Lake Balaton and the Great Plain

After nearly a week in Budapest it was time to move on and see some of the great country of Hungary. First stop, an hour’s drive away from the capital is the largest freshwater lake in central Europe – Lake Balaton. Here is where the residents of BP make their summer getaways, a lake some 100km long, by about 10km or so wide. It is an strangely luminescent shade of pale blue in the sunshine - impossible to capture on camera and just so mesmerising - and a flat, dull grey on an overcast day. We stayed the first evening the town of Balatonfured, the most upmarket of the lakeside towns. It’s a super pretty town that reminded us of Noosa’s Hastings Street. We dined on the waterfront on local caught catfish… followed up by great ice-cream and a stroll along the promenade – how genteel of us!

(And Hayley discovered that yes, her Dad was right- catfish is not for eating, and yes, er Mum was right - river fish taste like mud)

The following morning we cycled up to Tihany, which is the small jutting peninsula approximately halfway down the lake. Upon the top of said peninsula sits a tiny tourist town with associated church, lookout and touristy-tat stores. We ate our vegemite crackers and promptly left. The local trees seemed to be spawning some kind of seed or flower that resembled white fluff, which floated in the air in great billowing wafts and accumulated in gutters and on lawns. Our ride back to camp was like stirring up fluffy snow-storms, and otherwise uneventful, except that we discovered a field full of gophers!

Gophers!

Cows

White tree fluff

We arrived to our next campsite in Keszthely with plans of spending the next day swimming in a famous thermal lake, Gyogy-to. Thus, with no other pressing business, we relaxed with some beers and ciders and watched the newly arrived Germans in the camping pitch across from us manoeuvre and re-manoeuvre their caravan to try catch the days dying rays. Alas, by the time they had finished faffing, the wind had picked up and the sun was down – and they moved again. I love the free entertainment provided by campsites!

Gyogy-to is a thermal lake filled from a gash in the earth some 40m below ground level that gushes 80,000,000 litres of steaming hot water out every day. This means you get to float about in the lake on any given day of the year (pool noodles provided), and it will be between about 28 degC to 33 DegC. The clean, though slightly sulphuric smelling water is home to a multitude of lillypads, which grow in the nutrient-filled layer of silt that hovers about a meter down. If you dangle your legs straight down, your feet glide through the silkiest of mud. An experience that is lovely and terrifying at the same time. The entire lake complex is about the size of a 2-3 football fields, pretty large, and it has to be so you can avoid floating too close to the German caravanners you spent the previous evening laughing at. If you think I am singling out the Germans, you’re wrong – practically 4 out of 5 motorhome/caravanning folks you see in this part of the world are from the Deutschland. You can’t escape their cheery guten-tag’s while they are on their way to the chemical toilet disposal point with last nights currywurst and strudel.

I digress. We left the Lake Balaton area thoroughly soaked and having found a new passion for floating around warm pools of geothermal goodness. We headed to the outback! Or the great Hungarian plain as it’s known locally, and like our outback, it is flat, expansive and full of large trucks zooming along its various forms of livestock. Unlike our outback – this one is green. Red poppies line the roads and the vast grassy seas of fields are full of wild flowers in yellows, whites and purple. Hungarian horsemen are world famous in Hungary for their horsemanship-skills, thus we went to a Lonely Planet recommended cowboy show! Yee-Haw! They rode their horses bareback, showing off all sorts of skills and one guy even managed to ride 5 horses at once! Was pretty cool. We also got to check out the farms woolly piglets! All for 5 euro! Amazing.

Wildflowers

Riding the 5

Horse RIders

Woolly Piggies!

Big Woolly Pig!

Dawg

That evening, we managed to find a campsite that was built on top of another thermal spring – so again we soaked, this time in a tea-coloured pool, and the following day we thought we had better up the ante and head to a proper water park – with slides!! We found one in Debrecen. Smiley face. The slides were pretty cool – but Hayley found my descriptions of Wet’N’Wild (on the gold coast – google it) even better, so we are making plans to head to the gold coast sometime in late 2016 or early 2017 to try out the double screamer.

Next stop – Transylvania!