21. Hungary and Slovakia

Day 113, August 6th.  Valea Lunga Romana, Romania – Lakitelek, Hungary, 21 - 34C, sunny

We might be back in the Schengen area, but any thoughts of an easing of the language barrier issue are swiftly extinguished as we cross the border into Hungary, and attempt to read a few of the signs.

Spoken Hungarian sounds similar to someone choking on a huge mouthful of meat.  Written Hungarian looks like someone’s had a seizure on a keyboard.  It makes Welsh look intelligible and concise.

Luckily at our first stop – lunch in the elegant city of Szegad, Hungarys 4th largest city – it becomes clear that many Hungarians are aware of the challenges presented by their unintelligible language, and speak excellent English.  Laurie tucks into another pizza whilst Nina, Ralph and I try various delicious Hungarian specialities, including the ghoulash and something called Lasco – which roughly resembles a ratatouille crossed with shakshuka.

We eat our lunch on a quiet street, watching fashionably dressed Hungarians going about their business, whilst the restaurant’s speakers play a selection of 80’s British and American rock hits.  The music is a welcome change to the near-ubiquitous 80’s and 90’s Brit / US pop that’s been played in every country since we left Italy, but we all agree it’d be nice to hear some local music, for a change.

After lunch we manage a perfunctory walk through Szegad’s centre – entirely rebuilt in the late 19th century after the city was destroyed by catastrophic floods in 1876 – spending most of our time being entertained by the boys as they repeatedly soak themselves in the amusing, synchronised fountains in front of the Museum of Móra Ferenc (Natural History Museum).

Our accommodation for tonight is the – by Hungarian standards relatively concisely named - ‘Avarok Szálláshelye’ campsite, outside Lakitilek, which boasts naturally heated geothermal pools and a spa.  Hungary is littered with these; as we soon discover, bathing in 40C murky brown waters appears to be a hugely popular Hungarian pastime.

The campsite is pristine and uber-efficient. So efficient, that it takes us over half an hour to check in: the friendly yet fastidious girl on reception politely interrogating every line of our address, postcode, dates of birth and prior stops in Hungary.  We’re not sure if this is symptomatic of Hungary’s increasingly authoritarian government, or just her: either way, by the time I’ve finished the process, exasperated, Nina and the boys have largely set up camp and are itching for a swim.

We spend the rest of the afternoon with what feels like the rest of Hungary, the boys sliding down slides into beautifully heated,35C pools whilst Nina and I periodically poach ourselves in the natural thermal waters (over 14’s only, ostensibly for health and safety but more likely for sheer peace and quiet).

A relatively short conversation with the boys before supper confirms that we’ll be spending another day and a night here.  There’s very little appetite to move on to Budapest in a hurry and see more – as Laurie describes them – “boring pointy things”.  Frankly, we can’t find a good reason to disagree.

Day 114, August 7th.  Lakitelek, 28 - 35C, sunny

A super-relaxed, albeit far from lazy day.  We spend a solid 2 ½ hours on the slides and in the pools in the morning.  Laurie discovers increasingly inventive ways to politely jump the queue on the pool slide, whilst the local kids faff around and egg each other on.

We drag the boys off to have some lunch at midday, as much to get them briefly under some shade, as for anything else.  But by 1pm, whilst Ralph’s happy to read his book in the roof tent (he’s busy devouring Noah Yuval Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century having consumed his previous two humanities volumes in less than three weeks), Laurie’s insistent on returning to the pools.

In the middle of the afternoon, again largely driven by wanting (and needing) a bit of shade, I suggest to Laurie we go and do some proper swimming in the large, indoor pool, to which we haven’t yet ventured.  We do a quick six lengths which feels like a reasonably modest achievement.  Nina and Ralph come and join us and we stop for a quick ice-cream: tasty but disappointingly small compared to Italy’s generous ‘single scoop’ ice-creams.

Laurie suggests that, if he swims another 20 lengths, he could have another scoop of ice-cream.  This sounds like an easy deal; Nina and I agree and semi-jokingly suggest that if either of the boys swim 40 lengths, that’ll be worth two scoops.

Never underestimate your children’s determination!  Ralph and Laurie immediately rise to the challenge.  A little over half an hour later we’re back at the ice-cream stall ordering double scoops all round: we’ve all completed 40 lengths (about 720 metres) – a great achievement for the boys.  If only incentives on hand for this sort of achievement came in other, non-ice-cream, forms…

We’re out of food for cooking tonight, so we have to make do with the campsite’s café.  In the circumstances, huge plates of chips and ketchup-laden, McDonalds-esque burgers don’t feel out of place.

Day 115, August 8th.  Lakitelek - Budapest, 28 - 32C, sunny, rain showers

Keeping in the spirit of searching for ‘points of differentiation’, we’ve arranged to visit a hacienda en-route to Budapest this morning, to watch some of Hungary’s famous horsemen performing stunts and traditional games on their horses.

At the farm – a poplar-lined complex of sandy, square paddocks enclosing an array of near-immaculate stables, barns, sand arenas and a large restaurant – we’re greeted with local ‘cracked scones’, apricot juice for the boys, and a shot of palinka for Nina and I.  The scones taste like they’ve been baked in beef stock and the palinka is the foulest of all the home-made spirits we’ve endured throughout the Balkans and Eastern Europe.  A simple coffee would have been preferable.

We appear to be alone, until a coachload of German tourists appears in a clatter of hooves and a cloud of dust, evidently returning from a tour of the farm on a series of horse-drawn carriages.

We’re all chaperoned to the sandy arena where we watch five wiry, suntanned and outstandingly skilled local horsemen performing their tricks on a selection of beautiful white Lipizzaners.  One of them stands on the back of two horses whilst controlling another three in front of him, all five galloping at full speed round the sand.   Others race carriages round the ring with a cheerful, fearless abandon. 

They crack their whips in unison, generally around their horses’ unwavering heads, and persuade their horses to lie down, play dead, and then sit up again, all the while with the cracking of whips overhead. 

They then invite a few members of the audience to test their whip cracking skills – knocking an empty bottle off a post from six feet away.  A series of middle-aged Germans try and eventually succeed, then Ralph – keen as ever to try his hand at anything – has a go and knocks the bottle off first time, to enthusiastic applause from us and the Germans, winning us a bottle of dubious-looking Hungarian wine in the process.

We eat at the hacienda afterwards: local ghoulash, immeasurably improved by the copious quantities of local paprika that appear to have been added to it.  It’s bright orange: almost luminous.  We ask the boys to try and not spill it on their new and hard to replace Macedonia and Kosovo T-shirts.

It’s only an hour’s drive on to Budapest, through the ‘Great Hungarian Plain’: 20,000 square miles of low-lying flat land which takes up most of Hungarian territory.  Originally fertile and forested, it was almost entirely laid waste during centuries of war between the Hungarians and the Ottomans in the 1500’s and 1600’s.  

The land remained barren and almost uninhabitable until catastrophic flooding in the 19th century allowed grassed to re-establish themselves.  Even now, whilst much of the land is re-forested and we pass through acre upon acre of poplar trees, vineyards and corn fields, the land is still sandy and vulnerable to droughts.

We reach Budapest in the early afternoon and find our apartment, near the centre.  On the plus side, our car (for once) fits through the gateway into the secure courtyard behind, on the minus side, our flat appears to have only one bedroom – and looks very different to the photos for the apartment we booked.

We fear another episode of booking.com brazen mis-selling – a permanent, intensely irritating banana skin whenever we’ve booked apartments on this trip.  Luckily, Nina has started taking screenshots of all our apartments before and after we book them, and in this case, the cleaners are still here (and speak English), so we can challenge them.   

“Where is the other bedroom?” we ask politely, with a touch of casual, apologetic innocence, as if we’ve been a bit thick and we’re expecting the cleaners to say “it’s just through this door here, didn’t you see it?”.  Nina shows them a screenshot of our booking, with the currently invisible bunk room very clearly visible.

The cleaners are apologetic and explain that the photo we’re showing them is of the owner’s next-door apartment, which is booked for the next two nights, evidently not by us.  Perhaps it’s the look on our faces, or perhaps the tone of our voices when we explain that this current state of affairs is rather less than satisfactory for the tired family of four in front of them – but either way, they promptly decide to call the landlord. 

One urgent, utterly incomprehensible conversation in Hungarian later, and it transpires there has been a ‘misunderstanding’, and we’re moved into our rightful two-bedroom apartment next door.  We thank the cleaners kindly for their efforts, and heave a grateful sigh of relief for Nina’s prudent screenshots.

Once in the right flat, the boys are unwilling to leave it.  So we spend the majority of our only afternoon in Budapest reading, catching up with our diaries, and wondering at what time we can realistically drag them out for what’s becoming an increasingly brief tour of this beautiful city.

But drag them out we finally do, with promises of rides on the underground and tram network.  Horses for courses.  Budapest and its magnificent Baroque and Neoclassical waterfront may well be impressive on foot, but it’s even more delightful when viewed from a slow-moving tram as it trundles up and downstream along the Danube.

On foot, we manage a visit to the Central Market Hall, buy a couple of local snacks plus an enormous bright red bag of paprika for Ralph to use in his culinary creations when we get home, and realise we’re too late for most of the stalls.

We eat in a Thai / Vietnamese restaurant.  Everyone’s a little bored of European food and the prospect – now we’re in a large, sophisticated capital city – of eating something Oriental is truly exciting.  In the UK, we’d consider it pretty average, but on account of it being the first non-European cuisine we’ve encountered since the extraordinary sushi restaurant in the middle of an Italian industrial estate one Sunday afternoon in June, it’s collectively considered to be outstanding.

We take the tube back to our apartment, tuck everyone into bed, and make the most of a not-particularly comfortable set of beds – albeit in separate rooms – for the night.

Day 116, August 9th.  Budapest Hungary – Vjanke, Slovakia, 28 - 34C, sunny

The morning brings a renewed appetite to explore Budapest, in part thanks to an excellent breakfast – cooked by someone else for once – of baked eggs and avocados, croissants and a goat’s cheese and bacon bagel for Ralph.

As we’re drinking our espressos, hot chocolates and raspberry lemonades, we eye up the Russian family at the table next to us: similar aged parents, with two similar aged boys, albeit far more expensively dressed than ours.

Hungary is one of the few remaining places in Europe where Russian tourists are welcome; indeed, it started issuing two-year residence permits to Russians and Belarusians earlier this year – much to the chagrin of the rest of the EU, who are now terrified about a potential back-door influx of Russians into the Schengen area. 

The father is wearing a T-shirt saying: “Leave the world a better place”.  Ironic, perhaps.  Nonetheless, we wonder what life must be like for the countless ordinary Russians, politically agnostic and fearful, just trying to get abroad on a decent holiday.

After breakfast we climb the short, steep hill on the west side of the river (‘Buda’) to the Fisherman’s Bastion, simultaneously admiring the view of the city’s riverfront below and discovering where all the tourists are.  We manage to persuade Laurie that the multi-spired, ornately decorated Gothic splendour of Matthias Church will be worth a visit, this time he agrees.  Perhaps it’s the mosaic patterned orange, red, white and black roof tiles, or the ornate, bud-like crockets that spikily adorn the tallest spire: either way, all four of us enter.

Inside, it’s a mass of carved, gilded splendour: not a single inch has been left unpainted or unchiselled.  Ralph talks us through the Gothic styling whilst Laurie snaps away, now expertly altering the manual settings on the camera until he gets the photos he wants.

Walking back down the hill to the city, the House of Houdini provides us with an interesting hour’s distraction – including a magic show which is worth the entry fee alone. It’s lunchtime by the time we get back to our apartment’s courtyard, but we can’t leave the car here any longer so we decide to find a lunch spot on the way out of the city.

The outskirts of Budapest are – putting it mildly – lacking in the food department. In the industrial suburbs, we stop at a vast shopping complex and find an enormous Tesco’s to stock up with camping supplies at.  If Budapest’s metro reached this Tesco’s, it would need a station at either end.  Having bought our food for tonight and navigated our way past the power tools, electric lawnmowers, garden sheds and bathroom section (actual baths and showers, not just shampoo….), we stumble on a variety of clean – if uninspiring – foodstalls. 

We opt for ‘Wok’n’Go’ – in keeping with our new-found Asian predilection, and on account of the quality of everything else.  It’s predictably terrible.  Even Nina, queen of vegetables, casts her eye over the options and lumps for the sweet’n’sour beef with rice, like the rest of us.  The boys receive a long-overdue introduction to the gloopy world of MSG.

Leaving Tesco’s and hitting the motorway, there’s little to divert us en-route to the Slovakian border.  Whilst driving, Nina consumes nearly all of our remaining Romanian plums from Ada’s garden, in an attempt to re-balance her internal fruit and vegetable reserves.  Simultaneously, she delicately manages to (a) drive as fast as possible, whilst (b) not letting our still-vulnerable engine overheat on the long motorway ascents.

We cross the Danube and enter Slovakia, then cross back again, following a narrow strip of land that sits between a huge dammed-up section of the river, and a myriad of Danube branches, each one larger than the Thames.

Our campsite for tonight offered fishing and kayaking: when we arrive, we’re told that the shop where we can buy licences has just shut, for the weekend.  Nina politely makes clear exactly how we feel about this – especially since their earlier confirmation over e-mail meant we’d promised a fishing stop to the boys.  The beleaguered campsite owner offers us free canoeing in compensation. 

Later on, Laurie and I find a secluded section of the Danube to do a spot of illegal fishing in.  We catch two tiny, whitebait-sized fish: a meagre return for river that supposedly holds sturgeon which are six metres long and salmon the size of a man. Wouldn’t have been worth the licence anyway.

To re-set our karma, we offer to pay our campsite host for the canoe.  He refuses, we settle halfway.

No fish for supper this evening: instead, we enjoy a delicious chicken, ginger, lemon and sesame one-pot wonder – a welcome change from the endless pasta.

Day 117, August 10th.  Vjanke, Bratislava, 28 - 34C, sunny

We’re woken at 7.30am by some tuneful yet insistent church bells.  It appears that, in crossing to Slovakia, we’re out of the lands of the barking dogs – but we’ll have to travel further to rid ourselves of ecclesiastical intrusions.

After breakfast, we load up some essential provisions into a waterproof bag and haul our four-man canoe down to the banks of the river. 

Our campsite host has suggested a two-hour route for us, indicating on a map as he speaks: “You start go upstream here, find little tunnels, lie-down go hand-hand through little tunnel, then join main river here, drift down, little waterfall here but not problem go straight, then when river turn right go left, nice swimming in lake here, then upstream here slow water, have to take boat out water few metres but no problem, then left hand bank slow water back to start.”  So easy.

So easy indeed.  The first half hour of our canoe adventure is riven by squabbles and arguments as we paddle into reeds, submerged logs, fast sections going the wrong way, and round in circles.  Eventually, after many grumpy and precarious alterations of the seating arrangements, we settle with Nina providing the steering at the back, me providing the power at the front, and boys paddling, occasionally consistently, in the middle.

It's a delight though.  On the downstream stretches we can relax, watch the bird life, fruitlessly try to spot fish in the depths beneath us, and point out the bright green frogs on the lily pads, before they jump away from us.  But the upstream sections are exhausting and by the time we’re paddling into the bank at our starting off point, we’re all suffering from sore backs and shoulders, and famished.

After a quick picnic lunch, we’re back in the car, heading for Bratislava.  We’re spending two nights in the capital before moving on: we’ve accepted that from Hungary onwards, we’re really focussed on just having a nice time.  If we manage to learn anything vaguely insightful about these last few countries, it'll be a bonus.

Near Bratislava, the Slovakian countryside is neat, ordered (not like Slovenian ordered though) and unremarkable.  Apparently, Slovakia’s section of the Carpathians is stunning: it’ll have to wait for another trip.

Our apartment is in a modern block, some way out of the centre, with a dedicated underground parking space that – as per usual – we can’t fit in.  As it transpires, there’s also a ground level car park underneath the building’s podium.  A quick reccy reveals that (a) we can fit through this garage door and (b) there are multiple empty parking spaces.  We drive in as subtly as our chugging engine and smoking exhaust will allow and nab an empty space, leaving an apologetic note and our phone number on the dashboard, in case some angry Slovak returns and demands his parking space back.

The only restaurant in the immediate vicinity is a Vietnamese – and this time it’s excellent.  Enjoying the pleasures of international capital cities, we eat too much before waddling the 50 metres back to our apartment, stuffed.

Day 118, August 11th.  Bratislava, 28 - 34C, sunny

Slow day.  It’s 8.45am before we’re all up, and gone 10am before we finally venture out of the flat and catch a trolley-bus into the centre of the city. Laurie’s discovered some of the benefits of urban life, notably having a shop literally downstairs that he can visit numerous times for his increasingly wide cooking repertoire.

Bratislava – clean, relaxed, small, not many things to see – is perfect for our requirements today. 

Bratislava Castle, a lovingly restored, rectangular, white-washed affair with a red-rooved conical tower at each corner, contains enough to interest everyone for an hour.  The pale blue and white Church of Elizabeth – which looks like a giant cake covered in fondant icing – is a delight.  We manage to persuade everyone to climb up the Old Town Hall Tower to enjoy the view, before finding a trendy brunch spot, eating a trendy brunch, and heading home for a lazy afternoon in the flat.

In the evening, we venture out on foot to a Persian restaurant, a little further away than last night’s Vietnamese.  Outstanding.  We’re done with European food.  Another contented waddle home.

Day 119, August 12th.  Bratislava, Slovakia – Bad Aibling, Germany, 28 - 39C, sunny

Given the distance we end up driving today, we probably should have packed up and left a little earlier.

As it happens, Laurie spends an hour making (delicious) lemon curd after breakfast, while Ralph reads his book.  We finally leave by 10am, primarily because that’s our check-out deadline and we’ve no choice.

Within an hour, we’re out of Slovakia and driving across eastern Austria’s flat, hot farmland, heading for the elegant, sophisticated behemoth that is Vienna, for lunch, followed by the start of the long dash home through western Europe.