Lake Balaton

Hungary has no sea, so it made one: Lake Balaton, seventy-seven kilometres long, three metres deep, milky green in the sun and warm as a bath by July, with two shores that could not be more different. The south is flat, sandy-bottomed and loud — Siófok and its discos, the family beaches, the water that stays knee-deep for a hundred metres. The north is volcanic and vined — Badacsony's flat-topped hill above the rows of Olaszrizling, the Káli basin's stone villages, Balatonfüred's spa promenade and regattas, and the Tihany peninsula pushing into the middle of the lake with its abbey, its lavender and its echo. At the west end, Keszthely keeps a palace, and Hévíz, just behind it, a thermal lake you can swim in when the snow is falling.

The traveller crosses on the Tihany–Szántód ferry at least once, for the eight minutes of the whole lake at once; climbs to the abbey and eats lavender ice cream on the way down; drinks on the Badacsony terraces at sunset with the lake going gold below the vines; swims off a grass strand on the south shore, the Hungarian way, with a lángos after; rents a bicycle for a stretch of the two-hundred-kilometre loop; and, at Hévíz, floats in the thermal lake among the lilies, thirty-eight degrees in any season, which is either the beginning of the trip or the reward at the end.

The Guide's honesty: Balaton is Hungary's own holiday and it fills with Hungarians — book July and August early, and expect German to be the second language of the south shore since the days it was where the two Germanies met —; the water is shallow and warm and can turn to chop in an hour when the wind comes down; the strands charge a small entry and are worth it; the north-shore wine is very good and very cheap at the cellar door — buy there —; trains from Budapest take two hours to the south shore and longer to the north; and Siófok at midnight in August is not the lake — it is a party that happens to be beside one. Choose your shore.