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 |
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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…....
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