Trippin’ – 20th-22nd June

Stop 3 - Velka Domasa, Slovakia & Stop 4 – Lublin, Poland

Slovakia had some of the most beautiful and dramatic scenery which mesmerised me as a gazed at it out of the car window (no, I have no photos – I was mesmerised, I told you). Mountains, forest, dramatic dark clouds and sunshine breaking through. Spectacular. The scene we were confronted with next however, was gut wrenching.

I was shocked by the poverty I saw in the village in Hungary where Gábor uses to work; poverty that I had never seen in Europe before but even that was paled by the full on shanty town we drove though when we left the mountains in Slovakia. It was comparable to those that I saw in India – but this is Europe! This is Schengen area! This is the bloody Euro zone which supposedly has strict economic criteria for joining! We had to stop the car; I couldn’t breath.  I made a note of the name of the town so that I will remember the people, remember the place and remember that poverty and suffering is not something that happens somewhere else or that you can take a break from. It is here in my home and here in the middle of my holiday.

One I had collected myself we drove on. We were heading to Velka Domasa, to the lakeside, to relax. We just spent the last week in Szeged, packing up our apartment, carrying all our stuff downstairs and loading it onto the truck, doing the moving out clean (Gábor spent 3 years as a cleaner, often cleaning apartments that had not been cleaned properly when people move out – he has very high standards), preparing for the trip and saying goodbye. We were exhausted and were looking forward to spending a couple of days by the lake recuperating.

We had checked out the area and it looked fairly nice (although our Slovak is pretty poor so we were just gauging by the pictures) and there were quite a few campsites marked on our map so we didn’t bother with finding a specific place we would just see when we got there...Well when we got there we found that he lake was a reservoir, the beach was clay and that the campsites were non-existent. Oh yeah, and it started raining as soon as we stopped the car. We found a little patch of grass with a view of the water, although we may have been trespassing but everywhere was closed so there was no one around to complain. We got our water canister filled at the bar a little way around the lake and Gábor stet off to find an ATM in the village to buy some milk for Ernest. There was no ATM (the closest one was 20km away) but a friendly bar tender gave us a couple of cartons of milk and some chocolate too. There is nothing ike the kindness of strangers to brighten your day. The sun coming out helps to brighten thing too.

Things went right back to being sucky though when I realised that the trusty little digital camera was no more(Farewell you were a good friend) and suckier still when I found that my SLR was broken too. The part that the lens screws into had broken off from the main body. I was completely cameraless. My photo challenge plan was utterly screwed. Oh, and it started to rain again.

Not the R&R we were hoping for so we decided to move on to Lubin in Poland in the morning.

Lubin we really had planed. We had found a perfect little campsite; lakeside again, forest, nature walks, just south of the city. Great for our resting place, one day chilling in the campsite and take a little walk and one day to explore the city. Great plan – but for some reason our great plans weren’t going to...well...plan. The campsite so longer existed. It had been turned into a car park. After a little bit of enquiring we found out there was another campsite on the other side of the lake but were told “it’s really bad”. We took this with a pinch of salt; we like simple sites (all we need is a spot where the nature is cared for and we can get clean water) and know that many people want a bit more than we do. But this place was really bad, it was dirty and dangerous. The grounds were set up for caravans but the only place they had to empty their “black water” tanks was the same place ay you got the drinking  water from. We had to sleep there that night though as it was too late in the day to find somewhere else.

We were getting more and more tired with each day that passed and we still hadn’t stopped to recover from the moving. We were too tired to drive on another stretch the next day so decided to stay in Lublin but sleep in the hostel in town and eat out rather than cook. We had a lovely day in Lublin, the old town is charming. It is a contender for the European culture capital for 2016 and they really are making a lot of effort to win it. And after sleeping in a bed we were a bit more rested and ready to move on to Bialowieska where we planed to stay in this perfect little forest campsite...



Gábor's posts about these days:


20th June -  Hungary to Slovakia
21st June - Crappy Campsite
22nd June - Lublin
22nd June - Lublin revised


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Trippin' - 20th June

Aggtelek to...some lake in Eastern Slovakia that I can't remember the name of right now

We were in no rush to leave Aggtelek, we were only planning on driving a few hours to a lakeside in Slovakia and although the weather had improved it wasn't exactly swimming weather, so we had a relaxed morning and took a walk over the hills (rather than into them like the day before).

I don't know if the trail had a name but surely it should be called "Butterfly walk" (or something more imaginative but butterfly related). I have never seen so many butterflies in their natural habitat before; we had to watch where we stepped - they where everywhere. The photos don't show it so well, like I said yesterday, the zoom was playing up.

The abundance of butterflies probably had something to do with the abundance of wild flowers.

Gábor tends to avoid using the camera, but sensing that it was coming to the end of its life, he took up the challenge and took up the camera (meaning that for once I feature in the pictures...my friend Gail has a fear that if something were to happen to her there would be no pictures of her with her son, as time passes and I have so few pictures of me with my kids I start to understand her fear...maybe I told this before...I have a very bad memory and tend to repeat myself...or ramble; I ramble a lot too, like now for example...sorry).

Frankly I think he did great.

Perhaps he could do with a little praise from people to encourage him to do it more often...well maybe it will take more than praise, a new camera might be necessary since later that day the camera gave up on us.  

Before we set out I made Lily an explorers utility belt, complete with, sketch book, crayon (for rubbing), pencil, magnifying glass, pocket knife, matches (yes, I put a knife and matches in the hand of my 7 year old) and colour scavenger hunt cards (might do a crafty post on the bely and cards at some point).

After our walk it was time to leave Hungary after spending a year there and head to Slovakia, adding a new country to the list of countries I've visited. I will save the tales of Slovakia for tomorrows installment and leave you with one image of the lake there...one of the very last taken with our camera.

From this point on all pictures are from Gábor's phone or Lily's mp4 player.

Gábor's blog of the day as always has more pictures, more videos and more languages (his blog is in booth English and Hungarian).

Trippin' - 19th June

Stop 2 - Aggtelek, Hungary

After the beautiful sunshine of the day before, the sudden change to cold drizzle was a bit of a shock. So...on our fist day of our camping road trip we cheated and opted for a wooden hut rather than a tent pitch. To be fair it really was a BIG drop in temperature; we had had weeks of well over 30^oC it went down to about 12^oC.

Our little hut was in Aggtelek, still within Hungary (but only just), a national park with some spectacular caves. Gábor and the kids had gone to some caves in the Buda hills (I missed out because I had been left behind in Szeged for the weekend to study). Lily loved them; Ernest however, was not so keen. So we decided that only Lily and I would take the tour of the caves while Gábor and Ernest did their own thing. There was one small flaw in this plan though; the tour was of course in Hungarian. Normally on these kinds of tours kids might need a little bit of a simplified (or elabourated) explanation from their parents to accompany that of the guide but (even after a year of studying Hungarian) my language skills were not quite up to. In fact I had to use Lily as a translator but she wasn’t able to translate most of it. - Well how many 7 year old do you know that can translate the history of cave exploration and the scientific explanations of the formation of stalagmites and stalactites.

We bought a book but with having a new adventure every day we haven’t had time to give it a proper read. We will.

But anyway, I can’t tell you an awful lot about them. Big caves, fairly impressive, smell kind of musty.

It was on this day that the first signs of the coming disaster arose. The zoom on the digital camera was having “issues”.

Gábor has a post about this day too, with more pictures and video of what him and Ernest got up to when we were in the caves.

I used to be a cyclist, now I just ride a bike.

As Spring begins to challenge Winter here in Szeged I find myself longing for a bike. Technically I do have a bike but it isn’t good for much more than the school run popping to the shops; it’s not a real bike like the one I used to have.

Once upon a time I was a cyclist. It was part of my identity. Cycling was more than just my way of getting about. It was who I was. But we gave our bikes away when we moved to Finland and we have never been able to afford to replace them.

Cycling was my main form of exercise, recreation and being outside. Oh, I miss being outside. We used to have a cupboard in our kitchen stocked with eco-fuel for the camping stove and ingredients for tasty camping dishes so that we were ready for a weekend cycle trip any weekend the sun was out. We would just load up our bikes and go, we’d be outside until we got home on Sunday evening. We haven’t figured out how to go camping without our bikes yet and it has been nearly 4 years since we gave them up. We don’t have a car; we don’t do driving (yet) which leaves public transport and foot as the transportation options but these options don’t get you to the quiet little campsites off the beaten track in the utterly stunning locations that you can reach with a bike.

Without bikes our weekends tend to become about tidying up, shopping, laundry...We do have some fun, we go to the park, for a walk or do baking or make something extra special for dinner but it doesn’t give me the same soaring lift I get from riding my bike through the countryside and sleeping under the stars.

I was just commenting to Gabor just last night that I like our way of living where we keep our debt much lower than the average young family buy simply not buying stuff (no house, no car, no furniture, no TV) but maybe bikes are something that would be worth accumulating some debt over. That little bit of debt could reclaim my identity, give me back my freedom, my weekends, my adventures.

Then again maybe it is the start of a slippery slope.