Suurte puuviljatujatukkidega!

May 8, 2007

Around the rim of my yoghurt pot is a broad yellow band designed to catch the eye. On it are bright red words. They say:

Extra nagy gyümölcsdarabokkal! Suurte puuviljatükkidega!

That's the kind of language Hungarian is.

"Even we Hungarians find it difficult," a woman told me the other night. "The grammar is just too hard." The actual words aren't that simple either.

Hungarian: not a language you grasp at first glance, I feel.

Our new president doubtless finds it no problem. We watched the election on television on Sunday night, the only thing we did watch, the climax to weeks of lacklustre campaigning in an election that nevertheless caught the public mood. The new man (it could have been a woman, in which case republican France would have been administered by a Royal for the first time since Louis the Sun King) is the son of Hungarians.

By next morning, or even within 20 minutes, there was no more to be said and cycling life resumed as normal. Except that I am struggling to come to terms with Hungary. There have been hints of smiles, there have been the rare nods of acknowledgement, and there has been a sometimes hyper-enthusiastic wish to give directions and be helpful.

The countryside is pleasant, too, now that we have moved from the flat Slovakian border. The green of grass and trees is strikingly rich, the young crops blow in the wind (a tail wind for the first time in more than a month) and roads wind over hills that are demanding but not debilitating.

However...

Villages are plain ordinary, monotonous strings of bungalows and then a church built in the road as a godly traffic obstacle. But they are nothing to the towns. If Hungary wants to join the fraternity of cycling nations with the enthusiasm with which it has adopted the European Union, then it has to accept that cyclists have an equal and legitimate place on the road.

As it is, the nation is locked in the 1960s philosophy that everything must be done to speed up motorised traffic and that nothing else counts. Roads are arbitrarily closed to cyclists. When they are, it is rare there is a cycle path. When there is a cycle path, it can end after 50 metres.

Hungary's border is more desolate than the picture suggests, but the smile and the welcome are genuine; it is a happier experience getting into ex-communist nations these days than entering Britain or the United States.

When there isn't one, you take your place on the narrow pavement along with pedestrians. There is no ramp, no priority at junctions. You lift your bike down on to the road when the traffic clears, because it won't wait for you other than occasionally, and then pick it up to regain the pavement on the far side. Over and over for kilometres on end if need be. If the pavement just ends, hard luck.

The most bizarre instance happened riding to Esztergom, which is a busy, attractive if obviously tourist town where our route rejoined the Danube. The road is a fast highway and beside it was a cycle path. Quite a good one, as it happened. But 200 metres before the turning we needed, the path ran out. A sign indicated the end of the path. The next, 15 metres later, announced that cycling on the road was forbidden.

This meant that where there had been a path, it would have been legal to cycle on the road. Where cycling on the road was the only option, it wasn't allowed.

This morning we rode 45km into Budapest, the capital.

This was part of the Danube bike route and of Eurovélo 6. Our "Cycling in Hungary" map from the Hungarian tourist people, written with more enthusiasm than the facts justified, said airily that the cycle path would end and those heading for Budapest would face what it accepted was the "busy" main road.

What it didn't care to mention was that 15km out of Budapest, that road too becomes banned to cyclists. There is no path and there are no signs. By chance we found the old road going in the same direction, but when that petered out we were on an unmade track that shadowed the railway and at one point mounted a platform at one end before leaving it at the other.

Somewhere, because there were no signs and no obvious paths, we found ourselves riding a pathway through a depressed area where the size and ferocity of your dog established your order in society. Coming along the back of garages, we startled three lads in the process of a drugs deal. They were so astonished to see two heavily-laden cyclists in bright Lycra heading for them that it took them long enough to hide what they were doing for us to get a glimpse of white powder in plastic bags.

After that, the track ended in a shopping centre and, now on our street map of the city, we got through side streets to the narrow bikeway that enters Budapest beside the Danube. The tourist office will doubtless say it is proud of that path, which it has reason to be, and that that is the way that we should have gone in the first place.

But, if it says that then it is acknowledging that for cyclists there is only one feasible way into a city. And that's not good enough. Hungary is a modern nation in the biggest trading block in the world. Budapest is its capital. It is also a shitty place to ride a bike.

Spread the word.

Now you see it, now you don't... one of Budapest's vanishing cycle paths.

Many years passed. Then in 2015 a message arrived to say that the impossible words on the yoghurt pot were not Hungarian but Estonian. You can find the message in the guestbook.

Now, there are languages you find wherever you roam. English is one. Spanish, French, even German, are others. And then there are languages which pretty much stay at home. So what are the chances of getting to Hungary and finding a yoghurt pot labelled in Estonian?

In my defence, I maintain that it looks like Hungarian. Just as, er, almost any seemingly random collection of letters would look like Hungarian.

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