Six days in Kőszeg

On Sunday we left Pityu's place around 11am and started our slow procession towards Kőszeg. We were aiming to reach the Arboretum at Jeli by 2pm, where we arranged to meet up with Zsuzsi and Robi, our friends with whom we were to spend the week in Kőszeg. But first we stopped in Tapolca and Sümeg to do some geocaching. Tapolca is very pretty and I remembered it from several trips for orienteering events in the past.  A good 15 years ago I remember being the official interpreter for the speaker at results ceremonies at the Hungaria Cup in that year. We stood on a specially built platform in the middle of a small lake, which seemed rather precarious to me, but thankfully we never fell in.

Tapolca lake

This time round a multi cache's points were all round that lake and its park, which along with most buildings, looked as if they have been renovated recently. I found the cache easily and we moved onto Sümeg for another two caches.  Sümeg is also quite well known to me from previous orienteering events and it has a really impressive castle. The first cache was there and the second in an ancient square with a big church and the bishop's palace round it. That cache was gone, but the alternative one was easy to find on an old plaque on the wall of the church.

One of the hundreds of glorious rhododendrons at Jeli

After munching our sandwiches there we pootled on and arrived at the Arboretum with about 2 minutes to spare. Zsuzsi and Robi have arrived just before us and we duly went in. I know rhododendrons well as I lived not too far from Sheffield Park Gardens in Sussex which is one of the most amazing places to see rhododendrons in.  Unfortunately, most bushes were past their best, but they were still gorgeous. We walked about for a while, took lots of photos and left to travel in convoy to our final destination.

A happy Roy on the see-saw

The landlady seemed quite nice, gave us two sets of keys, explained most things, made us pay up front and departed.  The apartment was definitely in the centre of the town, although even if it was somewhere else, it would not have mattered, as Kőszeg is pretty small and nowhere is very far. In the late afternoon we went around to find a place to have dinner and visited the downtown area, which proved to be really old and lovely. Dinner was had in the old hotel, which has got its name from an ostrich.

Locksmith's sign in Kőszeg

On Monday I decided to attempt the longest hike I was planning as the weather looked perfect and the rest of the week was forecast to be windy and rainy. So off we went to the top of one of the hills above Kőszeg, where the car park was and left Roy there, as he is not the hiking type. He spent quite a lot of the week like that, but he does like having a nap in the car, under some pretty tree in the middle of nowhere.

The Seven Chieftans' spring

An abandoned border guards' barracks in the forest

The gate tower of the inner town of Kőszeg

En route to the Geschriebenstein tower we also took in a spring, where the cache was found quickly by Zsuzsi, who has an eye for these sort of things, much better than me. Then came a long and steady climb to a place literally on the border between Hungary and Austria. The back of the look-out tower is in Hungary, but the front door is in Austria. Once the Iron Curtain started having holes in it in the late 1980's there was more and more demand for a loosening of the border controls, not least by the hiking fraternity that was barred from many lovely hills and forests on and near the Austrian border.  The then still communist government, as a gesture of good will, allowed a double hike to this very place where in the summer of 1988 Austrian and Hungarian hikers arrived from two different directions and shook hands.  That was one of the first symbolic acts that started the complete dismantling of border controls.

Geschriebenstein look-out tower on the border

En route back to Kőszeg we took in an interesting, shabby old manor house for another cache, making it 3 for the day. On Tuesday, very much to our chagrin, the weather forecast turned out to be absolutely spot on.  The skies were dark and it was raining on and off all day. Zsuzsi and Robi decided to go out in their car, so by the afternoon, when it looked a bit better Roy and I went out to a couple of caches that were in the outskirts of  Kőszeg on our own. The first was a look-out tower called after Suleman the Great, who besieged  Kőszeg in 1532 and whose 15000 troops were repelled by the barely 1000 defenders. Those 1000 heroes are accredited with saving the Hapsburgs from Turkish domination by persuading the Turks that having a go at the West might not have been such a good idea after all.

Parish Church of Kőszeg in the centre

Bronze model of the medieval town of Kőszeg  with its wall

The second cache was by the remains of an 800 year old sweet chestnut tree, which apparently survived in parts all the way to the XIXth century, but eventually had to be cut down due to the danger it represented to the houses around it. Its circumference was more than 30 feet, which is one hell of a large tree, if you ask me.

The ancient sweet chestnut tree's remaining bits

On Wednesday we all decided to do indoorsy things due to the bad forecast again, although the Castle had plenty outside bits too.  We started with the Museum, which was in a medieval building and which had an internal connection with the gate tower of the inner downtown since the XIXth century restoration of the latter. The exhibition inside was about trades, carpenters, felt makers, potters, weavers, printers, bookbinders, blacksmiths, photographers, watchmakers etc. Roy loved it, and even I found a lot of it quite fascinating.  Especially that almost all that was exhibited had been left to the museum by local craftsmen and women and thus represented local history, which both of us are very fond of.

The bell tower of the Lutheran church in Kőszeg

Lovely old fashioned street lights in Kőszeg

Finally we ended up on the top of the gate tower, where plenty of photo opportunities awaited, as thankfully it didn't rain when we got out there. Once finished there we went over to the Castle, which is heavily restored, but tastefully, so I quite liked it. We were lucky with the weather again, as quite a lot of bits of it were outdoors, but we escaped the rain again. I ended up in the stocks and the rest of them did silly things too.

Kőszeg's abandoned Synagogue

Zsuzsi, Robi and Roy being silly in the castle yard

Late afternoon the weather seemed quite clear, so we had a little outing outside of  Kőszeg to a nearby village to pick up a couple of geocaches. The first one was to show off some lovely old thatched press houses and an abandoned quarry, while the second led into the depth of the forest to find a geodesic base point, the equivalent of English trig points. Roy spent both in the car, but for a change, that day even Zsuzsi and Robi went on strike and didn't come up to the geodesic point with me, so that was a lovely, lonely hike up into a gorgeous and damp sweet chestnut forest.

Kőszeg's Main Square from the Gate Tower

Old thatched press houses

Some of the over 100 feet tall trees

The weather completely cleared by Thursday morning, when I decided to return to the farther hills and forests for some more geocaching.  Zsuzsi and Robi came, but Roy still stuck to his "guarding the car" role. The first car park was the same as on Monday, but we got going in the opposite direction. The target was a set of renovated foresters' houses from the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries. They are currently housing a little forestry museum and some accommodation for children.

The foresters' houses

As we approached them the smell of gulyás hit our noses. The teachers, who were expecting the arrival, on foot, of their classes under the supervision of other teachers, were already there and cooking dinner in a cauldron on the open fire in a clearing . The houses were next to a spring and looked splendid. Apparently all of them were inhabited by foresters from the 1790's to 1954. The forest en route was also magnificent.  We estimated the height of the tallest beeches to be over 100 feet.

Memorial to the dead of the Jewish Labour Battalions

Once we got back to the car, we started descending, but stopped in a little space by the side of the road, where Roy stayed and the three of us went for another cache by two springs above us. The first one had no housing or spout, just seeped out of the rocks somewhere, but we couldn't decide exactly where as this region had a very dry winter and a lot of the springs were dry or almost dry. The second spring, however, was beautifully built up, with picnic spot, a shelter and benches/tables. The cache was spotted by Zsuzsi again, she is such an observant girl!

The fishing lake in Kőszeg

Roy straddling the Austrian/Hungarian border

The final cache was approached from a car park quite a long way from the original, where basically we had to go back to Kőszeg and up into the hills again. There we wanted to hike to another look-out tower, which Zsuzsi was keen to visit, but which had a cache that is currently set to "sick", therefore I didn't bother to look for it. As it happens, I could have, but never mind! The view from that one was amazing and even on a rather hazy day went a very long way. Unfortunately, while we were climbing up in the forest to it, the wind got up again, so we could only stay on the top of it for about 5 minutes, or we would have been blown away.

A border marker

The lane to the border with Roy, Robi and Zsuzsi

The next bit was all the way down a hell of a long way to the spring named after the Seven Chieftains of Hungary: Álmos, Előd, Ond, Kond, Tas, Huba and Töhötöm. This was a spring with great water flow, as all seven spouts produced a large amount of water fast. What was really sod's law, however, that having arrived and just managed to take a couple of photos, about 50 school children turned up with teachers and an excited dog. Such is life.  I found the cache quite easily there and we went back to Roy. He was awake this time, unlike the last couple of times when we found him fast asleep.  He obviously had enough sleep and was hoping that we turn up soon.

Lovely wild flower by the path

Friday was our last full day and Roy, quite rightly, demanded that we should do something that would please him.  Knowing his predilection for Jewish cemeteries I decided to track down the one in Kőszeg and find out how to get in.  Somebody told me where to get the keys, so off we went. It was an amazing experience. First of all, it was really difficult to find it, in spite of an absolutely accurate description from the guy in the main cemetery as he handed over the keys. Inside there was a small, but quite well kept cemetery with approximately 150 graves, vast majority of which were still standing. I took copious photographs in the bad light due to thick tree cover and finally we had to abandon the last 3 or 4 rows as it was really dark there, more overgrown than in the other parts and also our friends were getting restless in the car waiting for us.

The look-out tower at Old House Top

As I still had the second part of a cache to get to on the Austrian border West of the town, I suggested that we all walk there together.  The distance was no more than 2km and I was hoping Roy would even join us for that.  First we went round a really lovely boating lake, which since privatisation lost its boats and became a fishing lake.  More money in that, I suppose! The environment around the lake was very pretty. Afterwards we all started for the border and my cache, Roy included.  It was definitely a lovely hike. The path we were on used to be a favourite place for outings in the late XIXth and early XXth centuries. In parts we could see how nice it must have been then, nowadays it is a part of the Virgin Mary pilgrimage route between Mariazell in Austria and Csíksomlyó in Romania. Once we got to the border Roy became really excited to look for the little white posts which mark the border between Austria and Hungary.  We did this once with friends on the Slovakian border and Roy got his jollies by straddling one little border marker here as well.  The cache turned up OK and we started walking back, but not before trying to imagine what it might have been like with the electrified double barbed wire fence with border guards every few meters. We were all very glad those times are now gone, although if one looks at recent developments in Europe it is beginning to look as if they are coming back.  Let's hope not!!

Muggins in the stocks in the castle yard

Roy looking for something in the castle

We got home in the early afternoon and then something that now has the title "The Great Phototransfer Disaster" happened. I'll copy here my FB post about it, for those of you who have not yet read it.  Those that have, can just skip it.

The end of our holiday to Kőszeg - via Monoszló, Tapolca, Sümeg, the Jeli Arboretum and Tata - was nearly ruined by a very unfortunate occurrence which now, in retrospect, seems like a hilariously funny case of sod's law.

I took nearly 1200 photographs during our 9 days away. My friend Zsuzsi has no camera and usually she comes round after most of our outings together with a pendrive and copies them for her own use. This time, however, we all had the clever idea that she could take them even before we all went home by transferring them off my chip onto her tablet. Like most good ideas, this one turned out to be the beginning of about 10 hours of hell. The exceedingly long time is a reflection of how many things and gadgets went wrong as well as the slow speed of those that did work.

First of all, because Zsuzsi is not exceedingly familiar with her own tablet, she clicked on Move instead of Copy, so every single one of my photos were deleted from my chip. No bother, she said, when we realised this fact, I'll copy them back onto your chip. We started doing that, taking fortunately a lot less time than the transfer to her tablet, but when I checked it seemed that the transfer back didn't work.

Additionally, all the Jewish Cemetery photos, which were very important to Roy, were missing, as before Zsuzsi knew anything about the mix-up between Move and Copy, she deleted them as of no interest to her. So at this point both Roy and I were suffering from a mixture of anger and depression, which does nothing good to either of us, but especially is poison for me due to my heart troubles.

I basically started accepting the fact that I have lost a week's worth of lovely photos, but Zsuzsi, bless her heart, insisted that even if it takes her getting an IT professional, she'll find all my photos for me. At this point, Robi got involved and somehow between them they discovered how to recover deleted photos from her tablet. One small victory!

But still no sign of anything on the chip, so we decided perhaps we should save them back onto a pendrive that I had. We spent about an hour and a half slowly transferring the photos when the whole process stopped. Obviously, the tablet didn't like its coupling (fussy, I know!) with my pendrive. We tried another one, which was fine, but had nowhere near the memory capacity to take them all, so we needed to use Zsuzsi's pendrive as well.

If you are still reading this, you must be just as much of a glutton for punishment as I am. It was nearing midnight when this was all done and we could go to bed. Needless to say that the late hour coupled with the stress suffered all afternoon and evening made it nigh on impossible for me to go to sleep. I think I eventually dropped off around 1:30am, but as I am programmed to wake up by 5am the latest, I only had about 3 hours of sleep.

Postcript: Upon arrival home and sticking the chip into my computer, I discovered that we could have gone to bed at least 2, if not 3, hours earlier, because the transfer onto the chip was totally successful, just it didn't show that fact at the time.

A very ancient church built in a shape of circles

And as the departure day arrived we were all quite happy to move.  Unfortunately I was so shaky from 3 hours of sleep that the first 5 of the planned 10 geocaches en route home had to be scrapped. The second 5 were mostly drive-in, so very little walking was involved. Finally I was much better by the afternoon, so we popped into the town of Tata where I found three caches, one near the Festetich Chateau, one near the riding stables and one by the medieval castle by the Old Lake, which is also known to me from previous orienteering expeditions.

The lake at Tata

Today we are doing the washing, unpacking, catching up with computer and paperwork and getting ready to journey on to the village tomorrow. I hope I haven't bored too many people with a post this long, but believe me, this is the telegraphic version!! :-)