Rain, rain rain and a not so blue Danube

After a very rainy night and the forecast doesn’t seem much better for the next few days we decide to head north towards the great river Danube. En route we pass a stork (just had to sneak one in).

And a town with some old communist architecture complete with a Tesco Hypermarket.

More fields of sunflowers

A castle

And we drive up two hills !! - quite a rarity in Hungary as it’s so flat.

Early afternoon and we arrive at the Unesco world heritage site of Pannonhalma abbey which is a 1000 year old Benadictine abbey and monastery.

Visit is by guided tour only as the building is still a “working” monastery. We thought that we would be the only two on their 15:20 English speaking tour but no, there were two Dutch, a couple from Scotland who might as well have been speaking Hungarian their accent was so broad, and a Chinese couple with a toddler in a rucksack.

The tour took us round the outside of the heavily restored buildings

 then into the interior of the chapel

and their impressive library with documents from 1022.

We then head north for an hour to the river Danube where we stop for the night in Komorom, we stay in a campsite as the area looks a bit rough and it’s getting late. The great river is a few hundred yards away from our overnight stop so we take a walk and find that a railway line is between us and the river but we manage a glimpse through the trees, finally there it is.....

The mighty Danube.

One of the best bits about travelling is that every so often you happen on a “pocket of bizarreness”, Komorom is one of them. On arrival it’s one of those places where when driving you don’t stop for too long or else someone will have jacked up your car and stolen your wheels. The road where we staying is on the outskirts of a housing estate, it has three hotels, two campsites, and two bar/restaurants, at the end of the road down by the railway line is a huge car park with black tyre marks where the local chavs have been doing donuts in their pimped trabants. As it’s late we decide to eat at the best of the two non descript restaurants, fearing the worst we enter into a 1980’s dark wood decorated room which has a surprising amount of people in it, we are greeted by a camp Austro/German guy obsessed with making cocktails who speaks some English, unlike his waitress who is an overweight Hungarian woman with a beard and warts who only speaks her native tongue. We choose local fayre and are pleasantly surprised by the food quality and the cost. Leaving the restaurant we pass the other campsite which has a disco booming away in the bar, we can see through the windows people wearing shell suits dancing away and can quite clearly make out the song, “Oona paloma blanca”.

Maybe if Komorom should have a twin town it should apply to Bridgwater, they seem an excellent match.