Awesome Baradla cave tour in Aggtelek, Hungary

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(the article below accompanies this video)

We got to know our new temporary home of Hungary better today. After arriving last night from Slovakia in the city of Miskolc, Masayo and I took a bus to the minute village of Aggtelek in northern Hungary right by the Slovakian border. We toured the famous caves, drank a surprising amount of homemade plum liquor, and made last-minute plans for tomorrow morning.

The travel pace continues unabated, and today was a real test of my skills at blood sugar control. Some lows plus liquor – this day would require all my focus and luck.

Morning in Miskolc

At 8:00 am in Miskolc my blood sugar was 69 so Masayo and I hit breakfast right away. It was included with, and eaten in, our room and consisted of bread, ham, jam, coffee, and beets. The beets struck me as an odd choice but we duly ate them and they really added a tasty and unusual touch to the breakfast.

First time for beets on this trip – must be a Hungarian thing.

After checking out we strode through Miskolc to the bus station nearby. It was our first look at Hungary in the daytime. We lamented how lovely and cheerful little Miskolc (pronounced “mish koltz”) looked – we hadn’t given ourselves any time to see it today and weren’t planning on coming back.

Sometimes when you travel you only get a glimpse of a place and that’s all. Some places get short shrift, and you have to feel lucky to see them at all. Kind of like diabetes: if you are only briefly between 70 and 130 one day you have to appreciate that small time.

The day in Aggtelek

Our bus from Miskolc to Aggtelek was small, like a city bus. By the time we actually pulled past the rolling countryside and smatterings of Hungarian farms and houses and into Aggtelek itself, Masayo and I were the only passengers. It was still mid-morning; the bus let us off and continued up the hill and around a bend, leaving us standing in a tiny, silent town in the slanting morning sun.

I’d booked us a room via booking.com at a place called Katica Vendegház and had a vague idea of how to find it. Fortunately as we trudged up a hill with our big bags my hunch proved correct and we saw the sign out front.

This place is a house, not a conventional hotel or even guesthouse. We had to wait awhile for the owners, a middle-aged couple, to show up from a house across the road, but they showed us up to our private room upstairs. The woman did most of the guesthouse business, with her mercurial and quieter husband lurking in the background.

Neither seemed to speak much English (she more than him), but let us check in super early and verified that we’d opted not only for breakfast tomorrow, which we usually do when offered, but for the first time, dinner tonight.

The Aggtelek caves

Setting our bags in the room and locking the wooden door behind us, Masayo and I walked one or two kilometers through the cool but not cold town to the tourist entrance of the town’s main (only?) tourist attraction: caves.

The Baradla Domica cave system, as The Caves of Aggtelek Karst and Slovak Karst, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. To see them you have to join a guided tour, which we were lucky to find are available even on a serene Sunday in December. We bought tickets, despite the lady warning us that the tour was available in Hungarian only. (She gave us photocopied sheets in English as a kind of consolation prize.)

The tour was set to begin at the top of the hour, and since we were a little hungry we went to a nearby restaurant beside the cave entrance. The door was open but the tables were all set, as if they were expecting a large group. Only one table, shoved into a corner, was open for us and they let us sit there.

I had a sparkling water and a chocolate crepe, and checked my BG: 187. The crepe was thick and I’d be walking a lot on the tour, so I had to balance these things out when taking my Humalog. I was carrying juice and chocolate with me in my day pack for emergencies. Wasn’t sure I’d need it: the crepe was thick.

People did indeed come in and occupy all the nicer tables around us in the restaurant, but when the tour began there were only two other people on it. It was a young Hungarian couple, or a couple that at least understood Hungarian. Our earnest and competent-seeming guide spoke to them the whole time and Masayo and I basically just tagged along.

That actually allowed us to enjoy the tour more, even if we were informed less. We could gaze at the many spectacular rock formations, in a surprising range of psychedelic colors, in our own world. (We wondered what would happen if we were the only tourists. Would the guide struggle through broken English?)

A cement walkway with a rail meandered through the cave system, winding here and there under low and high ceilings, through wide and narrow passages, as the guide turned on floodlights along the way. Great caverns were exposed, each unique and full of jagged, towering structures and wondrous arcs of moist-looking rock. Some looked like great squids, frozen into place. Slow, steady drips echoed dully in some places.

At one point we came across the biggest chamber, in which a large flat floor had been fashioned and furnished with rows of red plastic chairs: seating for classical concerts that are occasionally held to take advantage of the awesome natural acoustics.

There was of course no private classical concert for us today, so the guide went up on a nearby platform and dialed up some prerecorded music on a large electronic console. He also gave us a glimpse at the accompanying light show, and colored lights bounced off of twisted stalagmites and stalactites far overhead.

The tour was scheduled to last an hour and did indeed. Precisely sixty minutes after we’d entered, the five of us exited the cave through a door a little ways away from the entrance and walked on paths back to the front. Thanking the guide we then walked down one more kilometer along the two-lane highway: I wanted to see the Slovakian border.

And there it was, a little covered carport structure in the road, no longer staffed since there is no longer border control between Slovakia and Hungary. A larger building sits beside us but it too lay unused, at least today. Masayo and I could wander back and forth between the two nations, looking at Slovakian road signs on one side and Hungarian signs on the other (the two languages are not related, interestingly enough.) It was just like the border between Estonia and Latvia in Valka from earlier this trip.

We walked back to the cave entrance on the way back to our room and I checked my BG: 66. Oops, guess I’d taken too much Humalog for that crepe. I drank some juice as we walked under the bare late-autumn trees to the room. We rested; it has been a very busy few days.

Both of us fell asleep and woke up around 5:00 pm. Naps often wreck my BG; I’d have to take it easy at dinner. That was scheduled for 7:00 so we watched a Louis CK video on my laptop to pass the time.

By dinner I still felt a little low so I was ready. The lady called to us (twenty minutes early!) to come down to the dining room. As I thought, we were the only guests today and had the room, and meal, all to ourselves.

It was a homemade meal, quite unlike anything we would choose to eat left to our own devices: a large bowl of soup and a baked chicken on a humongous plate of white rice, with large whole pickles. The woman had obviously made it herself, and it looked excellent.

The meal was aided and abetted by a clear, unlabeled bottle of liquor they poured for each of us in small glasses. The woman tried to explain what it was – some kind of fruit. We think she was miming a plum.

Masayo does not in fact drink alcohol, and I can’t remember the last time I had anything stronger than a beer. But the smiling couple poured our plum liquor drinks and both of us – yes, even Masayo – drank them. It was strong and sweet.

The couple left us alone to eat, and I switched our glasses because Masayo didn’t want to drink any more than a sip. We dove into the food, grabbing entire chicken parts, spoonheaps of rice, and crunchy pickles. Every now and then the woman would return and re-fill the glasses and leave; I always seemed to end up drinking the great majority of both of them.

Diabetically this was all a lot to think about: lots of rice and liquor, plus unknown soup, and pickles which I never eat. (In fact, this was probably the first time I’ve ever eaten an entire pickle in my life.) Plus I had been low earlier but then had a nap.

How do you shoot up insulin for this??

After eating a little while, continuing to spoon out rice and knock back the mystery wine (there was no other drink besides, not even water), I took a large Humalog shot and shrugged. It would be up to the diabetes gods now. I wished them luck, dealing with so many different factors at once.

After stuffing ourselves – and I wasn’t shy about eating rice, diabetes aside; I was hungry – we dragged ourselves upstairs, fat and happy. I’d had maybe seven or eight shots of the liquor and felt warm, here in northern Hungary in December.

Later, about 8:00 pm, I checked to see the damage: my blood sugar was 195 mg/dL. Not bad at all! I felt proud. Luck and skill had converged for me, so far at least.

Even Masayo was ok after her small amount of liquor; it doesn’t take much to knock her out and she was lacking in energy but not dozing. We watched more video on my laptop and at 11:30 I checked one last time: 211. A little high for so long after dinner, but much, much better than it could have been.

The couple, between our bites of chicken and gulps of sweet liquor, had convinced us to take a second cave tour tomorrow in a different part of the underground system. I had wanted to take this tour today but couldn’t work out any way to get there. The couple said they could drive us themselves tomorrow.

So we are still planning on heading to the capital city of Budapest tomorrow, but will push it back a few hours to see this newer and perhaps even more stupendous cave tour. The personalized service, and the homecooked meal and the quiet private room on a friendly little back street, were all excellent. And cheap.

You can have your five-star resorts and obsequious staff snapping to attention and calling you sir or ma’am. I’ll take a ragtag evening in a little old house in Aggtelek, Hungary any day.

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