Another relatively early morning today! We were downstairs having breakfast at 8am, ready to catch the two trains to our hiking spot. One hour later we arrived and discovered that ‘hiking’ was really walking up an asphalt road for a while, to a lake with a restaurant. Apparently sometimes the tour goes on an actual hike up a mountain but, due to the varying levels of fitness in this group, Vicky opted for the easier option instead. The walk up was nice, mostly uphill but nothing scary. It was a typical forest walk (so, lots of trees) except that there were swarms of flies everywhere. I was steadily third in the pack and enjoyed walking on my own with no one else in sight.
Hamish, Dan, Julie and I arrived at the lake restaurant first (after about an hour walk) and waited around quite a while for everybody else. The opportunity was taken to skip stones on the lake for a while but mostly, we just stood around for a while. I should note that at this point the weather was cloudy and cool which was actually really refreshing for walking but really not great for photos (so they all look bad again).
Eventually, everybody arrived and soon talks began of walking back the way we came. Hamish began eyeing off the mountain we were at the bottom of and investigations revealed it would take about an hour to get to the top. So, everybody else went home and Hamish, Dan, Julie and I headed off for the hour uphill trek. I was clearly the least fit of the group (the first conversations were about how many push up and tyre flips people could do) but I managed to keep up alright. The middle bit was the hardest, but then Dan and I got talking about books and Agatha Christie conversations made the last third much much easier!
In about the expected hour, we reached the top. The weather was pretty cloudy so we couldn’t see very far but it was still quite impressive. It was mostly exciting to know we’d done some actual hiking and achieved what we’d set out to do. After about 15 minutes relaxing up there, posing for lots of photos and taking in the view we began our descent back down.
Then things got interesting. About two thirds of the way down a thunderstorm hit, complete with thunder, lightning and very heavy rain. Hamish was very lovely and gave me his rain jacket but still things got saturated. And by things I mean everything – my hair, my clothes, my socks, my shoes. We all gave up rock hopping and ended up walking in the creek/path instead. There was no point in being upset and I couldn’t help but be greatly amused by the situation.
The walk back to the train station from the top took just under two hours I think, where we missed the hourly train back by eight minutes. This meant a very cold 55 minute wait and then an hour train ride back (in which we were all very quiet and focusing on pretending to be dry and warm). Once we were back at the hotel we all ran to get hot showers which were AMAZING. I then covered the hotel room with everything that had gotten wet – this included everything in my backpack!
At around 6.30pm the usual six of us decided to leave the group dinner and head back to the place we went last night, at which I ordered the same meal (chicken with parprika sausage sauce, mmm). There was also consumption of wine, Tatra honey cake and hot chocolate that was basically just melted chocolate in a cup. We were all entertained by a Slovakian band downstairs playing violins hideously and then by the wild stag we met on our walk home!
Once back at the hotel Dan, Sarah, Julie and I had our fifth 500 decider match which Dan and Julie won with a killer misere hand (but we don’t really need to talk anymore about that). Tomorrow is our very last day of the tour, which went by extremely quickly! We are not looking forward to saying goodbye to people at all, so we’ll just have to make the most of our one day in Hungary!
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