Hungarian highlights

Saturday 13th April 2013

We spent 9 days and covered about 600 miles in Hungary from Lake Balaton in the East to Miskolc in the West, Szentendre in the North to Szeged in the South. The weather was very mixed – rainy mornings, mainly overcast days but occasionally quite warm and sunny. Hungary has a very varied landscape from the swollen Danube and Tisza rivers that dissect the country to the mountain ranges in the north east and the vast Great Hungarian Plain which covers half the country. 

Danube north of Budapest

Flooded Tisza river in Szeged

The Great Hungarian Plain

We avoided the motorways to ensure we saw most of the changing countryside but in doing so found the roads were often terribly potholed and poorly patched. The deliberate dumping of waste and litter on the roadsides is a huge problem and a real eyesore.

 

Vineyards in Badacsony - Lake Balaton

Airplane museum in Szolnok

Many people cycle the old style ‘sit-up-and-beg’ bikes in towns and villages as their main means of transport and there is a good network of cycle paths. The standard of driving was very good and we found the people really friendly and polite.

Art Nouveau style buildings in Szeged

Votive Church in Szeged

We stayed 2 nights in campsites (one cost £15 the other £12) – other than that we stayed free in quiet car parks on the outskirts of towns.  All the usual supermarkets were here – Lidl, Aldi, Penny Market and Tesco and food is generally cheap. Diesel cost £1.18 a litre and most garages accepted credit cards.

Car-park camping on shores of Lake Balaton

The language was impossible to fathom out with no recognisable words and unpronounceable name places. We got the grasp of the essentials – Good Day, Thank you, Please and Goodbye, just enough to get us by. Foreign tourism is still in its infancy and signposting for touristic attractions is really poor. We’ll be back in a few years I’m sure…....