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Early wake up to take the tram to another station in Miskolc, which seem barely used.

The train I’m taking this morning is quite exceptional. It’s a tiny regional train, the kind I’ve never seen before. It’s an old, VERY high (don’t even dream of getting onboard if you’re in a wheelchair) train composed of two cute tiny carriages. The inner doors are not sliding doors like on every train ever, but more like your house doors. You have to carefully close it behind you. The seats are replaced by benches. Each have their own upper rack for luggages. It’s all very exotic, and to be honest, quite comfortable. It’s also sloooow.

But we eventually reach the small village of Putnok, where I jump in a local bus. It’s a one hour ride for a mere two euros!

I’m finally at my destination of Aggtelek, in the eponymous Aggtelek NP. It is located on the Slovak border, and the area forms the Slovak-Hungarian Karst region, a zone with hundreds of caves and other fascinating geological features. I wanted to do a guided tour of the Baradla cave, the biggest in Hungary (25 km in length!), which would only start in a couple of hours. So I walked around, did a bit of grocery, followed the road up to the Slovak border to apologize to good old Slovakia again, and finally it was time to go underground.

This tour doesn’t go far into the cave, but it has some memorable stalagmites and -tites on display. The draped rock walls remind me a lot of Postojna in Slovenia. However, the crowd was way bigger than I imagined. We were probably a hundred people there. And among them, a big slice were kids, some playing with their parents’ camera on flash mode. Erf. The guide was only speaking Hungarian, so explanations and jokes were quite lost on me. But still an interesting experience, I hadn’t visited a cave yet on this trip.

After that, I saw on a map that there was a hiking path all the way to the other entrance of the Baradla cave, in the next village of Jósvafő. Buses are very few and far inbetween in this neck of the wood, so I had all the time in the World. And also I could get an earlier bus from there, so on I went on the seven kilometers hike, said to last three hours.

It turned out to be more of a countryside walk, going up and down gentle hills, through fields and forests. With the sun, it was a very pleasant walk. At this point of the day, I had already seen a stork, a squirrel, a toad and a bat. Quite the animal day, completed by a multitude of insects (I hadn’t really seen much of them yet this year!)

In the end, I did the hike in slightly over two hours, giving me the good surprise to be able to take the 16:40 bus, instead of the next one… at 19:00. On the first stop, we waited for a couple of minutes. One woman on the bus get off to get a couple of icecreams, and the driver was kindly waiting. Awesome.

I got off in the middle-of-nowhere station of Aggtelek-Jósvafő, which is actually nowhere near those two villages, but rather in Perkupa. I climbed aboard the same tiny regional train as this morning, and nearly fell asleep in this so relaxing ride. The sun was getting down, casting beautiful shadows and late day light over the Hungarian countryside.

If I’m not mistaken, this was actually the 100th actual train that I’ve taken so far on the Great European Train Trip! Woohoo!!!!

Finally arrived, I realized that tram tickets office are far away and not on my route. I shut up the outlaw torn within me who wanted to take the first passing tram, and walked instead.

A few days ago, I finally installed an app to count my steps. Sadly, the first two months will be missing, but today’s 17 km record might stand for a while. I’m exhausted.