One Final Push

We leave early, my backpack bulging with two and a quarter litres of water, a half pack of inadvertently crushed biscuits, two cereal bars, six dry rolls, sliced Edam and a map produced before the Berlin Wall came down (translations: Russian, Polish, German and Hungarian; price: 5 Czechoslovak crowns).

Parking the car in Stefanova (at less than a third of High Tatras' prices) we take the steep blue path through the forested valley to Medziholie, five hundred metres up between the rocky top of Velky Rozsutec and Stoh's shorn head. A muddy short cut along the yellow path bypasses the peak of Stoh, cutting forty-five minutes off the walk and depositing us in the woods at Stohove Sedlo, from which its a sharp drop down and then back up through the raspberries to Poludnovy grun and lunch.

We're now striding along the shoulders of the mountains, clipped, stark and topped with baked-mud paths like a dried-out Lake District, all mini-hills, dips and rises until we finally reach the top of Chleb, 1,647 metres above sea-level, 1,000 metres higher than where we started.

Dropping down to the saddle brings our first encounter with cable car culture: fat men in white trainers wheezing on the path, a gaggle of Polish teenagers screaming and flirting on the rocks, Coca Cola and hamburgers, sinks designed so you can't fit a water bottle under the tap. The half hour hike to the park's highest point, Velky Krivan (1,709 metres), brings relative peace and quiet until the thunder starts rumbling ominously to the north. We take the fast way down, straight under the cable car to Chata Vratna, losing the badly-marked path two thirds along and ending with a mindnumbing, madcap, foolish scramble down a scree slope. Foot on small stone, stone slips, fall on hip, slide, swear loudly. "Be grateful we have our lives," says a woman at the bottom. A tad melodramatic. But maybe only a tad.

The hike ended nine hours after it began, squashed four in the back of a car from Prague, driving 100kph along a winding road. Towards the pub.