Julia Jones of New York City writes, “I’d like to do a two-week genealogical trip to hit some of the countries that my boyfriend and I have ancestors from. Ideally, we’d like to see Armenia (my background) and Hungary (his background). We are outdoorsy, cultural sightseers, interested in history and food, and would like to travel in November or December.”

A his-and-hers ancestral trip? Sounds like a fascinating—and deeply personal—vacation awaits you! As you didn’t mention which cities or regions in particular your families came from, I based each trip around general itineraries that reflect your interests, which you can easily modify to best suit your tastes and specific family histories. 

To make the most of your vacation time and budget, I recommend this genealogy travel in November, with a week in each country.

In Hungary, plan on using Budapest as your home base, with day trips or possible overnights in the easily accessible Eger-Tokaj wine region, where you can feast on outstanding food and wine, hike, and bike. From Budapest, you’ll fly to Yerevan, Armenia’s capital city.

For your week in Armenia, spend several days in Yerevan for a cosmopolitan getaway, then a few days in Goris, an unspoiled, non-commercial “town that time forgot,” known for natural wonders such as dramatic cliffs, caves, and stone pyramids; oghee (a local spirit made from local fruits and berries); and historic stone architecture.

Airfare/Transportation

As with most travel nowadays, airfare will take up the biggest chunk of your budget. In this case, too, you’ll also want to budget extra time getting from Hungary to Armenia – I found scarce options for road or train transportation between the two destinations, and flight options were limited as well. As such, you’ll pay a premium price, and spend more time in transit compared to other European and Asian destinations.

I priced multi-city flights on Kayak in November and December: New York to Budapest for the first leg, Budapest to Yerevan a week later, then Yerevan back to New York a week after that (for a total of two weeks away with minimal backtracking). The cheapest flights came in around $1,350 per person for travel from Newark but returning to JFK, with all travel on Saturdays. Mid-week flights and December travel were more expensive.

A caveat: The cheapest flight includes a very long travel day for the second flight – 30 hours with two changeovers from Budapest to Yerevan. The next-cheapest option, $2,700, reduced the travel time to 13 hours (but there were still two changeovers). Track flights for a few days using a multi-city travel tool (similar tools are also available on Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity) to see if you can find better prices and times. When you see a price and schedule that fits your needs, book it.

Alternatively, you can also look into a combination of train, sea, and bus travel to get into Armenia – prices and schedules will vary by operator, but this may be a more scenic—and adventurous—way to get between the two destinations. Check out the recommendations from the  Tour Armenia website to see if this appeals to you.

Once you’re in both Hungary and Armenia, embrace buses and your own two feet for sightseeing. There are also local trains and private tour services that can get you where you’ll need to go.

From Budapest to the wine region, take buses to Eger and Holloko, two lovely towns that are both within a two-hour trip from the capital. From Yerevan to Goris, a mini-bus (or marshrutka) is a popular option for locals and sightseers alike.

Note that in each country, you’ll have to fly out of the city you arrived in, so there will be some element of backtracking to get to the airport. By keeping your Hungary explorations limited to day trips or mid-week overnights, however (with Budapest bookending the Hungary portion of your trip), you can avoid a rush to the airport on the day you travel to Yerevan.

Accommodations

For all destinations, I started with reviews from other travelers who shared your interests in food, outdoor explorations, and historic sightseeing. From there, I ran price comparisons between the major online travel agencies, as well as the property’s own websites. Here are a few suggestions for each. All rates are based on double occupancy.

In Hungary:

The Bohem Art Hotel in Budapest has three-night stays starting at €280 (or $375), including airport transfers, a daily champagne breakfast, Wi-fi, and happy hour. Alternatively, the Continental Hotel has three-night stays from €260 (or $348), including daily breakfast. Booking.com also had a large range of properties available, starting at $60 per night.

If you do decide to stay overnight in the wine region, the Palazzo Wellness Villa hotel and spa in Eger has rates from €65 per night ($87), including daily breakfast and full use of the property’s wellness facilities, including pool, sauna, gym, and more.

In Armenia:

At press time, Expedia had Yerevan hotels starting around $50 for budget accommodations. If you don’t mind staying outside the city proper, the Three Jugs B&B offered three-night getaways from $164, including breakfast. Cooking, art, and cultural classes are also available for an additional fee.

B&Bs are also the name of the game in Goris, where the historic Christy Hotel has rooms from $39 per night including daily breakfast and free Wi-Fi. Khachik Bed and Breakfast is also a good option, with rooms starting at $37 per night.

Things to Do

Get acquainted with the lay of the land and start planning your customized itinerary by visiting each country’s respective tourism website: Go to Hungary and Armenia Information.

TripAdvisor’s forums have great advice for travelers, from travelers. Ask a question here, and you’ll typically have a response within a few hours. I also like reading the questions other travelers ask about the destinations I want to visit – I typically get great suggestions and recommendations I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Lastly, if my suggested itineraries don’t appeal to you—or if they’re nowhere near your ancestral towns—contact a local travel agent to assist with trip planning. The Armenia Tourism board website, for example, has an extensive listing of local tour operators specializing in trips for all types of travel interests.

Is there a trip I can help you plan? Send your request to EcoSalon’s <a href=”/mailto:sarahpascarella@ecosalon.com”>Journey Genie</a> and I’ll consider it for a future column!

Main Photo credit:Lieven SOETE;Lanchid Bridge, Budapest, courtesy Abel Leemans; all others courtesy mentioned venues. 

Related on Ecosalon:

Places & Spaces: Brody House, Budapest

How Family Farming Revitalizes Local Economies

Passports with Purpose: Fundraising Gets Inspiring

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ColumnHow do you say “cheers” in Hungarian?

“Normally they have rooster testicles, but I think they’re out of them today.”

Right.

We were staring at the wide array of meats behind the glass, busily snapping photos of everything from beef lungs to goose liver, knowing perfectly well that meat photos aren’t necessarily the most appetizing of food porn. With several floors of fresh produce and more meat than you can handle, the Great Market Hall, the largest indoor market in Budapest, has plenty of it, and Carolyn Banfalvi, owner of Taste Hungary, a Budapest-based company that offers food, wine and market tours, was taking us on a quick run through to make sure we knew all about fried fat and the importance of duck meat.

When you want to explore food culture, the market is often a good place to start. It is here that I learned that in Hungary, bacon is a big deal, the Hungarian countryside is full of fruits from apricots to blackberries and because wild mushroom picking is a popular pastime, there’s a “mushroom office” in many markets, where you can take your mushrooms to get checked, just to make sure you’re not eating anything poisonous.

Food is a central component of my plans anytime I travel, so it was no surprise that I was attempting to take in an entire food culture in five days.

“What is a classic Hungarian dish that we should eat?” I asked our apartment host Krisztina, a fashionable and savvy young Hungarian that was intent on giving us a long list of “underground” places to explore.

“Well, there is of course goulash, but it’s so heavy and not a summer dish, so please don’t eat it,” she responded.

“We will certainly not,” I responded. Always take the advice of a local.

Which is exactly how I ended up at a taco bar drinking fröccs.

A few nights earlier, Krisztina and her boyfriend Vandy had taken us out to explore the local ruin bar scene. What started as people taking over abandoned buildings, mostly in the Jewish quarter, and setting up makeshift bars, has turned into quite the scene, the kind of place where you’ll pick out a few tourists, but mostly you’re surrounded by hip Hungarians that ride single speeds and talk film and art. For the most part, they’re in courtyards, with packed seating and a mixture of low lighting and funky fixtures. My kind of place.

“So what do we order?” I asked.

“Fröccs,” said Vandy.

I quickly scribbled it down in my notebook, attempting to correctly pronounce it about five times first. Note: Hungarian is hard. Fröccs is a popular drink combining wine and soda water, mixed with varying proportions depending on how much you’re feeling like drinking, and for summer it’s perfect.

“Egészségedre!” Vandy and Krisztina pronounced, holding up their glasses.

More pronunciation repetition and scribbling in the notebook; it’s important to know how to say “cheers” in multiple languages after all.

Goulash may not have been on the list of recommendations but at least now I was well aware of how the cool urban crowd was spending their evenings. Budapest has a convivial culture, sitting in open courtyards in the summer and hunkering down in cozy basement bars in the winter. On Kazinczy street there is a handful of them, and you could spend an entire evening going from courtyard to courtyard, checking out the garden decor at Szimpla to sitting in a hammock chair at Köleves Kert. The winding cobblestone street is filled with bikes, parked up for the evening and entrances decorated with hanging lights.

“It’s two different worlds,” said Vandy, referring to the difference that the season and weather has on drinking habits, as he poured us a shot of Unicum. “You can’t leave Budapest without trying this!”

He was referring the the classic Hungarian herbal bitters, that is such a part of Hungarian culture that I later saw sample shots of at the airport at 8 in the morning. Just for the record, 8 is too early for herbal bitters. But at midnight in a ruin bar, it’s the perfect night cap. Just as tacos are the perfect street food.

Given my personal taco obsession, it came as no surprise that I would somehow end up eating them, even in the middle of Central Europe, but the beauty of globalization is that even in Hungary you can eat chicken paprikash for lunch and tacos for dinner. Sometimes exploring a food culture reminds you of how small the world has become. But because the Hungarians are good at preparing meat – when I asked Carolyn if there were any vegetarians in Hungary she said, “well, just a few” – the tacos were excellent.

Bacon, tacos, herbal bitters, the popularity of pickles and the large amount of hip people on single speed bicycles… Budapest was almost starting to feel like Portland. With more Hungarian of course, and less vegans. Add to that the extensive culture of cafes and the city is one continuous experience of eating, drinking and talking with people.

As a Hungarian proverb goes, “Good coffee should be black like the devil, hot like hell and sweet like a kiss.” And that’s exactly what you get in the multitude of kávéház that line the city streets. A double espresso and a classic Hungarian pastry will do good things at any time of day.

Jó étvágyat!

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

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Brody House: a rough-luxe aesthetic in the bohemian city of Budapest.

At Brody House, hospitality, design, art and music come together in a stylishly refurbished period building at budget prices. Still under the radar, this hip but homely hotel on the Pest side of the river is a favorite for low-key showbiz and media types. A multi-talented space, it has places to sleep for one night or one month, showcases work from international artists and musicians, whose pieces can be seen, heard (and bought) in the rooms and apartments as well as holds live events.

The hotel is a refurbished historic 19th century building – what could be more eco than reusing an existing period gem? But it’s not just a museum/gallery; thanks to its tireless owners, Brody House has become a social and artistic hub of the Hungarian capital. It’s also a private members club, with a stream of varied events from workshops, tastings, debates and readings to gigs, film screenings and magic shows – and guests can join in on the life of this regenerated boho mecca.

The eight guest rooms, named after the artists whose work hangs on their walls, are decorated to respect the original character (parquet floors, distressed walls, freestanding bathtubs), while adding an individual, contemporary-without-being-cold vibe. Home-designed and made furniture use recycled materials – headboards are made from old doors, and beams turned into beds.

If you want to hang out and meet the other guests, the club rooms have sofas, an honesty bar, and musical instruments for jamming sessions: a grand piano, a violin and a guitar. There’s no restaurant, but the in-house chef can rustle up simple meals and special dinners, as well as all-day breakfast, brunch at weekends, and afternoon tea.

When in Budapest:

You must immerse yourself in one of the world-famous public baths, which use the waters from natural thermal springs. Here are our top 5:

Szechenyi: Outdoor Neo-Baroque wonder; one of Europe’s largest bathing complexes.

Gellert: Art Nouveau furnishings, mosaics and stained glass windows.

Kiraly: Dates from the 16th century, during the Ottoman rule.

Rudas: Features octagonal pool dating from Turkish times.

Lukacs: Medicinal bath, swimming pool and park.

Rooms from $76 including tax, breakfast, and a free pass into the city’s artistic scene.

Images: Money Week; This Charming Home; Swoon Worthy; Hermes College

Places & Spaces is a travel guide that will inspire you to carve out a vacation on your calendar. All of the gorgeous locations and accommodations in our guide share our concern for the environment. From tent glamping to lavish built environments, fair warning, you’ll feel compelled to pack your suitcase.

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