Day 4: Budapest to Kalocsa

The first proper day of the trip turned out to be fairly challenging but I will save the most challenging bits for later.

I’d eaten at a quirky and tiny Hungarian/Jewish restaurant called the M Restaurant in the run-down side of Pest. It could be unfairly characterised as paprika flavoured kosher, but it was delicious and I would definitely recommend it.

Up bright and early for the first day, I bounced down to breakfast only to have yet another run in with the scary manageress. She really objected to me filling my water bottles from the…water machine which produces infinite amounts of chilled filtered water for…nothing.

Four star hotels really are the “uncanny valley” of hospitality. In some cases like, say, the Kitzhof in Kitsbühel, they are stylish and luxurious but with a little iconoclastic twist. In cases like the Alice Hotel in Budapest, they’re weird and clearly only holding on to their four star rating by their fingertips. Similar price to the luxurious ones obviously. Tonight’s hotel, the Club Haus 502 in Kalocsa, is a three star hotel and, as I write this, I can say that they’re holding on to that third star very tenuously. But more of that later.

Anyway, after reloading my Angry Eyes™ and filling my bottles I had my breakfast of two bread rolls, cheese, ham and three cups of Americano with an added double espresso in each. I waved a cheery goodbye to surly manageress and took the, now traditional, photo of the bike.

Nice bike you’ve got there. Check out the tan sidewalls!

Budapest was quiet and beautifully sunny as I cruised down to the Danube on a beautiful Sunday morning. People were out walking their dogs and sitting on the pavements sipping coffee or maybe having gulaschsuppe…who knows?.

The first part of the route through Budapest followed the banks of the Danube which looked particularly fine in the cool early morning,

If tan sidewalls are good enough for Tadej Pogačar, they’re good enough for me.

Just before I crossed back over the Danube, I saw my first Eurovelo 6 sign! It was like seeing an old friend after a long time. Those of you who have read this blog on previous trips will know that I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Eurocrats at Eurovelo but what they have done is an amazing achievement. 14 trans-European routes mapped out and, in most places, signed. Like Sustrans in the UK but…bigger.

Not quite sure what’s going on in the background…

The Eurovelo maestros had done their best to get a scenic route out of Budapest but it’s not easy to find quiet roads in the suburbs of major European cities. There were some unpleasant cobbled bits and strange sections of rutted paths.

Eastern European cobbled streets. My “soft tissues” remember you from 2022.

The route wound its way through the Budapest suburbs taking some extremely strange turns up through some single track paths, what appeared to be somebody’s back garden and fly tipping dump.

This is the cycle superhighway to the Black Sea

It was complex, tough, commando-style cycling. One has to be perpetually “on it” to avoid hitting the sand ruts and falling off. As I had discovered with Eurovelo 2, the route designers really really hate going on roads and will do almost anything to avoid them.

WTAF? These holes are a foot deep. Christ knows what it’s like when it rains.

Progress was slow and the temperature started rising. What had been a cool and clear morning turned into a thermonuclear day. Eventually the Eurovelo 2 planners ran out of joke paths to send me down and I got on some vaguely proper roads — modulo the Eastern European potholes — and I started to make some decent time.

Along the river, there were boat clubs and those strange sports clubs from the communist era which I associate with people injecting drugs into unwilling teenage athletes. Although the roads were better than the rutted tracks, there were endless speed bumps (which are signed) and endless root bumps (which sadly are not).

The town of Ráckeve was the first place that I could stop and despite the three triple strength Americanos in the morning, I really felt the need for some caffeine. It was about then that I realised that it was a Sunday and not many places would be open. Luckily Ráckeve is a bit of a tourist hotspot (well…relatively anyway) and there was a little coffee shop that sold espressos and radioactive slush puppies. I had one of each.

My tongue turned this colour too.

Ráceve isn’t actually on the Danube, it’s on an offshoot called the Ráckevie (Soroksári) and the giant river which I’d been tracking on my left was just a little minor river in Danube terms. It was bloody enormous.

As I crossed the offshoot, I was back on the mainland and spent an hour cycling along gravel paths which were access roads to holiday homes. Each home had its own fishing jetty on the Ráckevie and I must have passed about 250 of them. Most were protected with scary signs in Hungarian but I did trespass on one of them to take this picture.

Ok, enough with the jokes about tan walled tyres

When the Ráckevie rejoined the Danube, I lost sight of the river because, of course, the real estate along the river is pretty valuable and therefore people build a lot of holiday houses and don’t want sweaty cyclists cycling in front of their expensive view.

As the road swung away from the Danube, I was going through a tiny no-name village when a giant 200kg guy swung out in front of me on a tiny scooter. Some quick emergency braking avoided a collision but as his 50cc engine strained to accelerate to 25km/h, I realised that I was going to be stuck behind this guy in a miasma of badly combusted 2 stroke fuel and body odour. I stuck it out for 10 minutes and then just stopped in a bus shelter to give my olfactory organs a bit of a rest.

The Danube has flood dykes on either side. They’re between 5m and 10m high, set quite a long way back from the river, and I had read that much of this route would be on top of these dykes. Soon after the smelly guy incident, I was directed up onto the dyke and things really started looking good. Of course, this wouldn’t last.

Things are looking good!

The tarmac road lasted for 500m and then this appeared.

Ah, a this is a lot more challenging.

Yes, most of the flood dykes have farm tracks on top of them and this was the Eurovelo 6 route. Why was I not surprised?

It’s hard to convey how difficult it is riding on this stuff so I stupidly tried to take a video. It’s hard enough riding on this stuff with two hands and concentrating 100% on the two metres in front of your wheel. Taking a video is…foolish.

It was like this. For a very very long time.

I started being reasonably careful and keeping my speed down but after a while, I threw caution to the wind. Me and Tom Pidcock, living on the bleeding edge of off-road performance. To be perfectly honest, I bounced around a bit more but I can’t honestly say I went faster. If the rest of this route to the Black Sea has a lot of this stuff in it, I was going to have to seriously rethink how far I can go in a day.

40 kilometres of this later (which to put it in context is about 2.5 hours of riding at the speed you can go on rutted gravel and grass) I was pretty done.

I pulled off the EV2 and went into Dunavesce for something to drink and maybe something to eat.

I looked like this dog. But less hairy.

There was only one restaurant open and so that was the choice. No menu in any language other than Hungarian but Google Translate came to my rescue. It turns out that “Kérhetnék egy nagy kólát, egy üveg vizet és egy csirkesalátát” means “can I have a large coke, a bottle of water and a chicken salad”.

Now is the time to mention how absolutely bonkers Hungarian is. It’s one of those languages like Basque and Finnish which appears to have no relationship to any of the major language groups in Europe. Even if you don’t speak French or German or Spanish, there’s always a few things that you can work out but even loan words don’t make any sense. It seems that it’s vaguely related to the language which became Persian at some point in the 1st millennium BC but it is very very strange.

Whilst I wasn’t in any particular rush today, I really didn’t expect to wait 55 minutes for a chicken salad. One of the problems with not speaking the language is that it’s very very hard to be mildly annoyed. You don’t want to sit there like a dork but also you don’t want to get super angry because god knows what the chef will do to your salad. So I sat there like a dork.

It took 55 minutes to make this. I can make this salad in 10.

I had prepaid the bill. It took me 5 minutes to eat my rather poor and small salad and then I jumped on the bike and headed off for the afternoon feeling like a dork for wasting an hour. If I could be arsed, I would give them a one star review on Trip Advisor but life is too short.

The gravelly, grassy track section seemed to be over for today and on my way out of Dunavesce I saw my first Eurovelo 6 compañeros. A family of four laden down with way too much luggage. I’d like to say that I slowed down and engaged them in cheery and supportive conversation about where they came from, their EV6 experiences so far, where they were going etc., but, that would have required an complete personality transplant. I powered past them and failed to avoid sneering at their huge amount of luggage and dilatory pace.

I might not be able to overtake a fat boy on a scooter but these guys I can take.

I could see ahead that the road climbed up on top of the dyke again but, praise be, they had tarmaced the top of the dyke. This was going to be better cycling. Well it would have been had the temperature not topped out at 36 degrees and I was starting to seriously regret not putting on sun screen in the morning.

This would have been glorious cycling if I hadn’t been quite so hot and desiccated.

About 30 km of baking hot tarmac and relentless sun was…wearing. Even when the route slipped back down onto the road, I didn’t really feel like I was powering along. I had water in my water bottles but it was now about the temperature you would use to wash dishes.

The kilometres ticked down very slowly on the way into Kalocsa. Even the appearance of one of those slightly disturbing sculptures made out of a hay bale didn’t cheer me up.

This is creepy.

And then it was done. As I circled round Kalocsa, the podcast series I had been listening to finished. Perfect timing.

I’ve been listening to the 11th Series of Revisionist History. In this series Gladwell is doing the Berlin Olympics. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I was surprised that the story I thought I knew about the Berlin Olympics wasn’t really true and weaving the story around this Olympics and the previous LA Olympics is the theme of how does Olympic sport deal with systematic prejudice in member states. Just listen to it.

I found the Club 502. It was shut, locked up and I was hot, dusty, tired and dehydrated. I had been dreaming of a cold beer in the bar for about three hours.

I banged on the door, I cursed the sky and generally behaved a little badly. However, hiding in the corner of the window was a small card which said “nyisd ki” and a telephone number. Thanks again to Google Translate, I worked out that this was “open” and I phoned the number and a woman answered. I was polite and restrained. Between her non-existent English and my non-existent Hungarian, she worked out that I was outside and came to get me.

The Club 502 is just in the three star zone. The proprietoress is slightly scatty, the rooms are…basic, there is no heated towel rail and only one towel. But…they have beer.

Two big bottles of beer sorted out a lot of my dehydration problems

A bunch of cycle kit to wash, one towel and no towel rail suggests that tomorrow will be a moist affair for the first hour or so.

There’s almost nothing open in Kalocsa so I chose the only open place which is this pizza joint.

Not very promising

I sat there for an hour. Maybe today was Serve The Foreigners Incredibly Slowly Day. How does it take 60 minutes to make a Pizza Diavola? It was nice to have time to write the blog but…Christ. When one is suffering from a 3,500 calorie deficit, one’s temper gets a little frayed.

Anyway, the pizza finally arrived. It was food and I needed food but the pizza was oily in the way that The Isles of Scilly were oily after the Torrey Canyon. I ate my oil-slick pizza. Such is the life of a long-distance cyclist. If I could be arsed, I would have given it a one star review on TripAdvisor.

I was getting a bit worried about tomorrow. It was going to be the longest day on the trip (203km), it was going to be hot and I wasn't that confident that the Club 502 is going to produce breakfast at 7am. Could I have done another 50k today? Maybe. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.

Stats:

• Distance 😊145km
• Average Speed 😕 21.2km/h — A game of two halves. Much of it at 15km/h, some of it at 25km/h due to the nice tail wind.
• Bike 😊 Worked really well. On tarmac, perfect and handled the off-road stuff with aplomb.
• “Contact points” 😣. Hands, feet, err…soft tissues…all taken a bit of a beating today unfortunately. Tomorrow is going to be…painful.

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