diary entries: March 2008 Archives

With hindsight, we can see that we made several less-than-perfect decisions on the day we left Săpântă to go exploring rural Maramureş in northern Romania.  

Firstly, it was not a great idea to take the cross-country back roads through the hills on the first sunny day after heavy snow, however enticing the little village names looked on the map.  Secondly, we failed to pick up on the signals when several ‘roads’ we tried disintegrated into streams/fields/forests ...

We finally said goodbye to Poland (we'll have to go back one day, there's so much more to see) and drove south through Slovakia to Hungary.  As we were a bit behind schedule we rushed through Slovakia in a day, admiring the snowy Tatras mountains and warming ourselves up in hot springs (and some of the best saunas we've seen) at the fairly-tacky-but-wonderful Tatralandia resort.

It was a shame not to have longer, but this did mean more days to check out all the wonderful Hungarian food - and wine - and more time to zigzag all over the place rather than planning a sensible route.  We learnt lots, but three things stick out.  Firstly, the wine's excellent.  Secondly, most of Hungary's pretty flat.  OK, really flat - think East Anglia but with more moustaches.  Thirdly, goulash isn't what you think it is ...

Tonight we spent the evening at Tuba Tanya, enjoying the fantastic local specialities of course, but also the Hungarian folk music and other folky activities.  The band (Tuba Rózsa) were fantastic: listen to that bass sound - it's someone rubbing a wet cloth up & down a stick attached to a skin stretched over a jug.

Click here to listen to the band.

After that we all went outside to play with the enormous whips the herdsmen traditionally use out here.  Anna was very good at it ...

Click here to listen to the whip-cracking.

Click here for more audio samples.

Well since leaving France we've come quite a long way (now about 3,500km on the clock in fact).  We shifted across Germany pretty fast, eating nice fresh apples and sticky spätzle by the Bodensee and then great griesenschmalz in the Bayrisches Wald.  But we wanted more - spätzle only get you so far - so we crossed over the mountains into the snowy Böhmerwald and the Czech Republic, immediately being rewarded with the first dumpling sightings of the journey.

This was only the beginning - we soon made our way to Bohemia and Český Krumlov, where we learnt all about why Czech beer tastes so good, and about its ideal accompaniment in the form of (imagine the excitement) the stuffed dumpling.  Next to Moravia ...