City Partner Hotel Laterum Pecs

... and livelier. Still, I
plan on doing a bit of relaxing here as apart from going to the natural
thermal lake a few km away in nearby Heviz, I don't plan on doing much
here!



Oh, and before I forget, the one thing Hungary does have over just
about any other country I've ever been to - is that dogs are welcome
pretty much everywhere! Even this high-rise hotel on the lake welcomes
dogs! How cool is that?!?!

We returned to Pecs with the intention of getting an overnight train down to Belgrade. Unfortunately we arrived at the station to late so missed the train. There was an early morning one though so we found somewhere to stay and walked up the road to it. We arrived at the hostel and there were instruction on the door to phone a number if we required a room. While we were waiting for the hostel owner to turn up to give us a room James' camera got stolen. An absolute nightmare as it had some ...

... ourselves. Near the camp site was a massive lake that we went for an early evening wander around which is where we came across an abandoned water park! We managed to find a hole in the fence and had a look round. There was a rather stagnent looking/smelling swimming pool and even a dilapitated water slide. Very ...

... the construction going on everywhere around us. Building were being cleaned and renovated, streets repaved, and the entire main square was torn up (a joint renovation/archaeological project apparently... "Start up the backhoe and let's dig up this road -- Whoops! There's Roman ruins under there! Call the archaeologists!) So carefully avoiding the maze of construction fences, we clambered on.

Our first stop was the Catholic church ...

... also some lovely parks and gardens and we stopped at one for a while and used the town WiFi Hotspot. In 2010 Pecs will be named the European Capital of Culture and will celebrate more than 2000 years of history of the town. It also is home to the University of Pecs with 35000 students, which is one of the biggest and most diverse research and educational institutes ...

... towards the north of Croatia have a more Bavarian look to them. The most interesting thing about them, and a highlight, was that they had stork nests evenly spaced through the towns on specially made structures at the top of telegraph poles. Most of these massive nests had a resident stork and a chick. We crossed the border having our passports checked as we left Croatia and again when ...

... who this woman is who could be the next US vice president. Some chick from Alaska of all places. Sounds like she's got lots of dirty laundry for the press to dig into. Amazing how out of touch with the world you can get when you're travelling. Pecs is a fairly small place, especially compared to Budapest. I didn't do a whole lot when I was there but it was so hot that most of the time you just wandered around from one shady spot to ...

... it hilarious as we stumbled through the consonant clusters and vowel sounds that make up the impossible to learn Hungarian language. In rewards for our attempts at the learning Hungarian they offered up their smuggled in drink, which they called Vibika; they described Vibika as a mixture of local red wine and cola with just a dash of some herbal liquor. This drink is what caused the night to become a blur of accordion ...

... much of this time dodging rainclouds and then trying to get rid of a nasty 24 hour bug that we passed to each other. This and the fact the Tour de France was now in the Alps gave us a good excuse to stay at some of Romania's many affordable pensions with satellite TV ( a night's stay with breakfast is about the same cost as camping in Corsica). So our routine in Romania was to ride to the next town and search out a pension. Once there, ask to see the room ...

... 28th March). Before that time we have a couple of visits from border patrol officers just doing their job and checking that we weren`t hopping across un-noticed...both sets of officers had big smiles on their faces once they spotted the bikes. So everything`s wet, wet, wet..although the Northface tent performed wonderfully (as it should), and the waterproof panniers (Ortlieb...fully recommended to anyone interested in bicycle touring) ensure the clothes etc are dry as a bone. It`s on ...