Kitten Titties 2012

The chicken is alive! And this way we could leave the country peaceably. My first atrocity was when 3 mongrels were chasing me over the Bulgarian border. Béla thought I did a nice run. We were heading to Burgas, but it wasn't that easy, because Bulgaria is not so open to hitchhikers - that was at least what we thought. And what we also thought was, that this country isn't really interesting and that we want to pass through it pretty fast, going to Turkey. But we were so wrong!

Michaela proved us the opposite, who had us as her first CouchSurfing guests. She took her role very seriously :) We got a whole apartment, which was designed by her mom (an interior designer). So we took advantage of that and cooked lots of Bulgarian and Hungarian meals:

You can see David's professional moves on this picture. The first dough's preparation was successful already and because of his routine he could just look away really often and gaze at the things around him.

We got an invitation to a salsa club that night. The sports clothes I got from Mountex (the Hungarian outdoor company which supported us) weren't ideal for the place, but despite that everybody was friendly with us and tought us some moves. A few girls from Burgas showed us some awesome dances, which were more Cuban than Burgas style :)

The next morning Michaela took us to the beach for joga and we did some breathing exercises. We got so excited about this that from now on we would like to start our days this healthy...

Then we hopped on the bus and drove away. A little peninsula next to Nesebar, just a few kilometers from Burgas. There are lots of things on offer for the tourists at that place. You can feel the Mediterranean atmosphere more and more and it is surely not a surprise when you have to run over the whole peninsula, away from a local old lady selling bracelets... And when you just have the feeling, after 5 km, that you got away successfully and you get a little satisfied smile on your face, she appears again. Yes, there are also ruins we climbed on :)

After three days we headed to the direction of Istanbul. We randomly chose the most neglected border crossing from three possibilities and after three hours of walking through the woods we stopped a minivan that came across and went on towards Asia.

(translated by Naomi Lenart - thank you! :)

I was in Vama Veche only once, 9 years ago. Since then I always remembered this place as the best one I've ever been. For a long time I've wanted to return here to see how much it has changed. Most people told me it wasn't such a great hippie place as it used to be as by now it's packed with fancy hotels and now it's better to go somewhere else for hippies. According to other people, the place still has its spirit and it's worth visiting. From what we saw here both statements have their part of the truth but before going into details I'd like to tell about our way there.

Fram Sfantu Gheorght (the Danube delta) we took the ferry for the 80km trip to Tulcea (anyone interested in these places' locations please see our map) from where our two Romanian-Belgian friends helped us get out from the city by their car. We stood out to the road and started hitchhiking in a great competition with whole families standing near us, which is quite normal in Romania as hitchhiking is still a quite common way to get around. Anyway, we can say we won the race as after 3 minutes a minibus passed by us, turned back and started honking from the other side of the road for us to hop in. From here our journey way quite funny as in the minibus there was a full class of 10-year-olds, two teachers and a Turkish driver. They said they turned back for us because they found or "India" sign funny :) As it turned out, the children had an excursion to Tulcea and now they were heading back to Constanţa. Well, we were quite happy for our luck and company:

It was Thursday evening when we arrived, and there were only a few people at that time, but by Friday some hostels and the pubs got full with people. They were cool, open, friendly people but still, it's not the old hippie horde and although it's still possible to spot a few naked people on the beach, 95% of them are wearing clothes. 9 years ago almost everyone was naked there, not because it would have been a nudist place but because people just didn't care much abouth clothing.

The good thing is that the famous good old pub still exists on the beach with really old furniture, sand floor and some flat, low roof made of random things and straw, leaking everywhere in the rain. A litle hole it is, without walls, with the greatest atmosphere ever.

It was a big storm with strong wind Friday night but our tent held on perfectly, everything remained bone-dry in it.

One afternoon I tried to steal chicken from the gypsies so they locked me up in this chicken coop where I was squatting real sad waiting for that man called Sergei to come, of whom they were talking all the time in Romanian:

And finally, a little present from Sfantu Gheorghe: This is how a real local cowboy mows the lawn :)

So I'm soon gonna write a summary about what sort of stuff we have brought with ourselves, 'cause who knows our numerous times rethinked packlist might be useful for other travellers too. But for now here is a short list about those trekking equipments we've got from Mountex (the biggest Hungarian outdoors company).

Buna seara...

There exists only one traditional recipe in the delta of the river, and that recipe is special because the water needed to make it comes from our well-deservedly famous river, the Danube. I tried to find out how is this ciorba soup made in June of 2011. While David and our mates were taking a swim in the sea, I walked to the village, escorted by Lolo (he was an abandoned dog not leaving my side for three days)

Two nice local Romanian aunties showed me the how-to for the thing. According to them: take two or three portions of cepe, kartofi... after it, some se pun la fier, and then se adauga ardei toca... Oh and don't forget the se fierb birve si se adaugok!! and so on... they couldn't speak Englsh, I couldn't speak Romanian, but this came out of the process:

Yes, you're right: for making this, we didn't take the water from the river. We needed two types of fish from the sea to cook it, the creepy one with the mustache and the big-eyed kind. So far my knowledge on the topic is exactly that deep. =)

I damn liked it, I'm taking the recipe home!

That guy called David wrote about all other stuff which happened in the Danube delta, until now I was sick, but from now on I can be more active!

(Thanks for the comments)

(translated by Kovács Attila - thanks a lot mate!)

Hi all :)

Reporting in again, this time from the Danube delta where, much to our bafflement, there are campsites, warm water, and - which is the most surprising - Internet access, in multiple spots. When we visited this place around eleven years ago with my old man and his folks, not only was there no Internet access, but for lack of other options, we were holed up in the courtyard of a local school, got a nice fish dinner courtesy of the locals, and seen no one but fishermen here.

Here's the Danube delta for you, with us at the bottom right, surrounded by pelicans and the swamp:

The ferry from Tulcea now visits here only three times a week, carrying a handful of people through the 4 and a half hour travel, but lots of visitors arrive in the summer, so a whole tourist quarter sprung up beside the 1000-strong village, complete with a swimming pool, jacuzzi and the like. There are also two cinemas (an outdoor and an indoor one), where there's a movie festival held every year, which attracted a whopping seven thousand people last year. With the ships' capacity being a measly few hundred people, and also due to the fact that their timetable does not change at all, it takes quite a bit of time to get everyone on solid ground again.

The popularity of this place compared to eleven years ago should not discourage anyone from coming here, though: the village is still mostly untouched. There are geese, ducks, swans, pelicans, cows and broncos, which, reportedly, are being secretly collected and turned into sausages by the locals. Not funny.

What is funny, however, are the cows. While stumbling back home from our Romanian friends after a few bottles of wine, I found the only street completely blocked by cattle. Crawling my way through them was a little scary.

We also saw a bull up close, we were afraid of that too. It didn't hurt us though, it was just super huge.

Many of you have complained about the lack of photos of Judit, so here's a few of the better ones :)

This is her, applying her freshly acquired fishing skills:

This is her thanking the Lord God that we could eat warm food that night. We had a really tasty fish dinner, Judit is an expert in thankfulness.

And a gift to you guys, a framed tractor (keretes traktor):

We'll be back with more goodies soon, please be patient, we have a lot to do :)

(translated by edward of himmel)

Romania is naturalistically beautiful, and although public spaces are not as clean as in Hungary, basically they are much nicer in design and much better equipped technically than in our country. A good example is the metro (subway) in Bucharest: Huge LCD screens at the stations, a nice photography exhibition (!!) underground, clean everywhere and also the train itself is much more modern than in Budapest.

Big mountains in the West (we saw some snow even in June), vast flatlands in the East (which I don't like in general but after the mountains it was a relief to see it), and now in Tulcea, the Danube-delta... So it's different everywhere and beautiful. Only the half-built and abandoned, and the fully built but half-collapsed buildings ruin the scenery at places.

Soo, what happend in the past 3 days when we didn't write.

We went scytheing (is this how you write this word?):

On this picture still on Hungarian lands :) But then Judit's sister took us to Oradea, Romania, where we started hitch-hiking and pretty quickly we got to the highway starting from Cluj-Napoca, from where we got to Bucharest. In Bucharest we had accommodation at Alex's (from CouchSurfing), whom we didn't meet at all. When we got there to the address he's given us there was nobody and Alex didn't answer his phone either. We rang the doorbell, it didn't work, we knocked, no answer, so tried the door, it was open, we went in, there was noone, we heard noises from a room, we knocked, no answer, I opened the door, there was a guy in a big room with nothing just a TV, an Xbox console and a racing car-like chair and a guy in it, playing some racing game. I asked about Alex, he responded in English something like "I'd tell you he'd be back soon but honestly I don't have the faintest idea. Just make yourself at home." So we did. Later we met the other guys living in the flat too and they told us it's kind of a squat because it's dangerous for collapsing in case of an earthquake so it'd been evacuated. But they didn't know about Alex either so we went out for a beer.

While having our beers we checked out Casa poporului, one of Earth's biggest (it's bigger than the Pentagon!), and according to Wikipedia, the world's heaviest building.

By the time we got back to the flat we got very tired and fell asleep. In the morning when we left we saw a guy with a beard on the bed, but it never turned out whether it was Alex :)

We were soon taken to Slobozia (thanks to our big INDIA sign :) where we almost had to stay for the night because we were dropped off at the worst place ever, but with a fantastic luck somebody going to a completely different way from where we were standing just stopped and took us to Tulcea. But really, the guy just drove 50 meters on the road where we were hitchhiking (the wrong way as it turned out), U-turned and went to Tulcea, our destination. :)

This all happened the day before yesterday but we're still in Tulcea as it turned out that the ferries to Sfantu Georghe only go once in 2-3 days. So we're going tomorrow at noon.

When we arrived to Tulcea we took a break at the gas station at the side of the city, and we forgot our INDIA sign there. It was very important for us so we went back for it the next day. This is me taking it out from the dumpster (it looked rather awful when we found it):

Our losses: till now we lost a box of matches, a pen and some hair rubbers but what hurts is that we left one of my t-shirts at Judit's sister's place, I have no idea how to get it back. Till then, I have only 1 t-shirt. :/ I'm angry at myself for being such a hippie, always losing some stuff. But at least I have my passport, not like the other time when I lost it in Western Sahara on our trip to Bamako, Mali. Since then I take care of my passport as my life. I got the t-shirt as a sponsorship and I loved it too, but I have a slight chance that someone could send it after me someplace.

So this was it for now, we'll write again in a couple days. No worries, in Sfantu Gheorghe we only have to fear the mosquitoes :)

We want to thank our good friend László for getting us pissed yesterday evening so instead of 8AM we could leave at 2PM :)

We packed our stuff, scanned our passports with the visas, made a sign for hitchhiking, then at 14:15 we got on the tram, then the metro and the suburban rail out to the suburbs (Mogyoród), where we started hitchhiking:

• The secretary guy at the Pakistanian embassy disclosed in 15 minutes that he wouldn't like us to cross the western part of Pakistan - called Balochistan - because there are some extremist people who will blow us up then kill us and then f*ck our asses. Their motivation: Western tourist disappears/gets hurt -> Western countries get nervous -> case goes to Western media -> they got publicity for their terrorism -> they are happy.
• I wrote to several Pakistanian guys through CouchSurfing and they also told me 'welllll it's not so safe to cross that part...'
• I talked to my friend Nyúl who has been to several parts of the world, but also she was discouraged to visit Pakistan, so she didn't.

• Pakisztán is beautiful, according to pictures. (Well, the most beautiful part would be the northern area where we'd especially get killed. We don't go there.)
• Gorondy Máté, who gave us many tips before the trip also crossed this area two years ago by hitchhike and his ass reached India in one piece.
• We may get police escort in Balochistan.
• Many people said at Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree forum that they were there lately and had no truble at all.
• The plane ticket to the safer part (Lahore) is expensive, about $300 each.

A lot of you asked how much money we are taking with us. Obviously it's an important question, because if someone would like to go on a similar trip then he can calculate how much coal he has to shovel.

The goal of this blog is to encourage everyone who is interested in traveling to just go and see the world for yourselves. So we won't keep our financials in secret, and this way maybe you'll see that if you cut back a little on the budget it's not that expensive. A lot of people could afford a trip like this instead of cigarettes or a better car - it's just the priorities...

So our proposed numbers:

• Judit, who comes for 5-6 months wants to spend about $2200, including $550 for the flight home. Plus she paid visas, vaccination and equipment for about an additional $550. That's a total of about $2750.
• I calculated for one year about $5500, including some exciting sporting/learning opportunity I might find. Plus there's an additional $3000 for a scuba diving licence. I also spent $550 on visas and equipment, and I have to get home from New Zealand, that's about $1000. So the total for me is about $10000, which contains a lot of extra spending on the scuba diving. And actually that's all the money I have, so if I don't work anywhere during this trip than my balance will be zero by the time I get home.

We carry our money on credit cards, and we'll use them instead of cash everywhere we can, but we'll carry about $400 each in cash too, because for example in Iran there aren't any ATMs, so we'll need it there. I hope I won't be so unlucky like the time I went to Mexico and lost my all $500 on the plane. Shit happens.

Also, there's a lot of stuff that we would have had to buy, but instead we got them for free thanks to Mountex. It's really great quality stuff, I'll write about them in a different post.

We tried to find more sponsors, it would've been cool to have free travelers insurance (now we don't have any, except for the first month, which came with the credit card so fingers crossed...) Or for instance if someone would have financed us to stay at a bit better places, or to try out even more exciting opportunities along the way. For example there'll be rafting in Turkey but we won't have the money for it. Sadly, it's quite possible that we'll loose a lot of potential experience like this. But I think if someone starts a similar trip and spends a month looking for sponsors, he'll find plenty.

Other than material sponsors our blog will receive appearance on the main page of index.hu, the second-biggest Hungarian news website, and maybe in some of their articles if they like our blog.

I'm sure I left out a lot of important information, so feel free to ask if you're interested. Comments wont't work easily for you on this Hungarian-English blog thing so feel free to write to me in e-mail (to veszelovszki@gmail.com).

(thanks for the translation to our friend Bence!)