Picturesque Poland is a teenage hit
MY son is ahead of me, his kayak skimming across the slate blue water. A fish jumps. A battalion of cormorants lands on a tree. i pull up my paddle and the air settles around me, as serene as the lake. Then James comes shooting across, spraying me with water as he turns on his paddle. ‘There’s a great beach over there. Let’s swim.’
James is nearly 16, and i’m painfully aware that my years of holidaying with him are coming to a close. My last choices all ended in teenage snits. Then a friend suggested a back-to-nature break in Poland.
our destination is Wigry national Park, in the north-east of the country, close to the Lithuanian border. it is the furthest outreach of the Masurian Lakes (Poland’s Lake District), and the most sparsely populated.
our base is an unassuming but pristine clean hotel right on the Wigry lakeshore. The national park snuggles around it, a mass of primeval forest and waterways that are home to otter and beaver, wolf and elk.
The area is unspoiled, but it is also exceedingly well set-up for outdoorsy pursuits. The hotel rents mountain bikes and nordic walking poles, and you could cycle or hike for days around the well-marked trails.
or you can take to the water. Whichever way you turn, there is another beach, another jetty, another twisting corner of Wigry — the name means ‘winding’ — and it has the longest and most meandering shoreline of all of Poland’s lakes.
The food is solid, verging on stolid, big piles of comfort stacked high and priced low — a lightweight £3 a plate. We need the calories with the amount of exercise we are notching up. We cycle through the forest, keeping a hopeful eye out for wildlife. But we are too noisy, what with our clanking gears and my muffled grunts as i hit yet another tree root.
it is all so wholesome that, as we sit by another pristine lake, watching the sun dip down, i find myself singing old campfire songs as James takes another swim.
The place has somehow transported me back to my own teens, to a time when holidays did not need to be sophisticated.
‘You know what? i’ve loved this holiday,’ says James, as we sit for the last time on the hotel jetty, sharing a bar of chocolate and watching the stars.
i can’t argue. ‘Me too,’ i tell him. TRAVEL FACTS RYANAIR (0871 246 0000, ryanair.com) flies from Stansted to Kaunas from £49 return. Double rooms at Hotel nad Wigrami, Gawrych Ruda (0048 87 563 59 59, hotelnadwigrami.pl) cost from £50 per night B&B. Mountain bikes and kayaks can be hired. For more on Wigry National Park, visit wigry.win.pl.