Hungary

Monday, 27th August 2018 Travelling Herd needs all the technology available to keep the blog up-to-date… As we were conducting our own tour of Budapest we were first off the boat after lunch and headed straight to the Great Market Hall so that Robert could invest in some paprika to perfect his goulash and we could return any purchases to the boat before going to look round the city. We walked along the river front by the trams. And paused to admire an artist at work. We crossed to the Buda side of the city and took the funicular up to Castle Hill to enjoy the views back across the river from Fisherman’s Bastion to the Parliament Building. The guards at the top of Castle Hill are so still and tanned they almost look plastic. But the views are impressive. Matthias Church has a colourful geometrically tiled roof but it can be difficult to get the best angle for a photograph. The interior is beautifully stencilled from floor to ceiling in warm almost autumnal shades of orange, brown, green and gold and unusually you can also climb to a gallery level for views of the interior from a different perspective. […]

Sunday, 26th August 2018 This morning we had to go through passport control on board the boat to enter Hungary. This involved completing a declaration the night before about the amount of alcohol, cigarettes and currency we were bringing into the country and presenting ourselves to the customs officers in an orderly fashion in the morning. A cursory glance at our passports seemed to be all that was required. The weather has broken and the temperature is a chilly 21 degrees. Since the sun deck loses some of its allure in these temperatures, Ruth, Matilda and Jaime all decided to join the excursion to the Puszta area to see the Hungarian horsemen in action. Robert remained on board, hoping to arrive at the pick up point in time to have a look round the town. We were moored alongside another boat and had to walk through it to disembark. This seems to be a slightly more luxurious vessel than ours and Jaime wanted to jump ship. The tour started with a visit to a traditional Hungarian home with painted walls and hand embroidered cloth and clothes. Ironically, given the current water level, houses were built on a slight mound to protect […]

Friday, 10th August 2018 Our fifth train of this trip, departing at 08:23, took us on a two and a half hour journey to the city of Debrecen. Debrecen is the centre of the Northern Great Plain region and was the largest Hungarian city in the 18th century. As the site of the uprising, it is an important cultural centre and was the capital city during the Hungarian Revolution [1848–1849] when Lajos Kossuth declared the dethronement of the Habsburg dynasty in the Protestant Great Church of Debrecen. At the end of World War II Debrecen served as the capital of Hungary [1944–1945]. The Protestant Great Church of Debrecen provides quite a striking contrast to the decorative excess of Budapest’s Catholic St Stephen’s Basilica we visited yesterday. Debrecen currently has a population of 318,000. To put that into perspective, we live in Bromley, a commuter suburb of London, with a population of 309,000. In fact, Debrecen is about the size of Bromley, but is much quieter and there is little indication that it is home to that many people. The streets in the centre of town are restricted to trams and cyclists. It is a university town and the peace is perhaps in […]

Thursday, 9th August 2018 A leisurely start to the day, partly because of the promised temperatures of 34º, but also because, unusually for us on a train trip, when we are often up to catch an early train, on this occasion we had a second day to explore/enjoy a location, so we were able to get up for breakfast at 08:45. Although we like to walk, the heat and Robert’s enthusiasm for different forms of transport prompted us to buy one day travel passes which cost 1,650 Ft [£4.59] each. We were pleased that our first experience of the Budapest Metro was catching Line 1 from Deák Ferenctér. The Budapest metro is the oldest electrified underground railway system on the European continent, and the third-oldest electrically operated underground railway in the world. It was predated by the 1890 City & South London Railway (now part of the London Underground) and the Mersey Railway. Line 1 was completed in 1896 and the older stations are a charming step back in time with tiled walls, tiled names, curved wooden storage cupboards and barriers between the lines. The platforms are short and the trains are just two carriages long. The metro took us […]

Wednesday, 8th August 2018 Robert woke up at 03:00 to the sounds of carriages and buffers and when he went to investigate he realised that the sleeper carriage we were in, and the two behind, were stationary at a platform at Salzburg. We had been uncoupled from our engine and the rest of our train and it had disappeared on its way to Budapest without us. Apparently, this is standard practice, otherwise we would have arrived in Budapest too early and not had the chance for a full night’s sleep. At 04:00 we were connected to the Zurich to Budapest sleeper and we were on our way again. We woke at about 08:00 and once we were up, dressed and ship shape the train steward converted our beds back into chairs and a table and served us our breakfast. Matilda had been a little concerned when boarding the sleeper the evening before that she might find herself sharing with complete strangers as the berths booked were 32 and 36. The non-sequential numbers were explained by the fact that carriages can not only accommodate three sleeping berths but also three seats – or two seats and a table for breakfast – […]