Budapest, Hungary: Where the Hills End

These things happen. Somehow I lost about 100 pictures of our three day sojourn through Slovenia. A lesson to not do even simple computer tasks after cycling in hot and humid conditions for six hours.  So there are no images to prove we were there, just a few credit card receipts.  These things happen.

We headed due north from Plitvick Lakes into Slovenia rather than staying in Croatia and going through the capital of Zagreb.  The city did not interest us, and neither did the busy roads to get there.  Our first day was a quiet Sunday morning, and for the first time on this trip we saw more than a few recreational cyclists out for the day, and also dedicated bike lanes through the larger towns. The houses were in the style of Swiss and Austrian chalets.  Every house looked occupied, in contrast to the many abandoned ones we saw all over Albania and Croatia.  In the rural area, almost every yard had a substantial vegetable garden. On this day, after the rains of a couple days previous, men and women were out hoeing their way ahead of the weeds.  Our impression is that Slovenia is a relatively prosperous country.

We went through the town where Melania Trump was born, Novo Mesto, with a small and interesting walled old town.  We went up a rural road to avoid the highway that took us up 15 percent grades. We had to push our bikes up a kilometer or so (we thought we left that terrain behind in Albania), but at the top were views of mountains and valleys not unlike the Alps.  And just as we were getting used to how Slovenia did things, we crossed the border back into Croatia to see a romantic castle at Trakoscan, followed by another night in Varazdin with another castle.  And then we crossed into Hungary, where we can continue this story with pictures.

Not hard to sustain over 20 km/hr on terrain flat as flat can be in all directions.

Hello, Hungary!

Some town names are so long they don't fit on the map.  But unlike Croatian, there are at least a few more vowels.

We did a ride-by of Lake Heviz, the largest warm water lake in Europe.  We could only peer through the fence at the swimmers and their pool noodles taking their morning therapeutic soak.  It was our first glimpse of the Hungarian spa culture.

Soon we were cycling on the shore of Lake Balaton, the largest and shallowest lake in Europe.  There is a bike route that goes around the perimeter of the lake, about 200 kilometers total.  Much of the route is dedicated bike paths, and there ferries that will allow for shorter loops.  It is a popular bike tour destination for the region.  We were there on a weekend, and there were people with minimalist panniers going from hotel to hotel.  It is pretty much flat, but there was more than one stout European with an ebike doing the tour.

The Tehany Peninsula juts out into the middle of the lake from the north shore.  There is a high point where a historical abbey exists.  It is a popular weekend destination for walking around and eating gelato, as well as taking in the view of Lake Balaton, here looking to the east.

Catholicism is the predominant religion of the country, and even the smallest town will have more than one church.  This brick church was particularly interesting.

Lake Valence is east of Lake Balaton, the third largest lake in Hungary, but small enough to cycle around in one day.  We happened to be going counterclockwise, while several hundred other cyclists were going clockwise on this day in early June, apparently on an annual family fun ride event.  We intersected with them around noon, and many were sunburned and almost as wilted as we were on the hot and humid day.  We had our Hungarian thermal experience that night.  We stayed at a campground next to a thermal spa.  The campground host talked us in to upgrading for a couple of dollars each for entry into the spa.  Now, soaking in hot water did not sound very appealing after biking in the heat all day, but we went for it.  It was quite an experience.  There were hot water pools shaped like donuts with people going around in circles.  There were huge shallow outdoor pools with canopies with people sitting in the water.  We chose one of the two huge indoor pools, apparently preferred in the winter, with jets and benches in the water to prop yourself up on while you soak.  It felt quite nice, actually, and the people watching was worth the price of admission.

It was a day's worth of cycling to get to Budapest from Lake Valence.  We came in from the industrial southern end , over a bridge that gave us views of the city.

WE stayed in an AirBnB for four nights, in what was described as a typical Budapest townhouse.  Lucky us, it was newly renovated and we were the second guests.  It was in the heart of downtown, and this was the view from our second-floor window.

The Dohany Street Synagogue is the largest in Europe, and quite a beautiful building.

The lasting impression we have of Budapest is that it is a city of massive buildings.  Much of the city was destroyed a year before the end of WWII.

We spent a day in the Hungarian National Museum, where this guy watched over the front entrance.

Franz Liszt was a notable Hungarian musician and composer, and this piano was given to him when he was a child prodigy pianist.  It was a piano previously owned by Beethoven

It made a great impression on us to see an instrument with Beethoven's name on it, and to think that he once played it.

Day two:  walking along the Danube on both the east and west shore.  Budapest is actually two cities in one.  Here wer are looking at the east side, of the town of Buda.

We crossed the Chain Bridge from the Pest side to get to the Buda Side.  Built in 1849, the bridge was bombed in WW11, and only the towers survived.  It was rebuilt in 1949.

We climbed up the many stairs to the top of the hill on the Buda side to look back at the Chain Bridge and the Parliment building with its domed on the horizon.

The Buda side is a more compact urban area with several churches, including this Gothic church with a glazed tile roof.

Later that afternoon, back on the Pest side, we did a tour of the Parliment building.  A bit opulent, especially these carved figures watching over us.

Our townhouse was just a few blocks from the Liszt Academy, a renowned music school with five concert halls.  An internet search gave us a performance schedule, and just our luck, there were a series of free diploma concerts happening while we were there.

We attened a symphony concert in the Grand Hall.  It was actually a small venue, just a couple of hundred seats.  The performance were three pieces, each led by a different student conductor.  We expected that the orchestra would also be students, but when they came on stage the members were more around our age.  Maybe a community orchestra, we thought.  But they played beautifully, and later we found out it was the MAV Symphony Orchestra, a professional orchestra formed by the state railway after WWII to visit the destroyed towns of Hungary after WWII.  It was a magical night, and the highlight of our visit to Budapest.

On the last of our three days in the city, we continued our immersion into all things Liszt, and visited his studio where he taught when he visited Budapest.  The studio was the first home of the Liszt Academy, and is now known as the Old Academy, while the campus and performance hall we visited the previous night is the current home of the institution.  There was this drawing, made from a photograph, of Liszt and his assistant in the studio.

The studio as it is presented today has much of the original furniture and paintings arranged just like what is seen in the drawing.  In the same building was a concert hall, but locked behind closed doors, so we could not get a peek.  But lucky us, there was another diploma concert that night, in the Old Academy concert hall.

The concert hall was nothing more than a small auditorium.  But there was a polished Steinway on stage, and the diploma candidate that performed for us was the definition of perfection.  One of the peices he performed was by Liszt, an appropriate ending grace note to our visit to Budapest.

7 AM, and time to get out of the city and onto the EuroVelo 6 bike route that will take us north on the Danube.  Stay tuned...

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Plitvicka Jezera National Park, Croatia: Conga Line in the Garden of Eden

It is a mixed blessing to wake up to clouds in the morning. On the positive side, it means that when grinding up a long grade, at least the sweat doesn't wash all the sunscreen off your face and into your eyes.  But it also means, when you get to the top of whatever you invested all that energy into, the view might be less than spectacular.  So it was when we left our waterfall camp at Knin and continued our journey through the Croatia hinterlands.

A wide valley view north of Knin under a canopy of clouds.  We anticipated rain all day, but fortunately we found refuge when a few drops fell at lunchtime.  We ducked into an empty service building at a cemetery, which was fine.  But the groundskeeper decided to light all the piles of dry grass accumulated from the last weed-whacker session, and it smoked us back onto the road rather quickly.

We found the best stealth campsite yet on the trip in an abandoned pasture in an oak forest.  And the sun came out for a couple of hours before dropping below the horizon.  But morning was a different story.  We managed to eat breakfast and pack the tent, and were just about to get back on the road, and it started to rain.  See that tree next to my bike?  We stood underneath it for a good two hours waiting for the squall to pass.

Our destination this day was Plitvicka Jezera National Park, or "Plitvick Lakes".  John decided this was worth going to early on in his planning process, but I had not read the section in the guidebook about it yet and did not know what to expect.  After we left our oak forest, we cycled a bit and then merged onto the main highway leading to the park.  And what we noticed was camper van after camper van, heading south, with license plates primarily from Germany, some from The Netherlands, with an Austrian or Swiss to keep it interesting. Traffic going our way was busy, too.  By the time we got to the south entrance of the park, tour buses were passing us with barely enough room for comfort.  Maybe we weren't going to have this natural place to ourselves.

Fortunately, it was 25 kilometers of downhill to go through the park to the campground at the north end.  We passed hotels, chalets, inns, apartments for rent, and people moving between all of them.  Along one stretch we were moving along so fast it felt like we were flying through a deep green tunnel, and I wanted so much to stop and take a picture of the rainforest, but it was too dangerous with all the traffic. But we got through all of that, and just a couple of kilometers away from the campground the traffic subsided and a road gained a shoulder.  John came to an abrupt stop -- he had seen a glimpse of something across the road.  We parked the bikes, crossed quickly, and looked over the guardrail to see a deep, green river gorge and waterfalls and turquoise blue water.  It was a preview of what we would experience the next day, and only for us bike tourists who can stop anywhere on the side of a road with a sliver of enough room to park a bike.
 

Our roadside preview of what was to come.

We rented a sweet little cabin at the Camp Korana campground.  Not much more expensive that a tent site, it had twin beds, a little table and chairs, a wardrobe, and a porch with overhang to protect our bikes from the afternoon thunderstorms.  The campground was massive, with a capacity for 2000+ campers, as well as these cabins, a store, and restaurant.  It is operated by the national park, and a free bus picked up campers to take them into the park in the morning. 

It was a rare day off the bikes, and it was spent hiking a loop along the series of lakes strung along a gorge like gems on a necklace.  This is a karst landscape, with dolomite and limestone rocks and subterranean water sources to feed the lakes.  Travertine dams form between the lakes and control the flow and the beauty of the waterfalls.

Almost equally amazing is the wood path that is built that winds along the lake and over the dams and between cascades.  There were hundreds, maybe thousands of us walking the planks, like in a conga line. 

The water is so clear, and all different shades of green and blue.

There are 16 lakes total, and signs along each lake provide the vital statistics of elevation, area, depth, and height of the cascade to the next lake.

There are short and long loops, and electric-powered ferries transport hikers across a couple of the bigger lakes.

Travertine forms can be seen just below the surface through the clear water.

So I got to wondering about why so many Germans come to this place, and I went down an internet rabbit hole to find out.  My mother always talked about reading a series of books when she was a child growing up in Germany, written by the German author Karl May.  They were stories of cowboys and Indians, set in the American West.  The funny thing is that Herr May never even visited the United States. But his stories were captivating enough for my mother to dream of seeing those places.  Who would have imagined she would move to America and travel for decades with my father through those landscapes in a Jeep and tent trailer.  A set of those novels were given to her as a gift a few years ago, from my cousins who live in Radebeul, Karl May's hometown.  In the 1960's a total of eleven movies based on the novels were filmed in Croatia, and Plitvice Lakes was featured in several of them (look for a cameo of a waterfall in this trailer for "The Treasure of Silver Lake") And we will visit those cousins in Radebeul in just a few weeks, and see the Karl May birthplace.  And our house, back in California, is just a mile from Silver Lake.  Life is a circle game.

Ho, hum, another waterfall.

I got my rainforest shot!

At the end of the day the trails climbs out of the gorge for one last view of the conga line.

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Knin, Croatia: Island Escape to the Hinterlands

The ride into Dubrovnik rattled us enough to have John rethink our planned route up the Croatia coast.  Too many buses, too many trucks, not enough shoulder.  We weren't alone in our thinking.  We met a couple of French girls bike touring north, and they fashioned a cardboard sign asking for a hitch to the city of Split.  A solo Australian cyclist had the same idea as us -- go island hopping.  Look at a map of Croatia, and you will see long islands, hundreds of them paralleling the coast like furrows in a plowed field. Ferries service many of them, so we decided to hop to the island of Mljet, stay overnight, bike the length the next day and catch the ferry to the Peljesac Peninsula.  Then bike north a couple of days and catch a ferry back to the mainland, with just a day and a half ride until we get to the gap in the coastal mountains to head east into the hinterlands.

It turned out to be great decision.  We had a stretch of wonderful weather, the scenery was fantastic, and next to no traffic to spook us.  Here are the best pictures from that adventure (and beyond).

The ferry arrived late to Mljet Island, so we rented an AirBnB for one night.  Oh, had we wished we had time to stay a day to explore!  There were lakes on the island with good swimming and forest trails,  The apartment was located in the tiniest village -- just a handful of houses, and a beautiful terrace overlooking the forest.

We biked about 35 kilometers along the island to get to the ferry dock.  Only us, a few cars, and sleepy coves along the way.

From Mljet Island we took the ferry to Peljesac Peninsula.  It is long and narrow and connected to the mainland, but gets very little traffic because once you get to the northern tip, you need to either turn around and drive back or take a ferry.  It was very rural with lots of vineyards and wine tasting opportunities (which we passed on --- we generally don't "drink and bike"!)

We spent the night in a campground in the tiny village Zudljana, where we were the only campers.  And with view of the Adriatic Sea, just steps away.

The water of the Adriatic is so, so clear.  We had the gravelly beach to ourselves when we went for a swim, and be assured we were glad for that.  No one needs to see our mid-thigh bike shorts tan lines.

It was a non-trivial grind the next morning from sea level to a high point, and then back down to the port of Trpanj to catch the ferry back to the mainland.

The last of our three ferry rides arriving back on the mainland at Ploce.

We pedaled from Ploce for a few hours, camped in an overpriced campground, and then the next morning did a short stretch to the pass to take us inland.  The morning light highlights how impenetrable the coastal mountains can seem.

But lucky us, the coastal road stayed high and we just had a couple of switchbacks to climb to pop over the mountains,  See those distinctive bands on the tilted beds of the headland? 

Here are those same bands from the backside.  It was like we entered a different world when we got on the east side of the coastal mountains.  Very rural and very quiet roads.

The big surprise of this part of Croatia was finding this spring pouring out of the limestone here at the base of Croatia's highest peak, Dinara (1831 meters), seen here in the distance.  The spring is the source of the Krka river, and there was a sign with a map showing a 15 km bike trail that goes down the canyon along the river.  It was a dirt trail, but well-graded, so we followed it to the town of Knin.

Along the way were abandoned mill sites like this one.

Before the paved road was built this used to be the only way between Knin and the towns to the south.  Note the stone guard rails.

The canyon was narrow in places, and the water clear as glass.

The major highlight was the last of a series of waterfalls, called the Topoljski slap, 22 meters in height. Click on the photo to bring it up to full-frame size, and see if you can see the person standing to the left of the high cascades.

We found a little dirt road near the top of the falls and made camp, thinking we would be undiscovered.  But apparently it is a hangout for the kids of Knin, and we had just crawled into bed when a quad-runner came down our road.  They turned right around, and we had no other excitement overnight.  The roar of the falls was our lullabye.

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