Hungary's Most Touristy Place - Tihany 2023
hey there I'm on my way to Hungary's most touristy place well at least outside the Castle District of Budapest but this is different I'm in the countryside and the place where I'm going is right over there behind these hills so this is the peninsula of Tihany the peninsula in Lake Balaton and where I'm going to is the town the main town of this peninsula which is also named Tihany an interesting thing is that the name Tihany comes from a Slavic word meaning quiet and there are definitely some quiet places around here especially if you go walking up these hills there are lots of hiking trails but the place where I'm going is more like the absolute opposite of quiet so let's go just left my bike near the main parking lot where most people of course park their cars and what I'm going to do now is just a tour of the main tourist trail in this town so I would say if you have already been here this video will probably be not so interesting for you so in that case better stop watching [Music] and here we already got the first lavender shop so there is some some tradition of growing lavender in this region which has started I think in the early 20th century and during communist time it became less popular because you know lavender is not one of the things you absolutely absolutely need for your living but during the past I would say 10 to 20 years it became more popular again but more for touristy reasons so well not that much traffic here but you have to know that it's a really hot day one of the hottest this year got about 35 degrees nice restaurant here at least it looks nice not so sure about the actual quality of food leather stuff which is normally actually still quite cheap and Hungary even in touristy places like this foreign Okay so this will go on like this I would say for another 300 400 meters I'm not sure if it will be interesting to film all the time but anyway no matter how touristy this place is it is really a nice location and we're getting closer to the main attraction of this town really not too many tourists here today but you know look at this iiew look at this view over the North Eastern part of Lake Balaton there's lots of sailing boats all over the place well this is really outstanding I think and on the top of this hill this is the Benedictine Abbey of Tihany so this is actually the center of it all so to say so you have to admit that these Benedictine monks really had a taste for great locations so Tihany is one of the few places in Hungary outside Budapest where you can see a significant number of tourists from outside Europe and they typically are on a city tour staying a few nights in Budapest so that's the abbey and one of the most popular day trips is the one to Tihany to Lake Balaton which is about 120 kilometers so you can go here by bus in about two hours stay for a few hours have lunch and then go back to Budapest so that's the abbey and I think I didn't mention that Tihany is also part of the 2023 European Culture Capital event so it's not only Veszprem it's also basically the whole Northern shore of Lake Balaton and all of this has been a construction site for about I would say two years but now it's at least almost finished let's go to the top of this hill which is actually really nice park okay part of it seems to be a graveyard what is this maybe you have to view it from the other side okay so it's oh I think this is just maybe to get water for for the plants growing on the graves I don't know so this is quite interesting so it's a kitchen off Golgotha obviously but what I find special are these crosses you know they they seem to be made of complete tree trunks normally you see the crosses made of rectangular bars but these are real not real but they look like tree trunks so this is something I have never seen before I don't think you can see this very well but here you have a look a view on the so-called Belsö Tó the Inner Lake which is a small lake inside the peninsula and in the background I don't think you can see this there is the other the other side of the Malachi well Southwestern side so really few tourists here so I'm planning to to tell you some more things about tourism at Lake volaton in general at least that's what I'm planning so when you come here for the first time I recommend to go inside this church and there is also a museum attached to it I'm not gonna do that because I have been here at least two times before and the entrance fee is well for Hungarian circumstances it is quite high it's about 7.50 Euro so these are prices which well a few years ago I would have expected that maybe maybe in Italy not even in Germany and anyway in Germany it's normally it's normally free to go inside to churches so it's very uncommon to have to pay an entrance fee for the churches but still I would highly highly recommend going there if you haven't been there before already on the way back down to the main street [Music] so yeah they're really really plenty of those lavender shops that actually haven't existed five years ago seems to be quite a good business concept over there with another quite touristy place it's the paprika house see all this dried paprika or chili around the entrance so paprika is definitely typical for Hungary but actually not so much for this region so here at Lake Balaton there is not so much paprika being grown okay I would say that's it that was the main tourist Trail can have another view at the Abbey over there together with the paprika house so that's the point where most people actually decide to go back to the parking lot Maybe have some food first and then drive back to the river they came from but as I said there is there is much more to this to this peninsula than just the main town and I think um first go take my bike and then have a little tour to Belsö Tó at least which is also not so touristy as here but still quite a touristy place and there I will also try to explain some more things about tourism in this region in general I decided to take a different route back to show you this part as well looks like there is a probably very expensive piece of Real Estate still available thank you [Music] Visszahang means echo the Hungarian word for Echo and there was one place I don't know exactly where it is but somewhere around here where you can hear quite a good Echo if you make some loud noise let's try to find it I think you have to go up there a little bit more here is the echo restaurant that still didn't find out where the exact places where you can you can hear this echo which is a little bit embarrassing because I'm supposed to know this place quite well I've been here many times but to be honest not so much on the most touristy routs so maybe it's up here you can see that quite a religious place that's another Golghata depiction and a I think it's called a calvaria these Hills where you can walk up and have 14 stations seven on both sides not sure what these chats I'm not supposed to be for okay unfortunately at least cases like this are often used as a toilet but that's the way it is when you have many people many tourists in one place so I don't think that's really the echo place but here you can see okay so this 300 meters five minutes this way so looks like this is directly where this restaurant is okay so that's the restaurant and I just heard that the place where you can hear the echo is actually down there let's see okay that seems to be it still I cannot really imagine where the sound should be reflected here to create an echo that seems to be the place I'm not in the mood for screaming around here so I will not try it out yeah that's the famous foreign there are lots of restaurants here and as you can see you have not restricted to a Hungarian cuisine you have International Food like Kebab here as well if you really want to so slowly getting towards the quieter places of Tian you can still fee the town and the Abe over there this is Belsö Tó a little Lake. Belsö means inner, the Inner Lake because it's inside the peninsula which is inside the large lake, like Balaton and over there awesome gray cattle so let me tell you a little bit generally about the history of tourism in this region in the Balaton region during the past I don't know 30 40 years so the first time I came here was about maybe 30 years ago I'm not sure about that so to summarize it the lake Balaton has changed from a simple and cheap place into a fancy and expensive place so at least it got much more expensive so let's look at which tourists used to come here and which kinds of tourists come here now there is one group of tourists who didn't change a lot during the past I would say 40 or even 50 years and that's middle class Hungarian people from the surrounding towns and Villages some also came from from the largest larger towns like Budapest Györ, Sopron so these have always been here and they still come here and yeah middle class in Hungary of course means that's not really people with too much money on their hands so they liked this for being a nice place but also for being a cheap place then I would say in the in the 70s another group of tourists appeared that came from farther away they were Germans from Eastern Germany the so-called German Democratic Republic so why did they come here simple because they didn't have a chance to go anywhere else so they were not allowed to travel freely and Hungary was one of the very few places where they could go without too many problems so many people from Eastern Germany from the German Democratic Republic came here and the interesting thing is um it was also much easier for Western Germans to come here than to visit their friends and maybe families in Eastern Germany so often they want from Eastern Germany and the one from Western Germany met here in Hungary to get together so that period took until of course 1990 and after that the people from Eastern Germany were of course allowed to travel anywhere and that's actually what they did so they checked out other places and didn't come here at least not that often anymore so you can see the not sure if you can see it but I know that the water level is relatively low but it still is higher than during the last year because last year we had very few rain very little rain this time it was a little bit better so I hope the lake is filling up again so normally everything which is gray where you have this muddy sand here will fill up okay so I was actually talking about the different topic after 1990 the main reason why people came here was that it's not only a nice place but also it has been very very cheap so I remember the first time I came here I think it was in 1993 you could have a meal, lunch or dinner, for about one Euro and it was okay so um that was the 90s then in the late 90s a different group of tourists appeared those were people mostly from Germany and Austria wealthier people who bought real estate in Hungary many of them were older people who were no longer working and wanted to spend the rest of their life in this place saving a lot of money and still having a good time so they were not or mostly not the super rich people but they were wealthier because they were able to buy real estate so they also had from there are some expectations so they wanted to go to fancier restaurants and wanted to go shopping some specific maybe luxurious things so that led to a much higher quality of everything here in Lake Balaton at least to a certain extent of course it also meant that the prices were rising but it wasn't that bad at that time then a little bit later I would say in the early 2000s another group appeared those were also well still are also wealthier people but not from different countries instead they were wealthier people from Hungary mostly from Budapest where of course most of the rich people Rich hungarians live so they came here bought houses, apartments some of them also bought yachts and they came here still came here still come here of course with their fancy cars SUVs now uh electric cars are quite popular um so of course these people they wanted to show off they like to show what they have so I have to say like in in most countries outside Germany people really like to show what they have so there is not much understatement here which is I find it's okay but as a German you have to get used to it so these people of course also cost an increase of quality there were even more fancy restaurants they were even fancier shops and again things got a little bit more expensive so I would say that was the period maybe from 2005 to 2019 and yeah you know then came the pandemic then came the war in Ukraine and this caused some serious inflation so I would say most of of the prices have kind of doubled during the past three years so that means they are approximately on the same level as in Germany which is still acceptable for a person like me who earns this money in Germany but here in Hungary you're still have I think on average something like half of the salary as in Germany and other Western European countries so that's a real issue and also the people who really also the people from from Germany Austria France Netherlands that really don't have a lot of money but really need to save money I'm not sure if they will come back in the future because they could go to Italy to Spain for approximately the same prices so that's inflation during the past three years and I'm not sure how it will develop so of course when the prices rise of course it's bad for tourism it's bad for the tourists but on the other hand at least some of uh the money some of the additional money will make the salaries of the people who work here higher and that is actually a positive aspect of this but on the other hand we of course also have to have to live with with inflation so it's it's definitely an issue what has happened during the past three years and I'm really wondering how it will continue so anything else to say about being a tourist in Hungary well at least one thing so I still absolutely recommend coming here you know Hungary has a really bad marketing but yeah marketing is not necessarily the right term so many people don't consider it in a place where they want to go and that's also for political reasons so the media or at least most media in Germany are presenting a really negative image of this country and that's because yeah of course the the leader the Prime Minister Victor Orban is also somebody I do not like at all is uh well I'm not you I'm not going to use any any derogatory words but he's definitely not my favorite prime minister but then from my point of view this is absolute no reason not to visit this country because well some people support him but actually most of them don't. You don't really notice a lot of the effects of his politics here
at least not directly so from my point of view you shouldn't really consider politics too much when you travel to a country and this is definitely one of the most underrated and most interesting countries in Europe so I think that's it for today have a nice time hope to see you in my next video bye bye
2023-09-07 05:58
