From Lyon we caught the train to Geneva, where we spent the night in an exorbitantly expensive and extremely sterile hostel.

It did absolutely nothing to improve my opinion of Switzerland.

The following morning we headed to the airport to catch a flight to Budapest, which should have been a fairly straightforward exercise.

It wasn’t.

We had boarded, the plane had pushed back from the gate and we were taxiing towards the runway when it suddenly came to a very abrupt stop. The jolt was enough to pitch everyone forward in their seats.

I looked out of the window and saw emergency vehicles screaming across the tarmac towards us, lights flashing and sirens going.

“Bloody hell,” I said to A.P.

Within moments the plane was surrounded. Men jumped out of the vehicles and ran towards us while other people stood on the tarmac talking urgently into radios and making the sort of wild hand gestures that generally suggest things are not going particularly well.

For a while I watched with everyone else.

Then I went back to my book.

There wasn’t much I could do about the situation. Whatever was happening was either going to be resolved or it wasn’t, and anyway the woman sitting behind me was giving her husband a continuous running commentary, so there was really no need for both of us to monitor developments.

Eventually the police came onto the plane and called out a name.

A young man several rows away stood up rather sheepishly and walked down the aisle with them.

This caused another round of speculation from the woman behind me.

Not long afterwards the young man reappeared.

It turned out that a bottle of vodka in his luggage had smashed and liquid had been seen leaking from the aircraft.

So what had looked for a while like a major aviation incident was, in fact, vodka.

As he made his way back to his seat, most of the passengers laughed, teased him and gave him a round of applause.

The woman behind me did not.

She had moved on to tutting loudly and muttering about irresponsible young people.

Eventually the excitement died down, the emergency vehicles disappeared and we finally took off for Hungary.

We landed in Budapest without further incident and made our way to an apartment we had rented for the next few days.

The location was excellent.

The drains were not.

There was a fairly persistent smell coming from somewhere in the bathroom, which we never really managed to solve.

The joys of travel.

Fortunately, Budapest itself more than made up for it.

We liked the city almost immediately. It was beautiful, grand without feeling stuffy and had a sense of energy about it. After travelling through a number of places where everything felt slightly worn down, Budapest seemed to have an air of progress and optimism.

One of our first explorations took us up Gellért Hill to the Citadella, which sits high above the Danube and has some of the best views across Budapest.

The fortress was built by the Habsburgs in the 1850s, following the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–49. It was intended partly as a very visible reminder to the Hungarians of who was still in charge, which probably did little to improve relations.

From the top we could see both Buda and Pest spread out beneath us, divided by the Danube and linked by the city’s bridges.

We happened to be there while the Red Bull Air Race was taking place over the river.

Small aircraft were tearing up and down the Danube doing aerobatics and flying ridiculously low over the water. Part of the Budapest course involved pilots flying beneath the Chain Bridge before entering the race circuit, which was quite something to watch from above.

It was all very impressive.

And slightly insane.

Over the next few days we wandered all over Budapest.

We crossed the Danube and explored Castle Hill, wandering around Buda Castle and the old streets above the river before making our way to Fisherman’s Bastion and Matthias Church. The views back across to the Parliament building were superb, particularly with the river running between the two sides of the city.

We also spent time around the Hungarian Parliament and the Danube riverfront. The Parliament building is enormous and wonderfully over the top, exactly the sort of building you would construct if restraint had never occurred to anyone involved.

Another stop was the Great Market Hall, where we wandered through stalls piled with paprika, salami, vegetables, pastries and all manner of things we didn’t really need but were quite happy to look at.

Mostly, though, we just walked.

Budapest was an easy city to wander around, with enormous buildings, broad streets, old trams rattling past and cafés and bars appearing whenever we felt we had walked far enough.

We ate extremely well.

There was plenty of goulash, stews, sausages and all the solid Central European food that makes considerably more sense after spending the day walking around.

Most evenings we ended up having a drink in the square near our apartment. It became our regular end to the day — find a table, order something to drink and sit watching Budapest go by.

The drains could do whatever they liked.

We were hardly spending any time in the apartment anyway.

After a few days exploring the centre of Budapest, we decided it was time to head out to one of the city’s more unusual attractions.

Memento Park is where many of Budapest’s enormous communist-era statues ended up after the fall of the regime.

Lenin, Marx, Engels and assorted heroic workers had all been removed from their former positions around the city and gathered together in one place.

It sounded exactly like our sort of outing.

So off we went.

But that is the next story.