So a friend of mine came to visit this week and we decided to go out on a caving trip. The hostel in our building has brochures for it, and we decided to give it a shot. It looked interesting and it was only like 3500 Ft, which is like $20 CAD maybe.

We went to Nyugati train station and met the rest of the group from other hostels and then our guide, and we took a bus up into the hills of Buda. It’s actually a small national park, and was quite nice to get out of the city for a bit.

Caving in Budapest

We were all given overalls, hardhats with lamps, and had to sign the usual release form in case of injury, death, etc. Then we headed for the cave entrance. We were split up into two groups, and each group had about 10 people in it. We were then asked if we wanted the easy or the hard route. Of course we all said the hard route!

It didn’t take long before we realized our guide wasn’t joking when she said it would be hard! More like tight. There were so many tight squeezes we had to go through and it was very claustrophobic. I’m not a big guy or anything (I’m tall, but not thick) and even I had trouble squeezing through some of the gaps.

When we finally made it back around to near where we started in the cave, our guide asked if we wanted to walk back, or if we wanted to take the difficult route back. Again, we chose the hard way.

We had to go through several more tight squeezes, which resulted in more wedgies (in fact some of the holes we had to squeeze through had names like “Wedgie”, “Birth Canal”, and so on). Eventually we came to the “Sandwich”. This was really really difficult.

It probably took about 15 minutes to get through for each of us, or at least it seemed to take that long. I can’t even describe how tight it was. I had to hold my head a certain way because my hardhat kept getting caught on edges. One girl actually took her hat off and found it was much easier that way. My friend who I was with got stuck at one point because his ultra-thin camera which he had in his pocket made him just that extra bit too big to fit through the gap. He had to struggle to take it out. I had the same problem and ended up crawling through with my camera tied to my wrist instead.

We all went out for dinner and beers afterwards and talked about the experience. Everyone had their moment of panic at some point in the cave, where just for a second you think “What the hell am I doing!”. All I can say is “wow”. It was a great experience and I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so sore. Anyone coming to Budapest should definitely try it.