Déjà vu in Pere
Last Friday we checked out from the hotel with the rock-hard beds and struggled through the snow to the little nice resort in Pere. It is a small village with a single grocery shop, a small school, 3 churches and 350 inhabitants.

The hotel was run by a family and the rooms were clean and simple with a tiled bathroom and tiles on the floor in the bedroom. I believe our room was quite newly built since it had a smell of freshness in it. The smell, design and way of furnishing quickly gave me feeling that I had been there before.

Since I am in Hungary I had to try a hungarian gulasch for dinner. It was delicious and on the table there was a little bowl with dried chillies to spice it up. I put a lot of it in the soup and soon it was almost as spicy as a thai dish. The feeling of being at home grew stronger.

We have cycled mainly on the countryside both here in Hungary but also in Slovakia and Poland and it seems rather popular in this region to keep a dog or two. The dog barks at us every time we pass by but since they are within the fences of the houses it is not a problem. Later on we will be chased by dogs for sure.

Still lots of snow

Last night when I had gone to bed I heard that the dog in the house opposite to the hotel started to bark. Within a few seconds the neighbour’s dogs barked too and soon we could hear how the barking spread all over the village. This is something I have experienced a lot before too.

These three separate experiences gave me a déjà vu feeling of Thailand. Tiled, clean rooms in a resort run as a family business, spicy delicious soups and dog barking competitions in the street at night. I felt like I already was in Thailand and we could stop cycling already here 🙂

This morning we started to cycle at 10.15 which is very late for us. It was planned since we wanted the ice on the road start to melt a bit so that we could get some grip when riding up the switchbacks out of the village. The road was not as bad as expected, but at some places we can understand that it had been a big trouble to pass a few days earlier. We saw big piles of snow that had been cleared from the road and thick layers of snow in some ditches along the road.

Grapevines in tidy rows

Later on we entered the Tokaj area which is famous for its vineyards. It was much less snow there and the sun was shining and we could actually see some green grass on some spots. Although probably not as nice as during summer, it was still beautiful with grapevines in tidy rows.

Sun protection factor 1.000

The sun kept shining all through the day. We had a little tailwind and could move over the small back country roads and pass nice little villages at a convenient speed with only a few cars passing by.

Since at least I have had this déjà vu feelings of already being in Thailand, I thought that we might as well hurry up to get there and when this thing stood at the entrance of a town, we thought that we could as well leave our bikes there and catch a ride with the rocket instead.

A quicker way to get to Thailand