Budapest Walks: Buda Hills and the Elizabeth Lookout

Last weekend we had a brief interval of beautiful weather between the pulverizing heat of the previous week and the cold and rain of this week. Nice weather for a good hike.

Destination: the top of the Jánoshegy ("Mount John". I don't know which John it's named after. You are free to use your imagination, especially since Budapest now has an Elvis Presley Square) in the Buda Hills, at 538 meters the highest point in Budapest, about a 400 meter climb from the Danube. Of course, we've wandered up around there many times, but never hiked up from the base, much less all the way from home. But we will be on holiday in Croatia shortly, and there is a certain mountain there that I plan to climb. So we need a bit of training.

We saddle up Folti and off we go. First crossing Erszébetváros - Elizabeth-town - our own District VII, which will get its own blog entry at some point. There is an Elizabeth theme running in this one though. They are all the same Elizabeth, nicknamed Sisi, Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary, wife of Franz Josef (why is usually only half his name anglicized in English?). Hungarians like naming stuff after her because after the 1848 revolution it was her affection for Hungary that restored us to the good Imperial graces, thereby resulting in the dual monarchy of 1867 (i.e., that’s when we start to talk about an Austro-Hungarian empire, rather than simply an Austrian Empire with Hungary as one of the constituent kingdoms), leading to a period of wealth, prosperity and cosmopolitan urban culture that is still visible in the architecture of Budapest and other Hungarian cities from the period. But the dual monarchy also ultimately led Hungary, as a co-belligerent of the Central Powers in WWI, even though we didn't control our own foreign policy, to the castigation of the victors and Trianon and the dismemberment of the country. Which makes us sad. But we don't blame Sisi.

And across the Elizabeth Bridge and the Elizabeth Statue (shown here together), which is for some reason in Döbrentei Square and not Elizabeth Square. And passing through a little valley between the Gellert Hill and the Castle Hill, and up the Sun Hill (or maybe Day Hill, it's the same word), the first little bump of a residential hill, where all the streets are named after ferocious animals—Panther Street, Tiger Street, Fox Street, etc–we are officially in the Buda hills. (We’ll have to pass close to that TV tower at the top of the hill in the background below, and then turn right for a couple miles to get to the lookout tower).

I’ve lived in Budapest for a good while now, but the Buda Hills still seem exotic to me. With its crooked streets and hidden gardens, there’s still a whiff of Oriental mystery up there that’s hard to put a finger on, as if the Turkish occupation hadn’t quite ended yet. In fact, I’ve met people who have lived there up all their lives and still think it’s exotic. A funny thing about Budapest people, including us blow-ins, is that we almost invariably divide ourselves, at some deep level of the personality and identity, into Buda people and Pest people, a phenomenon that often occurs to newcomers almost immediately. In my own case, even though I rationally know that Buda is basically nicer and more distinctive than Pest, I still got drawn into the vibe and bustle of Pest-ness early on and even though I worked in Buda for five years (a flat part of Buda with only the merest sprinkling of Ottoman intrigue in the area), I always felt like I was travelling to a different city each day, and I’m not sure how I would adapt to moving there to live.

It’s a nice place to visit, though. The bulk of our climb took us through the wealthiest parts of the town, whose inhabitants, some of whom might have come about their fortunes through entirely legitimate means, had thoughtfully abandoned the capital for weekends at the Balaton or longer holidays elsewhere, so we didn’t have to dodge lots of black Mercedes and Audis hurtling around the corners on their way to whatever it is rich people are always doing urgently.

 

And at the top we come out in the middle of a turn-of-the century rural village, complete with Hungarian Art Nouveau school building, right in the middle of Budapest. Well, not right in the middle, but certainly a good way from the city line, which runs through fields and forests in some areas. If you live around here, you can commute to work on the cog-wheel train, which I bet never loses its thrill.

Now we are on the main ridgeline of the Buda hills, given over to parkland. Folti is relieved of her leash and we tromp through the Norma wood, so named because of a famous outdoor performance of Bellini’s Norma that was once made up her long ago.

This little strudel stand is revered by many Budapesters, especially for its cabbage-stuffed offerings (I'm not just making that up). Móni wanted a lángos though, which is a kind of a deep-fried pizza dough with toppings of your choice – garlic and sour cream being typical – that you should really only eat after climbing a big hill.

Our quarry is in site. It's that little dot on the top of the bump:

And here it is:

 And here we are at the Elizabeth Lookout. It’s named after Elizabeth because she used to hang out up here when in town to enjoy the breeze and view, and after her death (by a completely pointless assassination, poor thing) her many admirers erected a tower in her name for the good people of Budapest to enjoy forever after. 

Here is the view from the top in roughly the four cardinal directions. This is what I mean about when I talk about the lack of urban sprawl here. To the East we see the downtown area. See if you can pick out where I live!

Wow, the earth really is round. But to South, West, and North respectively, there's a noticeable lack of strip malls and subdivisions:

Which is how cities should be. But just in case I've given the impression that Budapest is perfect, here is a picture, taken after scrambling down and starting tolook for a nice terrace restaurant to eat schnitzels in (the waiter even brought Folti some beef scraps), of one of our new well-conceived bike paths.

Salzburg / Berchtesgaden

Our Weltanschauungs stricken with Wanderlust, we headed off for the Alps last weekend. This was Móni’s birthday present from April: I promised to take her to Austria in the summer, but my fixation with border areas overcame me, and when planning the trip I said, well, why don’t we get one of these cheap train tickets to Salzburg (39 Euros return!) and then we can stay in the mountains in Berchtesgaden on the German side of the border and go hiking in the national park there, and if we clever about it maybe we can even work out how to cross the Austrian-German border on foot somewhere.

For some reason, I have spent very little time in Germany, and none at all since first moving to Europe in 1999, except for Frankfurt airport, where I have also spent very little time because the Germans are so good at getting their connecting flights into the air without delay. Frankfurt airport is far and away the finest airport in my little Atlantic world, but I don’t think visiting an airport actually counts as visiting the place to whose name it is attached.

Once we tried to dash into the city of Frankfurt on the way to New York (Newark, not JFK, which is the 3rd worst airport in my little Atlantic world after Heathrow and CDG) a few years ago – this other new travel mania besides crossing borders on foot: flying between Budapest and the US, usually New York or Washington, I try to find the longest stopover I can in an attractive stopover city and wander around there for a bit while waiting for the connection. I’ve reaped near-free mini 5-hour holidays in Copenhagen and Warsaw this way. Alas, the attempt at Frankfurt was thwarted by heavy storms that delayed the Budapest-Frankfurt leg, and we were lucky to catch the connection to Newark, even with the five hours built in.

Anyway, even if I haven’t been to Germany much, I have visited Austria quite often, so I sort of feel like I have spent a fair amount of time in Germany no matter what Austrians and Germans may tell you, probably drawing some analogy to the US and Canada.

So with rainy skies but prospects for nicer weather the next day, we boarded Austrian Railway’s Railjet at the Keleti train station and zoomed westward. This is a funny aspect to rail travel in this part of Europe. Some of the rolling stock, like the one to Belgrade, for example, is decades old, maybe even centuries old, and you get a view of the railroad ties flashing past below when you flush the john. If you go to Salzburg on the OBB Railjet though, you enjoy the moxt luxurious train travel since the Orient Express. It even has a screen with a GPS system that, rivetingly, shows you exactly where you are on the map as you glide across the countryside, just like an airplane. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. And km per km, they cost the same as the rumbling hulks on the Balkan and local lines, although the coffee costs a lot more on trains with internal plumbing.

Six hours later we detrain (I always thought “detrain” was an ugly neologism but recently found it used in Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to All That”, so I guess it’s OK.) in Salzburg train station. Train whooshes off toward Munich and we, after visiting the left luggage, wander off to spend about 3 hours in Salzburg. the following photos are actually from the 3 hours on the return trip, where we saw pretty much the same things except without total cloud cover and the occasional downpour.

Lovely city. I was here once when I was very young, but don’t remember it.  Slightly over-touristed – oddly the bulk of the tourists seemed to be American, or at least the most vocal segment was. Home to the famous chocolate-covered marzipan Mozartkugeln and its namesake tunesmith. One can go up to the schloss pictured above, or look at the Mozart museum, but for this trip, simply wandering around a bit was sufficient. In general, Salzburg falls into a category of city that I find very attractive these days: medium-sized cities with a high level of culture, like Seville, Bologna or even Cluj Napoca. Salzburg might be a little twee to be considered for long-term habitation, but I will certainly be visiting again to explore more in depth, especially since it makes a good stopping-off point for these alpine adventures.

Note to self: Download “Sound of Music”, er, in a completely legal fashion that provides suitable compensation for the starving heirs to the films’ stakeholders. When I first saw it at around age 5 I thought it was the early life story of my Aunt Maria, who is also blonde and also fled to the United States from Totalitarian Europe. But it turns out that it was a different Maria.

From perches in the old city along the schloss you can see the Berchtesgaden Alps, and they are a good deal higher and craggier than the gentle rolling Alps in the other directions, so clearly going to Germany was a good call as far as seeing big mountains goes, and when you live in Hungary, you don't get to see many big mounts.

It is the Berchtesgaden area that gives Austria its funny shape, as if Germany is sticking its elbow into Austria’s ribs. Taking the bus to Berchtesgaden a few minutes later (45 minutes from Salzburg: interestingly Salzburg and Berchtesgaden are on the same local transport network and the bus is full of commuters heading home. I’ve always wondered what it is like to live in one country and work in another), it’s easy to see why the border has a strange shape. This spade-shape bit of Germany is surrounded by towering peaks on three sides and forms a natural boundary at the crests. My Historical Atlas of Central Europe suggests that this border has been in existence since at least around 1250, when the territory of the Archbishop of Salzburg was under the rule of the Dukes of Bavaria.

We had a pleasant little B&B in a hamlet with a few houses, an old working (Catholic) church, and a few such B&Bs, a few km out of town with Herr and Frau Kürz. Since I can read functional German pretty well but make a hash of it in writing and they seemed to have a similar lack of confidence in their English, when booking the room we had been emailing in a mishmash of both language, and they decided to have some fun with Google translate so we got all their emails in three languages: German, mangled English and even more mangled Hungarian, the latter two anglicizing and magyarizing their names into Mr. and Mrs. Short and Rövid and Rövidné respectly.

The Kürz’s/Shorts/Rövids were awful friendly people: Bavarians are more like Austrians in this sense than many northern Germans, who aren’t necessarily unfriendly, but generally more reserved. Also the Kürzes, like most everyone else in the area, were happy to let us practice our German rather than switching into English – which in their school days they may not have studied quite so assiduously as their urban northern brethren tend to. Moni and I together, probably speak German about as well as a German 6 year old who is unusually conversant in Wagner, the contents of wellness magazines, and other specialized topics of interest. It’s tag-team German though, since often only one of us gets the meaning of the sentence, or we need to consult before responding. So it was good to practice, especially as we occasionally toy with the idea of living and working somewhere in the Teutonosphere at some point. One problem with English being the international language is that it makes it difficult to practice other languages, and not only for native English speakers, since unless Interlocutor A speaks the native language of Interlocutor B at a very high level, it is often easier for both to switch into English. The corollary is the further you get into the boondocks, the easier it is to charm them with your beginner mistakes in language B, because Interlocutor B, the country-dweller, is like to have relatively lower English skills and a lot more patience than his/her urban peers.

For the purpose of getting away from urban stress, this must be a great place to live. Dependent on tourism, but with a lot of hard physical work evident, with people cutting hay, chopping firewood, tending livestock, in exchange for which you get fresh air, water, and a good night’s sleep, and as much guilt-free sausage as you can eat. As in most rural areas, there was a noticeable lack of people in their 20s and 30s who weren’t there as visitors. No doubt many of them wander off to nearby Munich or other cities to find careers and stimulus, but I would be surprised if a large percentage of those didn’t return home after they have had enough. 

After supper of liver dumpling soup and Bavarian ham hocks at the inn next door and an excellent night’s sleep amidst the unfamiliar sound of nothing. Morning of Day 1, after breakfast with our fellow guests (more German practice) we wandered off in intermittently drizzly weather into Berchtesgaden itself where we unexpectedly caught the Eidelweiss Classic: a classic car rally starting from the main square:

This was the only Edelweiss we saw, as it only grows above 2000m altitude and we, starting from a deep valley, never got about 1000m. Next time. As you can see, Berchtesgaden is a picturesque little town. It looks bigger than its true number of inhabitants due to, mainly German, visitors.

The entire area is a hiker’s paradise, crisscrossed with trails of every level of difficulty. From Berchtesgaden we followed burbling brooks and rolling meadows of grazing cows, down to the Königsee, a deep glacial lake surrounded by the high peaks that make up the national park, and then wandered around there for a few hours:

Wandering back to the B&B, we stopped for a weisswurst supper with weissbier at one of the biergartens thoughtfully placed near the trail. Moni asked for sour Bavarian potato salad as a side dish. “Mit weisswurst?” gasped the horrified waiter, but then recovered and smiled. “Ja. Kein problem. Hier gibt alles.” This must have been the Bavarian equivalent to ordering cucumber salad with your stuffed cabbage in Hungary (my own favorite trick). Had we been locals we might have been summoned to a judicial inquiry with regard to our cultural loyalty but as silly foreigners, we duly got our weisswurst, in their little pots of hot water, together with the traditional sweet mustard and pretzels and the potato salad.

Another good night sleep, but the big question is: will it clear up on Sunday? No it didn’t. Alpine weather is hard to predict. My theory as to why Hungarian weather announcers often have such a tough time telling us what the weather will be like the next day, aside from the safer explanation of simple incompetence, is that downwind from the Alps you just have no idea what’s going to hit you. The Alps are like a bumper in a gigantic meteorological pinball machine. Will you get warm Mediterranean air from Italy? Rain from the North Sea? Who knows? Find out tomorrow. But we’ll make up some numbers just so we don’t look stupid.

With our usual travel luck, it was not drizzling the next day but pouring. And it looked like the blue sky we were expecting was still over France somewhere. So, the other options being the various perhaps not so fascinating museums in the area (Salt processing museum, Local history museum), we went hiking in the rain.

So to go with the rotten weather, today has a Nazi theme. The area is unfairly associated with them, because Hitler built his private country house in the area, the Berghof, and then all his top toadies followed suit until the area was overrun with them.

 
We start at the Berchtesgaden train station, which is a pretty good example of Nazi architecture (kind of an imposing mixture of medieval and industrial design: they really liked those parallel sets of high vertical windows, or of high vertical anything) and then headed upward – this was our one pretty good climb of the weekend, about 400m, to Obersalzberg (there is lots of salt in this whole region). Obersalzberg is where the Berghof stood, along with many of the other Nazi villas. The Brits bombed the crap out of it at the end of the war when presumably the main targets were in Berlin debating what was to be done about the Red Army. Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be anything left of all those places. There is a Fascist-era history museum, which we didn’t visit, and a refreshment stand, which we did.

The main site of interest we missed was the Kehlstein (for some reason translated as Eagle’s Nest in English) the mountain aerie retreat built for Hitler that missed being bombed), shown here looking appropriately forbidding.

Apparently it has been spared by the wrecking balls because Hitler, out of fear of heights (not sure I believe this) only visited a few times and therefore it is not as closely associated with him and the top Nazis as the Berghof. For 15 euros you can get a bus that takes you 1000m from Obersalzburg to the top along some crazy winding mountain road that is considered a marvel of engineering.  On a nice day you can see as far as 200 km, and apparently there is a relatively easy walk from there along the mountain crest to the Austrian border. But in this weather, all you would see is a big cloud and we were already soaking wet, so we gave it a miss on this trip and hiked back down. We’ll be back in this area sometime again.

Dinner, more leberknudel suppe and well-deserved Munich-style beef scallops in onion sauce.

The next morning, when it was time to leave, glorious weather emerged and we got in a quick walk before grabbing the bus, a few more hours in Salzburg, and then home.