Trail Review: Lillafured - Szilvasvarad

Elli’s the young American gal who lives a couple towns over, spending the year here in Hungary at a culinary trade school. I met her on Thanksgiving, and to this day I still call her Thanksgiving Elli in most references.

I didn’t really think that she would be game for an adventure when I sent her a text message, proposing the idea of a backpacking trip. After all, this is a gal who’s turned me down before. (Transcript of actual phone conversation.)

Jeremy: Hi Elli, it’s Jeremy. I’m leaving Nyiregyhaza in an hour or so. Interested in getting some ice cream before I go?

Elli: No. I have to work in the garden.

Jeremy: Okay, then, I have a better idea. How about I buy some ice cream, bring it over, and then help you with the garden work?

Elli: No.

Jeremy: Okay, bye.

But for some reason, she was feeling inclined for a weekend of fun -- what she called her first unplanned adventure ever -- and promptly got her host mom’s permission.

We hit the trailhead in Lillafured, a little resort town most famous for its palace hotel. Just a short narrow-guage train ride up the foothills from Miskolc, Lillafured is like the personal hill-station getaway for Hungary’s second-largest city. Beautiful green hillsides, charming lakes and waterfalls and even some white-faced cliffs shooting upwards.

We set out for the trailhead with our new map of the Bukk National Park, a wooded preserve of rolling hills laced with hiking paths and old logging roads. Trail blazes, though, proved hard to find and we spend hours wandering up and down little towns until we found the red squares painted on trees.

It was Elli’s Hungarian that earned us the trailhead, and I must say that I’m impressed with her prowess with the difficult language. She came at the same time as I did last fall and has embraced the challenge of submersion into the language. I’m proud that she maximized that part of the experience way more than us teachers.

Our job is to demand that kids speak the languages of the world other than Hungarian, it’s best if we don’t let our kids communicate in Hungarian. Her role, on the other hand, is to attend Hungarian language cooking classes, work in a kitchen with Hungarian coworkers, and come home every night to a wonderful Hungarian host mother.

The result is that she’s earned a passable proficiency with the language. She could talk to all of the people we met on the trail. She can hear their story and make them laugh. She’s taken to liking it so much that she’ll enter Indiana University’s Hungarian-language program next fall, sight-unseen. In four days, she even taught me more Hungarian than I usually learn in a month. I’m a bit disheartened at my own effort when I look at her progress and successes.

She’d never been backpacking before and claimed to have a vague dislike for hiking itself. I think the very first hill, too, caught her off guard. I bet she was beginning to question her decision to follow me into the woods. But by the time we found our first campsite 5km down the trail, she was getting into the groove of hiking, two slips into the muddy trail not-withstanding. Spaghetti was good, but nighttime temperature was low. And it rained.

The second day, the terrain was speckled with caves, waterfalls and great woodlands, but without the soaring views of the Matra blue bar trail. We spent time on almost ten different sections of trail, the straightest line across the web of trails toward Szentlelek (10 km). We meant to stop at the private campground there for just a quick beer, but ended up staying a bit longer.

A man who would introduce himself as Jozsef waved at us as we took our packs off next to the mountain hut. He surprised us with English, then an invitation to join a goulash fest. He and his wife, along with another middle-age couple, had bussed to the hilltop campsite for a long afternoon of bubbling goulash to perfection. He proved to be a very friendly man, chatting away most of the evening.

My favorite snippits of conversation?

(Overlooking a view that stretched for maybe a hundred kilometers) "Did you know Slovakia is Hungary? Have you heard about Trianon?"

"Jeremy, you have an Irish accent. Yes, it is an Irish accent. I am positive."

"Elli, you are Polish? Polish girls are the best lovers in the world! (His wife looks on in concern.) Jo bula! Mwa!"

So we drank their wine, ate their goulash and joked in Hungarian. We never ate our instant potatoes, instead found ourselves in the unique backpacking situation of packing more food than we started with, all the extras they gave us! Camping place was about six dollars a person, complete with running water and complimentary view.

As Monday morning broke, the temperature was cold and skies dreary. And unfortunately, we still had half our hike -- 15 more kilometers -- to go. After a drizzly 5km, we stopped for a warm lunch at Bankut, a ski-resort at a different time of year. Grey skies and raindrops escorted us the remaining 10km after lunch, a rather scenic walk down the valleys to

Getting lost, being cold, seeing neat things, noticing litter, putting up with uncomfortabilities, hearing about Trianon, and drinking wine while eating goulash on a mountain top…doesn’t get more Hungarian than that!

Next trip: Green Club backpacking trip! With the kiddie corps!