5 Fun Day Trips From Budapest

I spent 17 nights in Budapest last year, on my third visit to the city, and there’s certainly enough to do there to keep you occupied longer than that if you’d like. Even if you stick to the tried and true, the capital city of Hungary is packed with history and quirky attractions. If you want to defy the tourist norms and see more of the country though, there are some fun day trips from Budapest you can easily do on a train or an organized tour excursion.

It’s not going to cost you a lot to travel around Hungary. Prices in Budapest are reasonable and that’s also true for train tickets to get out of the city. If you go on some kind of a tour through Viator or a local agency, it’s usually not going to shatter your travel budget. Hungary has been featured in every edition of my book The World’s Cheapest Destinations and though there are cheaper spots in Europe, this is still one of the best values.

I’m leaving out a few spots I visited on my first trip to the country that you could get to on a day trip, like the wine regions of Villany and Pecs, just because that’s not really enough time to do them justice and it would be a dawn-to-midnight kind of travel day probably. Better to spend the night in the area, maybe even renting a car to visit a few different spots.

These others are easier to get to though and can be done on a day trip relatively easy, provided you’re only going to the eastern area of Lake Balaton and not to the far other end of it. I visited all of these areas (after seeing what I wanted from a Secret Budapest book I used) and really enjoyed them, highly recommended if you’ve got the time.

Memento Park for Communist Relics

Memento Park is technically part of Budapest itself, but it takes so long to get there and back that I’d consider it a day trip. You first need to take a metro to the far-flung Kelenfold train station, then from there you take a public bus through the countryside to reach the place where communist statues went to die.

This is not some haphazard display area where the statues nobody wanted to look at in their neighborhood got tossed and neglected. The site itself is designed as six circles that double back on each other and like the ideology itself, they go nowhere. There’s a natural flow when you move around and see these works glorifying the great workers and the great communist overlords who had Hungary under their thumb for decades. You can take a guided tour to get more insight into what you’re looking at or pick up the thorough book in the gift shop called In the Shadows of Stalin’s Boots.

One display is Stalin’s boots actually, a replica of what was left of a giant eight-meter statue that got sawed off and toppled in in 1956 in a failed revolution. That’s outside the gates where the other displays are and is a great metaphor. In a nearby building you can watch some crazy spy training videos from the 60s and 70s that show how normal citizens got tracked and surveyed constantly, with tapped phones and intercepted letters.

There’s a lot of symbolism behind the gate and walls across from here: they’re meant to show that the system looked imposing, with powerful-looking entrances to government buildings, but was really just an empty shell inside. The architect took great pains to present the art itself with respect though and the last thing he wanted was to create an “anti-propaganda park” to counter the propaganda the art itself was pushing.

Some of these displays make us chuckle or feel sorry for the people who had to look at them every day. Some are quite impressive pieces though if you approach them objectively, like this guy:

There are layers of meaning and history in this park that are hard to dive into in a short article, but a visit to Memento Park is a great education about conformity in a dictatorship and the power of propaganda that is constantly in your face when ruled by communism. It’s a key part of understanding the bleak history of Budapest in the 20th century and the authoritarian tendencies that are still continuing today under a leader who has clung to office and suppressed opposition since 2010. There’s a lot of manipulation of history going on now, just as there was in the 1950s when these statues went up.

Memento Park is open every day from 10 to 6. See transportation instructions on the official website here.

The Wine and Fortress City of Eger

People usually go to Eger as a visitor for one of two reasons. The highbrow one is to explore the castle on the hill. It is so old that it was destroyed by the Mongols before being rebuilt and repelling the Turks in 1552. The other reason is to get drunk with friends while drinking copious amounts of wine in the “Valley of the Beautiful Women.” You can, of course, do both.

Eger is a lively university town that also happens to be in one of the country’s main wine regions. The infamous Egri Bikaver “bull’s blood” hearty red wine originates here, though it’s certainly not the only thing on offer in chic wine bars in town or in the dozens of cellars all clumped around a park on the outskirts.

We went to two very different cellars when we were here. The first was Biro es Fia, with funky stone basement walls and a grandma trying to chat us up in Hungarian while pouring glasses of wine for barely more than a buck. Then we went upscale to Juhasz, where I paid three times as much (big spender I am) to sip a more refined Kekfrankos. Most of the places you can visit fall somewhere in between, but many sell plastic jugs for bulk purchases from a big barrel if you forgot to bring your own for to-go orders!

It’s worth coming in early and wandering around the city though to take in the atmosphere of this historic area. The town itself is gorgeous, with cozy restaurants, outdoor cafes when the weather permits, and colorful history buildings lining cobblestone alleys. There’s an imposing grand church, a huge central square, and that stone castle on multiple levels.

An Easy Jaunt to Szentendre

One of the easiest day trips from Budapest is to Szentendre, a historic town that has been through plenty of ups and downs since its founding in the 12th century. The original medieval buildings got decimated by the Ottomans when they invaded and the town spent a long time being an empty shell. It gradually rebuilt after and then it was a majority Serbian settlement in the late 1600s when the Serbs were invited there to escape the Ottomans.

Szentendre really started to take on its current form in the late 1800s when it got connected to Budapest by train. That’s how you can still get there now, with a change from the suburban line out of the city to an old Soviet-style wide gauge train with plenty of character. It’s an easy walk from the station to the center.

This is a popular tourist destination you visit for a nice stroll and an interesting lunch more than to see any amazing sites. Unless you’re psyched to visit the Marzipan Museum or the Serbian Ecclesiastical Art Collection that is. A lot of artists live here, so you can explore their galleries and shops, plus there are plenty of sweets shops and ice cream options.

If you head up to the highest point of Castle Hill (where there hasn’t been a castle for centuries), you can get a nice overlook of the rooftops and down to the river. On the edge of town is a folk village highlighting Hungary’s history.

We found interesting alleys to explore and places to duck into before catching a hearty meal with a view beside the River. The cemetery next to one of the oldest churches was interesting to wander through, even though the black cat walking across our path was a little unsettling…

Keep in mind that while the boat trips to the Danube Bend (see below) are limited to what’s along the water, if you take a land tour instead it will probably include a short stop in Szentendre. It’s not a very big town, so if you don’t want to dig deeper that will at least give you chance to stroll through it.

Despite what you’ll read all over the web and therefore on AI tools that can’t fact-check, Szentendre is not on the Danube River. It is actually on a parallel river called the Szentendrei-Dunaag that leaves the larger one and joins back up with it later.

The Danube Bend and Esztergom

A Danube Bend trip is the most popular excursion tour offered by Budapest travel agents and tour companies because it’s a way to travel somewhere on the Danube or take a bus trip that will make multiple stops. Book it directly with one of them locally or reserve in advance here:

The highlight of this trip, no matter how you get up to this bend in the river, is the giant Esztergom Cathedral, the largest church in Hungary and looking even more dramatic because of its location next to the Danube. Everything about it is huge: the 72-meter high dome, the length that’s longer than a football field, and what’s behind the alter: supposedly “the world’s largest painting on a single canvas.”

If you just want to make this your destination, there’s a direct train that takes less than an hour and a half and Esztergom is a nice town for grabbing lunch and strolling around. There are places where you can sit by the river and watch the boats go by. There are also two notable museums. One is housed in a centuries-old mosque that goes back to the Ottoman Empire and the other is in a former royal palace.

Otherwise, a Danube Bend tour will probably make some other stops including the 13th-century fortress of Visegrad. If there’s time and you’ll feeling fit, you can make the steep hike up to the top. Or there’s a bus. In the same town there’s a 15th-century palace and a small museum dedicated to the local hard alcohol of choice, palinka made from distilled fruits.

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Exploring Lake Balaton

Lake Balaton has been a popular getaway spot for centuries, back to Roman times when wine originated here, and it really took off in communist times when the places citizens were allowed to go were very limited. Although Hungarians can now travel wherever they want, they still flock here in the summer because it’s so easy to get to. You can get to the resort town of Balatonfured by train directly from Budapest or if you’ve got a rental car, your options are much greater.

Try to spend some time out on the water if possible. You can get on a public boat to take a spin around the lake or rent one for something more private. When the wind is cooperating there are a lot of sailboats dotting the horizon.

This is Hungary’s prime white wine region, producing mineral-rich, delicious bottles that are great for sipping cold in the summer months. If you like the area so much you want to spend the night, you’ll see “room for rent” signs in different languages, but just be advised that lodging prices here are on par with what you’ll pay in Budapest.

These are just a few places I made it to myself when visiting Hungary. There are plenty of other options, especially if you’re into wine, and this is a small enough country that you can get almost anywhere in it within a few hours by train. If you do that you’ll quickly get away from the tourist hordes because some 90% of Hungary’s foreign visitors never make it beyond the capital city.

Want to know what it will cost you after you arrive? See this earlier post on Budapest travel prices for visitors.

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This human-produced text and all original photos (c) Tim Leffel of the Cheapest Destinations Blog.