One of the nice things about Europe is that you are not always sure what country you are in  open borders and all.  This was the case with Hungary for the first hour or so.  The biggest clue that we had crossed the Hungarian border was when we looked at the road signs.  The Hungarian try to put in as many letters of the alphabet into each word as possible.  In fact many of the words we saw probably had more than that.  Now when you are travelling you expect to come across sme strange things or funny coincedences.  Well the first of these occurred when we switched on the radio that first morning in Hungary.  When we tuned into the local station expecting to hear the local folk music or some obscure american song, as you get used to, although not on this occasion.  Coming out over the speakers was none other than an unedited version of “Enter the Ninja” by South African band “Die Antwoord”. 

That set the mood very nicely for Hungary, we even took the opportunity to cast our line into the Danube River, more to say that we have done it than to catch anything. We camped just inside the city limits of Budapest.  We spent the night surfing the Web in our tent until we heard the beeping of our invertor as we ran the battery low….oops.  It was so good to get in touch with everyone though.  By this I our method for dealing with big cities was to rise early and drive as close to the city centre as possible, then walk around taking as many pictures as our feet could stand.  This worked particularly well for Pest, unfortunately Buda, did not get as much attention as we were lured in by a sneaky icecream stop. 

So the story of Budapest,  for those of you that do not know, Budapest is seperated by the Danube River into two parts namely Buda and Pest.  We happened to drive right into the heart of Pest and stop at the central international train station.  This is also one of the major landmarks in the city… what a treat.  If you had to ask us for our impression of Budapest it would be old meets new and east meets west.  Take for example paying for parking.  If you come from the UK, you would expect to pay about £2 for an hour, we managed to pay for 3 days for the equivalent of 1 Euro.  It seems trivial, but if you’ve had as many parking fines as we have this is a big deal.  Another thing we noticed is that Budapest seems to have the biggest concentration of Burger King and MacDonalds within its city limits.  It seems almost sacriledge to see these wonderful old buildings, some of which are 400 years old, with big glowing Burger King signs on them.  We suppose that is the price of modernisation.  Nevermind that, did we mention that it is astonishingly pretty and that everyone is very easy going.  You don’t experience the throng of tourists that congest all the other gib cities in Europe.  Instead we got the feeling that it is just every day people going about there normal business.  They just happen to live in one of the more beautiful cities.  So we spent that morning and part of the afternoon walking around the city soaking up the atmosphere and all the delights taht confront you around every corner.  It was eeie seein the massive museum that they have dedicated to the communist era. 
We spent most of the day in the Pest part of the city, so by the time it came to cross the Chain Bridge to Buda, we were pretty much bushed so decided to stop off and enjoy an icecream.  A bit of a mistake for it made us totally lazy.  So instead of doing the proper thing and walking up the hill, we decided to call it a day and walked back to the car.  We didn’t realise ju how far we had gone.  It took us over an hour to walk  back.  All in all an excellent day missing out only on the Catacombs.  Budapest… Check… Now onto some birding and unintentionally some hectic 4×4 maneouvres. 

We left Budapest at about 16:30 with the intention of finding a nice wild camp somewhere in the region of Hortobagy National Park.  This happens to be one of the most reknowned birding aread in Europe.  The drive towards the park took unusually long so we were only in the area around 10pm and our only option was to drive up an unpaved track for about 1km and pull off to the side.  It was shortly  after thae tent was up nd we were lying down where we heard some strange animal sounds. I scanned the aread with the torch but couldn’t see anything.  The wind started to blow something fierce.  It wasn’t long before Silvie sent me out to tie down the tent flaps, this didn’t work for long and I was outside again, this time in the rain to make another plan.  Thankfully the animal had stopped making those odd noises.

The next morning we got up abouth 4:30am with the intention of doing some owl-watching, but more importantly, to offer me the chance of using the spotlights, Silvie does not allow me to use them on normal roads.  It was raining heavily and we were on some muddy trail.  It took us about 10 minutes of driving before we got heavily bogged down.  In hindsight it was great fun and and was an excellent opportunity to test our recovery gear.  When we first got stuck it was dark and raining.  Not good times!  But steadily got lighter and the rain even stopped so our moods improved and our ideas started flowing.  Whou would have thought with all the money we have spent on recovery gear, would be a peice of plank to prevent our highlift jack from sinking.  We ended up using one of the bridging ladders as a jacking platform and after we put the other bridging ladder under the wheel that had no traction.  All that remained was digging the axle free, no mean feat.  With all that done, I got in the car and put my right foot firmly to the floor.  Thankfully the Cooper ST’s were up to the task and gripped there way out of the rut.  This shows what experience does.  It took us about 2 hours of messing about before we figured out exactly what was needed.  Next time this type of situation would only take us 10 minutes to free ourselves…. hopefully… After extracting ourselves from the mud, we decided that descretion is the best part of valour and it would be better for us to retreat from where we had come, instead of trying to venture further down the rutted mud trail.  This worked out well as we managed to get very good views of a Rough-Legged Buzzard as it flew across our path and settled not to far from us.  This was only the first on 6 great lifers (new birds) we managed to get in the Hortobagy region.

We camped in the only campsite in the Hortobagy village.  It is about 2km from the info centre.  The facility were basic but clean and the owner could not do enough for us.  He even went as far as lending us his bicycles for our stay there.  Another bonus of camping here, is that it was the first campsite where we could make and fire.  We went straight ahead and sampled our Boerewors (farmer sausage) from London.  More than that it gave Silvie a chance to try her hand at making potbread.  With the first attempt, we hadn’t  quite figured it out yet, but my goodness, Silvie is a quick learner.  The second potbread was magnificient.  This with some selfmade tomato sauce went down a treat and we washed it down with some local beer. 

As far as the birding is concerned, this area definitely lived up to its reputation.  The “Fishponds”  especially, were exceptional.  Never before had either Silvie or I seen such a concentration of wildfowl and gulls in one area.  It made for some entertaining viewing and once again we were counting the lifers.  After 4 nights of camping in the Hortobagy region, the weather took a turn for the worse, so we headed for Romania in search of better weather and to meet up with Serban, Paula and the amazing kiddies of Cluj Napoca International School and Gheorghe Baritiu School.