Budapest from Romania

By car is what most people do, and since Romania and Hungary both joined the Schengen land border in January 2025 the crossing itself is no longer the ordeal it was. Nădlac on the A1/M43 is the main motorway route from Arad and the south-west; Borș, near Oradea, connects to the M4. Roughly 250 km from Oradea, 280 from Arad, 300 from Timișoara, 450 from Cluj.

You need a Hungarian vignette before you touch a Hungarian motorway — it is electronic, bought online, with no sticker to display — and a Romanian rovinietă on the way home. The driving guide covers both, plus the rules that differ and where to leave the car once you arrive.

By train there are direct services from Bucharest, Cluj, Arad and Timișoara. Slower than driving from the west, but it removes the vignette, the parking and the question of who is not drinking.

By plane makes sense from Bucharest and Iași rather than from Transylvania, where the drive is shorter than the airport is.

Hungary uses the forint. Not the euro, and certainly not the leu — a shop that accepts either does so at a rate you would not choose.

Cards work almost everywhere. The one thing to get right is this: when a card machine or a cash machine offers to charge you in lei, decline. That rate is set by the machine's operator, not by your bank, and it is consistently the worst available. It quietly costs Romanian visitors more than any scam in the city, and it is entirely legal.

Withdraw forint from a machine attached to an actual bank, ignore the exchange offices on Váci utca advertising impossible rates, and carry a small amount of cash for market halls and small bakeries.

A large share of Romanian visitors come for the water, and they are right to. But the bath everyone photographs is not always the bath they want.

Széchenyi is the yellow one from the pictures: enormous, sociable, outdoor pools open in winter, and busy. It is the correct first visit and a poor choice if you came to be treated rather than to swim.

Lukács is the one locals with a doctor's referral actually use. Plainer, calmer, medicinal in emphasis, and a fraction of the crowd.

Gellért is the beautiful one — art nouveau tiling, a hall that looks like a cathedral — and Rudas is the Ottoman one, a genuine sixteenth-century domed bath with a rooftop pool over the Danube.

If you are coming for several days of treatment rather than an afternoon, Budapest is not the only answer: Hungary's spa towns are cheaper and quieter. But nothing in the country matches sitting outdoors at Széchenyi in January.

If you are from Transylvania, a good deal of the food is already yours under another name. Lángos is the langoș you grew up with. Kürtőskalács is Székely, from Transylvania, not a Budapest invention. Paprika stews, stuffed cabbage, plum brandy: the same family.

What is genuinely different is the cukrászda, the Hungarian pastry shop, which is a separate institution from a café and where the country keeps its best cheap eating — Dobos, Eszterházy, krémes, somlói galuska. A slice costs a fraction of a restaurant dessert and is better.

Also different: the coffee house as a room you are allowed to sit in for two hours with a book, and the ruin bar, which is a real cultural form rather than a themed offering.

On language — Hungarian is not close to anything you know, but you do not need it. English works across the centre, and in the Jewish Quarter and the market halls you will hear Romanian more often than you expect.

Driving in. The car is useful for getting to Budapest and useless inside it. Park once, on the edge or at the hotel, and use the trams — Budapest's public transport is one of the best-value systems in Europe, and the centre punishes a car with one-way streets and paid zones.

Treating it as a day trip. From Oradea it is temptingly close, and a day buys you the Castle, a queue and a drive home in the dark. Two nights is the point at which the city starts giving something back.

Paying in lei or euro. See above. It is the most expensive habit on this page.

Not booking the Parliament. It is timed-entry only and sells out days ahead — the single thing on a Budapest trip that genuinely cannot be improvised.

Only seeing Buda. The Castle District is the postcard; Pest is where the city lives. If you have one afternoon left, spend it in District VII, not on the hill.

Two nights is the honest minimum: one bank of the river per day, a bath at the end of one of them, and no attempt to see everything.

Three adds the Danube, the Parliament interior and an evening that is not rushed.

Five is where the trip changes character — a day out of the city to the Danube Bend, and a whole day for the Budapest people actually live in.

If you are coming with children, the City Park and the Children's Railway will outrank every monument on your list, and you should plan around that rather than against it.