"Can you see high mountains on the horizon?" They thought they could.
"That's the Tatra. It's on the Slovak-Polish border and it's supposed to be one of the most beautiful mountain ranges in Europe. I've always wanted to go there but we just haven't got the time." A few hours later another invasion of armed and uniformed men and women signalled that we were crossing the Czech border.
"If these countries join the EU," Geraldine asked, "what are they going to do about all the unemployed border guards and customs officials?" She had a point.
"When are we arriving in Prague?" asked Luke. One of his school friends had been there.
"We aren't. Prague is the Temple Bar of Europe. Everybody goes there. We're going to stay on the train until it gets to Warsaw. Nobody goes there on their holidays."
As we approached the Polish border the scenery deteriorated into one of the ugliest landscapes so far. Huge railway marshalling yards full of rusty and abandoned rolling stock. Dozens of large factories - but the only one that still seemed to be making anything was a dirty cement plant. We crossed streams and ponds green with algae. If you're interested in viewing a country "warts and all", travelling by train is usually a good idea.
We had the compartment to ourselves until the train reached Katowice in southern Poland. There we were joined by a middle-aged Polish lady and her teenage son. I helped her lift her enormous suitcase onto the luggage rack. The boy immediately stuck the ear plugs of his Walkman into his ears but she turned out to be very friendly - which we were to discover was the norm in Poland. She also spoke excellent English and we were to find out that this is very unusual.
"You must have seen great changes in Poland in your lifetime?"
"Yes, many changes. Many changes in the past few years."
"Changes for the better?"
"Some good. Some not so good."
"What are the bad things?"
"When I was a girl growing up in Warsaw we had no beggars on the streets." After a pause I asked her what she thought about Poland joining the EU.
"I know we must do it, but there are some things I worry about. For many years we were in the shadow of Russia. Now, when we have a chance to be Polish again, we are becoming invaded by Coca Cola and McDonald's."
I suggested that Coca-Cola and McDonald's were American. A strong enlarged Europe offered the possibility of a force developing in the world that was big enough to balance the power of the US. I was not talking about military power, I explained, or even purely economic power. Cultural power was the important thing. I did not convince her. She felt threatened by the market economies to the west and made no distinction between western Europe and the US. She got off at the next station and we had the compartment to ourselves again.
The electric train whirred across a huge, flat landscape. The Polish plain is rather boring. Nearly half of it is covered in trees. They are plantations of Scots Pine and Birch and it is the best managed forestry I have ever seen anywhere in the world. The trees had the tall, straight trunks that produce quality commercial timber and instead of clear-felling they selectively felled the best ones.
Between the stands of trees were fields - mostly without hedges or fences and growing arable crops. Geraldine was looking out of the window with great interest.
"It's ridiculous." She seemed quite agitated. "Just look at that!" I looked. Poland has obviously made more progress than many other former communist countries when it comes to privatising farming. It was harvest time. Families were gathering up sheaves of oats and placing them in long, coffin-shaped carts drawn by horses.
Some women were picking wild blueberries beside the railway track. Outside a small farmhouse one brown cow with horns was tethered on a rope that allowed it to graze a circumference of about 20 metres. It was being milked into a bucket by a man sitting on a three-legged stool.
Geraldine explained her agitation: "One of the things that decided me to vote No is that we live in rural Ireland and I thought enlargement would be bad for Irish farmers. I heard one of the campaigners for a No vote say on the radio that the dairy farmers of Poland alone would outnumber all the rest of the farmers in the present EU and that they were so efficient we would not be able to compete with them. She obviously hadn't been to Poland."
I had heard the same thing quoted to me by several friends and neighbours as the reason they were going to vote No. It is a complete lie. There are well over 100 million farmers in the EU. The population of Poland is 37 million. It is an industrialised country and its agriculture is primitive.
"One of the reasons I voted Yes," I was trying not to sound smug, "is because if countries like Poland join the EU, the Common Agricultural Policy will have to be maintained to allow them to catch up under the principle of cohesion. If they don't join, countries like Germany may get their way, the CAP will be dismantled and Irish farmers will lose their headage payments and subsidies."
Our discussion of rural matters was interrupted because we were now in a city. We had finally reached Warsaw.
Tomorrow: The Warners go off the rails as they escape from Poland