Csoványos Peak

In Hungary we don't celebrate Halloween unless it happens to fall on a Monday, in which case wage slaves get two days off, but have to pretend to work just as hard as they can the following Saturday. It's complicated.

We (Móni, Folti, Andi, and Aquaman) celebrated the holiday by scaling the mammoth Csoványos Peak ("Mount Nettlesome"? Something to do with nettles anyway.), at 936m the 6th highest point in Hungary and the highest in the Börzsöny mountains of Nográd county an hour north of Budapest.

Autumn colors are presently at their fieriest and the landscape reminded me of the Blue Ridge this time of year, where we owned a dacha in the woods when I was a kid and I spent many hours communing with nature and shaping it to my whim. When I first moved to Hungary I thought autumn colors weren't quite as bright as in the Mid-Atlantic or New England, perhaps owing to the lack of maples, which give the red tints, or a couple dud seasons, or maybe I wasn't getting out into proper woods enough. Anyway, today I am perfectly content with them.

People don't really go on foliage tours per se around here, although there were a lot of hikers out on the trail. Transylvania also gets really splendid autumns. But to the north and south the character of the flora changes, and they don't get the deep colors so grandly, or at all. Maybe there's some way to market it to people in Germany and Poland who have to stare at boring old pines all year long, or to Italians sick of their verdant palms swaying in the Tramontana.

Like Kékes, there's no treeline to Csoványos. There's a look-out tower made of stacked-up cement sewer pipes, but big stencilled letters above the right-wing graffiti (presumably by different authors. Why does right wing graffiti always look like it was scrawled by a right wing hobbit?) instruct us not to ascend. So I didn't. I'm sure those who did got a nice view.