Down the Danube on a Bicycle, June 2015: Part Two--Hungary

Ottawa, October 19, 2015

Stage Three—Hungarian Homecoming

Since both Slovakia and Hungary are in the EU and in the Schengen Zone, there were no border formalities on Sunday, June 14 as we rode over the road bridge into Hungary, very unlike the situation in 1988 when crossing the border required a visa and lengthy formalities with stern border guards; I still remember my friend Jeremy getting turfed off the train back to Budapest after a weekend in Prague because his Hungarian visa wasn’t multiple-entry; we didn’t see him again for several days.  The main difference between the two sides of the border is currency; unlike Slovakia, Hungary still uses its own money, the forint.  At about 300 forints to the euro, there are a lot of zeroes involved, and when we went to an ATM to draw out some forints, these zeroes were Terri’s downfall.  It was my turn to take out money, but the ATM didn’t like my Swiss bank card, so Terri used her New Zealand bank card instead and took out 300,000 forints, thinking it was about 100 euros; instead, it was worth about 1000 euros.  Terri ended up bankrolling our entire trip through Hungary for both of us and still having most of the forints left over at the end.  She was not amused!

Riding through Hungary on a sultry Sunday afternoon, there was little traffic and, since Hungary has strict Sunday closing laws, we rolled through ghost towns.  We stopped off for radlers a couple of times, fortifying this with soup the second time, before arriving at the historic town of Esztergom around 4:30.  

Wild boar stew in Esztergom

The campground there featured a swimming pool, and Terri, hearing that it closed at 6 pm, raced off immediately to leap in.  It felt indescribably soothing to dive into the cool water and re-equilibrate our bodies after the sapping heat of the day.  The campground had a restaurant serving wild boar in red wine sauce, and we tucked into that, washed down with some fine Hungarian red wine.  Restored to life, we went for a walk after sundown across the bridge into Slovakia to admire Esztergom Cathedral from the other bank, lit up and looking grand.  The church is the centre of Catholicism in Hungary and looks the part, with a huge neo-classical dome rising high above the town like St. Peter’s in Rome. 

Esztergom by night

After the previous day’s exertions, we had an easier time getting from Esztergom to Vac.  On our way out of town, we found a EuroVelo 6 sign for the first time in a long while, directing us down to the Danube where a ferry crossing took us across to the left bank.  Talking to other cyclists waiting for the same ferry, I had a good look at the detailed EV 6 route atlas that they had, and we decided that we had to get the next volume, leading from Budapest to Belgrade.  It was wonderfully detailed, and looking at it, we saw that our route into Budapest shouldn’t be as grim as it had looked on my road map.  

Our unexpected ferry ride across the Danube

The ferry put us ashore and we had an easy, pretty ride along bike paths to the village opposite Visegrad, where we stopped and had langos, those deep-fried flaps of dough that I used to love in my Budapest days, and fagylalt, the ice cream that Hungarians consume in vast quantities in the summer.  We briefly contemplated taking the ferry across to see Visegrad up close, but decided that it was prettier from a distance.  I remember hiking up to the top of the old hill-top fort in 1988; it was a wild and desolate place in mid-November with great views in all directions.  This stretch of the Danube from Esztergom through Visegrad and Vac to Szentendre is called the Danube Bend (the river moves from being an east-west river to a north-south one) and played a key role in Hungarian history, especially during the time when the Ottoman Turks dominated most of the country and the Danube Bend was one of the regions still free of Turkish rule. 

Vac, city of churches

We rolled easily into Vac, arriving in early afternoon and, in view of the gathering rain clouds, keen to sleep indoors.  We tried finding a private room to rent through the tourist office, but they were overpriced.  I spotted a sign for a cheaper option and so we found ourselves staying as guests in a museum that had had its government funding cut and had turned some of its rooms into hostel accommodation; 4400 forints (about 15 euros, less than an Austrian campground) got us our own room.  We checked in and then went out for a poke around the town.  I had never been to Vac before, and was pleasantly surprised by its Baroque loveliness.  It abounds in churches, and its main square is a very pretty spot, full of families eating ice cream and watching small children play peacefully.  We demolished a pizza of truly monstrous size and lamented that the biggest attraction in Vac, the Mummy Museum, was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.  

Seriously hungry in Vac

I had seen a presentation years before about the DNA analysis of the bodies of hundreds of people buried in a crypt of the Dominican church in the 1700s and then forgotten until renovation work knocked a hole in the crypt wall.  The pine coffins and microclimate in the crypt almost perfectly preserved the bodies from decay, and scientists were able to figure out a lot of interesting information about diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis.  I was keen to see them, but the schedule conspired against us.  Instead, on a suggestion by the museum curator, we went for a walk into the nature preserve along the bank of the river, where a forested swamp sheltered lots of birdlife.  On our brief exploration, we spotted two different types of woodpeckers, lots of nightingales and (sadly) hordes of biting insects.  Despite the mosquitoes, however, it ended up being a real highlight of the trip, standing silently on the boardwalks leading through the marsh, listening to the cacophony of birdsong.

Birdwatching outside Vac

Our ride into Budapest from Vac the next day was a tale of two halves.  With only 50 km to cover, we thought it would take under 3 hours to get to the tourist flat we had booked over the internet.  It all started promisingly, with a ferry at 9 am leading us back to the right bank.  We rolled across an agricultural island that provided us with a fruit feast (cherries and more watermelon), then followed EV 6 signs along a bike path that degenerated into a rough forest track and a serious mudhole before suddenly spilling us out into Szentendre, the artists’ colony just north of Budapest.  We left the bikes and wandered around the atmospheric streets, very much cleaned up and gentrified since I was last there in 1988.  More bike paths led us into the far northern suburbs of Buda, where radlers and ice cream revived us for what should have been a simple trundle through the streets to our apartment.

Riding along the bike paths from Vac to Budapest

Instead it ended up taking us well over two hours to find our way the 14 km or so that separated us from our destination.  We lost the EV 6 signs, spent a lot of time looking for them, then tried to improvise a route along the Pest bank of the Danube (very, very unsuccessfully).  We finally ended up slowly rolling along side streets, trying to keep out of the crazy traffic of the main avenues, and when we got to our apartment building, we couldn’t find the door or figure out how to get in.  A bit of re-reading e-mails and we figured it out.  It was a small apartment (a larger flat had been cut in half) but a decent price for central Pest.  We had a late lunch of kebabs and then headed into Buda to meet a friend of my friend Kent, Peter.  He works in a graphic design firm and was having a wine and cheese evening with some friends.  We hit it off immediately and sat around eating fine cheese and sipping lovely wine and discussing the state of current-day Hungary.   Eventually tiredness, the curse of the bike tourist, hit and we said our goodbyes to catch a bus back to our flat.

Nighttime along the Danube in Budapest

We took a proper day off the bikes in Budapest the next day.  Since Terri and I had both explored the city in the past, we went in for strolling the streets rather than a series of museums, although I had to visit the Terror Haz, the brilliant museum occupying 60 Andrassy Ut, the former headquarters of both the Nazi-era and Communist secret police forces.  We walked through the chic streets of central Pest, went looking (unsuccessfully) for a new seat for Terri’s bike (her gel seat was starting to hurt a lot by the end of every day in the saddle), bought the map book for the Budapest-Belgrade leg of our journey, searched for my old favourite pub, the Fregatt (sadly closed during the day), looked in at the wild urban-ruin-themed Szilta Kert club, and ended up lunching late at the Khao San Road-esque food court outside Szilta Kert.  We then walked through the Terror Haz and both of us found it very moving.  Having visited similar museums in the three Baltic capitals, I would have to rate this one as being the top of those 4 in terms of humanizing the victims and explaining the larger picture.  While Terri went back to the apartment, I stopped in at the hospital to get my hand X-rayed.  Luckily there were no broken bones, although now (3 months later) it’s still sore and doesn’t close properly. We ate takeout kebabs, then went downtown with a bottle of wine to walk over the Danube bridges and along the river bank, enjoying the lit-up castle and parliament buildings and scouting our escape route for the next morning.  It was a fitting farewell to one of Europe’s most beautiful capital cities.

Szechenyi Chain Bridge with Buda Castle

In contrast to our agonizing entrance to the city, leaving Budapest was a piece of cake, with lots of EV6 signs and our new route atlas to fill in the occasional gap.  We meandered down the left bank of the river, past areas that had been completely rebuilt since my last visit.  Csepel Island, once a hotbed of heavy industry, was peaceful, with decaying factories separated by pleasant green stretches and lots of rowing and canoeing clubs.  As we got further from downtown, the houses got a bit fancier, as people renovated old places that were both within commuting distance of the city and perfectly located on one of the channels of the Danube.  Our progress was marked by a radler and peanut stop after 28 km in Szigetszentmiklos, and lunch (“gipsy-style pork”) in an upmarket pizza restaurant after 51 km in Rackeves.  We left Csepel island finally and crossed to the true left bank of the river, where we rode partly on quiet back roads and partly, propelled by a strong tailwind, along the main Route 51 from Budapest to the Serbian border.  We were looking for a spot to camp wild, but then saw camping signs near Szardszentmarton and followed them towards the Danube bank.  There was no campground to be seen, but there was an artificial lake with what looked like the burnt-out remnants of a campground reception building.  It took us a while to figure out how to get in, but once we did it was a perfect spot to sleep, with cooling breezes off the lake, no traffic noise and lots of space to spread out.  We cracked out the little toaster rack that I had been carrying and made toasted grilled cheese sandwiches and soup, and slept well in our tent after a pleasant 84 km from Budapest.

Toasted grilled cheese sandwiches

The next day we made more toast for breakfast to accompany our muesli, then rolled off southwards.  We took the main highway for a while as far as Dunavecse, then took a series of back roads and dirt tracks to Dunaegyhaza and on into Solt.  Along the way we spotted numerous stork nests atop telephone poles, some with two or three juvenile storks in them, and occasionally a parent as well.  Storks ended up being a recurring leitmotif throughout our Danube journey.  We took a lovely diketop cycle path as far as the town of Harta, where we ducked into a restaurant to avoid an oncoming rain squall.  The pork paprikas hit the spot and we used the restaurant wi-fi to book return plane tickets to Geneva from Sofia, Bulgaria, which we decided was a realistic ending point for our ride.  On our way out of town we met up with two fifty-something Liverpudlians who were on the fifth year of a six-year, 9-days-a-year mission to ride the entire length of the EV6 from the Atlantic to the Black Sea.  We raced along another dike-top cycle path, then parted ways with the Scousers as we took quiet back roads to Fokto and into Kalocsa, the paprika capital of the world.  Sadly we arrived too late for the paprika museum, and had problems finding a place to stay indoors, with more rain threatening.  Eventually we put up in a downtown hotel where 5000 forints (roughly 17 euros) bought us a comfortable double bed and an exquisite shower. 

Some of the dirt tracks we followed south of Budapest

The next morning, with the rain having cleared out the skies, we raced out of town in the direction of an off-beat, off-the-Danube attraction mentioned in our guidebook:  the wine-press village of Hajos.  With a stiff tailwind, we averaged 23 km/h all the way to Hajos Pincsek under clear skies; this doesn’t sound like much if you’re on a racing bike, but on a fully-loaded touring bike with more than 20 kg of luggage it was the best hour’s speed of the entire trip.  Strangely enough, we passed barely a single vineyard all the way.  It was only after we rolled through the actual village of Hajos and into the strange historical capsule that is Hajos Pincek that we started to see vineyards stretching away in front of us. 

Storks, symbol of central Europe

Hajos Pincek consists of hundreds of tiny houses that aren’t really houses, at least not for living in.  Instead, every Hobbit-sized building contains a wine press and a cellar carved out of the soft rock for storing the product of the wine press.  This huge concentration of tiny wineries is one of the many results of the Danube Schwabians, German-speaking farmers invited in by the Austrian Emperors to repopulate deserted areas after the reconquest of Ottoman-held lands in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  

In Hajos Pincek, with a few of the tiny wine press houses 

The Schwabians were famous for their hard work and business acumen, and Hajos Pincsek was the site of many a successful small business over the centuries.  Although the wineries fell into disuse after the upheavals of the Second World War and the deportation of many of the descendants of the Schwabians by the new Communist regime in the late 1940s, recently people have been reviving the wineries, often as a hobby or as a profitable sideline from their full-time jobs.  We saw a few folks working away in their wine houses, but only one house was really open, so we stopped in there to sample some wine with the old lady running the place.  The white wine was pleasant (more of the Gruner Veldtliner that we had so enjoyed in Austria), and the red was light but drinkable.  We peeked down into the cellar, full of past years’ vintages cloaked in a thick layer of mould.  We bought a bottle for all of 1100 forints (about $3.50) and then found a larger, more commercial outfit outside the village to sample a bit more.  We ended up finding a very pleasant red called Schwabenlblut (Schwabian Blood) to put into my panniers for later consumption. 

Wine tasting in Hajos Pincek

We cut back southwestward along an undulating road (the least flat road we’d followed since Krems) past more vineyards, and eventually out onto route 51 again.  Traffic wasn’t too bad and we zipped along to an early stop in the town of Baja, a pleasant town on a sidestream of the Danube that our guidebook told us was another centre of Schwabian life.  Our campground was right beside the water, and was full of triathletes taking part in a series of races right beside us.  We watched for a while, then put up our tent and set off carrying only cameras and water to explore a national park.

Exploring the national park close to Baja

Across the river from Baja is a park that is supposed to help preserve the swampy, riverine forest beside the Danube.  We crossed to the right bank and immediately left the narrow, busy main road in favour of the dirt tracks that run through the forest.  It was an enjoyable place to explore, full of birds (or at least birdsong; the birds themselves were hard to spot), fish, snakes and even wild boars that left us a bit nervous, given their fearsome reputations and the fact that they had young with them.  Less welcome were the swarms of mosquitoes that plagued us; I guess they help feed the fish, though, so they’re not completely without merit, although it certainly seemed so as we swatted away at them.  As in Vac, it was a glimpse of the rich natural world that once stretched the length of the Danube before population growth and industrialization took their toll.

We slept reasonably well despite the triathletes’ party going on in the campground that evening, and arose ready to have a short, easy ride followed by a cultural interlude.  Our target for the day was Mohacs, the border town only 38 km south of Baja.  We started out with a spectacular route-finding error on my part that left us pushing our bikes through waist-deep grass on a path that hadn’t been used in years.  Eventually Terri convinced me to turn around, and we backtracked to where we had gone wrong several kilometres earlier.  Once we got onto the right road, we raced along easily along tiny farm roads and some dike-top paths all the way to the Mohacs ferry crossing.  The campground we had been counting on turned out not to exist anymore, and with time ticking away, we decided to take a room indoors somewhere.  It took much longer than it should have, but we finally found a little oasis of genteel tranquility at a little private zimmer for 25 euros.  We quickmarched back into town to the bus station and caught a bus to Pecs to spend an afternoon poking around a city that I fell in love with back in 1988. 

Szent Istvan Ter, Pecs

It felt strange racing along in a bus, covering in an hour and a half what it would have taken most of the day to pedal.  We got to town and walked into the centre of Pecs, popping out in the lovely Baroque town square, Szent Istvan Ter, before continuing to the Csontvary Museum.  I had discovered Csontvary, a brilliant and eccentric Hungarian painter of the late 19^th century, back in 1988 and I wanted to introduce Terri to his dramatic huge canvases.  As I had hoped, she was completely entranced by his work, and we spent an hour and a half contemplating his paintings.  Afterwards we went in search of some very early Christian churches that have been unearthed (the town was an important Roman frontier post and Christianity flourished here in the late Empire), but couldn’t find them as that entire part of town had been taken over by a huge music festival.  We ambled back to Szent Istvan Ter and ordered wine and ice cream, lingering over the view of the neatly restored facades and the Ottoman mosque that is now the main church in town.  

Elegant afternoon refreshments in Pecs

When we got back to Mohacs, we had an unforgettable rooftop meal at the Szent Janos Hotel, watching the sunset paint the Danube all the colours of the rainbow.

Rooftop sunset over the river in Mohacs

The next morning, Monday, June 22^nd, we left Hungary after an unforgettable week of reigniting my affection for the country and its culture and people.  On the way to the Croatian border, only 15 km south of town, we stopped briefly at the memorial to the Battle of Mohacs, the 1526 debacle in which the Hungarian army was cut to pieces by the Ottomans and the inept King Lajos drowned in a swamp while running away from the battle.  The battle left the road to Budapest wide open, and the Turks duly occupied the capital for the next 160 years, a dark period in Hungarian history, at least from the modern Hungarian perspective.  Unfortunately, since we had just changed all of our forints into euros, we didn’t have any money to pay the admission fee, so we contented ourselves with a picture outside and then pedalled into Croatia.

Memorial to the Battle of Mohacs, 1526