The second half of the name comes from the River Morava, which is, of course, where the eastern part of the Czech Republic gets its name from. The river rises in the hills on the Polish border and then makes its way southwards. By the time it gets to a place called Mohelnice, about 40 kilometres northwest of Olomouc, it gets fed up with the headlong rush of its giddy youth and starts to take it easy, creating a forested floodplain for itself and splitting up into at least six different channels and a sprawl of swamps, meanders, and oxbow lakes.
One of the places it passes through in this languid mode is Litovel, a small town that is sometimes rather fancifully referred to as the Venice of Haná, partly on the strength of the various arms of the Morava that lap around it, partly because of a solitary and rather modest canal that flows through its centre. It did make a rather more serious effort to turn itself into La Serenissima during the epic floods of 1997, though.
Put the two together and you get Litovelské Pomoraví, a nature reserve which stretches all the way from Mohelnice to just a few kilometres outside Olomouc. It has beauty and charm during every season, but to be honest, in winter, like pretty much everywhere else round here, it’s frozen solid and not much worth bothering with, and by the time summer comes round you have to compete with a copious and lively insect population, with mosquitoes playing a prominent role, a situation which persists until another winter comes round and kills the little bastards off, so unless you actually like mosquitoes, in which case you should probably stop reading forthwith and tootle off to take your medication, the best time to go there is in spring, when it is seriously glorious, what with the merry burbling of the waters and a thousand shades of green as the forest comes to life.
There are flowers up the wazoo – we’ve been there three times in the last six weeks. The first time we found it still full of snow and ice but also ‘bear garlic’ (which, by the way, makes a great soup) and snowdrops; two weeks later the snow and ice was just a memory and a whole bunch of other plants were coming through, and last Sunday it was just a riot of spring colours. It’s home to beavers, otters, deer, and various other quadrupeds, plus, of course, all manner of birds; there are even a bunch of ostriches living on a farm just by one of the villages that dot the main route through it. It’s crisscrossed with paths and tracks, so you can plan as long or as short a trip as you feel like, and there are quite a few points along the way where you can access it from a bus stop or by train. It’s very popular not just with walkers but also cyclists – it’s flatter than a witch’s tit – and horse riders, rafters, and canoeists.
And, of course, this being the Czech Republic, there’s no shortage of pubs along the way where the thirsty traveller can pause for refreshment. Pretty much every village has at least one watering-hole. A favourite of many is the Lovecká chata, or Hunter’s Cottage.
In days gone by it was a woodland retreat for the bigwigs in the Communist Party, who, just like the bloated capitalists they loved to contrast themselves with, were inordinately fond of mass-murdering whatever hapless fauna happened along – just down the road there’s a huge pheasant hatchery that was built to provide them with shotgun fodder – but in these more enlightened and egalitarian times it’s open to the masses and the workers as well. In addition to good Litovel beer and a menu with a strong flavour of game, there are horse-riding stables and even that staple of many a Party Congress, crazy golf; just what a boy needs when the Five-Year Plan is going awry...
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