One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.
Sir Richard Burton

Home » Archives » 20. October 2006

My way through Hungary

October 20, 2006

As I'll soon stop to type - I'm not that fast and I'm getting tired - I'll give you just a short description of my way through Hungary.
From Gyoer the next day brought me to Komarom. The next day, I crossed the boarder to Slovakia again before coming back to Hungary at Esztergom, my next goal. From Esztergom I went to Szentendre, a small town just at the city limits of Budapest. After visiting Budapest (very stressful by bike, very stressful) I almost reached Goedoello (famous for its castle, just one word - Sissy). The next day brought me until Gyoengyoess, another day to Eger. From there, I went south-east to Tiszafuered to see the famous Theiss-sea and the Hortobagy Nemzeti Parc, spending the next two days in this windy area. And I do mean windy. After leaving the National Parc, I visited Debrecen and made a little sidestep to avoid the big streets (more on driving on hungarian streets later) and spent the night at Bagamer, befor crossing the boarder to Romania after 970 km of cycling at Nyirabrany - Valea lui Mihai.

Posted by gaston at 6:06:00 | permalink | Add comment

Hainburg - Bratislava - Gyoer

After getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning, I started to ride to Bratislava, crossing the boarder to Slovakia. As I slept just a very few kilometers before the boarder, the first human beings I saw where two poor austrian guys, doing their compulsory military service being boarder patrol. I know it, this time sucks, it really does.
After crossing the boarder, I visited Bratislava. Very nice town (at least the old part, I didn't visit the newer ones) and I especially liked its UFO, watching over town. Very helpful people, while driving around town I was asked several times if I got lost, because I also went to the little corners where usually no tourist goes.
Then I continued towards Gyoer. Do you remember Gabcicovo, the enormous dam which caused a big controversy? I passed it, and although they only build the smaller project, only on the Slovakian side it is enormous. And windy. And I'm talking about real wind, not a moderate breeze. Rather hard with a big with much luggage. Discouraging - a little bit, but not enough for me. After finally leaving this monument of communist and later Slovakian-nationalist mega mania I crossed the boarder to Hungary, visiting and spending the first night at Gyoer. I continued my visit the next morning, spending a nice morning in a charming, yet touristic town. Which on the other hand helped to pay for the renovation of the old houses in the historic center.

Posted by gaston at 6:02:00 | permalink | Add comment

Second goal - Vienna

After three days in Germany, I headed south-east to Vienna, crossing the Tchec Rebublic, again a car-ride, again this care-sharing system i mentioned before. This time, the trip was rather uneventfull, although we passed the town of Oberhaesslich (Overugly) (sic!). I tried to take a picture, but it didn't work. Just try out viamichelin.de to find it…
What realy surprised me was how much prostitution you have just behind the german border in the Tchec Republic. You almost have the impression to drive through a red light district village after village for kilometers. I had seen it before on television, but reality is still way more impressive. And we were travelling in the afternoon…
 Enough about this. In Vienna, I visited my sister in her new apartment with her new cat - well her cohabitant's cat, who was spending some days in Ibiza (lazy as always, these students…) to update her homepage and give her a short introductuion in the contetnt management system behind it so she can do smaller updates herself. Well, to cut a long story short, as I thought I could easily work on it after getting home wasted and sleeping for 4 hours, I totally crashed, destroyed, extinguised the homepage. So, as you have to fix what you break, I had to rebuild it more or less from the ground. Happily I still had the template files and most of the content saved in a second please, but still, it took some time. One of the delays on my trip.
One more word about the cat. It's the only cat known to mankind who retrieves tampons. Really, no joke. She chases after it, sometimes she plays a little bit with it and then she brings it back to you. Like a well trained dog.
After a lot of work, I finally had rebuild the homepage, then I could concentrate on the problem I initially wanted to save. Again, to cut a long story short - thank you very much microsoft for not respecting css and w3c standards, microsoft, you suck! This problem, I couldn't solve as good as I wanted, but I keep on working on it - in some weeks, in a warmer country…
Homepage repaired, I finally really started for my trip. Applying for the visa for Iran and then, go to buy a tent. Never ever order a tent or any gear at sportandoutdoor.de if you can't wait for weeks. Just google the name, you'll see. I didn't google the name before ordering. So I bought a cheap tent (I have so much luck that weather is fine, you can't imagine.) to serve for some days. It still serves, although…. aparently, by now the tent is sent to Vienna, from there I hope to get it till Constanta. We will see.
Same as before, come photos, come more details. But I have to move on.
The first day, well afternoon I managed to ride till Hainburg, just before the slovakian border.

Posted by gaston at 5:29:00 | permalink | Add comment

See my photos on mediamax.com

I uploaded some of my photos to www.mediamax.com. So if you want, you can have a look at them there. But I have to warn you - they are in a total disorder and they are just uploaded, some of them were never ment to be published anywhere, I just hadn't the time to delet them. The username is "gastonaroundtheworld", the password is "gaston06". his gives you full access, so please be carefull with it.

Posted by gaston at 5:14:00 | permalink | comments[5]

First goal - Berlin

I mentioned it once or twice before, but once again, the first goal of my trip was - not initially planed – Berlin. I went there by a kind of care-sharing system – www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de which really works great and I can only recommend – going to Munich by train. I had a good trip with interesting passengers ( a guy who's father is from Iran and a journalist who has already visited all the countries I want to go – how could my trip start any better?) I reached Berlin in the evening. After a short walk through Berlin at night I reached my first “hotel” - my cousin Florian and his girlfriend Anette's apartment. Very nice, very central (Berlin-Mitte).
So, as both of them had a lot of work ahead of them, my visit was very short notice and I'm already a big guy, I spent the next day walking around Berlin as tourist and doing some transactions. By now, I can join the former U.S. President JFK in saying "Ich bin ein Berliner". We both did it for insurance reasons - he to reassure the population of Berlin and I for insurance optimisation - strictly legal, 100% playing by the rules, just in an unusual way.
Berlin is also a center of pomo architecture - not surprisingly, seen the time of reunification and the recent history of architekture. So I took a lot of pictures, some of them you can see here, the rest in the photo-folder named Berlin - if I manage to get my usb drive working (I'm working on a windows 98 system…).
Of course, I visited the remainings of the berlin wall, Checkpoint Charlie and the controversial holocaust memorial. The latter was much smaller than I had imagined it and was rather unimpressive, not really touching. I just didn't get an access to it, it was, nothing special. I was way more touched by the visit of the old synagoge in Oradea today (but more about this later).
Another place you have to visit is the cupola on the Reichstag by Norman Foster - a really great building which offers also a great view over Berlin. You have to wait some time (45 minutes in my case, which seems to be rather short) but it's really worth waiting. Enjoy the pictures. 
  As Berlin has a communications museum, I had to visit it. Unfortunately, it's very much concentrated on technique, so not as interesting for me as I initially thought (I'm not that interested in old post-signs and telefons) - the old problem of anticlimax.
The evening, we went out to a trendy, thus overcrowded asian rerstaurant with two of Florian and Anettes friends. And the crowd was right - it's a good place to eat. Later, we moved to cool bar(?). It's called Trailerpark and it consists of - how surprising - small old trailers with one side cut off. And it's as cool as it sounds.
 In Berlin, I started the photo album "things on the street". I just saw the little stickers and graffitis everywhere which I really liked and so I decided to "hunt" them, trying to get a collection of examples from all places of my trip. I hope you like them as much as I do.
From Berlin, I took another car ride to Vienna, my second goal, where I visited my sister and updated the homepage I did for her company
Without access to my Berlin photos it's a bit hard to remeber all the details, so I'll close the post for now and update it later.

 

Posted by gaston at 3:39:00 | permalink | Add comment
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