Road Trip 1 - Monte-Budapest-Sussex, August 2008

If you ever have the need (as in requirement rather than a choice) to drive from Montenegro to Budapest, my advice would be to avoid taking the route through Serbia.

Our new life was about to have a quick intermission. Before the inevitable resumption of purchasing complications we had a four-day return to the UK to negotiate, a visit that had become necessary as my brother, his wife and nine month old son (my nephew) were visiting our hemisphere for the first time together from Australia. Naturally they had arranged this five-week tour of friends and family long before Emma and I threw a spanner into the works by announcing our departure, so this left us with the thorny problem of booking flights for a quick return before we had even left the country, or any idea where we’d be at the relevant time.

We had chosen Budapest as the place to get to for two reasons. First of all, we reasoned that our house-hunting mission might have taken us up into northern Croatia by that point with Romania next on the list, so geographically it was a reasonable choice. Secondly, we also gambled that my lovely Hungarian relatives would let us stash our fully-loaded Honda with them while we were away. Of course, we hadn’t really anticipated the extra-time shenanigans at Lake Skadar, which meant a rather longer journey to catch the plane than we had planned.

“We’ll drive up the coast, into Croatia, and then use their spanking new motorway all the way from Split to Zagreb, and then on to Buda,” I explained to Dean. “Should take around 20 hours in total, with one overnight stop.”
“Why go that way?” he suggested with a smile. “If you go through Serbia it’s much faster, cheaper, and you can be there in just one day.”
We had a look at the map. It was certainly a shorter route. As by that stage one day was all we really had to complete the journey if we wanted to arrive a day before the flight, we decided to give Dean’s route a bash off a 4.30am start, hoping to avoid the worst of any possible traffic. If only we had known…

At the Serbia/Montenegro border we noted with raised eyebrows that the queue to leave Serbia was over a kilometre long, and joked we were glad we were travelling in the opposite direction. Well, Serbia had the last laugh. First we got lost trying to circumnavigate the concrete jungle of Belgrade, mostly thanks to a rubbish map and the continued, complete absence of road signs. As in Montenegro, the locals in Serbia tended to use them for target practice in the winter, meaning that those signs that weren’t pock-marked with bullet holes had long since been blasted into horizontality. This lost us an hour. And then we hit the border with Hungary. We began to worry when the queue we had joined moved just 100m in 30 minutes. We began to really worry when we realised that we were still 200m away from a sign that proudly spelled out “Granica – 4km”.

The mercury was sitting stubbornly the sweaty side of 30°. We’d been in the queue an hour and a half already, it was six o’clock in the evening and we were only 170km and a couple of hours drive from Budapest.
“Five hours minimum wait,” confirmed a resigned Serbian policeman who had been sent out to stop newcomers from aggressive queue barging.
“Is there an alternative?” Emma asked in her best Serbian.
“If you go to the other border 20km west, there will be no cars there,” he suggested. I had three-point turned the car around before Emma had even got back in it.

Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones with the same idea. It took only 40 minutes to cross the Serbian exit border, but it soon became clear that the real delay was only just beginning. Overwhelmed by rapidly increasing volumes, the Serbians just started waving people through. This would have been a laudable approach if they had bothered to have a peek at their Hungarian counterparts a few hundred metres down the road, who were working so slowly that in about 15 minutes the end result was the mother, father, granny and granddad of all bottlenecks in the no-man’s land area between the two stations, with seven lines of cars trying to squeeze into three lanes. Horns sounded. Tempers flared. Some cars started running out of petrol and had to be pushed, adding to the general chaos.

“What the f*** is going on?” became the most used phrase – in several languages – over the next three hours, during which we had crawled about 150 metres across the tarmac towards the Hungarian border. By this point, there was a certain inevitability about both Emma and I suffering a sense of humour failure.
“Someone ought to get onto the Serbian tourist board,” I muttered, swigging the last of our lukewarm water. “People are queuing miles to get out of the place.”
“Unless they’ve driven into Belgrade without a map,” Emma sighed. Despite the south being reasonably pretty in an Austrian kind of way, Montenegro, Croatia and Slovenia had clearly claimed all the tastier ex-Yugoslavian attractions.
“It looks a lot like Norfolk,” Emma had remarked when we had hit the north of the country, a vast expanse of flat arable farmland. It was no surprise that Novi Sad was twinned with Norwich.

By the time we finally hit the front of the queue to enter Hungary, the cause of the delay became clear; every Albanian/Kosovan driving a German car – and they numbered perhaps 70% of the crush – was having to turf their every possession out of their car while the somewhat over-zealous Hungarian customs officials searched under their seats for concealed cigarettes or booze. This process was taking ten minutes per car.

“It must be an EU thing,” Emma shrugged, shaking her head. “They might have been told to crack down on anyone suspicious without an EU passport.”
This theory appeared to be backed up when after five hours in total, we were waved through without so much as a cursory glance. A tip to Albanian smugglers; if you want to get five hundred weight of fags or whatever into the EU, use English mules.
“We should have gone through Croatia,” Emma groaned.
“So should they,” I added. “If they’re heading for Germany, why on earth have they gone so far out of their way by taking this route?”
“Maybe Croatia makes them pay for their visas or something.”

The result of all of this chaos was that by the time we made it into Hungary it was 10:30 in the evening, and every hotel in the nearby town of Szeged was full. Fearing we might have to sleep in the car, we found our way back onto the motorway hoping to find a motel with vacancies, and got lucky. We arrived at Gatwick the next day having been on the road 38 hours - two longer, we noted ruefully - than it had taken my brother and his family to get to the UK from Brisbane!

It was a good job they were worth seeing again (my nephew was very cute and well-behaved, a combination which instantly endeared him to me). It was a bizarre sensation, actually like having a weekend away in reverse – just four days later we were back in Budapest again with a week to kill until we drove east towards Romania and our friends the Ridgleys. Thankfully, Budapest is one of the most interesting and lively cities in the world in which you could spend seven days, with plentiful museums, art galleries, theatres, thermal spas and cooling leafy parks.

Budapest has the best of all worlds – the western creature comforts are nicely counterbalanced by the ex-iron curtain hipness imbued by decades worth of oscillating history that has taken in Russian occupation, early 50s liberation and over a century of bohemian culture. Everywhere you glance there’s gorgeous Austro-Hungarian architecture one way and strangely compelling Soviet era concrete sculptures to the other, stretching from the classical, castle hills of Buda to the studenty, cool, flat geometry of Pest, all of it sprinkled with trams and some of the most beautiful McDonalds anywhere (seriously, the one at Nyugati Station is utterly wasted on the ubiquitous fast-food merchant). Being involved in poetry, music, dance or the arts is still something to be proud of in Hungary. When I admit to being a writer, instead of the immediate assumption that I must be a penniless scrounger without a “proper” job there are nods of approval and interested questions. In Budapest, it’s unusual if you haven’t written a book, or played in a band, or opened a restaurant as my cousins Imola and Robi have (Kölöves, on the corner of Dob ut and Kacinsky ut if you fancy delicious Hungarian/Jewish specialities). These are still things to aspire to and be proud of. Back in London, it seemed that the only things that would grant you a slap on the back or appreciative noises were ownership of a SMEG fridge or a new Audi. It’s this obsession with the material that first started to drive my ambitions away from London. In Budapest, culture, hospitality and the arts are the things to be celebrated. For me, anyway, it’s a refreshing outlook.

When in Budapest, therefore, it’s rude not to take full advantage of the events on offer. On previous visits we’ve moseyed around art galleries, listened to underground jazz in the evenings and soaked away afternoons in the famous Szecheny and Géllert spas. This time around, we decided take advantage of the things we’d be unlikely to find in either Monte or Maramures in Romania - namely cinemas, open-air opera and music festivals – we hoped to visit the Sziget Music Festival later that week. At the cinema, we saw The Dark Knight, which we both thought was excellent, and WALL-E (which one of us thought was sentimental crap). As revenge, Emma (for yes, it was she) insisted on a night at the opera, declaring that her love of Puccini had to be sated. Opera tends to divide people into two camps – those who love it and those who have only really heard the songs popularised by the Three Tenors. It’s always been a bit like cricket for me in that it lasts a long time, it’s well nigh impossible to figure out what’s going on unless you’re an expert and it invariably all ends in tears in the end (I speak as an England fan). Sadly Manon Lescaut turned out to be one of Puccini’s lesser-known works (ie, Pavarotti never sang it), and if you’ve ever gone to watch opera before you’ll know that having a rudimentary understanding of the plot in advance is often useful if you’re to have a fat tart in a tent shrieking at you in a foreign language for nearly three hours. On this occasion the action unfolded in Italian with Hungarian subtitles “helpfully” beamed via computer onto a board above the stage. The net result of this was that we stared gormlessly down at a sparsely decorated stage (whose principle prop appeared to be a massive smoke machine of the kind beloved of school plays everywhere) not having the faintest idea what was going on. We trouped out of the theatre having witnessed an alarming final act in which the lead soprano appeared genuinely unsure if the stage was really on fire or not only to find out subsequently that we had accidentally left during the interval.

Of course, we would have known better if we had been able to understand Hungarian. Unfortunately, Hungarian is one of those languages that simply can’t be learned by anyone who comes from anywhere else – and I speak not only as a wannabe polyglot but also as someone who is proudly half-Hungarian. Officially, Hungarian is a Finn-Ugric language, which means it’s very loosely related to Finnish and Estonian – and completely different to everything else. For those of you not to have yet come across it, it’s an unholy mish-mash of inexplicable grammar, indecipherable pronunciation and the sort of compound words that would twist a German’s tongue into submission, all using word-stems that bear no resemblence to Latin, or anything else you might have encountered. There’s simply no frame of reference, nothing you can use to even guess what words might mean, no common thread to cling to as you might with other European languages. It’s not Slavic, it’s not romance, it’s not Anglo-Saxon. Knowledge of these stems will not help you figure out if the bottled water you’ve just bought is fizzy or not.

“Termézsetes ásványvíz, szén-dioxiddal dúsított”.

The only thing that gave me a clue was the word “szén” (“sane”). Was that like the Spanish – “sin” – for “without” (and bonus points to anyone who can pronounce this excerpt correctly)?
Clue – I was only alerted to my erroneous assumption by a label I spotted on the back of the bottle – Best Foreign Sparkling Water Awards Winner 2007. I mean, come on. What are you supposed to make of a language in which the word “szia”, pronounced “see-yah” is actually the word for “hi”?

So see ya. I mean later. Not hello.