Lake Cave of Tapolca

Before we went to Hungary, I browsed through tripadvisor site to find out what other tourists liked visiting or doing in Balaton area. One of the things I found was the Lake Cave of Tapolca.

I was immediately interested. There was also another caving expedition somewhere, but I didn't really feel like climbing up and down a cave. But boating in a cave sounded nice ha ha ha...so one day we went there by bus. The bus ticket cost 560 HUF/person/one-way (around €2) and the trip itself took around 45 minutes to an hour (depending on how many stops the bus made). We found out, though, that the bus back to Keszthely took a different, faster route along the shore and that was really nice because then we got to see different places during those two bus trips.

It was already scorching hot when we arrived in Tapolca at around 11 am. When we found the entrance to the Lake Cave, there were already about 15 people in front of us, but at least we could still queue in the shade of the building he he...However, the queue took A LONG TIME to go forward. We found out after we could get inside that there could be only a maximum of 130 people inside the underground cave at one time and that the rest could wait inside the small building. Mind you that the building was hot 'coz everybody had to queue again before they could walk downstairs and wait inside the cool cave (20'C). We found out afterwards that the temperature was 37'C outside.

Many of us were sweating so much already while waiting for our turns to get inside the cave to wait for our turns to row the boat. The ticket cost 1,200 HUF/adult (€ 4,4). While waiting inside the hot waiting room, we were given an English brochure to read about the cave. After reading, I used the laminated brochure as a fan HA HA HA HA HA...

After a long wait, we were finally ushered down 73 steps to the cave. Immediately after coming down several steps, we felt such cool air, so we didn't really mind waiting downstairs - away from the heat!!! :-D Here's a pic of the steps:

Here is where people queue before getting into the boat (took the pic after most of us had taken the boat rides, so there were only a small group of people left):

Finally we were in front of the line to get into the boat. Here's a pic of the people who took the boat ride in front of us:

And there at the other side was the end of the boat ride on the left side of the above pic. Maximum load for each boat: 220 kg (3 persons).

And here's a short video clip of the boat ride:



After getting off the boat, we looked around in another part of the cave and took some pics:

Reluctantly we went up again to brave the scorching heat and look around Tapolca because by then we were already starving ha ha ha...