Nevers to the cheapest hotel in Switzerland

French motorways cost about €10 a pop and being a foreigner, with no way of making a traffic fine stick, you can drive as fast as you like. This is fine but it ends up costing a fortune in petrol. It's also about as boring as it gets. Passing through the Borgogne, both sides of the road as far as you can see are just vineyards or wheat or cornfields. This is the land of Chablis. Old Roman roads that go straight for hundreds of kilometres and then we reach the Jura mountains and the beginning of the Swiss Alps. The border crossing guard pulls us over and asks us what we're doing in Switzerland. "Trekking," I reply. "Really?" he says. I'm hoping he doesn't go through the back of the car as we've got a mountain of musical equipment, a bicycle, suitcases, a tent and loads of books piled in there, and if he takes them out I don't know how I'll get them back in again. "Enjoy," he says and we go on. Ten years ago I got a full body search at the border crossing into Canada. I'd been on a bus from Mexico for the three days previous. I had no money and all I'd eaten were doughnuts. The bus had no air conditioning, and was packed with inmates from Oakland prisons. I stank and felt bad for the guy who had to do the search. It wasn't his idea. It was the nazi bitch at customs who asked me if I'd any drugs in my rucksack. Of course I hadn't I was crossing one of the most regulated borders in the world. Then she asked if I did drugs, and I said no again, and she didn't believe that so I had to get searched. He ended up finding a small bud at the bottom of my rucksack. I think It'd come all the way from Australia, through NZ and Central America. He ignored it. To this day I love Canadians.

We arrive near Lausanne around ten in the evening. We put up our tent in a public park but get moved on by the police. Then we get moved on again from another park. At around one in the morning we decide to pull into the laneway of someone's house and just sleep in the car. We're so tired at this stage that even if someone offering free money were to wake us up, he might get his arm bitten off.