Monday June 1
OMG it’s June!! Winter in Australia!! I f**kin hate winter (as most people know) so I was uber happy to NOT be there... Apparently there is a mega cold snap too so I am extra happy. We woke at around 4am as we had set our alarms so we didn’t miss our stop. It would be too easy to sleep through and wake up in the Ukraine or something. It was around another hour until we reached Budapest. We arrived in Budapest, Hungary just after 5am and it was miserable weather. We got our pack covers out to stop everything getting wet and headed to the bus stop to go in search of our next hostel. We couldn’t work out where to get tickets and everything was still closed at the train station so we decided to fare evade. We had done it a fair bit in Serbia and Romania due to their old out of date ticketing systems. So we were starting to get used to it. To clarify: we paid for lots of tickets – but we were getting lots of transport so we maybe paid for 2/3rds of our tickets. We had a hostel booked and it was a little way out in the Buda side. It was called the Back Pack Hostel. We didn’t realise before we came but Buda and Pest were separate cities once upon a time and while the city is known as Budapest it is still know by its two halves, Buda and Pest. Buda is on the West side of the Danube River, Pest the East. The hostel was advertised as a hippy friendly place and had been recommended to us by Olly. He was staying there again – he went back for seconds – but we missed him by 12 hours.
We arrived at the hostel at 6.30am and a rather sleepy shirtless hippy by the name of Jay opened the door. After complaining about the bloody Australians arriving at 6.30am he showed us to the room and we crashed for a few more hours.
When we woke up we got to check out the place properly. It really was a hippy hostel. There were countless stories and photos on the walls, plenty of Bob Marley stuff, hammocks in a yurt in the back yard for when it was too hot to sleep inside in summer etc. We just chilled all day and recovered from our crazy weekend in Belgrade, made some dinner and got to know Jay and the other inhabitants a little better.
We started writing some post cards as they had free postcards of the hostel there. Everything we wrote on them was something that had been said during our very random and slightly intoxicated conversation. So I apologise to everyone we sent random and some quite rude postcards to. Ahhh hell no I don’t who am I kidding? We’re not really sorry at all haha. I hope everyone likes them and Jess I hope you still have somewhere to live since your Grandpa probably collects the mail :P I got tired after our big weekend and crashed early, but Steve stayed up with Jay and Hygai and talked more random things and made more random post ards of which sent a few... Some were just too crazy to send lol
One for Dave and Jessie...
Back Pack Hostel
Tuesday June 2
Today was exploring day. We headed out to do touristy stuff and look at buildings again... we’re still not entirely sick of the beautiful buildings in Europe. I still gaze up in wonder at the buildings in Melbourne city too though... but then I have always liked architecture. I did used to want to do architecture at uni, that’s sort of how I ended up in engineering. Everyone I work with will think I made the right change, as architects are the joke of the building industry to engineers :P
We started at the citadel, a massive structure at the top of a big steep hill. It really tested our cardio fitness, we had to stop for a break half way. It wasn’t overly spectacular, but the view at the top was. From there we headed in to the main city area of Pest and what can I say. Pretty much 98% of the buildings are beautiful old buildings. And about 95% of them are in good well preserved condition. We only saw about 2 modern buildings, and they looked REALLY out of place. They were big glass only bank buildings and they felt like a smear on the beautiful sites of Budapest. After a wander around, we got a train out to our first European castle. And it was amazing, so pretty. By far the nicest building we had seen in the whole of Europe.
This is a close up of the butt crack of a statue, which reminded me of Andy. So here it is. 
When we got back to the hostel, we had a quick feed before Jay and a guy called Fabian took us out to a bar. Fabian had just started working at the hostel. And Jay was about to leave to head to Slovakia. We arrive at the bar and it was a small and personal affair, Jay knew most of the people there and so we drank most of the evening away at the bar. It had cool graff on the walls, complete with naked ladies and was downstairs which felt almost like a basement too, like the club in Serbia.
We left the bar and headed back to the hostel on the night bus. We waited for one to go past as Jay didn’t have a ticket and there were 3 inspectors on board. We still had 3 left so we were OK. A few went the other way and they all had inspectors too so we figured they were having a blitz. The next pulled up and there were 3 on it too, so we gave Jay our spare ticket and actually had to validate ours (we must have gotten too used to fare evading as tight arse back packers). I should point out at this point that whilst we had caught around 4 trams and buses free that day we had paid for 7, plus the 3 extra that night and Budapest public transport is expensive. 1 Euro buys one trip, not like Melbourne’s 2 hour system. So sightseeing they added up rather quickly.
When we got back to the hostel we ended up talking the night away, not heading to bed until about 4.30am. It was Jay’s last night so he only had a few hours until he had to leave. He had been in Hungary for 6 years, of which 3 ½ had been at the Back Pack Hostel. We could see why Olly had recommended it and why Jay loved it so much.
Wednesday June 3
This was definitely the most fun day we had in Hungary. We woke up late, around 12 and we had alarms set as we had decided to go caving. A new guy arrived that morning in our room (we had the room to ourselves prior to that) and we made friends with him right away. Cameron was from England and within about an hour we had roped him into coming caving with us. We booked and paid at reception, had a feed and then headed out to get the tram. We bought 10 tickets as they told us we needed 4 each to go caving and we still had to get to the airport the next day. We got the tram and within 2 stops inspectors got on. I only got my ticket validated and was trying to do Steve’s when the lady blocked the ticket machine and jabbered at me in Mygar (the language in Hungary). We said we only just got on (in English) and she jabbered again, we repeated, she repeated, we repeated and she just moved her hand and walked off. We looked at each other, shrugged, and validated our tickets. We were told by people in the hostel they the inspectors had no powers to do anything and if you walked off first they couldn’t do anything.
We arrived at the meeting point for the caving and there were heaps of people. We caught 2 buses out there and when there we were split into 2 groups of 14. We were outfitted in overalls and helmets with lights, which were really dusty. Steve’s camera wouldn’t fit in the pocket and wouldn’t have dealt with the dust so, sadly, we had to leave it in the lockers - so there are only pre-caving pics here.
Steve and Cameron
Steve, me and Cameron
We entered the cave and started in a concrete tunnel which was too short to stand up in. We went down a really long steel pipe ladder into the darkness. The caves are quite unique because they were formed by thermal springs, not cold gravity fed water. So they are very erratic shapes and have funny pitting in the ceilings. There were only around 3 or 4 caverns that you could walk upright in, which were only short in distance. The rest of the caves were crawling, wriggling, squirming, pushing, pulling and squishing (sounds like a porno I know!). There were parts that it took over 10 minutes to go a few metres, it really was physically challenging. There were areas where we could feel the rock on our backs while lying tummy down on a rock, where your arms were out in front of you, but so you couldn’t prop yourself up on elbows, you could only push yourself along with the points of your toes – which makes for very slow progress. There were areas where we went feet first and slid down through holes, there were drops we had to go down slowly, and parts where we had to climb. Definitely not suitable for people who are either fat or claustrophobic. Soooo much fun though.
We got about ½ an hour from the end and we were given the option of doing a really hard part called the sandwich or go around it. Our guide said we could look at the entrance before we decided if we wanted to do it. If you didn’t, you could go with him, around it. He said it was very tiring so if you were already really tired not to do it. I must admit I thought twice after seeing the tiny hole that your start at, as my elbow still has not gained it’s full range of movement back and it had hurt on one parts where we were propped up on our right elbows squishing through a tiny gap sideways and pulling ourselves along by our elbows – I had to put my left arm up through a crack in the roof and grip the edge above to pull myself along that way instead. But I decided there was no way I was missing the sandwich.
After the first few minutes of squishing we came to the hardest part of the whole experience. We were lying down, with about 10 cm space between the rock and our backs and the ground started to rise. The gap to get your head through was really tiny and Steve’s head got stuck. He was in front of me. His helmet started making cracking noises and he was worried he would have to take it off to get thorough the gap. He eventually got it though and realised how steep the rise really was. Really steep, perhaps 25-35 degrees. The rocks are all clay, or covered in clay, so they are very slippery. The distance to the top of the rise was about 2.5m. Just too tall to reach the top, plus there were no hand holds at the top. And no foot holds at the bottom. We had to get the person behind us to provide their hands as a foot hold and pull ourselves up on the ankle of the person in front to get to the next hand hold which was maybe half a metre past the peak, where the ground started to level. The people first and last had the biggest challenge. We had to try and grip the roof with the other foot, but it kept slipping. After lots of grunting and grasping we made it to the top. It only stayed flat for a metre or so, and then got very tight again, it was very hard to get through that spot, and it took a few minutes just to squirm through a gap over maybe half a metre. I wondered at that point if my brother would get through at all, because he may well be too tall for some of the spots we had to jam into to position ourselves correctly to be able to get through. We were underground for nearly 3 hours. I asked our guide how far we had gone in metres, he said you can’t really compare but approximately 600m. You do the maths. Slow going. Well well worth the money (20 Euros/$40Au). My back was a little sore afterwards but I have to have faith I trained hard enough before I left Australia.
We headed back to the hostel and pretty much passed out, we were nicely tired from our day in the caves.
Thursday June 4
It was time to get our first flight since arriving in Europe. It just simply isn’t practical to get trains in Western Europe when flights are so cheap. We had a fairly uneventful flight, the usual lack of border control at airports in Europe (which REALLY surprises me). I could have packed 10 kilos of cocaine and no one would have batted an eyelid.
