Reconnecting

Goodness knows how far I've travelled in the last six and a half weeks, or for how many hours (or days). I could work it out, but my poor jet-lagged brain wilts at the very notion. Let's just leave it at 7 flights, 11 rail journeys, one week-long cruise plus four other boat trips, and lots of driving. Being driven, rather, in cars, coaches, a roller-coaster and one ambulance.

There's been history and architecture, art and war, old friends and some new ones, a wedding and a camel, innumerable churches and cathedrals plus one astonishing mosque, lots of good food and a surprising amount of beer (favourite: Berliner Weisse - must be rot, not grun). It's been interesting, sad, funny, emotional, heart-warming, boring, horrifying, painful and tiring. The weather was summer-hot and winter-cold, with rain and an icy Mistral. I hated myself for packing so badly and having to haul around such a stupidly heavy suitcase, and will NEVER do that again.

Right now I feel that I never actually want to leave home again. Mainly because I'm tired, and sore, and have so much writing to do from the trips I've done this year already - but also because though I've seen such wonderful sights, such beauty of so many different sorts, I went down to the beach today and realised yet again that where natural beauty is concerned, a 20-minute drive is all it takes for an eyeful (and heartful) of the best.

Another day, three other countries

Breakfast in Hungary, lunch in Slovakia, dinner in Poland: what it is to be a globetrotter! Though in fact it was only a day's not very intensive driving in our comfortable Insight coach through pretty green hills and farmland with little villages of coloured houses with steeply-pitched roofs, and churches with tall spires of various shapes. There were people tending neat gardens, some crop hung to dry on triangular racks, a stork wading through long grass, a deer watching something, lots of clear mountain streams and proper mountains with snow on them.

There were also clusters of horrible Soviet-era apartment blocks, now painted brightly but still eyesores ("though stylish inside!" insisted Karin, who grew up in one), ugly factories belching smoke and smells out into the clean air, electricity sub-stations all cables and transformers, car-yards under tents of plastic banners, and lots of Tesco supermarkets. But mainly it was lovely, the apple and plum trees blossoming white and pink, the woodlands pleasantly mixed deciduous and conifer, scatterings of goats and sheep, random singly-tethered cows chewing their cud, and always the appealing traditional houses, three or four storeys, or just one in sturdy wood.

The southern part of Poland we came in to was especially attractive - and the roads were excellent! And now we're in Krakow, which has not only swans on the wide bend of the river below the towers of the Old Town's cathedral, but an actual salt mine to explore tomorrow. Now there's a thing.

Ugly and beautiful

When the tour guide uses the words "wars of independence" you know you're in a country with a complicated and tragic history. Hungary is in the fertile Carpathian Basin that's been coveted for over a thousand years and successively claimed by Celts, Magyars, Romans, Mongols, Turks, French, Italians, Germans and Russians, some of them several times each, and if I think too hard about all the history I heard today the whole lot evaporates out of my head. Back at Heroes' Square, the four big statues on top of the colonnades represent Labour ("we know all about that"), War ("we've had so many wars"), Peace ("we've had hardly any of that in our history") and Progress ("still waiting") - that's according to Agnes, and she knew what she was talking about.

Later we went to the Terror Museum, in the Budapest equivalent of the Champs Elysees with Gucci and Louis Vuitton just down the road, and tiptoed through the building used first by the Hungarian Nazis (who knew?) and then by the military police, who were the same people in a different uniform. It was stern stuff, well presented and thorough, and though there could have been a bit more English labelling, there was no doubt about what went on there - and on, and on. The voice testimonies were pretty riveting, godawful stories from ordinary-looking people; and then there were the torture instruments, including an actual battered bright light on a stand by a chair in the 'Treatment Room' that made a joke I've often made seem very sick. And there was a gallows (used). It was horrible, and sad, and confusing: just a couple of days ago, in Zagan, we were feeling sorry for the Russians in the concentration camp of Stalag VIII C, and now here they were doing unspeakable things to the Hungarians. Bad people are bad people wherever they were born, I guess.

But there were beautiful things today too: the interior of the fabulous Parliament buildings, the lovely church up on the hill in Buda, and a spectacular dinner cruise along the Danube with all the bridges and best buildings perfectly lit up and colouring the black water.

Bard in Budapest

Knowing nothing about Hungary other than associating it with a Rhapsody, an Uprising, goulash and paprika, most of what I saw today meant very little. The statues in Heroes' Square of men world-famous in Hungary (in my ignorant eyes at least) I enjoyed simply as works of art and historical oddities: the horse's bridle made out of antlers, the Viking moustaches, the man in long robes clearly astonished to find himself in such - presumably - exalted company. We were free-wheeling today, making the most of the lovely weather on an open-topped bus tour with a frankly abysmal commentary - although, European history being the dauntingly complicated affair that it is, that wasn't so surprising.

What did impress us was the fabulous architecture; so grand, so imperial, so beautiful on its hill above the Danube, so artistically laid out. The Parliament buildings knock Westminster into a cocked hat, especially seen from a boat on a hot sunny day with a pleasant breeze. We boated, we bussed, we trammed, we wandered - it was all about ambience today, with violins (they are to Budapest what bagpipes are to Edinburgh). Tomorrow we get the facts and figures.

One thing we found while meandering was this statue of Shakespeare apparently deploring some kind of shoe-related malfunction (but actually bowing) that's a replica of one in - wait for it - Ballarat in Victoria, where we went in 2010. It was created by a Hungarian-born sculptor living in Australia, and recreated for Budapest to 'serve as a spiritual link among the discerning public in Australia [pause for your appreciation of no gags inserted here], Hungary and Great Britain'. Coincidence, eh? Not unknown to the bard himself, of course.

All aboard, again

Back on the trains today, successfully avoiding the scenario above: twelve hours from Berlin to Budapest during which I mainly gazed out of the (regrettably dirty) windows and watched the countryside pass by. It was sort of an experiment, to try overland instead of through the air, and on the whole I think it was a success. I saw occasional vapour trails of planes passing overhead whose passengers at best would have seen the yellow of the oilseed rape, but little else.

They didn't see the little towns and villages with their onion-domed churches and brightly-painted half-hipped houses, and the bridges over the Elbe (the river looking muddy brown but nowhere near as doomy as in Wolfgang Borchert's play Draussen vor der Tur), and the flowering chestnuts and lilac trees, the busily productive allotments, and the boats on the river. Nor, to be fair, did they see the derelict factories with peeling paint and broken windows, all the graffiti, the Soviet-style concrete apartment blocks, the power stations with their smoking chimneys.

But it felt good to travel in real time, to have the leisure to watch the day pass by, the sun move from one side of the train to the other, to see the people rushing to work and then, later, out enjoying the sunny evening on bikes, roller blades, walking dogs through meadows knee-high in grass and dandelions, fishing in ponds and the river; before a lovely sunset that I could watch till the very end of the afterglow. And it was good too to be able to move about during the day, wander through the carriages, be greeted at regular intervals by the cheery trolley guy with his beer and snacks. Finally - admittedly, about two hours later than would have been ideal - it was good to end the journey in a new city feeling tired simply because it was bedtime, and not spaced-out and confused after yet another episode of limbo.

Although, whoa, this was confusing: what's Rangitoto doing in the Czech Republic?

Cruising into 2012

What better way to spend the first (uncharacteristically damp, grey and humid) day of the New Year than by indulging in some movie nonsense on the pretext of revisiting locations from the old one? Thus it was that I spent more than two hours twitching and wriggling nervously in my seat as I watched Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol work through its ridiculous story, told with every tool of movie trickery in the box. Steve Jobs (RIP) would have been thrilled to see the casual and ubiquitous use of iPads and iPhones to track and identify villains as well as a host of other useful spy-themed apps. The most thrilling part though appealed to a much more basic and age-old human instinct: fear of heights.

Which of course took Tom to Dubai, home of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, at 828m and 160 storeys, to do a Spidey up the outside with a dodgy gripper glove and then a Canyon Swing back down again and in through the window. As you do. The views down that extraordinary shiny silver building were dizzyingly spectacular, the surrounding buildings, the vast fountain complex and the ground itself so incredibly far away. I wish I had had the time to go up to the Observation Deck, but you have to book or pay some huge sum, and I was, as usual, on a tight schedule; but I did get to see it from the bottom, which was amazing enough - although very hard to fit into a viewfinder.

The movie started in Budapest, which I was interested to see as I'll be going there in May; then from Dubai went to Mumbai - where I haven't been, does Delhi count? - and finished up in Seattle, on the waterfront where we had a nose around, were most impressed by the Aquarium, and took a ferry from across to Bainbridge Island, which looked lovely but again we had no time to look around (aren't you glad you're not a travel writer, hogtied by the tyranny of the itinerary?). There was even a glimpse of San Francisco, where a chunk got taken off the top of the Transamerica Pyramid by an at-the-last-second aborted nuclear missile. So, pretty much been there - but done all that? Thankfully, not.