Lake Balaton

Lake Balaton is the largest lake in Europe so we thought we'd head there for a nice relaxing bit of camping. We headed over to the western tip of the lake and set up our tent in a campground near Keszthely. We had picked a spot way in the corner away from all the other tents and parked up our car next to it. However, later on in the evening heaps of new people arrived and set up, leaving our car blocked in by a wall of tents! The next morning, after enough people had left leaving us space to drive out, we headed up to a town called Tapolca which had an underground lake right in its town centre. The cave lake was discovered when they were drilling wells and now you can paddle a little boat around inside of it. It wasn't as cool as the Magura caves and there were heaps of people and boats (enough for a boat jam). Still pretty cool and the water was real clear and warm.



Next we went for a swim in a radioactive lake. No kidding! Lake Heviz is a huge thermal lake and is famed for having medicinal water (only a little bit radioactive). They also use the radioactive mud for therauputic purposes. The water was 32 degrees and quite pleasant for lounging about in. Everybody else had life rings and noodles but we had to just swim and try not to drown too much. Kinda weird being in hot water with bits of mud and waterlillies floating around.



On the way up to Budapest the next day we came across a really nice grass beach on the south side of the lake (all the beaches are grass, weird!). It was the only free beach we had come across as all the other good bits of beach were in strands that you had to pay to get into. The lake is really shallow on the south side and there were people way out in the distace that were only chest high in the water. Awesome.