Who parked that car in our yard!?

We were well rested after KL and keen to move on. Weisie had been to Vienna before but this was my first time, and we both felt that we needed a lot more time (and money) to experience all that the capital of Austria had to offer. I suppose that means we will be going back...




Vienna is a beautiful, historic city with many opulent buildings. It is famed for its late, local musical talent (Mozart and Strauss, among others). We would have liked to attend an orchestral performance but shied away from the guys that hung around squares in stockings, wearing rouge and powdered wigs, touting discounted tickets. Instead, we opted for a whole day in the Natural History Museum. Some might have spent their time differently but all those stuffed animals were a highlight for us!




The Museum has, among many other things, one of the World’s largest collections of meteorites which I had been meaning to see for some time. An iron meteorite (pictured above) found in Australia in 1884 weighed in at just under a tonne. Imagine that! It would have been like a small car crash landing in your back yard (although meteors often enter the atmosphere travelling in excess of 70 kilometres per second and tend to leave craters ranging from ten metres to tens of kilometres wide).

Unusually for us, we did not really have a plan for where to go next. I had enjoyed a few too many celebratory beverages the night before we left Vienna, which did not help, and by a process of elimination and dehydration we jumped off the train half way to Budapest. From there, I paid far too much for a taxi to take us to Gyirmöt, a modest one-store town, best known for the nearby Greek run ‘Achilles Camp’.




We stayed comfortably in a thatched hut from where we witnessed a brilliant lightning storm, avoided the resident family of swans, played over-sized chess and whiled away the evenings drinking red wine on our wooden porch. We spent a summery day in Györ, a gorgeous Baroque-styled town that reminded us of Prague in a way and was well worth the visit. To get there we rode for miles on hired bikes through the woods, which was great exercise but my hand-made straw hat kept blowing off.

Our next door neighbours at the camp were a young Hungarian couple who only came out of their hut (bedraggled I might add) to light up cigarettes every half an hour or so. When we decided to leave Gyirmöt, the pair kindly drove us to the station from where we took the train to Budapest.




Budapest is actually two cities on either side of the Danube: Buda on the East bank and Pest on the West. Although we had heard wonderful things, to be honest, Budapest was not what we expected. Perhaps it was because our hostel had given away our room (a real bore given that a week-long music festival was well under way) or because we could not seem to escape that acridly ureic smell that often plagues European cities that charge money to use public toilets. We did a lot of walking but the only highlight (from our journal) was finding someone willing to sell us a beer on the old chain-bridge that linked the two cities.

A few days later, we flew to London where we stayed only one day (and managed to find a place to live in that time!), washed our clothes and repacked before setting off to see more of the former Soviet Union.