Cave Baths!

Today I learned an important lesson: Trust yourself.  I've spent years planning every detail of this trip; researching every minor point.  Yet there are still a couple areas that worried me due to a lack of reliable information.  Miskloc was one of those areas.  It's the third largest city in Hungary but for some reason isn't in any American Guidebooks.  Everything in our trip (Save our Hungarian overture) has gone relatively smoothy, yet for some reason the night before departing for Miskolc I lost my composure and became convinced that everything would go wrong on our trip.  It's very difficult to find lodging in the city and everything in the city is very spread out.  Thankfully, Kati stepped up and set up a contingency plan that really helped calm my nerves because none of the hotels I had contacted had responded by the time we had to leave.

Before discussing our day, it may be helpful to explain how Miskolc is laid out.  The area and its attractions are kind of arranged the shape of an "L" on its side.  Miskolc's downtown is found at the juncture.  Miskolc-Tapolca is about 20 minutes south of Miskolc.  Diosgyor is about 15 minutes west of Miskolc and Lillafured is another 15-20 minutes west of Diosgyor.

The Cave Baths

From the train station, we immediately followed Kati's (comprehensive and easy) plan and found ourselves at a "hotel" on Miskolc University's campus.  They had cheap and available rooms, yet we quickly realized that we were in the middle of nowhere and there was no food around (Yes, college campus and no food...what's up with that?).  Interestingly enough, the hotel was housing all of the young ladies from the FIBA basketball championship.  Yet to quell my complete and total unease with the situation we decided to make the trek to the center of the city To the Tourist Information Center and planned to find a hotel downtown.  Yet upon reaching the tourist information center we decided it would be more efficient to stay in Miskolc-Tapolca, near the cave baths.  Finding a place to stay was more problematic than anticipated.  One of the kind ladies at the center called a long list of hotels in the Tapolca area, only to find that 99% of them were completely booked.  Luckily, we found one with a free room that wasn't too much out of our price range.  Then we threw our packs back on to make the trek south of the city center.  Here's where my lesson of the day comes in: If we had followed my original plan, and if I hadn't freaked out about the trip the night before, we would headed directly to where we ended up after all of our unnecessary traveling.  Oh well, you live and you learn.

Our hotel was about 850 meters from the bus stop...uphill.  By the time we finally got there both of us were exhausted and our spirits were all but crushed.  We had arrived in Miskolc at 10:30 but by the time we checked into our hotel it was past 3:30.  Yet we decided to stick to our plan and check out the cave baths that evening.

Kati and Me at the Cave Baths

Miskolc-Tapolca is "famous" for being the only spa/bath in the world that is located in a natural cave system.  It is SO COOL!  There are a number of outdoor and indoor normal pools, but the focus of the area is on the five thermal baths that wind their way through caves.  The temperature of the water in the baths ranges from lukewarm to slightly warmer (Unfortunately no hot-tub temperatures) but there are saunas in the caves as well.  The first bath is kind of like a lazy river winding through cavernous halls.  The second has all sorts of water spouts crashing down through hollow cave formations.  Yet the best one (and the warmest) has three areas: two are relatively typical, but warmer than the others yet the third is a completely rounded dome room, painted black with constellations on it and anything that anyone says within the room echoes.  I really can't overstate how cool these baths were.  We were swimming...in a cave!  As we sat there, soaking in the water; massaging our feet with jets, all of the stress from the trip and the day just fell away and we both agreed that all of the suffering and misery from the earlier 3/4 of the day was totally worth it.