Pecs

After a peaceful night except for a couple of foxes rooting through the bins in the adjacent picnic area, we leave early for a drive south. The weather has gone cooler and we have had quite a bit of rain and according to the forecast we have more to come.

We seem to be in stork country again so for today only I will resurrect the popular feature from our Portugal trip, “stork of the day”.

This one was photographed 10km down the road from the village of Nagyabajom which has declared itself “white stork capital of Hungary” they have even gone to the trouble of mounting wheels on top of lamp-posts to encourage them nesting there, pity they didn’t tell the storks that as we didn’t see any at all near the village.

We eventually arrive in the city of Pecs, European capital of Culture 2010

The city has some impressive preserved buildings from its turbulent past, these include a Turkish built mosque (now a Christian parish church).

The town hall

Post office.

We go for a wander round and take the tourist train to some outlying sights.

Later we drive north to the lakeside resort of Orfu where we wildcamp for the night in a fisherman’s car park.

As we drive round Hungary we notice a lot of the villages are very similar in appearance, nearly all the houses are single storey with barns attached and a bit of land out back for growing veggies and rearing animals, though they all have satellite dishes.

Another common site are Roma riding round with horses and carts rifling through roadside rubbish skips.

Rural Hungary is quite an eye-opener.