Scoutmaster Europe Journal 2002
Report # 8
7/31/2002
Hi Everyone,
I awoke early and left the camp in Szeged around 7:00 a.m., no one else was up yet. There was a camp wide cookout the night before, and people stayed up partying late. This kind of camping is not what anyone would call "roughing it." All of the campgrounds that I have stayed in are actually quite civilized. They usually have a kitchen facility, very clean bathrooms and showers, and most have a restaurant and little store. Many European families use campgrounds to save money, and travel trailers are very common, they are called caravans here. I almost always meet Dutch and German families camping.
The evening before, I had an conversation with a misplaced Australian on holiday, visiting friends in several eastern European countries. His name is Ross, and he now works as an "administrator" for a sheik in one of the United Arab Emirates. He has not lived in Australia for many years, but in our conversation he must have mentioned half a dozen places around the world where he had lived and worked. He could speak at least five languages fluently as I heard him converse with others in the campground. Our conversation started with my questioning him on the Arab perspective of the trouble in the Middle East. He had two main points to make. There would be no peace until 1) Sharon is gone, and 2) the borders revert to some former state (not well defined). He then went on to say, very apologetically, that "everyone" hates the United States because of its foreign policies over the past 50 or so years. He pointed to Latin America, SE Asia, and a myriad of places that I knew little about as examples of American policies that resulted in the loss of many lives. He said the rest of the world views the way we've used our money and our strength in a very negative light. Interestingly, he also condemned the attacks of September 11th, and said that even the people in the Arab world condemn them. We talked for hours, very deep, very political.
Szeged lived up to my expectations again. I took in a concert that was performed by an English orchestra in the synagogue, and I got to attend a Hungarian dance festival. Both were terrific. I spoke to the conductor of the English orchestra. This was their first concert on a week long tour. Their percussion instruments couldn't fit on the airplane out of Heathrow and were sent later. The instruments were in Budapest supposedly enroute to Szeged, but the concert was performed without percussion! The orchestra had two exceptional players, both female, a cellist and a french horn player. It's hard to compare listening to music in this synagogue and looking up at the cupola over the Ark with other experiences that I have had. The inscription over altar on the ceiling is the Golden Rule written in Hebrew and in Hungarian. In Hungarian it reads, "szeresd felebaratodat mint tenmagadat," love your neighbor as yourself.
The dance festival was fun too. Dance groups from all over Hungary, and from Germany, and Romania, assembled in a large park and marched a few blocks to the performance stage in a town square. The dance costumes and the lively performances energized the spectators too.
The time had come to head west toward Austria. Enroute, I stopped in a small town called Mohacs (Moe-hachs). I had been there three years ago, and admired the Art Deco style of architecture. Mohacs is the gateway to Croatia, and is an important city in Hungarian and European history. This is where the Ottoman Turk, Suleyman the Great, defeated the Hungarians and invaded Europe. Suleyman's goal was to capture the city of Vienna, but he was stopped north of Budapest by a coalition of European armies, including Poles and Prussians.
I stayed in a very nice campground in the lake country of Orfu, north of Pecs, and the next day, drove across the middle of Hungary to Austria. I had to go around Lake Balaton, Hungary's largest and most popular vacation area. The weather has been beautiful, and I was sure traffic was going to be a problem as people headed for the lakeside resorts. It was. Nonetheless, I made it to the border and crossed into Austria without incident.
My goal in Austria was to travel along mountain roads, stay off the expressways, and see some of the more out of the way places, and I succeeded. Vienna and Salzburg are terrific places, not to be missed, but I saw them three years ago, and this time I wanted to be in the mountains. As a result, I had had no access to the internet while in Austria! However, I got to see some magnificent alpine vistas, and camp at some great places. There's an area south of Salzburg called the Salzkammergut. I camped in a place called Obertraun, on a lake called the Ausee. The mountain range is called the Dachstein. This area is where salt was mined, and is the reason Salzburg (salt city) became a wealthy town. Only later, did Mozart make his mark on the city. I was not interested in seeing any more salt mines, but some of the world's largest ice caves are in this area, and I visited the Dachsteinhohlen ice cave. To get there, I took a cable car up the side of a mountain, then walked about 20 minutes, uphill to the entrance to the cave. The altitude is about 10,000 ft. The cave tour took about an hour and involved another 1000ft of climbing underground.
The mountains here, have almost no streams or other surface water because the underlying limestone is cracked, it's called karst, and rain water seeps underground. The water that falls on the mountains winds up as underground ice and as underground water sources that empty into the lake basin. The ice cave contains large caverns where the ice forms columns and other structures hundreds of meters thick. Melting and freezing create intricate and beautiful formations. The ice caves were first explored in the early 1900's, without the benefit of cable car transport.
Philip Sternberg