Több magyar kedvességét

Next morning I rose early and since I had hardly unpacked my bike the night before was able to be on the road by 7 o’clock. While drinking a coffee in Dunapataj I received email informing that I have been “long-listed” for a UN job in the Middle East and that I should take an online test Monday of next week. I will have to arrange to be somewhere with a wifi that day.

The trail still continued to be marked quite nicely and passed through lovely little villages in Hungarian wine country. This is proving to really be a nice and completely normal country. The first night I was invited by a family in Germany to stay in their house I was informed of a very German community in this area in and around the town of Hajos and I promised I would visit. Hajos is not along the Danube and in that sense it is off my trail, but the country is lovely so no matter. In Hajos I did find an old German church and some of the monuments were engraved in German and in the church the information provided was written in Hungarian, German and even in Schwäbish, which I found really fascinating. Despite looking I did not however find any German-speaking people. I did find two Italian families in their motor homes, spending their holiday visiting the local vineyards. They were from Udine and spoke Italian in a odd dialect, at least one I had not heard before. I then went to the store to buy picnic supplies, including a cold one, then sat on a bench and had a nice meal and then a great sleep in the shade. 

Getting back to the Donau meant riding on the main road back and that meant heavy traffic. The roads are quite narrow and the trucks were coming close. Made out my will in my head a few times during that stretch….. Let’s see, to whom do I leave behind my two bicycles? My apartment goes to the bank, my motorbikes need to be repaired and that will cost more than they are worth so no benefit there….That is it, there is nothing else material to show for all these years on this earth. Maybe that is the way it ought to be. Who wants to collect stuff and then pass it on to others? They have enough of their own stuff in most cases. Maybe they don’t even want it.

Late in the afternoon I arrived in Baja, which lies directly on the Danube and appears to be a kind of holiday town. It has a southern feel, a beautiful town square and a lot of Austria-Hungarian type architecture. It was a Friday night and it would have been nice to stay there and explore the town in the evening but I did not want to take a room and there is no campsite.

About 5-10 kms south of Baja the weather starts to turn ugly again. Since Budapest I have not had luck with the weather. Riding through a small town I see a house down a side street with a nice garden and before the house two old people are working. Turn around and head down the street. Try with German – nichts. Try with Russian – nichevo. Try with sign language, which actually worked. Point to myself for “I”, point to my eye for “look”, put both hands under my head for “sleep”, point to my tent and then make a dome-shape with my hands. They direct me into the gate of their garden. Talking in Hungarian amongst themselves and to me, they tell me just to put my things down for a minute and relax. Then they manage to communicate to me that I should sleep in the house. Nice. They bring me inside and I sit down at the table and they sit down as well. You know how strange it is to sit together with people and have no means of verbal communication? I have experienced this many times in many places - Lithuania, Latvia, Romania when I first started going there, Vietnam, Thailand, China – and it never becomes any less uncomfortable. Nonetheless, with time we began to manage. 

They had introduced themselves with the Germanized names, Stefan and Lisi and I knew Stefan must know some German and Russian. Later he told me that in the past he had studied both languages but not used them for decades. By the end of the evening though he had managed to remember quite a few words. With his bit of German and Russian and the about 30 words of Hungarian I had managed to learn in the last few days, we managed quite well. Lisi cooked dinner for me and Stefan pulled out some maps to study my route. His maps were ancient and still exhibited long-lost political entities such as USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

Again I am not sleeping well. The last three nights have been rough, awake for hours or sleeping for short periods and then waking again and again. Considering the days upon days on the bike, I should be sleeping deeply from the fatigue.

I get up early in order to get a good day of riding in but it is pissing down. Stefan tells me there is no hurry and goes to the garden to gather vegetables and fresh eggs. Lisi prepares our breakfast and Stefan pours us both home-made palinca. After Lisi has served the food she gets a fresh bread from the cabinet and did the most amazing thing: before she cut it she blessed it by making the sign of the cross with her knife. That gesture was so profound to me, blessing a simple loaf of bread. Maybe it was simply habit, but I like to think that she did that with a real feeling of gratitude and conviction.

Lisi made me a big lunch with fresh vegetables from the garden and fresh eggs (when she put them in the bag I assumed that they were hard-boiled but later found out that they were fresh and I don’t know what she thought I was going to do with fresh eggs) and I was on my way. The sky was grey and foreboding when I left but it was not raining and within 15 minutes the sun came out. That feeling is like a child on Christmas.