The Hungarian lake Balaton

So here we are, as the sun sets, about to partylooks appears to be a raft made from a couple
all night with an international crowd of barefootof old surfboards, strapped together with gaffer
hipsters, in a location hardly any of us had heardtape. St Tropez, this ain’t.
of before. Yet it’s a destination of suchLying 60 miles southwest of Budapest (
outstanding natural beauty, you’d think itbudapesht-city.ru ), Balaton is a sort of Hungarian
would be regularly topping industry hot lists. TheHamptons. We’re here for Beach Club Beach,
temperature is tropical enough for a girl behind usa mini-festival (only 300 guests) featuring some of
to dance happily in her bikini, and there’s athe hottest names from the Berlin deep-house
man still swimming as the sun finally dies in a blazescene, which is being held for the second year
of fluoro pyrotechnics.running in one of several crumbling old villas dotting
This is far from the tropics, though, andthe southeastern shoreline of the lake. And we
that’s not the Indian Ocean stretching out intobarely hear another English accent for the
the night in front of us. We’re in Hungary, onduration of the weekend.
the shores of Lake Balaton, the largest“It was Fidel Castro’s holiday home,”
freshwater lake in Europe, and a former hang-outthe promoter, Tamas Racsek, told us when we
for the international communist jet set.arrived, walking us through a series of decaying
Balaton really is take-your-breath-away huge.rooms full of decaying 1960s furniture.
From our vantage point, you can just make outThe lake, large enough to be known as the
the eastern corners, but then it stretches far offHungarian Sea, was first developed as a holiday
to the northwest.destination before the second world war. In the
The Hungarian lake Balaton1950s, it became a centre for communist youth
It’s surrounded by greenery and occasionalholidays, with up to 1,800 children housed in the
dark, cool pines, and protected from the elementsexpropriated private villas used to entertain visiting
by a high wall of natural volcanic rock; the air isdignitaries, including Castro, Brezhnev, Yuri Gagarin
still and the crickets chirrup. Like the postcard soand Mao Tse-tung.
far? There’s more: the water, a ridiculouslyThe villas have since fallen into disrepair and been
inviting shade of faded turquoise, is warm andabandoned, which is a shame. The impressive
shallow. There are boats aplenty — but nonestructures, each set in their own plot of
of the motorised behemoths that blight so manyovergrown, tangled vegetation, would make for a
fancy resorts.fantastic development, but they have been
In keeping with the downtempo feel of the place,allowed to decompose so badly, it would mean
we see a wooden houseboat, lots of little sailingripping them down and starting again.
dinghies, pedalos — and one man rowing what