Perpetual Losers – Greg and Mandy's Travels

Perpetual losers is how I’d classify Hungarians. Every guide has the same running gag in their tour spiel. “We picked a fight with the Ottomans and lost so they occupied us for about 300 years. Then we picked a fight with the Hapsburgs and lost so they occupied us for about 200 years. As part of the Austro-Hungarian empire we were on the losing side of WWI and lost half our land. We sided with Germany in WWII, and when the going got bad we tried to change sides, so Germany occupied us in 1944 and we got involved in the Holocaust. Then we were occupied by the Soviets for 50 years. Tried a couple of uprisings, the big one just before the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, and lost all of them. Haven’t won a World Cup – couldn’t even qualify for this one. In fact Australia has qualified more often than us since 1974. We’ve only been a democratic country for 25 years – maybe we’ll do better this time.”

Called Oungroi by the ancient Greeks, which is how we come to call them Hungary, they refer to themselves as Magyar (May-jar). Their economy isn’t strong enough to be able to use the Euro, and the EU has imposed controls to try to stabilise it. They only have one mountain, and its more of a big hill. 20% of the population live in the one decent sized city, Budapest, so its a matter of Budapest vs the rest of the country. And it’s the only country I can remember visiting whose population is shrinking, including that of Budapest, because too many people are using the EU membership to migrate to somewhere with better prospects.

Around 10% of all jobs in the country, and 8% of GDP, is involved in tourism – touts selling tickets and tours everywhere, then there were cafes and restaurants, souvenirs, accommodation, bus drivers, boat drivers, tour guides, and dozens of walking tour groups. Most of them seemed to be well and truly over it, but I can’t help thinking that if all of the tourists just packed their bags and went home, the whole country would nose dive faster than Malaysian Airlines.

We dutifully spent our tourist dollars on a hop-on hop-off tour bus, and tipping our free walking tour guide. Barbie was her name, which coincided with the news this week that Mattel has just released a new wifi connected Barbie doll that can have (semi) intelligent conversations with the child by responding appropriately to what the child says. Must be a scream trying to create artificial intelligence to talk back to a 3 year old in fantasy mode. Anyway, I digress.

Barbie was good, but there was a small issue of around 200 people turning up for the free tour. A conundrum really. The economy is in the toilet, relying on the tourist dollar, and all the backpackers want the free tour. So 6 walking guides arrived, and divided up the masses, and off we went. Interesting fact about motivation. Our walking tour guides who operate on tips were terrific (and did well out of it). The touts selling tour tickets were motivated, but once you’d bought your ticket, the bus drivers and bus guides were disinterested and perfunctory.

However our walking tour was good. We wandered over the Chain Bridge to the Buda side of the Danube, also known as the hilly side, and up the hill to the Castle. Lovely views and interesting history. After the tour, which concluded at the top of the hill, we hopped on the tour bus at one of the stops, and went up the other hill to the Citadel to see one of the two remaining ‘gift’ statues from the communists to the hard working comrades of Budapest. More good views. Almost an hour wait for the next bus back to town, whose driver was rather hoping that if there were no passengers they could have a long smoke.

Walked back to the apartment, picked up our bags, and off down the road in search of the other international train station. Arrived early, so had tea in McDonalds where, with the patience of a saint, Mandy watched her husband fluff around and almost miss the train, though we did manage to agree that the displayed information was rather hard to interpret. Turned out we weren’t the only passengers who went to the wrong platform. Another passenger told us that his asthmatic wife was now recovering on her bed after running between platforms.

Slummed away the evening in our 2 berth first class sleeping cabin, blissfully falling asleep to the gentle clunking of the wheels, until a not so gentle hammering on the door around 11pm roused us. “Passport control” they yelled and hammered. Quickly dressing and searching for our passports I opened the door to police with guns and truncheons, who took my passports and disappeared. Luckily they returned them a few minutes later. Didn’t think it would help anybody’s mood to point out that we were going from one Schengen country to another. Anyway, back to sleep.

Thirty minutes later, more hammering. “Passport Control”. Aarrgh. Must be Romanian police this time. At least the passports were easy to find. Surely we can go back to sleep this time. And so it transpired.