Reflections on Cycling Through Hungary

I had not intended to write anything on cycling in Hungary but as it turns out it there were some differences worthy of note from previous countries.

Firstly there is the law. You are most definitely not allowed to ride on the pavement and, if there is a cycle path provided you are legally obliged to use it. This latter point can cause frustration when you you are on a perfectly decent road speeding along and a cycle path appears just set back from the road. You join it only to find it is pretty rough, which slows you down, or that it ends after only fifty yards and you have to wait to rejoin the road, which slows you down, or that it stops on your side after a while and crosses to the other side of the road, which slows you down. That said, these rules do not seem to be followed by many of the locals. Neither does anybody seem to obey the cycle path speed limit, a heady ten kilometres an hour.

Generally the state of the paths has not been bad but there is a definite difference once past Budapest. My bike (and my body) took more punishment I think in the couple of days I did in Hungary after Budapest than in all the previous weeks; one or two of the roads made the worst of those in Britain look reasonable and I would question whether those sections that are currently baked mud could be cycled if the weather was bad.

Signage was definitely an issue in Hungary. When there it was obvious but it was not always where it was needed. In the absence of signs I assumed that I should stay on a road should it turn sharply and this often proved correct, but not always. Sometimes if the road turned I was meant to carry on straight on a secondary track that appeared. There was no consistency. I think a level of local knowledge was also assumed with regard to placing signs: there were times when I would cycle a road or track that came to a dead end only to find I was meant to take the unmarked turning a hundred yards back. The consequence of all these issues was the need to stop regularly and check my position against the route on my navigation app which slowed me down. I would occasionally mount the phone on the bike and set it to full navigation mode, telling me where to go rather than just checking my position, but this would drain the battery quite quickly so I had to choose my moments. 

That navigation app may have been earning its keep but it was not faultless. While cycling through the town of Baja I lost the route and used my mobile to get me through the streets and back onto it. But unbeknownst to me the app had somehow reoriented itself from always facing north (that’s how I like it. Maps are oriented to north. That’s how it is) to the reverse. Zoomed in on the city streets I had no idea as I continued following the blue line downwards towards what I thought was south but which was in fact now the direction I had come from. At first nothing seemed wrong, after all I had missed a chunk of the route, but then things began to look familiar albeit from a different direction. I am still unclear what went wrong but I will be a little more mindful now when using the app on the unsigned roads that I can expect towards the end of my journey.