CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
Calm roads, flat plains and punchy climbs – not to mention the fine wines – welcome riders who make the journey to Zala County, this quiet corner of Hungary
Sweating in the mid-summer sun, pulse racing and lungs exploding, the gradient had just eased to 15 per cent when I heard the sound up ahead. A race helicopter? No, I had made that mistake at the start of the race when we passed a combine harvester. This wasn’t a pro race, after all. And it was too steep here for heavy farm machinery. Perhaps one of the camera drones that had been buzzing overhead, then? No, it sounded more like a chainsaw. A chainsaw? It couldn’t be.
On a bend up ahead, two enthusiastic Hungarians decked out in mankinis and long, flowing blonde wigs were jumping up and down on the side of the road, shouting what I took to be words of encouragement. Fortunately, they had the decency or embarrassment to wear clothes underneath. Unfortunately, one of them was also excitedly wielding a revving chainsaw.
I recovered enough to half catch my breath and know I wasn’t suffering delusions from the heat. But the climb was still plenty steep enough, and with over a kilometre of ascent left, I knew I had no chance of outpacing the dangerous-looking peroxide pair.
Box of tricks
Welcome to Zalakaros, Hungary. Not the first place you’d think of for a European cycling holiday, but full of surprises. Not least the almost deserted roads, the rolling rural countryside flanked by fine vineyards and the thermal spas to relax in after a day in the saddle. Budapest is famous for its spas and culture, but the rural west of the country is relatively unexplored by most visitors. For the cyclist, it offers all the terrain of a Belgian classic, but with central European temperatures thrown into the deal.
I was around a third of the way into the Tour of Zalakaros, an 85mile ‘flat’ gran fondo that took in over 3900ft of climbing in brutal, Flandrian berg-esque ramps of 15-20 per cent. If you’re looking for something out of the ordinary, this is not on the usual list of European cycling destinations, and there were only a handful of foreign riders.
The peloton was tightly packed during the first neutralised nine miles on fast, flowing main roads,
and I quickly learnt the Hungarian for car, as shouts of “autó” went up to warn of oncoming traffic or parked vehicles. I mastered little of the language beyond that; Hungarian has surprisingly little in common with other European languages.
Suddenly, the route took a sharp, 90° right off the highway and straight up the side of the first hill, a half-mile effort that exploded the 1,000-strong peloton. My heart rate barely dropped below threshold for the first 30 miles, and hitting the first climb maxed it out – I saw numbers on my Garmin I’d only ever witnessed before when racing on the track.
I’d gone too deep on the climb to stay with the lead bunch as it re-grouped on the descent, so I relaxed into my own pace and waited for the next group to join. The race settled into little echelons of 10-15 riders working well together, as crosswinds kept the groups apart, at least until the next climb – complete with chainsaw enthusiasts – a few kilometres later.
Waterworld
Recovering at the top, filling up on water and cooling down having been on the wrong side of the road for the previous pit stop, I rejoined the little group on the descent. The shaded patches in the trees were still damp in the humid air, despite the 26°C heat.
The race wound through rolling, wooded hills and across open, agricultural plains, skirting lakes and the Kis-Balaton wetlands, a once-natural filter bed that cleaned the water flowing into Lake Balaton
– the largest lake in central Europe. Drained early in the 20th century, the environmental importance of the Kis-Balaton wetland was later recognised and it was reconstructed in the 1980s. It has since attracted over 250 species of bird, in addition to providing a habitat for several other rare animals and plants.
Towards the end, I eventually gave in and took the chocolate-flavoured energy gel that I’d been avoiding all race. It was as disgusting as I’d expected, but not unwelcome.
I breathed a sigh of relief as the sign for Zalakaros came into view ahead, with just a couple of miles remaining. “Now we can almost relax,” I said happily to the rider next to me. He laughed. “Now it’s very hard,” came the reply. We turned off the main road once again, up a short, sharp climb through vineyards that would normally be very inviting. It was barely 150ft of elevation gain, but enough to shatter the temporary loose alliance of the group I was riding with. One final twisting, technical descent and then the welcome sight of the finish line at the end of the final straight and the thermal spa beyond it.
Burst of tourism
Zalakaros became a spa town in the 1960s when workers drilling for oil sunk a shaft into a thermal spring over 6500ft below, sending near-boiling water to the surface. Several hotels now surround a substantial spa complex, and the town has made a name for itself as a local tourist destination. Some of the more pungent-smelling pools are apparently renowned for their medicinal properties, but we stuck to the more aromatically pleasing ones. Stranger still, we were told the water is also mildly radioactive – another quality with supposed health benefits, though not one I wanted to test for long.
The region’s former oil industry is evident in the now-abandoned wells and storage facilities that occasionally dot the landscape. Oil production peaked in the 1980s, and the wells are no longer economically viable.
The post-industrial decline is evident across the region. In common with other central-European, former communist states, Hungary has struggled to reconfigure its economy in the post-Soviet era. Young people in particular have moved away from the agricultural west of the country to Budapest or other European capitals to seek employment opportunities, while farmers complain they struggle to find the seasonal labour force required for fruit picking locally.
The regional tourist board acknowledges this problem and is attempting to revitalise the area as a niche agro-tourism destination, including a programme to develop the EuroVelo 14 cycle route right across the country from Austria to Romania. Hungary currently has around 2000km of EuroVelo routes, including route 6 from the Atlantic to the Black Sea and route 11 between the Baltics and Greece. It’s interesting to note that as the country’s controversial prime minister, Viktor Orbán, looks inwards, the national cycling agency has been taken into government and given a more prominent position,
“Stranger still, we were told the water is also mildly radioactive – another quality with supposed health benefits, though not one I wanted to test for long”
helping to promote international tourism.
Hungary has received a lot of bad press recently because of the hard-line stance of its increasingly authoritarian prime minister. Refreshingly, there’s plenty of good to see beyond the politics.
Multitude of rides
If you prefer your riding more leisurely, there’s a whole range on offer in the region. Tamas, our guide at RideHard (an outfit that organises global cycling trips), took us on a 30-mile excursion around KisBalaton along quiet roads, taking in a delicious Balaton fish stew lunch at the Zalaszabar vineyard with distant views across the lake.
The rural lifestyle has its benefits for cycling in the area. While the road surface leaves something to be desired (though that’s due to change with planned upgrades), what the roads lack in quality, they more than make up for in how quiet they are. The traffic was virtually nonexistent and it’s not uncommon to see a horse and cart trundling along the road.
After the Tour of Zalakaros, we took a transfer further west towards the border with Croatia and Slovenia, where the contours start to wrinkle up, to the small village of Lisp es zen ta dorján nestled in the Zala hills. We were met at guesthouse Rejtek with a traditional goulash steaming over a fire in the garden, and ate dinner on the terrace overlooking the valley after a shot of pálinka – a traditional fruit brandy – to welcome us to our base for the next few days.
Part of the drive to regenerate the local economy is a move away from traditional agricultural products to niche farming, including kiwis, figs and blueberries, visible in fields along the roadside. We spent the next two days exploring the Mura region, hillier than the agricultural plains around Zalakaros.
For sure, Hungary is not about to rival the Alps, Majorca or Tenerife as a cycling destination. But that’s part of the appeal. It’s definitely off the beaten track, underlined when we stopped for a cheese-tasting session in the producer’s back garden, while the goats that supplied the milk wandered around the field next to the house.
There are drawbacks, of course. I didn’t see a single cycling shop in any of the towns or villages we went through, so you’d have to be selfsufficient if cycling in the area, or go with a guide. But it’s remarkably peaceful, only a short trip from Lake Balaton and close enough to Budapest to make a week out of it and soak up the culture and history of the capital.
Not that Zala County is lacking history. Its small city of Nagykanizsa dates back to Roman times, and has been an important crossroads for centuries, linking trade routes between east and west, north and south. The region changed hands between Ottoman and Habsburg rule before the state of Hungary emerged. When tanks occupied the main square during communist rule, locals gathered elsewhere for their coffee. Now, the square is the centre of a pleasant civic space, with cafés around the edges offering welcome shade from the mid-summer heat.
This part of Hungary is also famous for its white wines, and we ended the day at the Bussay vineyard, sampling the crisp, delicate flavours as the sun set over Slovenia in the distance. The vines stretched away down the hill before us, and to the south the hills of Croatia turned to purple as the shadows lengthened across the Mura river valley below. It really felt like a crossroads of Europe.