Letter 8

With some reluctance we left Jurta Tabor knowing that wherever else we were likely to stay in Hungary wouldn't compete and headed up into the North East of the country towards a town named Eger. For the last 30 kilometres on the way into the town we drove through fields of tobacco, sweet corn and sunflowers and mile upon mile of vineyards stretching out of sight over gently rolling hills.

Eger was a great place with, amongst other attractions, two thousand private wine cellars, some quaint old buildings and a fantastic collection of doors. Yes, doors. Eger contains a number of large old houses with shaded courtyards in which the locals sit all day, play chess, drink coffee and eat their meals. Each courtyard has an enormous pair of carved double doors and every one is different. In fact we came across a door making workshop in which upwards of a dozen carpenters were hard at it making new doors and repairing pre loved models any of which wouldn't have looked out of place on a Scottish castle.

There's the mandatory castle and cathedral of course but lots of little boutiques and beer houses with tables where one can sit outside and watch the Austrian tourists go by. As soon as we parked in the car park in Eger there was a tap on the window. It was a Polish black market money changer offering good rates so we had cheap money to spend before we even got out of the van and we went shopping straight away. We bought two products which changed our lives. A portable electric hotplate for the grand sum of eight dollars and a good quality German pressure cooker.

With an extension lead the hot plate enabled us to cook outside when the weather was good and it served as a heater at night. The pressure cooker cut our gas consumption down by about half. The cost of the gas was nothing to worry about but locating a gas sales establishment could sometimes take us the best part of a day and different countries had different fittings on their bottles. We parked just out of sight of the road in a large forest a little way out of Eger that night and were woken by the grunting and snorting of wild boars. Niether of us had ever seen wild boars before and when we pulled the curtains back and shone the torch on them they didn't bat an eyelid.

This was fine with us and we enjoyed watching them for a while but they were noisy and wouldn't go away until we put the car alarm on. In the morning when we went outside we saw that they had rooted up a large area of ground all around the van and defecated on our plastic water containers. After breakfast we took the back roads on the way to Aggtelek to see what the guidebooks describe as possibly the most beautiful cave system in Europe.

The way was mountainous with broad flat bottomed fertile valleys in which most of the villages were situated and we felt that at last we were seeing the real Hungary. In many villages up to this point the kids had come out to wave at us but now that we were in the little visited backwoods the adults were waving too. A campervan must have been a rare sight. The tiny hamlets were scenes straight from postcards, little houses with sagging roof lines and doors that were leaning over at an angle all nicely whitewashed or painted in an orangey colour with window surrounds in contrasting colours and grapes growing over them. Geese and chickens everywhere and old sheds and barns with thatched roofs which looked as though they were a hundred years old.

Almost every house had a well in the yard covered by little thatched house come dog kennel structures in different styles which covered the winding mechanisms used to lift the buckets. Some villages had up to four storks nests crowning the chimneys and lamp posts, scruffy ill defined constructions, more like a giant, flattened grenadier guards busby after a few hours in a spin dryer than a birds nest. Storks are considered lucky in this part of the World and every effort is made to induce the birds to stay and build their nests, including the placement of large wire constructions on top of chimneys, car tyres atop lamp posts and man made nests of twigs. Of the hundreds of storks nests we saw throughout Eastern Europe not one was in a tree or located more than fifty metres from a house.

We stopped in one village to change our gas bottles, not from a shop but from the gas delivery man who was doing the rounds in a horse and cart. He was standing outside the house of a bee keeper who's hives were kept in what looked like pigeon lofts and were made of straw which had been twisted into a rope and then wound round like a Chelsea bun into a conical shaped hive. I remember as a kid in England seeing a honey jar with a picture of the same type of hive on it. We arrived at the Aggtelek camping ground in the late afternoon and were suitably impressed with its appearance, especially the lake in the middle which was surrounded by tents and backed by steep hills. It was only as we drew closer that we saw the tops of a few other tents in the middle of the lake.

There had been a flash flood that morning when many of the campers were away from the camping ground and we were able to see the looks of horror on their faces when they returned later in the afternoon to find that they needed submarines to locate their holiday accommodation. Others were sitting in their cars with their bedding on the roof looking as though they'd had better holidays and in the morning when I went to the toilet block I saw some of them sleeping out in the open with just a piece of foam rubber underneath them and a wet blanket on top.

Inside the toilet block I stood next to a small, white skinned Hungarian sporting a pair of long, multi coloured shorts with Hugo Boss emblazoned on the left buttock. Long shorts these days don't have a zip fly and depending on how tight they are, a difficult decision confronts the "end" user as to whether one should pee over the top of the waistband or lift one of the legs. The small Hungarian had his toothbrush and toothpaste in his left hand and decided to pee "over the top" with his right hand. (by this I do not mean to convey to the reader that he peed with his hand of course, Hungarians aren't that different). When one decides to pee "over the top" with one's right hand, it means that one must hold down the waistband of one's shorts with the left hand. He did so - and peed all over his toothbrush. I laughed, he didn't.

We were up bright and early in the morning to go down the famous Aggtelek caves which the "The Lets Go Europe" book said were stupendous. One cave was said to be 14 kilometres long and a gigantic subterranean lake measuring some 2 kilometres in length awaited the intrepid visitor. The whole area around Aggtelek is riddled with caves stretching into neighbouring Czechoslovakia and six hour guided tours were on offer. We took a one hour tour which we later estimated to have taken approximately 50 minutes too long. I found, as Alicja had already told me, that caves are not the most exciting places to be in and as the guide spoke only Hungarian and no literature in English was available we may just as well have spent the time talking to our accountant.

Deep within the damp, dank, gloomy bowels of the earth there were things hanging from the ceiling which looked for all the World like cheese which had spent fifteen seconds too long in a microwave oven and a gaggle of Austrian tourists with compact flash cameras shooting off photo's out of flash range. When at last we emerged blinking into the sunlight it was with some relief that in front of us stood a cafe to which we repaired at speed for a cup of coffee before the party of Austrians could beat us to it.

It was run by a rotund, brown, bare chested man with a rotund brown, bare head widening out at the jowls. In the reflection of the coffee machine, which was unfortunately awaiting a service call, I inspected his gleaming pate for cracks just to be sure that I hadn't come face to face with the original Humpty Dumpty. The coffee was pre made, cold in a jug, and as it was ordered he poured it into a cup and heated it with one of those electric elements of the type commonly used by itinerant fruit pickers in dormitories. The milk jug too was awaiting a service call from the milkman but we were offered a substitute from a bottle labeled "Milky", a superb local coffee liqueur which we became instantaneously hooked on and thereafter scoured the countryside seeking to buy a stock of.

Hungarian food was superb, although perhaps some would find it a tad peppery, and so easily affordable that we embarked on a gourmet tour of the country sampling regional specialities, sitting in open air restaurants for hours on end gorging ourselves and watching the people go by. The shops too were full of an astonishing array of smoked and cured cold meats. Practically every day we would buy two kilos of peaches which we used in every imaginable way as they were so cheap. Peach pancakes, peach juice and peach flavoured yogurt for breakfast every morning and peach flavoured ice cream before going to bed.

What we didn't know about peaches by the time we left Hungary wasn't worth knowing and readers should keep an eye on the book shops for my next book "1001 Things To Do With a Leftover Peach." For those of you who are into kinky sex I'd recommend No 669 but first make sure that your peach isn't over ripe and that the chandelier is secured firmly to the ceiling.

According to the guide books, no trip to Hungary could be said to be complete without a visit to Lake Balaton. A huge body of landlocked water some one hundred kilometres long, it serves as Hungary's seaside and is the biggest attraction in the country, almost all of its shore line smothered in holiday resorts. So many holiday resorts on Lake Balaton were advertised in Hungarian tourist brochures that we decided not to drive into the first reasonable place that presented itself but to spend a while choosing the most suitable hotel with the best facilities.

We were by this time feeling somewhat shabby after such a long time in the van and were looking forward to a stay in a hotel with real baths and a laundry service where we could catch up on some washing. Alicja had already worked out that we'd get the seat covers, duvet, curtains and anything else we could easily detach, properly laundered together with all our machine washable clothes. We were unaware that it was school holiday time when every Hungarian, his kids, pets and a few hundred thousand Austrians descend upon this watery piece of paradise and no accommodation of any kind was available. It took two full days to cover the entire circumference of Lake Balaton stopping at dozens of hotel and camping sites only to hear the same story at each place, -you should have booked last year. The Swedes, Danes and Germans book two years in advance.

We finally gave up and headed for the area around Pecs further south in a quest to find a caravan park with one of the much vaunted thermal springs, Hungary being the therapeutic thermal spring capital of Europe with waters said to cure every unpronounceable ailment and rheumatism. This time we were in luck and managed to book in to a decent caravan park with a thermal pool within walking distance and set off hot foot (later to become even hotter), towels in hand for our first thermal pool experience. The vision in our minds was one of hot springs bubbling out of the ground into a natural rock pool, all clear and sparkling with little seats around the edge, rather like a giant hot tub. The reality was a little different.

It was a regular sized, full blown swimming pool full to the brim with a murky brown liquid hotter than any bath we'd ever taken. Perhaps it hadn't been filled to the brim at the start of the day but Archimedes Law had made it that way. It was chock a block full of wild thrashing Hungarians, the water bubbling like it was full of Piranhas during a feeding frenzy and kids leaping off the sides into spaces which weren't there until they landed. It was a first come first served event and as nobody was coming out, we slid in between the rest of them and stayed there for a full five minutes before coming to the conclusion that we couldn't stand the pace or the heat. It was an unusual experience for me, a first time communal bather, and I couldn't understand why people of all ages had to jump up and down like pogo stick passengers rubbing themselves against their neighbours.

I could see on the far side of the pool a couple of people I wouldn't have minded jumping up and down and rubbing myself against but my immediate pogo stickers were somewhat obese septuagenarians and the whole experience was lost on me. I'm pleased to say that we weren't put off by the occasion and over the following fortnight we visited several more thermal pools and found that it's one thing that is done well in Hungary. They were usually well maintained with attractive gardens, clean restaurants and toilet facilities and I suppose that if you live in a country without a coastline it's a good place to take the kids for the day.

It was while staying at a thermal pool park that I discovered that my word processing program had a spell checking feature, a marvellous idea which, once I found out how to operate it, saved me hours of work. Even more time would have been saved if I'd bought a legal copy of the software which would have come complete with a manual but as it was I sat up for hours experimenting with it. I could only wonder at the minds of the programmers far away in an office somewhere in California who seemed to have thought of every swear-word in the English language.

I was unable to stump it and it got me thinking. It must be someone's job somewhere in a programming development department to decide which swear-words go into the program and which ones don't. I wonder who it is that has the ultimate say on whether words like "fucker" can be included in a software package - probably the boss? Imagine the conversations and the correspondence which flies around the Microsoft building in such situations.

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MICROSOFT
Date......
Inter Office Memo

MEMO TO: Bill Gates CEO

FROM: Chuck Martin Programmer, Dictionary Dep't


Dear Bill,
Can I have Bollocks?

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REPLY: Yeah Chuck, fine with me as long as you don't charge the cost of the operation to the company.

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The West Germans and Austrians have been coming to Hungary for years and it's easy to see why. The whole country is exceptionally clean, which for a German is a prime consideration to start with, but apart from that, the Hungarians cater to them so well. At every restaurant, museum or place of interest they address all foreigners in German, all the restaurant menu's are in German as are the day to day signs at the entrances to places of interest.

A radio station called Radio Danubis broadcasts all day and probably all night too in the German language. It plays pop music most of the time but gives out tourist information at regular intervals and the German news. Hungary must earn a lot of foreign currency from tourism and deservedly too because they do a lot of things right. In the city of Pecs in the south there was much restoration of old buildings going on and I remarked to Alicja that it was a pity that the Poles just can't seem to restore and look after their old buildings like the Hungarians who most obviously have the craftsmen. We stopped to admire an old theatre which was built in Pecs by the Turks and we saw a gang of workmen restoring some of the decorative friezes which they had removed to the ground.

I tried to strike up a conversation with them in the hope of getting an authentic photograph of these Hungarian artisans at work. I wasn't getting anywhere until Alicja heard one of them say to another in Polish -I can't understand a fucking word of German, I don't know what he's asking me. Much to their embarrassment Alicja answered them in Polish and we ended up buying a take away pizza and coffee each and having lunch with them in their mess hut. They were interesting guys and told us that there was little work for them in Poland and that working in Hungary paid about three times as much. The Polish government doesn't have the money to spend on the restoration of its own buildings so they hire out their tradesmen to other countries and take a cut from their wages. Looking up at the building they were working on, one of them said -yes,the Turks built it, the Poles restored it and the Hungarians earn money out of German tourists with it.

It's hard to say exactly what combination of ingredients made us like Hungary so much but the whole package was very appealing and we felt at home there. Hungarians seem to have a certain style which we didn't see elsewhere in Europe, the architecture, hotels, restaurants, food, the people, it all left an impression on us and we were in a way sad when the time came to leave and head across the border to war torn Jugoslavia. On our last night we eat at a restaurant in Pecs which boasted a menu containing kangaroo tail soup and "forgs legs." I'm not quite sure about the forg but I've an idea that they're big things like chickens and a sort of paprika colour.

when we got back to the van we heard on the radio that East Germany is going to limit the number of people that it allows to travel to Hungary because too many of them are escaping through Hungary to Austria and then on to West Germany. It made us think of the guy we met when we first entered the country who asked us if we could take him across the border. I hope he made it.