For when the effort was made, and the country was entered, the case was little better. Presburg (today's Pozsony or Bratislava) might be reached within a reasonable time; but Presburg, after all, was more Austrian than Magyar. Pesth (today's Pest, Budapest's left side) came next. A young city was rising into interest, growing up by the side of the old town--half-Turkish, half-nondescript-of Ofen or Buda (today's Buda, Budapest's right side). Very uncomfortable steamers conveyed the determined voyager down the Danube to Pesth, and he must trust to the far-famed Peasant's Post to gallop back to Vienna in an open cart as well as he could, taking some forty hours for the journey. Now and then a geologist would penetrate to Chemnitz or Nagyar, to see the celebrated mining school, or the mines of gold and tellurium; but for ordinary travellers, seeking rational amusement in their peregrinations, there was little inducement to select Hungary as the object of their trip.

And if any one had attempted to study the real country Hungary and the people, he certainly would have found great difficulty, and must have given up a considerable time, a quarter of century ago. Railroads had not then rendered the access to Eastern Europe an easy and pleasant matter. Steamboats in that part of the world were struggling for existence, barely able to pay their way, and quite unable to think of providing comforts for those who patronized them. Bad speed, bad accommodation, bad food, very uncertain progress, and very certain delays, combined to limit the passenger traffic to a very small amount.

The frontier passed, or the landing at some town from the steamboat effected, the case was even worse than before. The roads were impassable in wet weather, and enveloped in clouds of choking dust in dry seasons. Inns were places in which dirt and discomfort were the only things that could reasonably be expected. Nor were the people more satisfactory than the country; for although the upper classes were always well instructed and hospitable, and essentially gentlemen, they could rarely fall in the way of the occasional traveller, who was thus for the most part obliged to associate with the peasants. These were uninstructed, speaking no language but their own curious Oriental dialect, which has few, if any, affinities with any other in Europe, and were unable t give help because they had no idea of what might be wanted by those so accustomed to luxuries as to regard them as necessaries of life. No wonder, then, that Hungary was unvisited twenty-five years ago.

But at a much later period Hungary is described in the best guide books as an unapproachable country. Opening "Murray's Handbook for Southern Europe" (seventh edition, published in 1858), we read in page 487, "It is, indeed, difficult for Englishmen to obtain permission at all to enter Hungary. Even should the traveller succeed, he will probably obtain only a limited leave for a certain number of days;" and the dicta of Paget, writing in 1837, admirable as they once may have been, are quoted as the facts of to-day. The Hungary of the present is not, however, in any sense the Hungary there described.

The traveller enters it and passes through it at his pleasure, and quits it when convenient without discovering that there is a frontier, or that passport exist. The pistols recommended on the ground that bands of robbers may be met, are as needless as they would be in France or Germany, and the inns, so much maligned, are in all points fully equal to the ordinary run of those in counties little accustomed to visitors, and in many respects much better. In the larger towns there will be found all the most modern appliances. Droschkys or cabs ply at the railway stations at moderate fared fixed by law, and carry the traveller to hotels where the smiling waiter, with his white napkin, is in attendance; where the inevitable loud clang announces the arrival of the guest to the boots and chambermaid where the well-appointed and perfectly clean and comfortable bedroom is shown ready for immediate use for one or more as required; and where the two candles, whether used or not, will appear in the bill next morning, just as in the great capitals of Western Europe. In the larger towns, and in many of the smaller ones, excellent cafés will be found, and the coffee or ices supplied are not excelled in Paris. The Hungarians, in this last respect, show something of their Eastern origin. Nowhere in Europe is better coffee made, and even in the little country inns where one would expect to find nothing, one may often obtain this luxury in perfection at very brief notice.

Travelling in Hungary is really now so easy and so pleasant, that there is no reason why the artist, the professional man, and even the typical tourist should not take advantage of a district in Europe where it is possible to obtain new sensations, to visit scenery not hackneyed, to study a people not yet spoiled by a large influx of travellers, and to met those moderate difficulties and little hardships that are not only perfectly endurable, but almost pleasurable by their novelty. There are forests in Hungary, only a very few days' journey from populous cities, where the bear and the wolf are extremely abundant, and are accompanied by the lynx, of which individuals have been shot not much inferior in size to the leopard. The rivers of Hungary abound with fish of kinds seen in no other European waters. Birds from Africa are frequent visitors, and establish themselves in noble primeval forests of beech, such as are not to be found elsewhere in the Western world. Not far off are mountains, whose snowy caps are rarely doffed, and which give rise to streams and torrents, sometimes falling over lofty precipices, sometimes foaming in narrow, tortuous channels, and sometimes rushing over golden sands, or amongst broken but gigantic fragments of the rocks they have undermined. Even reptiles of rare forms and colours are not wanting; and of the insect world there are flights of locusts only rivaled in Asia Minor, and a peculiarly troublesome fly, a kind of tsetse of the Danube, also absolutely local.

The above excerpt is from Ansted's A short trip in Hungary and Transylvania in the spring of 1862, which shows that although many things have changed in Hungary over the past 150 years, a lot of things remained the same.