Typically most of our time in Budapest was spent seeing the sights and heading out drinking. We paid a visit one of the many Turkish baths, and managed to kill a whole morning/afternoon there. Budapest has a number of huge shopping malls, and true to form I was dragged around every one of them.

 

Battery

Of course when we came to the leave Budapest the bike wouldn’t start, it would bump start then die again. As we were only heading to Lake Balaton just 1.5 hours away, I decided to get my money’s worth from ADAC (my breakdown company). We sat outside whilst waiting for recovery. It turns out that we were next to a tanning salon. Just as the girlfriend disappeared off to find some refreshments, a couple of girls headed to the salon. As there was no smoking inside, the one of them flicked her cigarette onto the pavement. Not noticing that all of our bike gear was there. I looked up from fiddling with the bike, and she ran over trying to put the cigarette out. No damage was done. I laughed and she blew me kiss by way of apology. The girlfriend didn’t find it as amusing then I told her about it though.

ADACs Hungarian representative arrived some time after and checked over the bike. The guy warned me that the battery was pretty much dead, but might just about make it to my destination. As I’m always looking for a fun challenge I decided to risk it.

We rode to a Chinese market to see what goodies were on offer. When we came to leave the bike was difficult to start, and the girlfriend was exhausted from repeatedly pushing the bike with me on it trying to start it.

Eventually we got it running and made a far few miles, but it was erratic, the tacho needle was bouncing all the over the place only a combination of clutch, throttle and breaks sometimes all at the same time, kept us going. Eventually it cut out and I’d had enough. Another call out to the ADAC. Unfortunately there weren’t any garages open, so they put us up in a hotel around the corner. Rather than wait for the recovery truck I decided to push the bike 50 metres to the hotel garage. We had been waiting for some time before this however and a local street trader selling flowers had noticed us sitting there at the side of the road. To ease the wait he came over and handed the girlfriend a rose, which cheered her up.

The next morning a recovery truck came to collect the bike and headed for the Kawasaki service centre. Of course they didn’t have a battery in stock but they located one and went to pick it up. This was going to take 2 hours so we went to the local shopping centre, by the time we got back the battery was ready; we parted with £58 and were on our way to Lake Balaton.