My brother thoughtfully gave The Boyfriend a great film this Christmas, ‘The Shining’. As we snuggled up after watching it however, it wasn’t the film we were talking about over a cup of tea. For anyone who hasn’t seen The Shining (I’d recommend that you do) it features a hotel with a monster of a maze. This had triggered The Boyfriend’s memories of our trip to the Buda Labyrinth. I don’t quite know why this review hasn’t made it onto Dooyoo prior to this – The Buda Labyrinth was certainly a highlight of our European trip.

Originally we arrived in Budapest with plans to change trains and nowhere to stay. It was hot and sticky in Keleti Station and we had to wait around for 40mins to speak to the YHA desk about finding somewhere. Usually, we’d have found somewhere ourselves, but the much-sought-after internet access in McDonalds was unusable and getting the tourist office to comprehend the word internet was out of the question. On top of this, we’d just missed an almighty rock festival and all the hostels were swamped. Anyhow… we ended up staying in the second grottiest hostel (The Hills) in the nicest part of the city, central Buda.

Among the wealth of things to see, The Boyfriend was anxious to see Buda Labyrinth. We hadn’t heard of it before our arrival, it didn’t seem to appear in our guide books and the only directions were on the 2-4-1 entry leaflet he’d discovered somewhere. When I say anxious, you must realise the following and magnify it extensively. We’d had a dreadful night’s sleep (or lack of it) on the train and the scabby hostel had refused to let us into our room until 3pm. Two days without a shower, tired and grumpy. As a result, The Boyfriend ended up manic on the Coca-cola he’d drunk to replace his coffee intake and dragging a very mosquito bitten Malibu Jenny around Buda looking for the Labyrinth.

The labyrinth is – literally - a very well hidden secret. We searched high and low that first day and eventually became too grumpy and tired to look any further. The trouble with Buda, despite it’s beauty, is that the sights are located on very steep hills. Although this makes for fantastic views over the mosquito infested Danube, it also makes for an incredibly tiring walk if you’re not in great shape. Things are rarely signposted and something underground is guaranteed to be a lot harder to just stumble upon!

The following morning, we ditched our backpacks at the Hostel for the day and set out to enjoy a couple more hours of Budapest before we had to catch our train. It seems the enormous pizza we’d eaten had done some good and we actually retained our sense of humour as we climbed the millionth flight of stone steps to find a dead end and courtyard restaurant. The only moment of ill-humour occurred when The Boyfriend threw away our water bottle. Eventually we found what we were looking for. The Labyrinth is on a residential street leading away from the castle and cathedral and the cold blast of air which greeted us through the open door on that hot sticky day couldn’t have been more welcome.

With regard to sensible footwear – much the same applies as in my Mary King’s Close review. Dark uneven floors are probably not the place to test the limits of your strappy sandals and on top of these the Labyrinth has puddles and many, many steps down to it.

On arriving at the bottom of these stone steps, you are greeted by a reception desk with a wooden counter. I think in our almost delirious state we temporarily mistook it for a bar. I’d hesitate to quote the entry price we paid as:
1) I don’t understand Hungarian Money. Somewhere between Prague and Bucharest I lost the concept of money altogether.
2) I think we were at our wits end from searching
3) I have no idea which of the money off leaflets we ended up using. There is a fair selection on the rack next to the entry desk.
Suffice to say it wasn’t much, we were mostly visiting free or very cheap sites due to our overspending in Germany.

Having been unable to read up on it, we weren’t sure what to expect. Returning to the film analogy, think more along the lines of the high rocky walls in ‘Labyrinth’ (David Bowie as the Goblin King, that girl with the big eyebrows) than the English hedges in ‘The Shining’. That said, the power of shining might have been useful to get us through… The Boyfriend led the way into the darkness with his cigarette lighter. I followed behind with the more sensible torch Dad had attached to my bag with a keyring.

The rocky tunnels of the Labyrinth were apparently created by thermal springs and subsequently used by successive generations as cellars for the castle, hiding places, water supply in times of siege, storage pits, torture chambers in medieval times and nuclear bunkers in the cold war. Tucked away behind the Iron Curtain, some of the caves suffered damage in the form of concrete under communism, but most have been restored to their original state. There are around 4 kilometres of cave, impressively linked by all manner of underground museum pieces. Some caves are still not accessible to the public as they form part of the military defenses.

I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, our discovery of these beautiful caverns deep beneath the tourist trail was one of the sights that made Budapest so memorable. For this reason, the review that follows is an overview rather than an exhaustive list.

The first thing to see were the cave paintings from around Europe, beautifully rendered on the walls. It was only with a vice like grip on the camera that I prevented The Boyfriend from wasting every single picture on the film. I’ve never seen the attraction in this kind of art before, but somehow these insprired a sense of awe. Actual size, they depicted all manner of creatures including the early cave dweller. I found these particularly impressive, this stick like image of how early man saw himself and the features he chose to emphasise.

Sculptures adorn almost all the caves in the form of Easter-Island type heads and faceless figures. Symbolism is rife, the stairs depicting the Hun Invasion faces are one such exhibit, making this a great way to learn the history of the Magyar. We wandered a particularly eerie tunnel, lined with stone men twice the size of life and stumbled across a sleeping man on horseback seamlessly emerging from the rock.

Upon turning a corner, The Boyfriend and I exchanged glances and wrinkled noses. “D’you think a wino died down here?” I asked, pulling aside a graceful sweep of chainmail curtain. We soon found out where the smell was coming from. A glistening chamber lay beyond it like something from a fairytale. Birdsong and music played, ivy grew from the crevices and a golden light illuminated an enormous fountain from which blood-red wine flowed on four sides. Alone in the Labyrinth and unable to believe our eyes, we ran our fingers through it and (after the suspicious pause brought about by 21st century living) lifted them to our lips.

This wine was the best I’ve ever tasted and we stopped in the cave to drink some. At this point The Boyfriend began to berate me for ‘losing’ the waterbottle and I began to feel that perhaps he’d had enough wine. Moving on, we lingered in the rocky tunnels, eventually reaching a door with parchment instructions fixed to it. The English translation instructed us to enter one at a time, leaving a gap between one person and the next. With no one else around, The Boyfriend entered first with some trepidation, holding the rope provided. I stood outside the door thinking how it’s normally me that gets made to go first for anything scary.

After a moment, I followed through the heavy door. It swung shut behind me with a bang leaving total darkness. Against the wall, I felt a rope held to the rock with metal loops. Holding on to it, I followed it around corners and over uneven rock with that feeling of my eyes somehow being shut when they were in fact open. Ever the classicist, I couldn’t help making the connection to Theseus and the Minotaur. I won’t tell you what lies at the end of this particular section of the Labyrinth, that would spoil the surprise!

Emerging back into the caves, the half-light seemed much brighter. We toured a cavern with a deep pool and green moss growing on the sides, an eerily empty projection room which was playing highlights of Budapest on a loop and finally another exhibition. This consisted of archaeological 'findings' from the future. I think I might have read an article in The Times about it - I didn't realise it was there. Unearthed fossils of humans are roped off in seemingly random sections of the cave floor alongside the marks in the stone left by their ‘grave goods’ of laptops and trainers. 'Icons of worship' including a giant coke symbol are deliberately misconstrued by the futuristic explanation while leaving a telling trail of our much despised consumerism.

Reaching the end of the tunnels, we slipped out of a door into a long dark passageway. This led us past framed pictures of mazes and out of the side of Castle Hill through an unmarked exit into the twilight. With bats circling us, we sat on the railings looking out over the Danube in semi-darkness and spent our last few hours in Budapest reminiscing about the Labyrinth.

Later, we caught the night train through Romania, to Bucharest - but that's another story.