DAY TWENTY-FIVE: NOT HUNGRY IN HUNGARY

Day Twenty-Four (Budapest to Kecskemét) Daily Distance: 93.53 kms

Day Twenty-Five (Kecskemét to Hódmezővásárhely) Daily Distance: 107.26 kms

Total Distance: 2216.11 kms

The food of Hungary has been an absolute gastronomic delight. It has set new levels for my taste buds that I dare say my wallet will not be able to satisfy anywhere else. It has continued to amaze us as we departed the capital overrun with tourists for the smaller towns in which there is presumably no translation for the word ‘tourist’. It has emphasised quantity, but at the same time remains a quality product. In every instance, our three or four course meals plus one round of beers and a bottle of red wine or two has lightened our collective kitty about as much as would a simple main-meal-each in the UK. It has been delivered to us with friendly smiles which mask the lack of English, but by wait staff more than happy to deal with tourists so uninformed they can’t even count to three in the local lingo. It has not been any less than outstanding on any single occasion. But most of all, it has of course meant that we have not once been hungry in Hungary.

Just before we departed our flash apartment in Budapest, a passing woman told Jim that we better have our water proofs on hand because rain was due across the east of the country that afternoon and the next day. We hoped that she was less proficient at weather-predicting than she obviously was at cooking (she was Hungarian). Unfortunately not: it began raining that afternoon, but only after we spent the last two hours of the day riding towards menacing clouds like this:

After riding on wet roads for a few hours – but never feeling a drop of rain – I was convinced that somehow, miraculously, we were going to escape it. Alas, we were a mere 2km or from the city centre of Kecskemét when it started bucketing down. As I was slightly in front at the time it started, the other three huddled under a tree getting gradually more wet and once they were so sodden that it no longer mattered, they gave up and came out from their hiding place and continued into the city centre. One kilometre down the road, they came across me sitting in a bus shelter, dry and warm (where did the phrase ‘old and wise’ come from?!)

SatNav lead us to a hotel right in the centre of the city that had a ‘Wellness Centre’ so it was nice to have a sauna and a spa to relax. That night we found a fabulous restaurant where Alan had “one of the best five meals of his life”, goulash followed by seared duck with red-wine soaked pear and duchess potatoes.

The following day we agreed to depart at 8:30am, but with gloomy grey skies and steadily falling rain, at 8:29 we decided that, much like a game of cricket, we shouldn’t start riding until the rain stops (if it started while we are riding, we thought, then it’s a different matter). So 8:30 became 9:00 became 10:00, although eventually we lost patience and set off. But not after Jim tried every means possible to convince us all to catch a train to our next destination. Honestly, we heard “choo! choo!” (complete with bending knees and circling arms, mimicking the movement of a train); we heard about the sole purpose of trains (“to avoid rain when you are on long cycling trips”); and worst of all, we heard him singing ‘All Down the Line’ (Rolling Stones), ‘Runaway Trains’ (Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers), ‘Last Train to San Fernando’ (Johnny Duncan), ‘The Last Train to Clarksville’ (The Monkees), ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ (everyone), ‘Trains and Boats and Planes’ (Peter, Paul and Mary), ‘I’ve Been Workin’ On The Railroad’ and a dozen or so more by the end of the day. When he ran out of train songs, it became RAIN songs, and when he ran out of rain songs, he started making up his own lyrics to suit ("leaving on a jet train", “spray wonderful things to me”)...........

Well, Alan and Dan are not cheaters, and I have been sponsored to ride across Europe, not to ride-across-Europe-except-for-that-one-day, so Jim was out-voted 3-1. Anyway, not for a single minute of the day did it stop so as a result I didn’t take any photos, I didn’t listen to my iPod, I didn’t have any profound thoughts or new revelations and so I am banishing it to the history books.

We were intending on making it to Makó but we couldn’t haul our drenched selves that far, so we settled somewhere 15km short of that, but with a 15km longer name: Hódmezővásárhely. I was overjoyed when we found the Kenguru Csárda (Kangaroo Tavern), although we’re still unsure of what, if any, connection exists between kangaroos and this small town of 45,000 on the Great Hungarian Plain, except that maybe they just love hairy mammals – the derivation of “Hod’s” (as we called it) name is “beaver field market place”, hmmm?



Kenguru Csárda in 'Hod'

This is pretty much the only reason we stayed here. Well that and I wanted to be able to say that I spent a night in ‘The Unpronounceable’: Hódmezővásárhely. Now THAT is a mouthful. Which I suppose is ever so appropriate for our last night in this gastronomic heaven!