Illuminated Budapest

Cruising through Budapest at night made for a gorgeous grand finale to our Danube River Cruise.

As beautiful as the Parliament Building and other historic structures are in daylight, tasteful illumination at night makes the views absolutely breathtaking.

Before our evening cruise, however, we had another delicious dinner aboard AmaCerto, followed by live traditional Hungarian music and dancing in the lounge. Cruises regularly foster the arts, such as providing venues and audiences for these talented local troupes who come aboard at some ports.

After the entertainment concluded, we migrated up to the sun deck for our illuminations cruise.

The temperature was perfect on that clear night.

We snapped plenty of photos, but none really did justice to the views of that night.

Some of the photos came out a bit blurry, but quite honestly, after a dark beer at the ruin pub and free-flowing local wine with dinner, my vision wasn't crystal clear either.

The technology that allowed us to snap digital pictures, of course, wouldn't have been possible until only a few years ago.

Developing Kodachrome would have gotten expensive, but our ship's passengers alone probably snapped off thousands of digital photos that night, and many are undoubtedly better than ours.

It's not so much about the pictures themselves as the attention on the present required to take the pictures.




Plus, in an era when cigarette smoking has become passé (for most Americans anyway), it also gives us something to do with our hands.

Carmen and other waiters offered some Hungarian apertifs on trays for us to imbibe, which gave us something else to do with our hands. I can't say the liquor was delicious, but that didn't stop many of us from sampling it...and making our vision a bit blurrier.


The beautiful buildings were not illuminated when Soviet domination of the Eastern Bloc created a gray world behind the Iron Curtain, including Budapest.  When Hungary won independence in 1990, freedom encouraged the "frivolous" pursuit of beauty that has enhanced Budapest's appeal as a tourist destination and generated greater prosperity with capitalism's invisible hand...plus lots of light bulbs and electricity.

Even in the Communist Era, Budapest was known for its healing waters, just as it was when the city was called Aquincum by the Romans in the first century and probably by the nature-worshiping Celts who settled in the region before them.

In the morning following our nighttime cruise through Budapest, Julie and I strolled through the city one last time, stopping briefly at Gellért Baths, which is supposed to be one of the best spas in the world.

While we enjoyed unwinding in the pool on AmaCerto, just as we enjoy larger pool areas on ocean cruise ships, we did not indulge in a dip in Budapest's restorative waters on this trip.



Not far from the spa is the Gellért Hill Cave Church.

A hermit who once lived in the cave purportedly treated the sick using healing waters and mud.

During World War II, the Nazis used the Cave Church as a hospital, but it resumed religious services after the war.




In 1951, the brutal communist State Protection Authority (Hungarian secret police) raided and shutdown the Cave Church as part of a crackdown on Catholicism.  They imprisoned the monks for up to ten years and killed the monastery's leader.




Julie and I were tempted to stay longer in Budapest, where the dollar is strong and there is much more to experience, but our flights home would be from Vienna, so we went back to the ship, picked up our bags and took a taxi to the train station.



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