Using an eSIM in Budapest

What Budapest is like on a phone

Budapest takes several crowds at once: bathers, a night-out crowd doing the ruin bars, and families on the Danube boats. The city is larger than people expect and most movement happens on the metro and the trams, so the phone comes out constantly. On the Pest grid the map behaves itself; over on the Buda side the fix is accurate enough but the route the app picks has a habit of sending you up a very long flight of steps.

When you land

Liszt Ferenc Airport (BUD), terminals 2A and 2B, sits a fair way out and still has no rail link, so it is the 100E express bus to Deák Ferenc tér or the 200E out to the M3 metro. Others come in by international train from Vienna and Bratislava into Keleti or Nyugati, or by coach into Népliget. Switch the line on inside the terminal before you walk to the stand: city tickets can be bought in the app and the machine queues are often long. The ride in holds signal except on the deeper platforms.

Where coverage changes

Over in Pest, with its wide boulevards and continuous building lines, things stay steady across whole districts. On the Buda side the castle hill and Gellért hill look out over everything and feel open, while the roads winding between the hills have short dead patches. The very shallow M1 line usually works the whole way, unlike M2 and M4, which dive under the river and go quiet for minutes at a time. Inside the domed bath halls and the caves under Buda, assume nothing from the start.

What a day here costs in data

A normal day here lands around 800MB to 1.8GB, mostly the city transport app, maps and translating Hungarian menus, which you cannot guess your way through from any other language. Bath sessions and boat tickets are booked on the phone as well. If you are out in the bar district shooting long video to send home each night, about 2.5GB a day is the comfortable figure.

Districts travellers ask about

• District V, Belváros: The riverside core of Pest, walking distance to parliament and the Chain Bridge; the wide streets keep the map steady and make it the easiest place in town to meet someone.
• District VII, Erzsébetváros: Ruin-bar country, heaving after eight; the layered courtyards of the old blocks make the speed you feel drop noticeably on a weekend night.
• District I, the Buda Castle hill: High and open, so it is the easiest part of Buda to use a phone in — but the ways up include a funicular and some very long staircases, so look at which one the app has chosen for you.
• District XIII, Újlipótváros: A residential river strip north of parliament: quiet, full of cafés, and the district long-stayers pick because it stays steady all day.

Day trips out of the city

• Szentendre: Forty minutes on the H5 suburban line from Batthyány tér, connected nearly the whole way because it never leaves the suburbs; the little old-town lanes stutter the way old-town lanes do.
• The Danube Bend: Visegrád and Esztergom: The riverside road under the cliffs thins out in places, while the citadel above Visegrád is wide open because of the height. If you go by boat, sailings shift with the season and from year to year, so check the operator's own timetable before you build a day around it.
• Eger: Two hours by car or coach on well-covered motorway, but the wine cellars cut into the Szépasszonyvölgy valley have nothing at all — save your return address and the last bus time on the phone before you go down the steps.