Tokaj is very special

The Tokaj wine country (Tokaj-Hegyalja) is sparsely dotted with little villages clustered near where several rivers branch and join. The wineries in this region are distributed throughout these villages. The villages are somewhere between 2mi to 6mi apart from each other, along fairly fast-traffic, sidewalk-free roads. It is very inconvenient to attempt to walk from one village to another.

There is no taxi.

Let me rephrase this. It is a somewhat dangerous proposition to try and walk between villages... but you can't pay someone to drive you between towns.

This is a baffling case of "you can't get there from here" which had us pretty steamed this morning. The hotel staff informed us of the lack of taxis in Tokaj. The tourism information office was minimally helpful in our endeavor to get from Tokaj up to Tarcal and Mezõzombor. In the end, we decided to cut 2 wineries from our day plan and just visit the one place that was in the next village via the train.

We ended up walking 5 miles total anyway, what with getting to the train station, getting to the wine cellar from the train station, getting back to the train, and then getting home from the train. For comparison, we could have walked the whole way -- dodging cars and tripping over grassy nubs -- a total distance of 13.5 miles.