One discount store at a time… So I am in this border town in Hungary trying to spend my last Forints. Mostly on water for me and gas for the bike and I see this shop:
No, no, not the red sign. That magyar-something-something obviously means Hungarian supermarket chain (fluent Hungarian anyone? Thank you Google Translate) but look closer, at the yellow sign: « Kinai diszkont ». Any guess as to what it may mean? My guess is as good as yours: Chinese discount store! Ok, it was funnier in my head but still, it was a tiny border town in Hungary, can’t remember if it was Vámospércs or Nyirábrány and the Chinese discount store was there!
In all truthfulness, I haven’t seen so many Kinai diszkont but the remoteness of this one called my attention.
By the way, I’m happy to be back in a place where I can at least guess what stuff means. Hungarian is so… so… unguessable?
…then buy some food in Hungary and picnic in Slovakia, only to finish the day 30km from Budapest.
That was pretty much the summary of our day yesterday. We woke up where we had camped, in the nice camping by the lake in the north of Bratislava. I woke up after a night in the hammock, there was no mosquitoes and I took the chance. It was pretty nice.
I didn’t sleep on it in Prague
Without further ado (save a shower of course, with boiling water though) we set off on the road to Budapest by the highway. Yes, the highway, but not for long. We stopped for breakfast at a gas station just past the border of Hungary where I bought the most useful piece of kit so far and instantly realized why I had been taking so many highways: because I didn’t know were the other roads were!!
From then on, the day was completely different to the previous days, we took the national roads following the Danube along the Slovakian-Hungarian border. Stopped at a supermarket on the road to buy some food for lunch that we would eat later on the road. When we arrived to Komárom, we wanted to have lunch and decided to cross the river into Slovakia again and set up our picnic in a nice park in Komárno, Slovakia. I enjoy crossing borders with the bike, it gives me a feeling of the distance I’ve travelled.
So far from home…
I especially enjoy these European borders, which are just lines on the ground with no one to stamp your passport even if you wanted to. Although here in Hungary you are supposed to buy a vignette for your vehicle to pay for road use. I’m not so sure if I had to buy it if I’m not using the highways but I bought it anyway, just to be on the safe side. By the end of the day, we had stopped for a couple of pictures in Ezstergom, visited Kisoroszi where we wanted to camp but decided against it, mainly because we didn’t have cash and it looked like a party camping. Back to the mainland and with some cash in my pocket, I was so tired of riding that we stopped at the first camping sign we saw just across the river in Tahitótfalu. It turned out to be a nice camping managed by a very nice Hungarian guy who had hung a French flag in his house as decoration. So we offloaded the bike and went for a pizza in the surroundings.
Although the hammock was there too, it slept on its own that night because it was full of mosquitoes and I didn’t want to wake up itching everywhere. Today, I am writing this from a hotel room in Budapest (I needed to sleep on a bed) as I am about to leave for Debrecen or maybe further. Alice has just left to take her bus back to Prague. She’s such a great friend has helped me so much with all the preparations that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to repay her. Thank you again, Alice!
Alice and her new friend
Now, off to the bike before it’s too hot to ride again!
