It's quiet in the Tatra mountains, not so that you could hear a pine needle drop but quiet enough for a Londoner like me to feel, at first, slightly uneasy, then to grow to like it.
No planes break the stillness of mountains which rise 2,655m from northern Slovakia into Poland, only the occasional car zigzagging its way along the road that links the three High Tatra villages, Lomnica, Stary Smokovec and Strbske Pleso. Even the red-and-cream electric trams climbing slowly through the pines up to these settlements of chalets, sanatoria and ski lifts seem subdued versions of their cousins that rattle through the streets of Bratislava and Prague.
I've taken a purring, swaying cable car up over the forest to the blinding white snow that lies half way up Gerlach, the biggest peak in the High Tatra range. A score or so skiers, mostly Slovaks, speed happily down the smooth, sugar-white slopes. But if you take a few steps away from the café by the cable car, there's nothing - no noise, no buildings to distract from the view of the mountains on either side and the hazy valley below.
Before the 20th century attracted skiers to the High Tatras, 19th-century illnesses like tuberculosis and over-indulgence brought doctors, patients and the Austro- Hungarian aristocracy up here to clear their lungs and take gentle exercise.
By the turn of the last century, dozens of plots had been cleared among the pines for high-eaved chalets and stuccoed neo-classical sanatoria. A daily train puffed its way to the mountains from Bratislava and Budapest. Each of the villages boasted a Grand Hotel, all stained-glass covered verandas and polished wood interiors styled to suit visitors of the belle époque .
Two are still in business, places where après-skiers are served Slovak beer (every bit as good as Czech pilsner) by soft-footed waiters in cavernous rooms; and maids, in expectation of the weekend trickle of visitors, dust old-fashioned stiffly-posed photographs and potted plants.
After the first world war, Franz Kafka came here from Prague in an attempt to cure his TB, and aristocrats were replaced by middle-class politicians and businessmen, but they left little trace of their presence in the architecture. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that new spaces were carved out of the forest, when the government built concrete rest homes for workers and "Green Schools" to give city children a taste of country life. In Strbske Pleso, the huge A-shaped hotel Panorama rises out of the pines to peer down across the frozen lake.
On a sunny day, the Tatras look gentle and inviting. But they are home to bears and lynx, sudden violent thunderstorms and avalanches that claim a score of lives each year.
Down in the valley, far away from bears and skiers, Propad is a smoky, dusty sprawl of squat tower blocks, railway tracks and decaying medieval suburbs. The guidebooks do not recommend spending much time here, but the battered socialist architecture and empty urban spaces evoke gentle decline not brutal destruction. At nine o'clock in the evening, our footsteps and a lone police car are the only sounds to disturb the darkness.
If Slovakia ever gets on the tourist map, most visitors would bypass Propad and head for Levoca's perfectly-preserved Renaissance square, where they can wander under the pollarded chestnut trees and sun themselves on benches round the bandstand. Now, there are only a few schoolgirls eying up teenage boys who hang around near the Gothic church of St Jacob and old women in black scarves picking their way through the wares in a meagre market. The wealth that built the town walls and made St Jacob's the marvel of Central Europe ran out before the town could be rebuilt to suit new fashions.
Kezmarok, Levoca's historic commercial rival has its own castle, churches and prettily-painted, though less well-kept, main street. At the height of its success, ethnic and religious differences were not allowed to interfere with the business of making money. Germans and Gypsies were welcome. But with commercial decline came intolerance, and when Trinity Church was built in 1717, the Catholic Hungarians had turned against their Protestant German neighbours. No Protestant churches could be built within city walls, no stone could be used in their construction and no foundations laid.
Trinity rises above its limitations with a baroque altar to rival the best 18th-century Catholic opulence. Its wooden pews can seat 1,500, but nowadays it opens only once a week when some of Kezmarok's remaining 800 Germans come to pray.
Vlkolinec (population 23), is a Unesco world heritage site. The cream-washed log cottages could be a haven for visitors seeking to escape the 21st century, but there is no tourist accommodation and none is planned. The choice is simple: you can either become a permanent resident - giving up piped water, indoor toilets and supermarkets - or take a day trip, toiling up the only street to peep at the villagers like animals in a historical zoo.
An old lady smiles toothlessly by the village pump, and two toddlers splash through the stream running down the centre of the street. Up by the church, the talk is not of wolves - from which the village gets its name - but of bears, which come down from the hills each autumn to help themselves to windfalls from the plum trees.
Vlkolinec's oldest resident opens the door to the house in which she was born and has never left. She offers us the traditional welcome of bread and home-made slivovic and shows us around her cottage. Here, the wooden furniture doesn't differ from the relics kept in the village house museum. Her one concession to modern life is the bag of empty beer bottles by her cottage door. In the long winters when Vlkolinec is all but cut off from the rest of the world, perhaps beer and slivovic are the only consolations.
After a moment's lapse into the romantic rural ideal, I decide that permanently step ping out of the 21st century is not for me and head off to Besenova for a Slovak-style soak. I'm lying back in the mud-coloured spa waters that bubble up from limestone rock at 40C and gazing at the snow-covered mountains when the rain begins. At first, it seems little more than a mountain mist then turns into hard, fast drops that fall like cold needles into the steam. Only the noise of rain on water and the soft talk of other bathers breaks the silence.
The practicals
Exodus (020 8675 5550) organises 8 day trips from July to September, visiting Prague, Krakow and the Tatras, from £528pp. The Heart of Central Europe 10 day trip from July to September visits the Tatras, the Aggtelek region of Hungary and the cities of Krakow, Eger and Budapest, from £765pp. Both include flights, transfers, guides and accomodation.
