Randy Ray
Csaba Borsai, a secondary school teacher at Regnum Marianum High School in Budapest plans to take his students on a 1,000-kilometre bike tour of central Canada in July.
Entitled A Bridge between the Danube and the Saint Lawrence, the Catholic school’s tour aims to introduce the students to the Canadian landscape and serves as a type of protest against global warming.
Tour participants will make the lengthy journey from southern Quebec to southwestern Ontario without being escorted by a car. They will pack all of their equipment and personal belongings onto their bikes.
In addition to the tour’s goal of raising awareness of key environmental issues, the students will also use their encounters with Canadians as an opportunity to introduce them to St. Elizabeth of Hungary and her life story. Mr. Borsai’s students will perform short sketches depicting the saint’s life to Hungarian communities in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and a handful of smaller towns in Ontario.
The students will arrive in Montreal on July 13 and return home on August 5. Their trip will include sightseeing in Montreal, including visits to the stock exchange, Old Montreal and the Olympic Park, cycling between Montreal and Ottawa, sightseeing in Ottawa, including a visit to the Parliament Buildings and the National War Memorial, cycling in the Ottawa area, including Gatineau Park and a ride to Smiths Falls south of Ottawa, and cycling between Ottawa and Kingston, Picton, Trenton, Oshawa and Toronto.
While in Ottawa, the students will visit the Hungarian Embassy. In Toronto they’ll stop at Budapest Park and Hungarian House. They will also take part in a bus trip to Niagara Falls. Upon their return to Montreal in early August they will spend time with Hungarian families.
“When I first started working as a teacher, I decided that I would try to show my students things that they would not find in their textbooks,’’ Mr. Borsai, a biology and geography teacher at the Regnum Marianum school, said in an interview. “We have been just about everywhere within Hungary and over the years, I have also taken my students on tours of Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States.’’
For the itinerary in Hungarian please click here.