Slovakia travel: Sausages and snow

Andrew Neather
21 Oct 2009

The temperature was minus six and a fresh wind was blowing off the snowfields but I was grinning from ear to ear as the huskies pulled the sled into the fast section of the two-kilometre circuit. As I stood on the back of the skids clutching the rail, my seven-year-old daughter squealing with delight from the sled's seat in front of me, I glanced up to the Tatra Mountains, white with snow.

Slovakia is neither well known nor fashionable in Britain as a winter sports destination. The language is difficult. Its cuisine is simple and solidly East European, the national dish a kind of potato gnocchi, halušky, smothered in sheep's cheese and greasy bacon bits. The aprčs-ski scene consists of a few village bars. Heavy metal T-shirts are viewed not as a sartorial faux pas but as an expression of the cultural mainstream. Courchevel it is not.

And therein lies much of Slovakia's charm. For a start it is still relatively cheap, having adopted the euro only this year. A half-litre of Pilsner Urquell costs around €1, a filling plate of halušky less than €4. Lift passes are around €22 a day for an adult; 45 minutes with a ski instructor is €15.

More importantly, it just feels different; a mountain world where skiing and snowshoeing are simply what the locals do. There is very little posing. Most of the tourists are Slovaks, with a fair number of Poles and a few Hungarians.

Families dominate most of the pistes around the resort of Zuberec, close to where we were based, with parents introducing children as young as three to the beginners' slopes. My three-year-old daughter coasted down, held by our guide, Lucia, shouting:“I love it! I love it!” Indeed in general, the children were incredibly well looked after.

Skiing was just one of the attractions of our week. This was fortunate because I was very bad at it. As my number of falls per descent increased, my notoriously un-sporty wife was barely able to conceal her glee, speeding past me with the five-year-old and seven-year-old nonchalantly snow-ploughing behind her.

Fortunately, there was a bar at the bottom to which I repaired regularly to nurse my bruises and knock back beer and klobasa sausage, while the three-year-old drank hot chocolate.

A day snowshoeing proved less technically demanding, although the heavy snow — a metre of gossamer-light white powder — was tough going even where a trail had been cut by others. And still it was snowing, quantities of the white stuff that would induce blind panic in southern England. Here, nothing stops for it. On up the hill, we crunched in our snowshoes until we stopped for lunch at a wooden shelter, the adults sharing a bottle of distinctly odd local herbal liquor while the children gathered around the table to eat chocolate and sandwiches.

“The three things that Slovak men always take with them in the mountains are alcohol, chocolate and bacon,” Lucia informed us. As the chill started to seep into my extremities, I could not fault those priorities.

Warming up again is one of the great pleasures of such an environment. One day we walked from the ski slopes through the woods to an inn for lunch by a roaring fire; I chose a typically uncompromising dish named “Three heaps” — heaps of three different meats served atop potato pancakes, that is. Thus fortified, we ventured back into the silent, snow-draped forest.

Likewise our hotel in the village of Habovka, the Julianin Dvor, was comfortable and warm. Its restaurant was appropriately no-nonsense, its breakfasts large enough to power a morning's snowshoeing. I gave thanks many times for its apparently limitless supplies of lager and sausages.

You can warm up more dramatically at Oravice's thermal baths. I'd seen pictures of Russians rolling around in snow before jumping into hot pools but the Slovaks are less masochistic, settling for a morning's skiing before lazing around in the pools, some of them in the open air, light snow falling through the steam. It is a strange sensation standing chest-high in bathtub-warm water and then realising that your hair is stiff with ice. Emboldened, my son and I got out and ran 40 metres through calf-deep snow in our trunks before plunging into the next pool.

For London children, however, such stunts are hardly necessary when they can walk two metres from the door of the hotel into deep snow. Ours were happy to roll around in it and make snowmen for hours. Ten minutes' walk away, a local ski slope offered excellent tobogganing. And while they were waiting for turns dog sledding, they built an igloo, with adult help.

Indeed so successful was the holiday that the children have since demanded to go back to Slovakia in the summer. I think we'll pass.
I'm sure the Tatras are delightful in summer sunshine but thermal pools, hot sausage and huskies are best enjoyed with snow stretching to the horizon.

DETAILS

The Adventure Company's seven-night Family Slovakian Snow Adventure costs Ł739 per adult and Ł669 per child, including all flights, accommodation, transfers and activities.
Availability throughout the Christmas holidays and February half-term.
www.adventurecompany.co.uk
www.slovakia.travel