Hello air conditioning!

The Hungarian love affair with egg continues at breakfast, with the choice only being, “Which omelette do you want?” Nothing else on the menu. I choose an omelette with plenty of tomato to drown out the egg taste. When cycling, you just cannot skip breakfast.

We leave Hajós and take the road to Baja, rather than retracing our steps back to EV6. We will pick the route back up in Baja. We travel a lovely undulating road, through farmlands and vineyards. A few kilometres from the outskirts of Baja we are hot and hoping for respite, when we happen upon a winery at the side of the road. It looks like what we would recognise as a cellar door, so we pull in to see what we can see.

Inside, the place looks a little chaotic and we have some fun trying to communicate – with no common language – with the woman inside. What we think is that the place normally runs as a cellar door/shop, but is under renovation. She suddenly drops to her knees and rummages through a cupboard and brings out a bottle of wine, saying, “Gratis”. It’s a bottle of ice wine. We couldn’t have that, and insist on paying her for it. In exchange she goes out to a back room and brings back two large bottles of water, for the obviously hot and dehydrated cyclists. We make more conversation with small words and sign language and manage to get across where we are from, where we have been and where we were going.

The saddest thing about travelling in a country where you speak only a few words of the language is that you miss out on the rich rewards of being able to really connect with the people you meet along the way. It would have been lovely to have had a real conversation with this woman from the winery.

We say goodbye, carefully stow the bottle of ice wine, and continue on our way, arriving very quickly on the outskirts of Baja. Uncertain at a roundabout, we are stopped, consulting paper maps, when a car suddenly stops and man gets out, asking where we are headed. He corrects our course and goes on his way.

Two people, in such short space of time, showing kindness to strangers. This part of the world is rapidly growing on me.

We stop briefly in Baja to get money and cannot resist an ice cream. On leaving town, we travel by road until Szeremle, where the route takes us back onto a dike track and closer to the river all the way to Mohács. We have decided that Mohács will be a two-night stop. We’ve been on the road for four days now since leaving Budapest. The heat has been relentless all four days and we’ve booked two nights in a hotel by the river in Mohács – with air conditioning! To get to Mohács we must make a ferry crossing.

When we arrive at the ferry crossing we wind through the waiting cars and straight down to the ferry loading zone. It turns out that we should have bought a ticket back up the hill somewhere but the ticket guy on the ferry takes pity and just waves us on. This makes the third act of kindness today, and we are very, very grateful, as we would have missed this ferry and had to hang around in the heat for the next one.

Our hotel is right there on the other side of the river, and before long we are ensconced in blessed air conditioning. It is only early afternoon, and we have chores to do, most particularly laundry. There is no Laundromat in town so we have to check it in with our hotel.

Our next point of business is to approach the EV6 information booth in Mohács to get general information about the route. From Mohács we can either go into Croatia or Serbia and we are keen to get info on the route and confirmation of the rumours of the border closure. Unfortunately all we got was a shrug of, “I don’t know,” and a map.

We order a beer at the hotel bar and enjoy a riverside view, but it is still so hot, so we decamp to the very popular restaurant just across the road to check out the menu. There seems to be some kind of bean dish on the menu and I am very excited until I am shot down by a waiter who says the only vegetarian dish on the menu is … wait for it … fried cheese. We sit down at a table and order a beer, then suddenly, to my surprise, a plate of fried cheese appears in front of me. Very strange; I did not think I had actually ordered. Oh well, there have been plenty of communication failures in the past week or so, and they are all our fault for not being able to speak the local language. We eat the cheese, order a bottle of wine and some more food (salad for me), and relax with the riverside view.

Many of the Hungarian people we have seen along the way are, umm, well built. They obviously enjoy their lives and their food and their beer, and carry that joy as body baggage. A party arrive and are seated at a table right in front of the river view. They order, and before long are large pork knuckle dish is delivered to the very large man in the party. I cannot resist and try to take a discreet photo of the man eating a meal nearly as large as he is. I succeed, but it is only afterwards that I have been sprung by somebody at his table, staring directly into my lens. Oh well.

It is SO nice to sleep in air-conditioned comfort. I make a new rule: no accommodation that does not have air conditioning until this heat wave breaks.

We’ve been travelling in the heat for over a week now. By all reports this heatwave has been running for more than two weeks. Maybe we were clever after all for heading into the mountains in our first week?

Today was possibly the hottest day yet, with the temperature hovering around and above 40 degrees for much of the time we were on the road.

Stats for today:

• Distance: 66.4km
• Climb: 112m
• Average speed: 19.3km/h
• Average temperature: 36C
• Moving time: 3:26:28
• See our ride on Strava

The beer picture

At the end of a day’s ride, our tradition is to enjoy a beer, and to photograph it for posterity. Today’s beer picture was taken at our wonderfully air conditioned hotel on the banks of the Duna in Mohács.

Along the way today: