A catheral on Tihany, the two towers are visible for some distance.
I honestly don't remember where this was taken, but probably in Tihany.
This is one of those places where we ended up finding something nice after getting lost.
Hidden around Lake Balaton on the north shore are a series of hiking trails, marked out with painted colors, just like the marked national trails in Israel. We saw the red, green, and blue trails, and occasionally signs for orange or yellow.
To find the above trail, we drove up a ridiculously narrow road near Tapolca until it was clear we couldn't go any further, and we parked in front of some farm gate. Then we walked up to an abandoned house, behind which was this trail. This trail leads up to 40 meter basalt columns near the top of the hill, otherwise known as the church organ.
We caused 40 EUR worth of damage to the underside of the bumpers of the rental car turning the car around to get back down.
At the foot of the columns.
The basalt columns.
The view from the top.
Hevitz. Near the southern tip, near Keszthely, Hevitz is one of those places that everyone comes to, as it has the largest natural hot lake in Hungary. As such, the lake is surrounded by a fence and it costs a decent amount to go in. But the walk around the fence is nice.
Here's a random monument near the lake.
The lake, as seen through the fence.
The lake from the other side, as seen through the fence.
In many small towns, the streetlights are adorned with red flowers around their midriff, like this one.
A wood carving on the outside of a small museum in Hevitz. Inside were several exhibits, including one by a Jewish woman about Jewish ritual scenes and synagogues, but it wasn't that good.
Paprika, one of thousands of such stands you can see across Hungary.
A Roman ruins we found in the back of Hevitz.
Goats and sheep we found at the back of our resort.
A horse at our resort.
Some sort of farming equipment displaying an elegant design.
A bicycle renter in Keszthely.
A native of Keszthely.
A tourist replica of a steamship in Keszthely. You would have to be a pathetic tourist to want to get onto one of these things.
My parents on the steamship replica. The ride takes an hour, and is supremely boring. A tape blasts information about the lake in Hungarian and German, and then 3 minutes of English at the end (all numerical information about the lake).
Train access to Lake Balaton is ok at the towns that abut the shore. Here is an old-style train station on the south shore.
Poseidon on the south shore.
Rachel considering, and rejecting, swimming in the lake.
Statues in Dozsa, south of lake. A sleepy town.
A wooden building in Dozsa. Some sort of exhibition hall.
Crafts hanging on the walls of the exhibition hall. Dozsa has nice fabrics, but the townspeople know it and charge tourist prices for them.
More crafts on the wall.
Cloth cuttings on the wall.
Outside, some of the villagers saw us arrive and brought out cloths to show us. They never stopped moving. No sooner did this woman wave and drop one piece that she picked up some other item half hidden below it and waved it and dropped it on top of the previous one, and then again.
They didn't speak any English. Whenever we so much as looked at one of the cloths, one of them held out a certain number of fingers to indicate the price (in thousands of forints), and then held out her forearm and wrote the price out with a finger. The prices were not outrageous, but they were not bargains.
The cloths were quite pretty. As soon as they realized we were not interested, they got somewhat grumpy and began folding up all of their wares again.
In a small store outside a nearby cloth museum, another clothmaker selling wares made by her and her mother. We bought a painted egg.
Bye bye, Balaton.
