Air hockey, surreal hotels and 20mph rally racing. Matt Hussey pays a visit to Hungary’s Lake Balaton

I have a confession to make. When I found out I was off to the Hungarian countryside for the weekend, images of sun-leathered peasants tending their barren land, small children selling lucky heather and farmers wearing woolly hats at the height of summer sprang to mind.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. No sooner had my companion and I arrived at Balaton airport, it became clear that country living there and back home in the UK isn’t all that different and Hungarians aren’t all that different from Brits. They wear normal clothes, drive normal cars and eat normal food – not boiled sheep’s testicles, as some of my rather more Europhobic English friends had led me to believe! So much for my preconceptions.

Balaton is more Lake District than backward Borat-like village. A lush, green region named for the magnifi cent lake, it is beautiful and serene and one of Europe’s best-kept secrets.

Lake Balaton itself is actually Central Europe’s largest freshwater lake. It’s very big, very shallow and very pretty. The north side is dotted with quaint villages and sleepy hamlets. The south side is more developed and lives off the thousands of European tourists who turn up looking for some sun. Forget the Mediterranean, Lake Balaton is the new sunseekers’ paradise of Europe.

But with so much choice of picturesque places to stay, the immediate question for us was where? A quick scan of the map and we opted for the party destination of Siófok on the south side. Think 1950s English seaside town – fl owerbeds, immaculate parks and more sculptures than you can shake a chisel at. Oh, and lots and lots of ice cream.

My map-reading skills not being the best, Siófok appeared to be only 5km away from the airport. Then we got in a taxi, only to discover that 5 minutes was actually one hour 20 minutes and the driver didn’t tell us until we were well on our way. Thankfully there’s a bus service costing a fraction of the €70 we paid. But we didn’t know that existed until the receptionist at our hotel berated us for paying the taxi driver a week’s wages.

Speaking of the hotel, it would have been sacrilege to stay anywhere else. This was something straight out of a drug-induced dream. Best Western’s Janus Atrium Hotel (www.janushotel.hu) is a mix of Alice in Wonderland and every childhood fantasy you can think of. There’s the Gustav Klimt room, a collection of the artist’s work set in minimalist décor; the Audrey Hepburn suite, with a whole host of fi lm-star paraphernalia; and my personal choice, the Arabian nights room, complete with Moroccan lamps, fl owing silk and an ornamental elephant the size of a bus.

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