Although Viking offered 6 optional excursions today, we decided to visit the Lake Balaton region using a private guide we found using Viator. For future reference of those interested, the tours offered by Viking were:
- Dohány Street Synagogue & Jewish Budapest (3.5 hours, moderate)
- Szentendre & the Margit Kovács Museum (4 hours, easy)
- Flavors of Etyek (4.5 hours, moderate)
- Gödöllö Royal Palace & Gardens (3.5 hours, easy)
- Highlights of Budapest (5 hours, moderate)
- Budapest by Night (2 hours, moderate)
Why Lake Balaton? My work colleague, Gezá, lives near here and had recommended on our previous trip in 2017 that if we ever return, we needed to get out of Budapest and visit this area. So off we go today!
The tour we booked was called “Private All Day Lake Balaton Tour from Budapest with lunch”. The planned itinerary included:
- Porcelain Museum of Herend
A nice visit to the Herend factory, where you will be amazed at the skill and craftsmanship of the potters, model makers, painters and in particular the master painters. In this day and age of mass production where the majority of manufacturing processes is done by machine it is nice to see the traditional methods of hand made production maintained at Herend.
- Tihany Echo
The place with the greatest historical significance on Lake Balaton is Tihany, a peninsula jutting 5km into the lake. Tihany village, perched on an 80m-high plateau along the peninsula’s eastern coast, is home to the celebrated Abbey Church.
- Balatonfured
Balatonfüred is one of the oldest tourist destinations on the shore of the “Hungarian Sea”. The “capital” of the northern coast is famous for its carbon-acid thermal spring, marina, and limitless range of recreation activities.
Our driver/guide for the day, Susan, picked us up at our hotel at 8:30am in her Hyundai Tucson and we departed the city. Traffic getting out of Budapest was light for a weekday, but then it was a holiday (May 1 – Labor Day). It didn’t take long for us to figure out where everyone was – they were headed to the lake just like us! We found ourselves in multiple traffic jams. Susan expected the drive to take approximately two hours, but it ended up taking closer to 2.5! Along the way, Susan pointed out additional sights as we left Budapest and explained their highway system. We would be taking M7 towards Lake Balaton, then turning to drive to the north side of the lake while M7 continues along the southern shore and can be followed into Croatia to the Adriatic Sea.
Here’s a rough overview of our route from Budapest to Herend to Tihany.
As she drove, Susan discussed how the flood of 1838 had impacted the Pest side of the city. While we had previously heard that the flooding was caused by heavy rains and rapid snow melt from mountains upstream, what we had not heard was that the Danube had frozen that winter and created ice dams which exacerbated the flooding far into the plains of Pest. The Danube has only been known to freeze to that level a few times in over 1000 years of recorded history in that region.
Herend Porcelain Manufactory
Fortunately, we arrived at the Herend Porcelain Manufactory in plenty of time for our scheduled tour and with room to spare for a quick coffee and/or cappuccino as desired in their lovely café before the tour. The cups used are their most famous pattern, Queen Victoria.
The tour began with a quick explanation of the porcelain world map, in the now recognizable to us Queen Victoria pattern, showing the world-wide availability of Herend porcelain.
We then entered a small theater for a 3-D movie that I expected to detail the porcelain processes we would see demonstrated on the other side. Instead, it seemed more like a commercial designed to portray the luxury and elegance of owning and using their fine pieces throughout the day – if you lived in a palace. There was no dialogue or captions, only music. It missed the mark with me!
Following the movie, we entered a series of rooms where they began to explain and demonstrate the processes involved in making the porcelain from creating the molds to shaping and refining the pieces to putting the pieces together to firing the pieces, then to the painting process. This part of the tour was excellent – could have skipped the movie in my opinion! Each of the processes is done by an artisan who specializes in that process. All the work is extremely intricate and helps explain why the porcelain pieces are so expensive. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take video or photos on the tour.
I especially liked watching the artist who created the rosebuds and found the video below of that process and more on Herend’s YouTube site.
After the tour, we went across the street to the portion of the factory that has been converted into a museum. Herend Porcelain Manufactory was started in 1826 by Vince Singl in his hometown of Herend. His focus of production was on earthenware products. In 1839, after falling into debt, the factory was taken over by Mór Fischer who over the next few years oversaw the transition to porcelain and the styles recognized world-wide today. The best-known patterns are the Rothschild Bird design and the previously mentioned Queen Victoria design. You can get these patterns in most any color palette you can imagine as Herend has over 14,000 colors to choose from – or you can create your own if one of those doesn’t suffice! You can see the history of the company alongside world events on their website here.
Lunch in Csopak
From Herend, we drove approximately 30 minutes south towards Lake Balaton to our lunch stop in the quaint town of Csopak (pronounce like “cho-pok”) at the Kerekedi Csárda restaurant (Csárda means “inn”).
Our tour-included 3-course meal consisted of a consommé with thin noodles as a starter, fried perch and parsley potatoes as the main, then a 3-part strudel (apple, walnut, and cottage cheese) for dessert. I need a nap now….
Holiday Crowds at Balatonfüred
Leaving the restaurant, we drove near the shore of the lake to the resort town of Balatonfüred. The Hungarian word “füred” means “bath” reflecting the many spas found here. The normal plan on this excursion is to park and walk along the promenade by the lakeshore. However, the access into Susan’s normal parking area appeared to be blocked off for Labor Day festivities and she didn’t spot any other good places to try. We agreed to keep going on to Tihany Peninsula and try our luck with the crowds there.
Tihany Peninsula
The Tihany Peninsula, with an area just over 10 square miles, juts about 3.1 miles (5 Km) into Lake Balaton creating the lake’s narrowest width at less than a mile to the opposite shoreline. The area is known for the Benedictine Abbey which sits on the promontory overlooking the lake. The abbey was founded in 1055 by King Andrew I (András) of Hungary who converted to Catholicism during an earlier exile in Kiev where he married Anastasia of Kiev. When Andrew returned as King, he proclaimed that the people should give up their pagan rites on pain of death and return to the Christian faith of St. Stephen (Hungary’s first king).
Despite the holiday crowds here, too, Susan was able to drop us off at the beginning of the semi-pedestrian area of Old Tihany and we agreed to be back there to meet her in about 45 minutes. She was going to give us longer, but we decided since we weren’t going to be shopping along the way that 45 minutes would be sufficient. We took off up the hill towards the Abbey, but stopped first at a refreshment stand to get a couple of waters as the day was heating up.
Although we’d caught glimpses of the lake as we drove, the color of the water as seen from the overlook when we arrived at the top was surprisingly aqua blue. Lake Balaton is rift lake approximately 48 miles long with a max width of 8.7 miles. It has an average depth of 11 feet and a maximum depth of 40 feet. The Zala River feeds into the lake at its western end and the Sió Canal on the eastern shore which extends to the Danube is the only outlet.
Near the abbey we found a statue of King Andrew and Queen Anastasia, a statue of St. John of Nepomuk (previously seen in Kalocsa! Note 76), and the opening to a thermal spring cave. The statue of Andrew and Anastasia was presented in 2001 by Ukrainian officials in recognition of the long history between the Ukraine and Hungary.
Having spotted St. John at least twice on this trip, I had to research him some more. It turns out he lived in the 14th century and was drowned in the Vltava river as ordered by King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia (now partly in the Czech Republic) because he would not reveal the secrets of the confession of the Queen of Bohemia, whom Wenceslaus suspected of an affair. St. John is seen as the first martyr of the Seal of the Confessional and is the protector from floods and drownings. The most famous statue of him is located on the Charles Bridge in Prague, but apparently there are at least 6000 statues of him in the Czech Republic and thousands more worldwide as well. I guess now I might be on the lookout for him in future travels and see how many sightings I can collect!
As we returned to the meeting point, we spotted a couple of other interesting sights in the village.
Return to Budapest
As we passed through Balatonfüred on the return to Budapest, the crowds only seemed to have increased. Susan turned and took a road which lead along the shoreline on the way back and we passed many fishermen along the banks and families enjoying picnics in the parks along the shore. In many areas, the shoreline was quite marshy. You can definitely see why this region is a popular escape from the city and why those who live here year-round love it. It was a beautiful day today. Susan said the prior couple of Spring weekends had been rainy, so this Labor Day long weekend and the sunny weather brought everyone to the lake!
We had an uneventful return to Budapest once we reached the M7 highway again – no traffic on the return route! Back in Pest as we drove up Rákóczi Street, Susan pointed out the 1838 Flood’s high water mark sign on the Chapel of Saint Roch which is 1.32 Km (.82 miles) from the Danube!
(I added red lines adjacent to the marker in the picture.)
You can imagine if the water was that high here, how much further it spread while wiping out most of Pest. I found this interesting site recapping the flood and its aftermath.
Susan dropped us off around 5pm – it was a long day! We enjoyed meeting her and learning about her experience under the communistic rule and since then. She started as a tour guide while in college in 1980 just to make a little extra money, then fell in love with it and made it her profession. She was given the opportunity to study English in high school and made the most of it. During our lunch, she recounted how much she wanted to be assigned to guide a group to “the west”, especially to the USA. Her first western assignment was to the UK, and she was both excited, but slightly disappointed. However, one of her mentors encouraged her that if she did well on that tour, then a trip to the USA was likely. Sure enough, her next group tour was to the USA. She escorted groups several times to different regions of the US. Again, this is one of the things we like about private tours – getting to know the guide’s personal story. A country is more than its history; it’s the people, too, and they all have a different story.
Final Night
Since we had an early trip to the airport scheduled the next morning (as in 4am), we opted to eat in the hotel restaurant on the final evening and found several others from our Viking cruise doing likewise! We enjoyed one final dish of goulash, Dave added a Greek salad, and then we both had dessert. It was the last night of vacation after all! We enjoyed the string trio playing both classical and classics while we ate. I’m not sure what that table-stringed instrument is (see picture below). I saw him plucking with his fingers as well as using a mallet.
Then, it was back to the room to pack and try to sleep a few hours before our 3am alarm. As we approached the elevators in the lobby, we saw a large group of Viking guests traipsing after a red lollipop and asked where they were going so late. It was the “Budapest by Night” tour leaving around 8:45pm. I hope none of them had as early of a flight as we did!
P.S. I’ll try to finish collecting my thoughts on the trip and do my final wrap-up soon since we’ve been home a week at this point!
Notes By Nancy 
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