The Liptau Valley was a bowl filled to the brim with spring: rolling hills, wallpapered with meadows in all shades of green and purple and rape-yellow, lined with bands of spinach-coloured spruce and even darker fields of pine.The waist-deep, fragrant hayfields around us were glowing with poppies, buttercups, nettles and campanulas and quivered with bees and all kinds of other busy insects. A cuckoo called from a lone island of wild shrubs and bushes left in the middle of wide-stretching cornfields and the copse of ash trees below us was over-crowded with garrulous song birds quarrelling for attention. At the bottom of this Cotswold-sized basin was Lake Liptovska Mara, a summer-blue blot surrounded by tiny villages, toy-roads and large ant-sized herds of cattle and sheep…Continue Reading