Eger, Hungary

Sun 17th - Tues 19th Aug

Three days in Eger, Hungary. The three worst days of this trip for me – or at least I hope it never gets any worse than this.

It wasn't Eger's fault. The city is lovely and I highly recommend it as a day trip if you're in Budapest. There's a great old town with lots of shops and great architecture, but the main reason why people visit Eger is for the wine tasting. Now I'd always been under the impression that Hungarian wine was crap. I visited Budapest a few years ago with some girl friends and we'd been warned by Charlotte that it was terrible. We ordered one bottle and none of us could finish a glass – it tasted like vinegar gone bad. Not to mention that me sending back a glass of anything resembling wine is definitely a bad sign, because I'll drink just about anything.

Tourists exploring Eger's old town

But I was pleasantly surprised – there were quite a few good wineries here in Eger. Still a few that were terrible but the experience itself is well worth a visit. The wine region is a short 15 minute walk from the centre of town in a small valley where you walk from cellar to cellar sampling the wines for free. Even better – it's really cheap and there is NOTHING snooty about it. If you decide you'd like to buy a bottle of wine, you can either buy one of their glass bottles for around ₤5, or bring your own empty plastic 1.5 L water bottle and they'll fill it on the spot for around ₤2! We walked away with 7 litres of wine for a grand total of ₤10!

But instead of sipping on a glass of wine watching the sun set, I'm sitting here on pain killers with a lip swollen so large that it could easily be assumed that I've just had some dodgy collagen work done.

It all started on Sunday night. Bevan had a bad case of the squirts and we were both giggling, trying to figure out what may have caused it. Every few minutes we had to stop the movie while he dashed to the toilets in a limping 'so I don't soil my pants' sort of waddle.

The next morning I awoke with the same problem but assumed it was fairly minor so we ventured into town on our bikes. Big mistake... clearly I had eaten quite a bit more of the offending food item than Bevan (which I reckon was a dozen bad eggs from Tesco).

Feeling very sick. Big thanks to Bevan for documenting the experience!!

Two very important lessons I've learned over the past 2 days:

If you've ever had food poisoning than you'll know that it attacks on both fronts and you're forced to make some very risky decisions as to which end is going to take priority. Go for the seated position first, and you could wind up spraying the toilet door with your breakfast. Go for the 'praying to the porcelain god' position first and you could end up with very uncomfortable trousers. Personally, I've learned it's always wisest to go for the seated position first because you can always walk away fairly unsoiled, despite whatever disastrous mess you may leave behind.

Thank god for McDonald's toilets. If you ever find yourself on holiday with a bad case of the runs or food poisoning, your first port of call is to find a McDonald's or Starbucks with a good toilet. Nowadays most of them will require a code to open the door, which can be found at the bottom of your sales receipt. Buy yourself a Coca-Cola in the morning and memorise that code. You don't want to be digging for receipts when timing is critical, and just make sure you're always within a 10 minute dash of your chosen toilet(s).

I managed another hour of sight-seeing and dashing to various toilets before the big storm hit. After a final 30 embarrassing and acrobatic minutes at McDonald's, I somehow dragged my bike back to the camp site while Bevan cycled off in search of more toilet paper. The next 12 hours were spent lying in the back of the van, running across the camp site to the toilets, or lying next to the toilets in the grass when it was flowing too frequently to be outside of a 3 metre dash. It was the worst food poisoning of my life and all of my fellow female campers got to share in the entire experience thanks to the communal toilets.

Lying in the grass outside the camp site toilets

Tuesday morning I awoke with a much milder tummy ache and even managed a short walk around the city centre before lunch, with only one dash to McDonald's (warning - they change the code on a daily basis!). I had a long 2 hour nap and awoke feeling like a new woman – a new woman with a HUGE appetite. Just as I was wolfing down the last of the most delicious cheese sandwich and my first meal in 32 hours, I took a large swig of ice tea and felt something tickling inside my mouth. Was that a bug in my drink? Then suddenly searing pain as if someone had taken a lit cigarette and put it out on the inside of my lip. I screamed spraying ice tea all over the grass, reached into my mouth and threw a wriggling wasp onto the ground. Bevan just sat there staring at me as if he was watching a horror flick unfold before him.

Swelling from the wasp sting inside my upper lip

Tears spilling out of my eyes, I didn't know what else to do except hop around in a wild dance screaming that I'd been stung by f*$%#ing wasp. Bevan rushed me off to the toilets and I stood there crying with my top lip under the cold water tap as fellow toilet goers wondered 'what on earth could be wrong with that whining American this time'. (By the way, I highly recommend the cold water tap trick if you ever find yourself in a similar 'mouth on fire' situation.)

Me - 24 hours after the wasp sting

Since lunch time, I've rubbed Nurofen chewables on my gums and lips to ease the pain a bit but it's been nearly 5 hours and I still look like Lisa Rinna.

Lisa Rinna