Day 3: Budapest to…Budapest

Yesterday was a bad day and I ended up being a bit dispirited and grumpy and even a couple of glasses of mediocre wine in the Alice Hotel’s bar didn’t really revive my spirits. Two long days of stress and worry don’t make for a very good night’s sleep and at 4:55am I woke up and checked the Apple AirTag which is in my bike box. The bike was in Budapest Airport! Things were looking up although, from where I was yesterday, there was nowhere for things to look down to.

A restrained breakfast — by long distance cyclist standards — fortified me for the day ahead. I took an Uber back out to the airport and, to be clear, IAG will be seeing the receipt for this trip in due course along with the taxi into Budapest last night, the cancelled hotel in Komárom, the hotel last night and probably the receipt for the couple of glasses of mediocre wine. I arrived at…Arrivals and set about the convoluted process of getting back into the baggage hall to get my bike box.

There was a slightly tense stand off between me and some armed guards when I attempted to get back into the baggage reclaim hall by walking through the doors but eventually they gestured with their sub-machine guns and I slunk past their stony and well-armed gaze.

Oh, there you are!

I think I may have blubbed a tiny bit when I saw that the bike really had arrived.

Now was not the time for inappropriate displays of emotion. I’d decided that I was bored of lugging around a big box on public transport and therefore I was going to make up the bike in the arrivals hall and cycle back into Budapest just to convince myself (and others) that this really was a cycling holiday.

This is about 30 minutes in real time.

Then it was time to change into my cycle gear in the fetid surroundings of a cubicle in the airport toilets and I was ready to actually 🎵get on my bike and ride🎵 — thanks Freddy Mercury.

First smile for a while

I pushed my bike out of the airport, through the throngs of happy travellers, and attempted to find a way out of the airport which wasn’t a 6 lane motorway. Next time you’re in an airport try to work out how you might get out of the airport without a car. It’s not very easy to be honest.

A few forays down pedestrian walkways ended badly “ooops, sorry madam, I seem to have ridden over your child on her Trunkie” However, eventually, as if by magic, there was a cycle path.

It’s like bloody Holland mate

I cycled past the saddest aviation museum in the world. A bunch of rusty old Magyar Airways Tupolevs and a tumbled down radar antenna which appears, if you zoom in, to be made by Tesla. Given the poor construction quality of the antenna, it really probably was made by Tesla.

We’re not in Duxford now Toto

The nice Dutch-level cycling infrastructure lasted 2 km before I was unceremoniously dumped onto a busy and creatively-potholed side road.

Yes, we’re back to normality for bike trips

I know that the outskirts of any city are a bit run down, especially so near an airport, but this was a very run down area. Strange shops appeared in the middle of desolate fields. I saw a lightbulb shop next to an ancient tailor with no other buildings within a kilometer. Who are their customers? Is it people who say “Oh Gabor, since we’re on our way back from the airport, why don’t we pick up a 100W lightbulb for the kitchen and while we’re at it you can get that polyester suit with the wide lapels that you’ve been wanting since 1972”. It was all very odd.

My belief is that the strange mixture of businesses comes about because of the sudden flowering of capitalism after the communism ended. People thought “right, capitalism is here, I’m going to open a light bulb shop right here and make my fortune”. The retail sorting that, over time, aggregates similar types of businesses who have similar types of customers just didn’t happen and so one gets startlingly heterogeneous retail areas. “Wow, if we need some power tools, a pram and a spray tan, this is the place!”

The journey was worryingly dangerous. Normally when I’m doing this sort of thing, I’ve got time to get my eye in when it comes to junctions, cars, road furniture before braving the rigours of a major city. Today I was thrown straight in at the deep end. Cars, lorries, buses, trams, scooters: every one of them in a big hurry to get somewhere and not terribly concerned about the wobbly cyclist avoiding the potholes and the tram tracks which greedily suck the unwary front tyre into their destructive jaws.

In the centre, Budapest is pleasant and up and coming city but, as I rode into it through the doughnut of decay that rings all ex-communist cities, the scars of the old architecture are still there. Occasionally I saw a new glass and steel building squatting amidst the Stalinesque apartment blocks like an abandoned sci-fi spaceship after an unsuccessful search for intelligent life but mostly it’s old apartment blocks painted in primary colours sometime in the 1990s.

\

Calling a building Block 163 has a strong Airstrip One vibe.

The cycling infrastructure started to return and the buildings got grander and then there was the Danube. I’ll be seeing a lot of this river over the next 10 or 15 days and so it was quite emotional to finally get to the river after the last two days of travel omnishambles.

Given that this is still over 1000 miles from the Black Sea this is a big river

I rode across the famous Széchenyi Chain Bridge built originally in 1849 which is a copy of the bridge in Marlow over the Thames. It was blown up in 1945 and endless cycles of destruction and reconstruction are a recurring theme in this part of the world. Rebuilt in 1949 by heroic workers of the socialist revolution, it is very impressive.

On the way through the fancier streets of Pest I saw a caricature of a Hungarian cafe and stopped for early lunch. Since it was a caricature of a Hungarian cafe, it was only appropriate that I had a caricature of a Hungarian lunch. Gulaschsuppe and a beer.

Do you have Gulyásleves? Of course you do.

Fully lunched up in a culturally appropriate way, I returned to the Alice Hotel and had a stand-off with the strange manageress regarding whether or not I could take my bike to my room. Eventually I had to deploy my Angry Eyes™ when she suggested that I could leave the bike outside the hotel chained to a hedge. My bike ended up in my room. Angry Eyes™…1, weirdo manageress…0.

It was really nice to actually do some cycling. The bike seemed in good shape and no parts of my body fell off during the ride so I was feeling confident in starting the big rides tomorrow.

After a couple of hours of fruitless discussions with DHL Express — who frustratingly are not the same as DHL e-commerce or DHL Romania — about why my the bike bag which is going to Bucharest is still stuck in East Midlands airport I could feel my bonhomie evaporating. I decided to deal with this drama later. Or rather, I decided to phone the wildly expensive ending hotel I had booked in Bucharest and get them to sort it out. It was time to go and explore Budapest.

I had only been in Budapest twice: once in 1990 just after communism imploded and a couple of times in the mid-nineties when I was attempting to sell financial toxic waste prudent risk management energy hedges to the Hungarian National Oil Company. I was excited to find out how things have changed in 30 years and, spoiler alert, the answer is “a lot” and “not so much” depending on where you look.

It’s traditional on these trips that I find some weird and wonderful museums to go to. Those of you who liked that sort of stuff on previous trips are going to be thrilled.

First up was the Terror Háza. This is a multimedia exploration of Hungary in the 1930s, the German Occupation and then the communist period. It’s a bit of a random mess but not in a charming way and the narrative flow is not helped by being effectively monolingual in Hungarian. Also…and I have to be careful here…there are certain aspects of Hungary’s conduct between 1933 and 1945 over which a veil of silence is drawn.

Endless photographs of victims brings it all vividly into focus.

This museum is probably worth going to see. The dungeons in the basement are a sobering reminder of just how many people were killed by two brutally repressive regimes. I have read ahead on the history of the cities and towns along the Danube. Budapest is just one of many towns and cities which suffered.

But it was time for some light relief and something I’d been looking forward to for months. The Elektrotechnikai Múzeum.

This museum is a mess but in an exceptionally charming way. I bought a ludicrously cheap ticket from a giant woman in a tiny wooden booth and she directed me to her colleague who was a submicroscopic bird-thin nonogenarian with arthritis in her hips. It turned out that she would be my guide round the insanely wonderful random displays of crazy electrical shit.

I was warned not to go anywhere without my guide and, given that the museum is on three well-spaced floors, progress was very slow. We would wheeze up stairs stopping every couple of steps and, having reached a display, Skeletor's Grandmother would collapse into a chair while I wandered around making appreciative noises about rare 1906 vacuum tubes. I honestly wondered what I would do if she popped her clogs while I was investigating an early innovative electrostatic generator…

A sequence of photographs is all I can do to try and capture the strange madness of the Electrotechnikai Múzeum.

Look, lots of ancient radios

A big copper switch

Dunno what this is but boy is it electrical!

Early washing machines. Don’t knock them, they’re a significant contributor to women’s emancipation.

What? Switches through the ages? I thought I was geeky…

Unsurprisingly maybe, I was the only visitor but if you’re in Budapest, just go. It’s brilliant.

It was a short walk from the museum to the For Sale Pub. It's well worth a visit and it has good beer and a quite unique atmosphere. They allow patrons to post any for sale notices (or indeed any paper) anywhere in the bar. There’s straw on the floor and you throw the shells from the free peanuts anywhere you like. It is a screaming fire-hazard in almost every way but it was rammed and fun.

Fire!

There was one more place to go but it was a long walk away in Buda. As I’m sure everybody knows, Budapest was formed from two cities. Pest which is on the left bank of the Danube, is flat with a broadly grid layout and Buda which is on the right bank of the Danube and is hilly and feels a bit like Prague or something. Buda feels Waitrose. Pest is Sainsbury’s…or maybe Aldi in the worse sections.

Unfortunately the bit of Buda I wanted to get to was 4 km away from the For Sale Pub and up a big hill.

It’s over the river and a long way past this hill.

I gamely trudged along the river and up the endless steps to the cathedral on the top of the hill.

This is an impressive building.

This wasn’t my final destination. There’s a whole series of labyrinths underneath the hill which have been used for thousands of years and which once held the original Dracula — of whom we will hear more of later in this trip.

I got to the labyrinths hot ‘n’ sweaty ‘n’ tired only to find out that they only took cash. Who running a tourist attraction in 2024 only takes cash? Tax evaders, that’s who.

I’d done enough so headed back to the hotel for a snooze and then decided that, after my run in with the crazy manageress, it would be best to avoid the Hotel Alice food.

This was a much much better day than the previous two. I got my bike, did some cycling, did some sightseeing and lanced the boil of frustration and anger which had been building.

Tomorrow is the first proper day. More than 150 km down the Danube to a small town called Kalosca. I’m staying at the "Club Haus 502" which is likely to be as bad as its name suggests. The choices for hotels on this trip are limited.

Previous

Next