We drive along parallel to the river. There are intense discussions going on in the front of the car, mostly in English, but I gaze out of the window and watch the river pass by. At the ferry station we stop, and Gabriella gets out and goes looking for a timetable. I get out too and gaze out over the water.
Hard to see how it could be considered blue, by any stretch of the imagination, maybe that’s just in Austria, though I suspect more likely it was only Herr Strauss’ flight of fancy.
‘It is a beautiful colour.’ Gabriella must be reading my thoughts. ‘It used to be brown, but now it is green, or – what colour would you say?’
‘Maybe turquoise?’ even that is a little romanticised, but it is certainly a lovely green. There are canoeists over near the other bank, there were canoeists even in the city centre, quite surprising, not something you could imagine on the Thames.
‘Over there’, she is pointing across the water, ‘that is the island where we are going.’
So, not the other bank after all. I should have realised it wasn’t wide enough.
‘The ferry doesn’t take cars. We will have to go over the bridge. It’s about 10 kilometres’.
We set off again. I disappear into my thoughts, not dozing exactly, though it was a very early start, even for me. We come to the bridge at last, and drive over onto the island. The land here is flat, but the mountains are there in the background, more obvious now there is a distance between us and them, the river in between has disappeared from view. I catch a glimpse of yellow in the fields, not rape, surely? No, sunflowers, all facing the same way, that must be south. We pass through villages with gardens full of geraniums and daisies spilling over in shades of pink and orange. The island is bigger than I was expecting, we seem to drive for kilometre after kilometre through this pretty landscape.
Gabriella has directions to the campsite, but they are talking about the ferry station. That seems to be the first priority.
‘There’s the old boat!’ Apparently the rusting hulk by the side of the road is significant. ‘We must be nearly there’. A turn to the left, a short distance further and the river is in front of us once again, there is a slipway directly in front but we turn right for a couple of hundred metres then pull up outside a yellow house with a yellow car parked in front of it. Gabriella jumps out and goes to talk to an old lady who is standing behind the building holding a bunch of yellow flowers, and there is a yellow digger behind her. Everything is yellow, like the sunflowers, full of sunshine. Another slipway runs past the building, Istvan turns the car left onto it, as though he is going to drive straight into the river, but he stops just in time.
We stare at the river through the windscreen for a few seconds, then he reverses back up and out onto the road. Directly opposite the turning is a noticeboard with a timetable. Gabriella is studying it closely.
‘The last ferry is 8:30’ she says as she gets back into the car. ‘the first is 5:30’.
We drive back the way we came, round the bend to the left and past the rusting boat, then straight on, down an unmetalled track. On our left, a gateway and a battered sign.
‘Here it is’.
We drive through into the campsite. A large wooden building to our left, we pull up in front of it and get out. There are wooden cabins among the trees, a central campfire area, some tents, not many people. We walk up onto the decking of the main building, where a table is set up There is a young woman, Gabriella talks to her in Hungarian first, then English.
The rooms in the cabins are for six or three people.
‘We need a room to ourselves because we have to use my laptop to work on our project’ she says to the administrator. Not strictly true. Embarrassed, I look away. The girl does not seem particularly friendly.
Now we are all climbing back into the car again.
‘We go to Istvan’s house. Registration does not start until 5.’ It must be about 1:30 now.
But first, for reasons I don’t quite understand, we need to find another ferry station. We drive around the island, find the ferry, once again Gabriella jumps out, but there is no one here to talk to, just a slip road leading into the river. We stare across to the other bank. The ferry, with a flat barge alongside carrying a couple of cars, is making its way across to a similar jetty on the other side. Once again, we reverse back to the road.
‘Now we drive to Istvan’s house, back over the bridge’.
Why not take the ferry? I wonder – and what’s wrong with the other ferry?
I don’t ask, but the explanation comes anyway. Gabriella gestures across the river.
‘We don’t know where that goes’.
