Day Nine - Eger

The train north east to Eger, after scudding out of Budapest's concrete suburbs, opens up to flat, golden plains of wheat and barley fields. Scruffs of ash trees cluster around the numerous rivers and steams, and the gound is flecked with splashes of wild flowers.

Eger is home to the so called "Valley of Beautiful Women" and is where most of Hungary's wine is grown and produced. Whether the sweeping hills are home to particularly attractive ladies, or that those ladies merely appear so after the locals' heroic intake of wine, I couldn't decipher.

We are staying with a middle aged lady with a large, round face and quick grey eyes. She speaks no English and so our conversation falls into farce, with each of us repeating the same phrase in our native tongue, slightly louder and slower each time. The room is lovely, in the northern suburbs of the town on a street lined either side with weeded piazzas. It is also staggering distance to the wine-making region.

It's late, so Claire and I decide to cut our losses and head direction to the valley of inebriation which, according to our guidebook, is populated by tightly packed rows of individual wineries, the occupants of which will fill any container you bring along for about one pound a litre.

If the first winery looks like someone's house, then that's because it is. We ring the bell and a man walks out of his back door rubbing his inflated belly as if it were a pet. His name is Alex, and he has a moustache that would make Stalin blush.

I stutter my other Hungarian word, voros meaning "red" and Alex nonchalantly lets us through the back gate before leading us down into his hidden, mercifully cool wine cellar. It is cavernous.

Either side of a brick-lined collonade are huge wooden barrels, each easily a metre in diameter, scrawled with numbers in white paint.

Using a decorative glass pump, operated by suction from his mouth, Alex draws some blood red liquid from a vat and fills up two glasses. These are 'tasters', and we have four large ones each before we decide that we liked the first one. Alex lets me have a go at operating the pump and filling our platic water bottles as he, assuming himself out of sight, quietly necks half a litre of fresh Reisling.

We pick up vegetables from the market and cook goulash (what else) as the ferdent valleys recieve a pounding of dark rain. Under a canopy we sip our newly aquired wine and enjoy a firework show of electical storms raging across the river. This is more like it.

After taking in nothing but capital cities - all of which have been delightful if a little sanitised - it's nice to finally see a bit of rural Eastern Europe, free from cosmopolitan crowds. I'd like to say its the feeling of tranuility taken from our village idyll that sends me so soundly to sleep but I'd only be kidding myself to not but this down to the excellent and ample Hungarian wine.