Felsőszentmárton, Hungary (text etc)

Monday was quite a tiring day in many ways, not only the 260 mile drive, but the stresses of being somewhere we shouldn’t be and trying to get out of it.

We both finally relaxed into Hungary and really needed the rest that two nights in the same place gives us. Felsőszentmárton is a typical village of this area of Hungary, most people travel by bicycle; everybody seems so friendly shouting “Hello” across the street as they ride past. There are old iron water pumps dotted frequently along the side of the straight streets, all of which seem to still work. The most noticeable difference though is that all the telephone wires and electric cables for the houses (and the transformers) are visible, so it made us think that we were in some village back in England during the war!

It’s strange to say this, but we were actually out of our comfort zone here, not because we are in Hungary, but it’s the first time I think we have had people so close to us. We spend weeks on the road completely happy and comfortable just being the two of us, so it’s strange when we’re in an environment where there are other people all around us. We embraced it, and had a very enjoyable evening with several Dutch and a Belgian.

Serbia

Although the roads we drove along in Hungary are dire, anything over 30mph runs the risk of all the clothes flying off their hangers in the wardrobes, the drive towards Serbia went quite well, until we arrived at the Danube. We expected to drive across a bridge, as led to believe by the satnav, but when we got to the banks of the river we found that actually there wasn’t a road there at all, just a ferry! The map didn’t show any other road crossings in the area, the ticket office didn’t take credit cards and we had no Hungarian forints. We found an ATM in town and returned 15 minutes later and paid our 3,750 fare for the 400 metre crossing, about £11. If that was expensive, at least we could be consoled by the thought that despite spending over 17,000 forints on fuel it worked out at less than £1 a litre.

The police at the border checked the inside of the van to make sure we weren’t smuggling any Brits into Serbia, and then we continued into the country for 20-30 miles until we finally arrived at the amazing oasis of a campsite. The owner, who speaks good English, laughed when I told him of the route we came in on, I used the word ‘route’ rather than ‘road’ as it was like driving through an orchard in places!

Harold and Albert (Serbian style)

The road leading to the campsite

Serbia, Hungary and Romania

Wednesday morning we headed back towards Hungary, the first 60 miles of northern Serbia is a landscape of flat featureless farmland of greens and yellows as far as the eye can see. The queue to get out of Serbia wasn’t so bad but trying to get back into the E.U. was a lot more difficult, I’m sure there’s a joke in their somewhere. Once through the border we headed east towards Romania, Rachel has now started a new hobby of stamp collecting and asks all the border crossing officials who examine our passports to stamp them. The guy at Romania said “No, you’re an EU country, when Brexit is finalised we’ll stamp it”, we had a laugh with him saying that we’ll come back in a few years and he stamped them anyway. The friendliest border crossing guard we’ve come across, most are miserable so-and-so’s!

The almost horizontal drainpipe was a feature of our first Romanian village