Monumental capital…

After a few more days in Slovakia, we continued our journey south to Hungary and its spectacular capital, Budapest. Two days (re)discovering the city and filling our eyes and memory with incredible images of the city’s amazing buildings, during the day and by night…

In the end, we came back down from our mountain meadow, after two days of breathing pure and fresh air. We changed valleys to reach Orava Castle, an impressive complex built over time and occupying every corner of the rock on which it sits…

Vampires… (7-8/09/2024)

The Tatras are the westernmost and highest massif of the Carpathian Mountains. And everyone knows that, apart from wolves and bears, vampires also live in the Carpathian!… Well, most of the family lives in Transylvania (the other end of the Carpathian, located in Romania), but there is one who lived here, and not just any vampire… The most famous and ancient of vampires! The one who gave its letters of nobility to horror movies, even before color was invented: Nosferatu!

So it was in Nosferatu’s Castle (officially Orava Castle) that we spent a good part of our Saturday, walking around this imposing complex that, over time, has gradually taken over every corner of the rock on which it stands. The highest (and oldest) part dates back to the 13th century. It occupies the tip of the rock, as if balanced on just a few square metres of stone. Below, over the generations, new parts and outbuildings were added, including a private church with an altarpiece as impressive as any basilica in Bratislava or Krakow… The most recent buildings date back to the 17th century.

Today a regional museum, the castle has been the setting for several films, including the most famous one: F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” in 1922. An emblematic work of German expressionism, “Nosferatu” is a thinly veiled adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in which Murnau was able to maintain the poetic ambiguity of the original text while creating, with the terrifying figure of Max Schreck, an icon of horror movies. A great classic of silent and black and white cinema, available on YouTube here…

Who knows if one of the coffins that can still be seen in the crypt of the private church is not that of Nosferatu, with its lid slowly rising in the darkness of the night… 😱

And then on Sunday we had to do some “mechanics”. Marvin’s brake fluid light came on so we went to a Tesco (the local supermarket) to buy a bottle and top up the tank (before stopping by Iveco tomorrow, to check that nothing more important than that is going on…). Then we settled on another hill overlooking the valley, close to the triple border between Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic. One last night in the Tatras before heading down towards the centre of the country (in the Lower Tatras…).

Highs and lows (Tatras)… (9-10/09/2024)

As expected, the weather has changed. From a last day with 30ºC we moved on to more moderate temperatures and, above all, to two days of rain and overcast skies that drastically lowered the average…

Our Monday morning started at Iveco Žilina, only to find out that the brake problem was solved and that there was nothing to do but top up the fluid tank. At reception, the workshop manager called a younger colleague who spoke English and acted as interpreter to explain what we had done, and to confirm that it was indeed the right thing to do and that sometimes it is normal for the brake fluid to go down, especially after so many kilometres. They told us to check the level regularly, just in case, but that, a priori, it was nothing serious and that nothing more needed to be done…

So we set off again for the day’s journey, initially planned to be short given the rainy weather. Except that in mountain areas, one is never safe from a road closure or roadworks causing kilometer-long traffic jams. And when that happens, the only solution is to go around the whole mountain to reach the next valley instead of just cutting “straight” through a pass… Fortunately, distances are quite short in Slovakia, but to reach our goal for the day, we still had to add two hours and a few kilometers to our initial itinerary… We even tried an alternative route, but we found ourselves facing a big river to cross, and the ferry on the other bank never answered the phone to come and pick us up and take us to the other side, so… we turned around and went around the mountain!…

We spent the night at a homestay, once again. A young couple who are building a house and, while waiting for the work to finish, are making part of the land available to spend the night there. They even gave us eggs from the few chickens we slept next to. It couldn’t be fresher! 😜

We then headed to the valley of Banská Bystrica in the Low Tatras to spend one last night in the mountains before heading south to the Hungarian border. The landscapes are simply magnificent. Even in the rain or under cloudy skies, like these days, and even if we don’t take many photos because of the weather, we never get tired of looking at these immense, seemingly impenetrable forests and the mountains that go with them. Also, the colour of the trees is starting to change around here, and we are starting to see autumnal tones… We keep ourselves ready for if a bear cross the road at every bend but for now, they remain well hidden… However, for the past two nights, we heard deer bellowing very close to Marvin. Autumn is definitely coming…

That night we slept in the mountains, above Banská Bystrica (an ugly town, like most round here). Apparently it is a bear area, but so far there was no sign of even the slightest bear snout, not even after the barbecue lunch!… 🤣

The end… (11/09/2024)

Although we did our best to shorten our itineraries, stop at Iveco, visit all the nice cafés in the region for our morning coffee and croissant, we had to face the facts: the Carpathian are quite narrow when you cross them from north to south… So, with a heavy heart, we resigned ourselves to leaving this beautiful region and reaching the southern border of Slovakia, especially since we will not see any more mountains until we reach Slovenia, when we cross the Alps…

As a matter of fact, it was very nice to be in the Carpathian… Even in the southern part (the Lower Tatras), more hilly and greener than the high peaks of the north, we had the impression of being in wild landscapes (even though we were never far from civilisation). Yesterday in our meadow, for example, in just an hour before sunset, we saw two deer a few meters from Marvin, and a falconer came up for a moment to fly her eagle in front of us, while we were doing as many videos as we could (surely falconry still has its followers, on this side of Europe)… 😍

We could have continued to wander around the Tatras while waiting for the first snowfalls, but… it wouldn’t have been reasonable, really. Besides, we still have some countries to discover and the Alps to cross before returning to Andorra (and we’d better do this before it really snows, actually…).

So after a few more photos in the morning sun, we hit the road again… We reached the southern tip of Slovakia, about thirty kilometres from the border with Hungary, which we would cross the next day. We settled on the banks of the Hron River, a tributary of the Danube, which we would also cross the next day as it marks the border between the two countries in the area where we were. The landscapes in this region are much flatter, and we only see mountains on the horizon, beyond the corn or sunflower fields. Another chapter ending with the closing of this Slovak page. It was a very nice discovery and, who knows, maybe one day we will cross the Carpathian again, but this time from west to east… 😁

Monumental!… (12/09/2024)

It is with a certain sadness that we left Slovakia. Of course, there was the idea of ​​crossing the Danube to motivate us a bit and, above all, the prospect of returning to Budapest (for me) and (re)discovering the city, but still… it was very nice, Slovakia…

We crossed the border anyway (country number 16 on our counter…) and followed the Danube (quite blue, by the way, before passing through Budapest 😜) until we reached the capital of Hungary. As soon as we settled into our super-protected and video-monitored parking lot, we set off to explore the city.

What can we say about Budapest, except that we definitely broke the record for the number of photos in one day! We have so many photos that we decided to split them into two between today’s post and tomorrow’s (since it will apparently be raining tomorrow and therefore we will probably take fewer photos…).

Budapest is actually the union of two cities: Buda, the upper and rich city, west of the Danube, and Pest, the lower city, east of the river. The difference between the two disappeared long ago and it would be very difficult to say today which, of Buda or Pest, has more monuments and other historical buildings… Wandering along the Danube, one can sometimes feel a bit bipolar: when you are on one bank of the river, you have the impression that the most beautiful monuments are on the other bank, and when you cross through one of the iconic bridges of the city, you realise that, in fact, the side you were on is also full of magnificent buildings…

Today’s photos are mainly from Buda, so we’ll leave Pest for tomorrow, after a laundry and, above all, the other activity that one cannot miss in Budapest: the thermal baths!…

Rain (Monumental 2)… (13/09/2024)

After a surprisingly quiet night (for the centre of a capital of almost 1.7 million inhabitants), the weather kept its promise. It is a rainy day in the Danube region, and temperatures that definitely seem to mark the end of summer… So we are going to take advantage of the day to do some cleaning and laundry, before going to enjoy the other attraction that Budapest has to offer: the thermal baths. We haven’t yet decided between the more modern baths (early 20th century) or the more traditional ones, but we are working on it… 😜

Meanwhile, second part of yesterday’s photos with the Pest area, east of the Danube, the “lower city” once considered the poor part, compared to Buda, which housed the Royal Palace and other major monuments. This idea is no longer valid as Pest is today at least as monumental as Buda, with the magnificent Hungarian Parliament and its library, the avenues lined with historic Gothic, Renaissance or Art Deco buildings, or the ghetto, much destroyed by bombing but which preserves some vestiges of its glorious past, including the Great Synagogue of Budapest, which is at least as spectacular as the Szent István Basilica, a few streets away, with its pediment carved in such detail that the stone looks like lace… And that’s without mentioning the Gellért Baths or the magnificent New York Café & Palace (where an espresso costs, however, 6 euros! 😮‍💨)…

Budapest also made the most of its less glorious past, when 600.000 Hungarian Jews perished under the yoke of the Nazis and their fellow Hungarians. Some bombed-out buildings in the ghetto were never rebuilt, but in recent years they have been salvaged to house bars and other concert venues among the ruins, in the open air or, in some cases, under the cover of a remnant of a roof or the ceiling of an upper floor that has withstood the bombing. It is a strange feeling to walk among these walls, now covered with dedications (it is one of the principles of these “Ruins Bars” that everyone can write their messages on the walls or even on the ceiling, for posterity). A nice nod to the dark history of the neighbourhood, echoing the quote from the Book of Exodus on a still-standing piece of the ghetto wall (the wall the Hungarians built to ensure the Jews stayed inside the ghetto, before bombing it): “You will tell your son…” To say or preserve, without necessarily rebuilding, so as never to forget…

After a mini-concert in the open air in front of the National Museum and leaving the ghetto as it was beginning to get dark, the only thing left for us to do was to go back to the Danube to contemplate the magical spectacle of “Budapest by night”. A perfect illustration, some images need no comment…

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In Slovakia, as in Hungary, LEAVE NO TRACE!

– Always travel on public ways and respect the signs.
– Limit noise and interfere as little as possible with wildlife.
– Respect the other users.
– Leave rocks, plants and other natural features as you found them and respect historic sites.
– Take your waste with you and throw it into the appropriate containers, in the nearest village.
– Do not camp inside protected areas and do not make any fires.