Slower Silesia – a cycling holiday in Poland

In September 1940, the great comics writer PG Wodehouse was sent by train to a German internment camp in Tost, Upper Silesia. As he looked at the damp, flat fields, he wondered: “If this is Upper Silesia, what must Lower Silesia look like?” Well, I can tell him: it’s wonderful in early summer.

I also got a good look at the landscape because I was looking at it from a cyclist’s perspective. This is something I have not done lightly; the last time I cycled, Tony Blair was Prime Minister. (It’s true what they say: you don’t forget how to ride a bike.)

But on a trip with tour company The Slow Cyclist, you’ll be given a customized e-bike before setting off on a carefully chosen scenic route, at a pace suitable for the slowest of the group. I thought I would be, as I am 61, and I am – to tick one of the boxes in the questionnaire they ask before they leave – “healthy but not fit”.

I don’t exercise because I don’t like it and don’t see a need for it. But I already knew that Lower Silesia was beautiful and wanted to go again, and this, thank goodness, isn’t about pushing the limits of your endurance. The point is to enjoy the scenery – and, thank goodness, the scenery is worth it.

The Slow Cyclist covers a range of destinations including Turkey, Transylvania, Greece and South Africa, but I especially wanted to go to Poland as it is the country of my grandparents (well, two of them).

After being picked up from Wrocław and taken to our first destination, a converted farmhouse and barn in a small village, the first day is a relatively relaxing settling-in period. After a generous lunch – which to my surprise was vegetarian – we were introduced to our cycles.

These are hefty mountain bikes with a complicated arrangement of levers and gadgets on the handlebars; when I looked at the rear wheel it looked like it had about 15 gears.

Landscape in Lower Silesia (Photo: Alex Barlow)

We wiggled around the garden for a while to get the hang of them and then Chris, the group leader, declared we were all ready to go; a 25 km drive to our first destination.

This seemed like an awfully long way and I looked doubtful at our first hill, but the modest motor on the bike did a lot to make the climb easy. You still have to move your legs up and down, but it certainly helps.

When we reached the top of the hill and had our first good view, I couldn’t contain my joy; a mountain range in front of us to the south, many of the peaks looking as conical as volcanoes – for the very good reason that they once were, several million years ago.

The entire region is known as “the land of extinct volcanoes”. (Technically, they’re actually the chimneys or chimneys of extinct volcanoes, but we don’t need to go too deep into that here.)

Chris, our leader and guide at the front of our peloton, gave us technical advice on how to get the most out of our bikes and what terrain to expect; Tomàsz, coming up behind, gave us fascinating details about the history and geology of the places we stopped.

Sokoowiec (Photo: Alex Barlow)

The entire group is bracketed front and back by these two experts, so that no one gets lost or left behind; at all times I felt safe in their hands.

These two were Polish (with excellent English), but The Slow Cyclist will provide you with another member of staff once you arrive at your destination, whether for lunch or for the night: in our case a young, articulate gentleman in his twenties called Jasper.

After a while I realized what Jasper’s function is: he is your butler. If he can do anything for you during the trip, he will.

In my case this was largely a matter of refilling my glass, which I must admit kept him quite busy, but he never once complained. He also delivered and packed the goody bag for our first night; in a Slow Cyclist tote bag we found a detailed, laminated map of the region, a Slow Cyclist T-shirt in a very attractive teal shade, ditto an eye mask, as the rooms at our first house had no curtains, and a small squirting bottle of Stillness Pillow Mist.

It’s a testament to how happy we all were with the company – a bunch of journalists, even though we were getting the same experience as everyone else – that when we got to breakfast we were all wearing our Slow Cyclist T-shirts.

The next day we cycled along the banks of the Bóbr River; this means “beaver” and because I am surprisingly knowledgeable about these things, I was able to spot a few beaver dams along the way.

The Pilchowice Dam (Photo: Alex Barlow)

We stopped briefly to admire the man-made Pilchowice Dam across the river, once the largest in Europe; a little further on we stopped at the most rudimentary bar I’ve ever seen outside Mexico – a shack with a rusting caravan next to it, although the beers were some of the most welcome I’ve ever had.

And that is one of the joys of the region; it’s completely unspoilt, we discover medieval castles (and their ruins), visit a local vineyard and have lunch prepared by a “housewives club” and pass vaguely unpronounceable destinations, including Sokołowiec and Tarczyn, on our journey. The largest city we cycled through was Lubomierz, which at that stage of the trip looked like a bustling metropolis.

The region’s history is dark, with massive involuntary colonization (in fact all the Germans were kicked out; the Poles here are now post-1945), so the whole area has something of a wild, underpopulated atmosphere, because when it comes to the mountains and the forests are eternal, and the human component is fleeting or contingent.

The barns could have been built in the Middle Ages, literally or because they never bothered to change the design. Quite a few are being renovated to cater for the slow-growing tourist trade here, but if you visit, you’ll still be ahead of the curve.

We were the only tourists we saw there, and there’s something delightful about that. So we were treated like royalty; we didn’t have to put a hand in our pockets when we left the airport.

And not only did we see some of the most beautiful landscapes in Europe, we may even have come home a little fitter than when we left.

​To get there

Return flights to Wrocław cost from around £40 from Manchester with Ryanair, around £50 from Stansted with Ryanair and around £55 from Luton with WizzAir.

A four-night trip through Lower Silesia with The Slow Cyclist starts from £2,290, including accommodation, all meals and drinks, e-bike, helmet and airport transfers.

3mZ_YKcNB27QECpNx_KB_xmW34nNYp_HB7LNQ7a6h34=.html