Sunday: Budapest been and gone
Sunday, October 11th, 2009Budapest, here we come….and go….
328km
In the vans from 8:15am til 5:15pm, with a stop for an hour and a half in the capital
It feels like we’re *almost* back in the Central Europe we left in spring. Is it merely psychological, an unsubstantiated impression, or are there real factors contributing to this sense of “a little less southern, a little less eastern, a little less old”??
Turkish restaurants are replaced by billlboards advertising Wiener schnitzel. Big brand supermarkets we recognise from England and Germany appear. More houses than in the previous few countries are plastered and painted – even in the villages. Farms are surrounded by substantial fences – not nothing, or at most a rickety fence. Hay bales in the fields are massive and machine-made. None of this stacking the hay around a tall stick with a pitchfork.
There are frequent truck stops. With toilets (toilets with seats even – we’re still wondering where all the toilet seats went in Italy) and toilet paper and running water and separate potable water too. Plus picnic tables and children’s playgrounds.
It would seem there is substance to our gut feelings.
The road is the clincher. For a-hundred-and-fifty-kilometres it stretches out without so much as a ripple in the surface. It’s not that any of the previous countries were overly bad – certainly Italy was the worst, but even that was nothing like the roads of northern Thailand or anywhere in Laos. But these Hungarian roads…they are smooth.
Until we reach Budapest anyway. Cobblestones are never going to be a smooth ride!
Suddenly we feel like we’re really *are* back in central Europe. The streets are narrow, lined with roadworks and we barely fit. Flashback to Heidelberg. The buildings around us are used-to-be-grand, very reminiscent of St Petersburg, but now looking tired. We pass under a bridge and one of the shorter family members calls out, “It reminds me of Berlin.” Down by the Danube River someone else recalls the Amsterdam waterways. We sneak up and down streets hardly wider than we are. We look for parking, hopeful that on a Sunday morning, the city might be empty. But it’s not. It’s humming and every space that could be occupied by a car is. (There is, however, no double parking, and no doubt that adds to the civilised air.) We drive around, consoling ourselves with the notion that this is a road race and seeing ANYTHING is a bonus and we have already seen so many grand buildings, so many ornately decorated churches, such wonderful bridges, so many brightly coloured tiles, enough to make us fall instantly in love with the city! Then we spy an entire street of empty carparks. Round the block we fly and manoeuvre ourselves backwards into them. Before we even have time to discuss whether I should stay to prepare lunch while everyone else takes a stroll, a black-suited policeman appears – running – around the corner of the building. It transpires we are in a diplomatic area, there is no parking, the area is protected and we are to move on, no he doesn’t know where we can go, just move. We oblige!
It’s been raining all morning, but now the rain lifts. We find a park. They stroll. I cook. We eat. We weave our way out of the city.
We leave Budapest behind our appetites whetted, satisfied to have enjoyed, even if only briefly.
We drive and drive and drive. The plain still stretches endlessly. There is no cause for the road to curve and it rolls out before us, an arrow-straight line.
Occasionally trees run alongside. Yesterday, the presence of autumn manifested itself in a wide range of yellows. Today it’s red. Oh, there’s yellow and gold too, but more distinctly today, there is red. Ruby red, fire red, orange red, cherry red, deep maroon and crimson. The trees are a blaze of colour.
Windmills appear on the horizon, come ever closer, and then I watch them recede in the rear view mirror. Gone. But the road goes on.
We cannot get to the end of it today. So we pull over, cook dinner and sleep in another truckstop. We also get eaten alive by mosquitoes. Just for old times’ sake?
rayres