Hungarian Venice

Just an hour away from Budapest you can experience what I like to call "Balaton Light". Go jump in a lake, scarf down some fried fish and take a hike around Hungary's Lake Venice.

A couple of years ago my old beer buddy decided to finally settle down. He and his wife first moved to Székesfehérvár, but later found a great house in a town called Agárd near Lake Venice (Velencei tó). Although it's a shame my beer buddy and I don't get to have a beer every week like in the old days, my lady and I are treated to his family's weekend retreat, which is a combination of living in the countryside and the archetypal Hungarian resort town atmosphere, just like the communities along Lake Balaton.

So on the weekends we got to Agárd I get to see my old friends with whom I once roadtripped to France to produce a report on the Tour de France and am also treated to the sights and amenities around Lake Venice.

The lake itself can be pretty nice on hot summer days, a great place to sunbathe, take a cooling dip (although the water could be cleaner), and drink beer and eat fried fish at the fastfood stands - simple pleasures.

A tiny town, Agárd also has some decent attractions including a great thermal bath facility, pálinka distillery, wine cellar and the childhood home of Géza Gardonyi who wrote the Hungarian children's classic "Egri Csillagok".

Reach a higher ground, though, by taking a trip across Lake Venice to the Venice Hills (Velencei-hegység). We have taken this short journey through the reeds on a cute little ferry boat. As buses run fairly infrequently (and rail only services the south side of the lake), this last visit to the region my buddy took us by car to the north side for our hike, to the tiny town of Pákozd. Incidentally, last year we showed up their on May 1st and enjoyed a big community get-together with football, beer and free food from a gulyás competition. The locals were friendly, too.

But this time around we headed for the hills and the ingókövek - "rocking stone" formations which dot the grassy hillsides. Climb up and they offer you a great view of the landscape. Moving further on up the marked trail the landscape totally changed; all of a sudden we were walking on a deeply forested trail surrounded by towering trees perched on very steep hills on both sides. We didn't run into anyone, but eventually landed upon the Angelika spring, where several families were reconnoitering. This was the edge of our destination, Sukoró.

This idyllic village has an abundance of peasant homes in various states of repair. We run into a cute little bar and ponder having a cheap beer, but the place is packed with members of a hiking group. Seeing a sign for a restaurant, we hightail it up a hill into the heart of the village. Lunch, two bowls of fisherman soup and fresh white házikenyer, is pleasant enough in outdoor seating at the Boglya Csárda.

After our meal we keep going up and find a beautifully-renovated Lutheran church. Down a steep little road on one side of the church, we went in search of Sukoró's tiny ethnographic museum, a real treasure. This museum is a gorgeous peasant home, which belonged to a néni who sold it to the village sometime in the 1960's. She's long gone, but many of her possessions remain, making for an interesting peak into the past. While we'd arrived just 10 minutes before closing time, the museum's caretaker gave us the full tour.

Sukoró is a nice place, but it's not an easy place from where you can get back to Budapest easily: buses to and from the community run infrequently on Sundays. So we hitchhiked back to the south side of Hungary's Lake Velence, where trains back to the Hungarian capital run hourly.