SLOVAKIA - It's a worrying indicator of culinary quality when Estonians begin complaining about bland food. Estonians, of all people, mass consumers of potatoes and pork, the land that spices forgot. But here in Slovakia the cuisine is even more tasteless, at least, according to one busload of Estonians who were forced to stomach it for a week. The irony of the situation was lost on everyone except me, the sole Australian on board the bus. I found Slovakian food to be quite bearable, but only because my palate had been numbed after a year on an Estonian diet. More sour cream and dill, anyone?
But the purpose of our trip to Slovakia wasn't food. It was snow. Or more accurately, it was mountains. Estonia has plenty of the former and none of the latter. To enjoy the qualities of both snow and mountains combined, Baltic residents are increasingly taking the long drive south to more geographically diverse locations.
Slovakia is by far the most popular ski holiday destination for Estonians. While Finland is closer, Slovakia is cheaper. Much cheaper. So cheap that even Estonians can feel like the privileged holders of a valuable currency for a change. After years of enduring smug British travelers throwing kroons about like confetti, Estonians can finally enjoy a similar experience. One Eesti kroon is worth about two Slovakian koruna. A pint of beer across the bar, for instance, costs 30 koruna 's that's 15 Eesti kroon (1 euro), a cheap lager in anyone's language.
Somehow I didn't manage to save any money though. When drinking cheap alcohol, a strange leveling mechanism comes into play. Because it costs less to drink, I feel liberated to drink more. At the end of the night, I am far more drunk, yet still just as broke. There's an economic thesis buried in that concept, I'm sure.
The drinking started very early on in the trip, at about 7 a.m., to be precise. That's the hour that our chartered bus pulled out of Tallinn. Our crossing of the city limits was celebrated by the opening of a beer can somewhere in the back rows of the bus, and from that moment our coach became a bar on wheels.
Alcohol is highly necessary when attempting to endure such a monotonous journey. The countrysides of Latvia and Lithuania are passably pretty, but Poland is an industrial wasteland with not a redeeming feature in sight.
But the scenery changed the moment we crossed the Polska-Slovensko border. Clearly the cartographers drew a line where the grey swamp of Poland ended and the mountains of Slovakia commenced. "You can keep that," the Slovakians must have shouted to the cabbage-munching Poles as they slammed down the border gate.
Slovakia is stunningly beautiful. The mountains rise swiftly, nestling tiny villages in their folds. Each turn of the road revealed yet another hilltop village with a church tower in the center. The nation's emergence from Soviet poverty is still a work in progress. The main highway is nothing more than a narrow road that detours through the main streets of the villages, yet the construction of bridges and bypasses is visibly underway.
We arrived at our hotel, the oddly-named Hotel Jamaica, a four-level concrete block that exists as a museum of Soviet-era hospitality. Nothing has been altered in the hotel for thirty years it seems. The funky bulbous glass light fittings aren't retro, they're original. Same goes for the beds and the bathrooms. It was comfortable all the same. We weren't expecting five-star.
The hotel became our home and our prison. Located on a hilltop overlooking a beautiful lake, it was certainly a picturesque setting, but at the same time a horribly isolated one. The nearest town was an expensive cab ride away, so our only option for an apres ski beverage was the hotel bar. Our nights were mostly spent crowded around the hotel's ping-pong table, queuing for the sole internet-connected computer or surfing between Slovakia's three television channels (the rooms were fitted with color TVs, I noted with quiet surprise).
The hotel restaurant was our only option for food. In any monopoly, quality is the first element to be sacrificed. Or in this case, flavor. My fellow Estonians weren't subtle with their complaints about the food. We ate every breakfast and dinner at that restaurant for a week, yet I can't distinguish one meal from the other. I am fairly certain that the strange soft-textured sausages that I passed over at breakfast one morning found their way into the soup that same night. Another evening, our soup was stocked with a fine sprinkling of noodles and a slither or two of carrot. "I think they only used one carrot and one packet of noodles between all thirty of us," my fellow traveller Leis suggested. Some folk resorted to assembling sandwiches in their rooms. I happily ate the leftovers my tablemates left untouched.
The Hotel Jamaica did have one redeeming feature, an expansive sauna and hot tub room. The sauna, of course, was not hot enough for the Estonians (is any sauna ever hot enough for these people?), but I found it to be steamy enough. Better still, the sauna room was equipped with a window big enough to climb through to enjoy a roll through a pile of snow, followed by a mad dash back to the hot tub.
But enough about the hotel, the food and the bus ride. They were mere distractions on our quest for "powder" 's that illusive blanket of fresh soft snow that every skier hopes to carve a track through. We were all concerned about the snow quality, given the unusually warm winter. The slopes of Slovakia were green and bare in early January, but thankfully they were coated in snow by the time we arrived in early February.
For a full six days, Slovakia offered up its best skiing conditions. The days were sunny and warm, blue skies above and soft snow below. I remember laughing to myself as I slid across a hillside, my jacket open to the sunshine, a vista of mountain ranges spread before my eyes. These were moments of pure snowboarding perfection.
Each day our bus delivered us to a different ski resort. Slovakia seems to have hundreds of ski spots. Many of them are quite small, with only one or two chairlifts, several tows and half a dozen different runs. They might have become boring, but thankfully we visited new mountains each day.
Our best day was had at Kubinska Hola, a relatively small ski slope, but one with a very enjoyable long and wide run.
Jasna also provided a great day on the mountain. Jasna is by far Slovakia's biggest ski slope, with a north and south face to explore. It can get quite crowded, though, and the lines at the chairlifts were as long as Disneyworld queues. A few of us ventured off-piste in search of adventure. We found a little too much adventure when the inexperienced among us (okay, me) became buried in the meter-deep powder and had to be dragged out by a passing skier.
On the whole, Slovakian mountains seem better suited to intermediate and beginners. Experts might become a little bored, given that the mountains aren't huge and have a limited number of runs.
Snowboarders will also feel out of place. Whereas ski slopes in New Zealand, Australia, the U.S.A. and Canada have a 50-50 split of both skiers and snowboarders, European mountains are dominated by pole-pushers. Slovakia, in particular, caters nearly exclusively for skiers. At one mountain rental shop, I found only two snowboards for hire in the entire store.
Like the rest of Slovakia, the mountains are cheap. Day passes cost between 500 and 700 koruna, or 250 to 350 Eesti kroon (16 - 22 euros). Food and drink on the mountains came at a bargain price (though, of course, the Estonians complained about the bland food on the mountain, too). The price of renting gear was about the same as the lift passes.
Estonians flock to Slovakia. This was most evident while queuing for the chairlifts, with Estonian conversation audible from every direction. We certainly weren't the only bus load visiting from Tallinn that week.
If I was to return to Slovakia, I would probably opt out of the tour package and organize it myself. I would find a cheap hotel or apartment in the town of Ruzomberok, which seems to be Slovakia's central ski town, from where it is easy to catch buses to numerous ski slopes.
But I don't think I'll return to Slovakia, as nice as it was. The mountains of Georgia sound much more exciting, and even cheaper than Slovakia. The food, at least, can't possibly be worse.
