The Travel Diaries
Hungary 1999

8/1-8/18/99

Herbarium Reunion Project

Photo Album

Trip Bird List

National Life List for Hungary

Cuvier divided travelers into voyageurs-naturalists, -geographiques, and -botanistes. Things are easier for a botanist: he can carefully pick the last specimen of a plant and preserve it in his herbarium, or even transplant it in a pot and take it with him, weather and climate permitting. Human geography complicates matters a little, since it is more difficult to embalm a landscape which is vanishing beneath the cement of the building speculators, a minority on the decrease, its roads, its customs, its people gesticulating in the marketplace. ...

A voyageur-botaniste would certainly have a lot to collect, with the requisite care, and put into a herbarium that would protect them, even if it is always too late, from being crushed by the wheel of things as they are. -- Claudio Magris in Danube

August 1: brezhnev's head
August 2: sergei's hip flask
August 3: hulló makkok
August 4: a giant snail and a nuclear family
August 5: the siege of Eger
August 6: the botanical department
August 7: numerical order and wax bean soup
August 8: a tour of the parliament building
August 9: the miracle of the boiled eggs
August 10: you can go off pink raffia
August 11: total eclipse
August 12: the price of laundry
August 13: smoked botanists
August 14: more cardboard and sponges
August 15: in search of the bird paradise
August 16: the Danube Bend
August 17: a herd of mouflon and István's new printer 
August 18: narrow gauge
August 19: i'm back