23 to 27 June, 2015

We’ve spent an easy few days exploring a very small area of Slovakia and Hungary, two countries we’ve never visited before.  We’re keen to see whether this part of the world is somewhere we would like to return to for a longer tour.

It was very hard to get motivated to set off from Bratislava, especially as it was pouring with rain and it was one of those days where you get properly wet very quickly.  We rode alongside the Danube, past a few small villages before we spotted a hotel at a water sports centre, next to a modern art museum – not what you expect in the middle of nowhere.  The place was buzzing with people – there was a European canoeing championship being held there at the weekend.  Watching them practising entertained us for the rest of the day.

The following morning we set off again with the town of Györ, across the border in Hungary, in mind as a destination.  It wasn’t raining (hurrah) just cloudy and with a very strong wind blowing on our backs.  The countryside was flat, mainly cereal fields, with small farming communities and villages here and there, and absolutely nothing to distinguish it as being Hungarian.  The cycle path ran alongside the main road.  It is surfaced, although it is not in particularly good repair.  The villages look to be well kept and most have food shops and cafés.  Most of the cyclists on the track are the locals going to and from work or to the shops.  You can tell a lot about the lifestyle of the inhabitants of a place by looking at what is for sale in the food shops – here we see about 15 different types of flour on the shelves and hardly any processed stuff.  We stayed in a hotel in Györ, again we found the quality to be very good.  The town itself had a really nice atmosphere.  Unlike Bratislava, there were very few tourists and so it seemed really relaxed.  We do notice that rather than being at the bottom end of the tourist ladder, as we are in France, Germany or Austria, we are suddenly promoted to ‘rich’  tourist at the top of the ladder.

For our next excursion we turn back, heading towards Slovakia, but using a different route.  There is a campsite marked on the map and the sun is shining, so we take the opportunity to have a day getting the bikes cleaned and bags sorted ready for the flight.  The campsite one of the best of the tour, very cheap, loads of room with nice facilities.

We move on and try another campsite in a bigger town, Mosonmagyaróvár, the next day – this is more like a French campsite with allocated pitches, but still very good.  The town is pretty, but very strange, in that every second business is a dental practice, without exaggeration, we see dozens.  It is so strange that I look it up on the internet and find out that it is a centre for dental tourism used worldwide.

 

So far, from our very limited sample of two hotels and two campsites we have been favourably impressed.  Another positive is that there are loads of roadside signs directing you to accommodation in the towns and villages, making it very easy to locate a bed for the night, something totally lacking in Austria.  All in all, we would be very happy to come back and do some more cycle touring in this part of the world – maybe we’ll fly to Bratislava and continue along the Eurovelo 6 to the Black Sea.

Our next challenge, however, is to get the bikes, our stuff and ourselves on the flight back to Málaga.  All very stressful and sad because it is the end of our tour.  Time to start planning the next one.