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Published: August 2nd 2008
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Hi everyone, we have now completed another good chunk of our travels in Eastern Europe.
From Bulgaria we headed straight into Bucharest, the capital of Romania. The main thing to see here was the monolithic Presidential Palace which was only completed after the dictator, Ceausescu was removed from office. This place was immense, being second only to the Pentagon in terms of the world's largest building. The streets of Bucharest reminded us of post WWII Paris, with lovely old buildings all over the place desperately in need of some repairs and a fresh coat of paint.
Next we headed north into spooky Transylvania straight into the arms of a massive rain storm. We stopped initially in a small town called Sinaia, which is apparently one of the country's best ski resorts in the winter. During our stop we unfortunately drove through one too many puddles which resulted in water in Bert´s distributor and a rather frustrating hour or so trying to start him again. We spent the night here, at what advertised itself as a camping ground but really was more akin to a homeless shelter for destitute locals, provided you brought your own broken down Lada to sleep
in. The evening was rather spooky, as we watched the mist roll though the trees on the hill (and the grave yard just out of sight next door) as it got dark but thankfully we both awoke fighting fit with no trouble from vampires or werewolves during the night :-)
Sinaia was also a summer holiday spot for one of the last modern kings of Romania, housing their summer palace - Peles palace. This was a really attractive large manor house, marred unfortunately only by the geriatric Portuguese tour group we were forced to share our visit with. We still really enjoyed the visit but had to take care not to knock any of the Portuguese over as they were all only 4 feet tall and had a tendency to cluster around the tour guide. Just up the hill from Peles Palace was another manor house, Pelisor Palace (photo´s of both attached). Before leaving town we also popped into the local monastery, the interior of which provided more good examples of the eastern style of fresco paint work.
The city of Brasov was our next stop in Romania. This site provided more of the same types of old
French style buildings as Bucharest but this time some were in much better state of repair. We ambled about the old town and took in the local "Black" Cathedral (so named because it had once burnt down in the past), as well as the remnants of a gate in the old city walls (Catherine´s Gateway) which had a rather cool roof line as well as the rest of the attractive old city.
Our last stop in Romania was Bran, home of Bran castle, which is rumored to have housed Dracula at one stage. This is thought by historians to be a bit far fetched and is also hard to believe when you tour the lovingly restored white plastered interior of the castle. The place is also pretty small as well too with no decent sized dungeons or nearby grave yard to give weight to the vampire rumor.
We then headed directly west into Hungary which was quite different, and much more westernized than Romania. The most obvious example we saw while on the road was between the Romanian´s hand stacked hay (see photos), and the machine rolled versions of the Hungarian´s. We had taken a back road from
Bran to the main "highway" at the start of our drive also observing workers out in the fields cutting grass with scythes, while the most popular form of transport remained the horse and cart - very unlike modern Hungary.
A long days travel took us across the border and in reach of our first stop in Hungary, Szeged. This place was a decent sized city on the river Tisza which was pretty much totally destroyed 100 years or so ago by a massive flood. We stopped briefly for a look at the local Cathedral and then continued our journey onto Pecs.
Pecs was the front line of the Muslim Ottoman empire in central Europe as well as an important old Roman border town. In Pecs we were treated to really well preserved early Christian Tombs, which still had visible painted fresco's on their interiors. We also checked out the old Ottoman Mosque, now converted to a church, and had our first visit to a Synagogue. The synagogue was quite sad as prior to WWII it catered to a congregation of thousands, but today hosts only 300 or so.
A couple of hundred of km further north put
us in Budapest, the twin cities spanning the Danube River. We got a great camping site really close to the city this time around and were able to make it into the central city in 10-15 minutes on a single bus :-) We spent our first day in Buda, admiring the architecture which had finally seen the paint and repair work which its counterparts in Romania had been missing. Unfortunately this care and attention on the part of the Hungarian´s also extended to covering the exterior of their main cathedral in scaffolding (photo attached). We also completed a visit to the Cave Labyrinth under Buda Castle which was used as a defensive regrouping point, bomb shelter and secret service headquarters at various times over the years. This was a really atmospheric place as we had it pretty much to ourselves with the odd drip of water landing on our heads and hardly any lights to speak of as we traveled the 1 km plus length of tunnels involved. Day 1 in Buda also included us checking out Buda Palace, the historic Chain Bridge and the scenic lookout point just to the southwest of the central city (photos attached).
Not
surprisingly our second day in Budapest was spent in Pest having a close look at everything we had seen from a distance from the other side of the Danube the day before, including a rather deserted Hero's Square (not even a lonely skateboarder in sight), the synagogue, St Stephen´s Basilica and the Parliament buildings.
However the most interesting thing we saw this day was Memento Park, a collection of Communist era statues. Amongst busts and figures of local Hungarian´s we didn´t recognize were a collection of the usual Soviet Demigods as well as some quite striking representations of happy and patriotic workers and soldiers. We also sat in on a relatively amusing set of training movies for Hungarian Secret Police from the 1950´s, which came across as very bad old Jame´s Bond rip offs.
We finished our visit to Budapest with an evening cruise along the Danube. This was well worth doing as we got closer river views of the water front and as night fell the lights were turned on and we had a lovely view of Buda Palace and Chain Bridge (among other buildings) all lit up like Christmas trees.
We are now going to
jig a little bit further west to Vienna before continuing our trek north, hopefully finally getting back into the west after a visit to Krakow, Poland - more on this next post.
S&S
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