2014-03-11

Getting Started - The Most Important Resources for Trails in Hungary

In this post I tried to gather the most important resources that can help those who would like to venture into the world of Hungarian organized hiking and trail running. The following few sites should be more than enough to get started.

Calendars

Endurance hiking calendar (Teljesítménytúra naptár)

The endurance hiking calendar
The Hungarian Endurance Hiking Association's (TTT) event calendar will soon become the bible of anyone who likes to spend their weekends participating in hikes all over the country. Besides the printed version, which is available for ordering and in some trekking shops, you can find most of the calendar (the events of the next few months) online as well. You can search among the hikes by region (régió) or by keywords in the name or the route of the event (érintve/túranév). Although the whole site is in Hungarian the use of pictograms help a lot in obtaining the most important information about the
events.

Trail running race calendar (Terepfutás versenynaptár)

Terepfutás.hu, the organizer of most of Hungary's serious trail running races collected every other trail event in the country that meet some criteria (professional timing, strict race rules, etc.). Most of these can be found in the TTT calendar as well, but it is still a very handy calendar especially for those who are more interested in the competitive side of trails.

Maps

Map on Turistautak.hu

Turistautak.hu

An online map service that features a well-updated database of hiking paths in Hungary. You can view maps by choosing a region in the drop-down list titled 'térképek'. There are also some options to make measurements and itineraries, but the online platform is quite buggy and hard to use. However, you can download any map from the site under Google Earth or to your GPS device, where it works splendidly.

OpenMaps.eu

An alternative to turistautak.hu also featuring maps of some of the neighbouring central european countries, this map service can be ideal for those who would also like to visit other close countries for their weekend excursions.

Weather

While you can surely get information on Hungarian weather from a lot of different international weather portals, for the most reliable and up-to-date weather information it might be useful to check out the best Hungarian portals as well such as időkép, köpönyeg and met.hu.

Forums

Endurance hiking facebook group
Although one should be able to get enough information on the hikes and routes from the sites above, sometimes it can help a lot to connect with the hiker and runner community and get answers for your particular questions that might arise when you are preparing for an event. While these forums and facebook groups are all in Hungarian, you can find active communities at all of these places and there are a lot of people who speak English and who are more than glad to help foreign buddies come and take part in their beloved events.

Endurance hiking: index forum and facebook group

Trail running: index forum and faceboook group

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