Well here’s a first. I didn’t take a single photo during the ride today. Sorry! It’s just that this really was something of a ‘filler’ day – with bad light and then rain. But I have been out this evening with the camera.
It had clouded over in the night and rain was threatening for the first time for a week. It was also cooler – hurrah – about 18C as we left Gyor. The suburbs were strangely familiar – it was just like riding out of the south of Leeds, but flatter. Similar road surfaces, traffic levels, traffic signs, freight lorries, industrial units, blocks of flats, inner city motorways .. you don’t need a photo – you get the picture. The cycle route was poorly signposted and we would never have found it without the GPS.
Then we were into villages, mostly single story houses always strung out along the main street. There were more people out and about than in the deserted villages of Western Europe, and more everyday use of bicycles.
Just after lunch it started to rain and we abandoned any idea of going on to visit the spa town of Tata. Instead we called it day once we had returned to the Danube in Komárom. (’Returned’ is slightly misleading. Downstream from Bratislava the river used to branch out into a huge inland delta, before coming back together 100 miles on when threading between hills at the Great Bend. Most of the branches have been drained and the main river straightened and channeled, but one old branch (the Moson Dona) remains as an irrigation channel and we had been following it to Gyor and beyond. So we hadn’t really left the Danube).
We found a room in a small hotel that forms part of Komárom’s thermal spa. Komárom has an interesting history. It used to include the cities on both sides of the Danube – connected by a bridge. But with the end of WW1 the border of Czechoslovakia was moved to follow the Danube and the city was divided. The Czech (and now Slovakian) city is called Komárno.
Tomorrow it’s back to following the Danube downstream, heading for the Great Bend.
Helen’s track of the day: Anton Dvorak, From the New World, Largo, which we listened to this evening on TV, played by an American orchestra in a concert recorded in Japan for French television and watched by us in Hungary.
