Southern Hungary – mid-January 2004

First night out of Budapest. Cold!

So, after more than a month at the Station in Hungary’s capital, we finally mustered up the courage to leave. We were torn between wanting to leave and wanting to stay. We were sad to leave everyone – Eszter, Peter, Andi, Jay, Jeff, Mark, and the others – sad to leave new friends behind. I guess that’s a part of traveling. But at the same time, it was good to be back on the bikes and pedaling again. Even in the snow.

Because, after our first day back in the elements after our long pause in Budapest, the snow was coming down fast and hard. Big flakes, too. We packed up and started pedaling, and I didn’t take to the snow very well. It was difficult to see with the wind and the snow in our face, hitting us hard. It reminded me of the sting of pelting rain that you feel when you’re in a boat or on a motorcycle. I skidded and fell after less than a minute on the road. It was so cold with the driving wind that we could think of nothing but the pain in our frozen feet. We spent a lot of time in the grocery store next to the heater, trying to get warm. Even the space heaters don’t do much for your feet. After about an hour, we gave up and headed back outside.

That night, Stephane wanted to knock on someone’s door and ask if we could put our tent in their backyard, rather than spend time in the dark looking for a place to camp. I was nervous – we had never done this before – and how do you go about asking someone if you can camp in their backyard? Especially when you don’t speak the same language? How would they react? It’s not something that you ordinarily do. I felt uncomfortable, but Stephane had more confidence than I did, and pulled out our French-Hungarian dictionary that a fellow traveler had given us in Budapest.

So we knocked on the door of the first farmhouse we came to, and hoped for the best. We took our hoods off so that people could see our faces, feeling that if people could see your face, they would be more likely to trust you. Of course, I’m pretty small – I’m probably one of the last people on earth that someone would be afraid of. A woman answered our knock, and actually understood us, but it was another thing trying to communicate after that. She called her son, who got out his cell phone and called his friend who spoke English, and like that, translated our conversation by telephone.

At first, the family told us of a hotel a few miles down the road that we could go to, then after a brief conversation amongst themselves, offered to let us stay in a little cottage on their property where the security guard lived. A short while later, the son said we could stay at his house, in the next town over, where there was running water and electricity – heat included! They invited us to dinner – pickles and bread – and we spoke with the aid of the dictionary. Mihaly and Dora spoke Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, German, and Russian – but very little English. Made for some funny conversation, like when Mihaly told us that when the security guard first saw us, he was afraid that we would cut his throat in the middle of the night.

We followed the Danube the next day through flat plains. There were farms as far as the eye could see. They must have once been – or still are – collectives. Huge. The setting sun was red and filled the entire sky. That night we slept at a farmhouse, behind the barn, which helped to protect us from the icy wind. The dogs barked at us all night long – I thought they would never stop. The farmer reminded me of how my grandfather might have looked forty years ago on his own farm.

Welcoming warm homes in the cold winter

The following day was easier biking – the wind was with us for a change! We passed a lot of farmland, and then two towns just before Baja that were visibly wealthier than the surrounding towns. We saw several horse-drawn wagons riding through the center of town. We stopped at a tiny community of houses by the Danube bridge, and met a woman who was coming home from work. She said we could put up our tent in her yard, then changed her mind and said we could stay in the garage – it was warmer – then took a look and said no, we have a house you can stay in for the night. She lived on the second floor, and the first floor was unheated, and therefore used only for the spring and summer months. So we had our own little house for the night. Kitchen, toilet, and a little room just big enough to hold our tent. Because we actually put up our tent and slept inside it, inside the house, because it protected from the cold air which seeped in through the door and the windows.

Before going to sleep, the family invited us over for coffee in another house – their cabin. It was Stephane’s first coffee ever. He made a big deal about throwing up, and I told him just to drink and say thank you, to be polite. I was afraid they would understand what he was saying. There was Mihaly, a middle-aged man, very jovial, very friendly and talkative; Bea, his young girlfriend whom I mistook for his daughter; and Zsuzsa, Bea’s shy mother. There was a wood stove to keep us warm – boy, did it ever burn that wood fast! – and a huge entertainment system with a large TV and speakers. They were going to watch “Black Hawk Down,” but because there were no subtitles, Mihaly put in a “Terminator 2” DVD instead. We watched it in English because Mihaly said that he had already watched it so many times that he knew the words by heart, anyway. He reminded me of dad – we watched it in surround sound – loud enough to vibrate the floor, the chairs, and the entire small room. As the opening scene showed a buff Arnold Schwarzenegger walk nude into a bar and demand the clothing, boots, and motorcycle of a tattooed cyclist, I couldn’t help but think that this was the new governor of California. Mihaly laughed about it, too.

As we sat near the wood stove, I couldn’t help but wonder if my feet would EVER get warm. Even in front of the fire, nothing happened. It’s been days and they hurt so bad that I feel like they’re going to freeze off. I keep praying that I don’t lose a few toes!

We left the Terminator house early in the morning and pedaled through a miserably cold wind (it was about 15 degrees F), up and down hills, up and down again. We stopped in a bar – Stephane had his last shot of Unicum and I wrote in my journal and warmed my feet – then we did enough grocery shopping so that we wouldn’t have to exchange money in Croatia. One thing I remember is passing a bloody pig with his neck slit in the back of a pick-up truck. I took a long look – I had never seen that before. Also memorable is the fact that it was the first time we passed some green scenery since Austria. We were nearing the Croatian border.

Some side notes on Hungary:
– – – Dance music is popular in Hungary. They play it on every radio station – we didn’t find any exception. It was almost exclusively American and English music.

– – – The food is flavorful. They cook with a lot of paprika and sour cream. The goulash is excellent.

– – – One funny thing: to say “hello” and “good-bye” in Magyar, you say “szia” (pronounced like “see ya”). So whenever a Hungarian wants to say good-bye to you in English, they say “hello.” They must think “hello” is used for “hello” and “good-bye.” They all do it.

– – – TV shows in Hungary are hysterical. They don’t believe in subtitles, only in dubbing. For example, dubbing usually works like this: if you have a show in the English language, you substitute the voices of the original actors with other voices in the native language. Normally, you would have one voice per person. However, in Hungary, they must not have enough actors that do voice-overs, so that every person in the movie ends up being dubbed by the same person! We saw American shows in which every single person in the show had the exact same voice – men, women, and children! A man doing all the voices of both the men and the women!