Feeling a bit defeatist after our efforts fishing on the Vah and Bela rivers in Slovakia, Fumie and I headed a few kilometers west to try our luck on the small river that has become our "home stream" - the Revuca, which feeds into the Vah in the town of Ruzemberok. The river's headwaters start up in the mountains near the Donovaly ski resort, and the first few kilometers of headwater are off limits to fishermen as a natural breeding ground for trout and greyling. The river gets stocked as well, but about half of the fish are wild holdover trout who have seen many a fly and are not about to give themselves up easily.
Although small, I have seen some very large trout and greyling come out of the Revuca. (Notice how I did not state
"I have caught some very large....") The Revuca is the Mecca of the Hungarian fly fisherman, mainly because it is just three to four hours drive straight north of Budapest, and you can usually find at least some evidence of Hungarians somewhere along the river banks...
This is the first time we hit the Revuca without a car. In order to get a day fishing permit for the Revuca you have to go into Ruzemberok. As usual, while you can buy a Slovak state licence at the city hall or any fishing shop, you have to do some footwork for the daily permits. I'll spill the beans - go to Mrs. P. Pavelkova, K.F. Palmu 44, Na Satelitoch. It's way up on the hill. Take a cab. Permits cost 500 Slovak Krn. a day. We then took the car to our favorite Guest House/Lumberjack bar, the Bodega, in the village of Podsucha. The entire cab fare was the same as what it would cost us to come home to Zuglo from downtown Budapest.
Sure, you can stay at the best hotels in Europe, but why would you want to? The Bodega is across the street from one of Europe's best trout streams. This is our idea of a summer holiday. Rooms are about 10 EU a night, and it may well be the best roadhouse food in Slovakia. Definately the cheapest. Stewed beef, cabbage sauce, and steamed bread dumplings.... 3 EU.
A local specialty is Liptovsky droby. On our last trip, this was a classic
hurka, just like a nice greasy Hungarian liver and rice sausage, a less spicy version of Louisiana
anadouille sausage. This time it was stuffed with some kind of potato and semolina mixture, more like a Jewish stuffed derma.
The Revuca has the advantage of being a small stream - you can concentrate on specific pools and pockets and get a sense of where the fish are. In the summer, it is also not difficult to wade without rubber boots. The stream is home to native grayling... and Fumie made the first catch.
Actually, Fumie made the second and third catch... the list could go on... she's getting pretty good at fly fishing. Oddly enough, she only uses two fly patterns, neither of which resemble anything actually swimming around in the water. One pattern is the old british Red Tag, a peacock herl/brown hackle dry fly with a bit of red yarn for a tail.
The others are variants of what she has named the "Dancing Queen" nymph - a gold bead head, thin shiny bronze flash dubbing with a bright red or green wool tail. And she is not flexible. She uses no other flies. I know - from scientific examination of the entomological literature regarding
Salmo trutta morpha fario - about what brown trout eat. I tie flies and use about ten basic pattern variations to imitate various stream insects. Fumie went to Art School and chooses her flies based on that. But she catches fish.
Since we had not gone out yet this year, we were pretty rusty up in Hradok, but by the time we got to the Revuca we had our game on - no more messy casts, no more scaring fish. Well, it worked for Fumie, at least.
Finally, about six PM on our last day, I hooked a trout just downstream from the spot shown below. I was drifting a small size 16 olive Goldbead Hare's Ear nymph across stream and felt a hit. But it didn't shudder and shake like a brown trout, and it didn't have the six-inches-of-steel aerodynamic resistance of a small grayling.
Finally,
a frigging fish! The first (
and only) of the year! I get to shore and, taking care not to handle the fish (I don't kill my catch. I try not to handle them or take it out of the water before releasing it from the barbless hook) It is a huge surprise. This is a Brook Trout.
Salvelinus fontinalis. It is native to North America and quite rare to find in Europe - although there is something similar called
saibling in the Alps. What is it doing in Slovakia?
My guess is that Slovakia is experimenting with stocking brookies. The Revuca used to stock a lot of non-native rainbow trout, big dumb hunks of willing fly gulpers to keep the local freezers stocked full of dinner. But rainbows can compete with natives for food, and tend to migrate upstream in the spring to breed, which can seriously hurt the populations of native brown trout fingerlings (brownies breed in the fall.) Over the last two years I have caught fewer and fewer rainbows in the Revuca. At first I thought this might be an
omble, a European Char, but they usually need a deep lake to breed. I know of no
saibling in Slovakia, although they exist in Austria and in Transylvania. If this is true, I may have a brookie stream only three hours north of me.
Hallelujah! My favorite fish!
Hungarian isn't what most folks would consider an easy language. Linguists usually count it among the most difficult languages to really master, and when I was studying anthropological linguistics other linguists usually counted it among the most difficult languages - and therefore it was one of those everybody wanted to learn. Informally, the list of difficulty ran thus: Hungarian (because of so few recognizable Indo-European cognates and a deeply inflected syntax,) Kekchi Maya (having studied Quiche Maya I can only imagine why Kekchi would be harder...) Japanese (actually not that difficult except that it utilizes three writing systems simultaneously and is rife with "levels" of speaker formality) and Mohawk (an incredible pronoun system.) So it always comes as a surprise to me, or any speaker of Hungarian, when we hear somebody who is not a native speaker of Hungarian speak Hungarian at all... especially with mistakes. In Slovakia, however, you meet lots of people - speakers of Slovak - who are able to communicate in various levels of Hungarian, from totally broken to fluent.
Slovakia was a part of the Hungarian kindgdom for 900 years, and during the late 19th century Austro-Hungarian era was subject to a strong Hungarian-centric education program, during which time all schools and all administrative life were conducted in Hungarian. After the emergence of a Czechoslovak state in 1918, the use of Hungarian was restricted to those areas where Magyars formed a large ethnic minority. Since the "velvet divorce" granted Slovakia independance in 1990, the Slovak language has finally come into its own... [photo not my own...]
Nevertheless, Slovaks often know a lot of Hungarian. Lots of them went to schools with Hungarians, lots of them come from areas with large Hungarian minorities, and most important... lots of the Slovak guys really like Hungarian girls. And so while we were in Slovakia I heard quite a lot of Slovak conversations where, when somebody was quoting a Hungarian, the language would switch to Hungarian... and everybody understood. Hungarian phrases were popped into Slovak sentences in the way New Yorkers pepper their speech with bits of Spanish or Yiddish. I met one fisherman while we were there who spoke quite good Hungarian, but he was a Slovak, and from a region with very few Magyar villages - he'd learned it during his army service chasing local Magyar girls.
Above is an old shop - across from the train station in Liptovsky Mikulas - that proudly displays its old Hapsburg era Hungarian orgins - the sign advertises "Alchoholic Drinks." Incidentally, this is one of Europe's main meccas of urban trout fishing - the Vah runs straight through it, a premier fly fishing water through and through, if you don't mind fishing in town. Get your day licence at the main hotels.
In between the two world wars, Hungarian education was banned in Czechoslovakia. Jews, however, were allowed to choose their language of education, which at that time in East Europe usually meant choosing between a Yiddish school system or a Hebrew one. The Czechoslovakian Jewish community chose to educate their children in Hungarian. Subsequently, during the inter war years, many non-Jewish Hungarians living in Slovakia chose to send their children to Jewish schools.
The sad result is, that with the destuction of Slovakia's strongly Hungarian language-identified Jewish community, Hungarian language education also suffered - after the war it would be years before Hungarian language high schools reopened in Slovakia. Today, the Jewish presence is represented in empty synogogues such as that in Ruzomberok, above, and in Liptovsky Mikulas, below. 
Today Slovakia boasts East Eutrope's fastest growing economy. During the first ten post communist years the country stagnated under the government of communist-turned-nationalist Vladimir Meciar. When Meciar left office a new generation of Slovak leadership - educated in the west and up on the latest economic theories - took the reins. A combination of smart economists, flat taxes (in a small country) and generous benefits for foreign investors has suddenly trust Slovakia from the backwater of the post 1989 East European changes to the forefront. Unemployment is expected to disappear in three years, forcing the importation of labor. Towns that were once dusty backwaters, like my beloved Ruzemberok, are becoming smart regional investment centers, and tidying up their downtown areas. 
Which brings us to Globalization. Will it destroy Slovakia? the Answer is resounding: No! Not as long as Slovakia has Kofola to defend it! [OK. A shot of borovicka doesn't hurt either...]
Kofola is Slovakia's contribution to unique, weird, what the fugg edible drink items in the world. Kofola is Slovakia's answer to near-beer. It is some kind of non-alcoholic brewed malt drink, served on tap in bars, and marketed in the same manner as other big brand beers.
It is really quite good... in a non-intoxicating way. People who have to drive home from bars feel fine hanging out over a cold mug of Kofola. Truck drivers drink it with lunch at roadhouses. It is actually quite good. About half as sweet as a cola, and not as carbonated. My Hungarian clarinetist Janos, who is addicted to this stuff, calls it "Somewhere between coffee and beer." If Slovakia keeps going down the road to success as it has so far, this stuff may well knock Coke and Pepsi out of the twenty first century.
We stayed our first day in the fabulously named Hotel Smrek. There's nothing that says Liptov quality like Smrek. I can imagine the regional planning commitee sitting down to a marketing discussion... "What should we call the new hotel? I kind of like 'Hotel Paradise'... well, there's also the option of naming it the 'Hotel Mountain View'.... no, it's already been decided. We're going with HOTEL SMREK!"
And now was time for lunch... The Smrek was the main downtown eatery in Hradok, but in Slovakia food prices are much lower than in Hungary, and although the Slovak culinary tradition isn't exactly adventurous, it is good, honest stick-to-your-ribs peasant food and even in a hotel you won't pay more than five bucks for a meal. 
The Smrek Special, the only dish in the world named "Smrek Special." Super garlicified stewed beef on top of sour cabbage over a plate of flour dumplings. Absolutely smrekolicious! Another dish you can find in every Slovak restaurant is some take on halushky, dumplings with melted sheep cheese and bacon, or in this case, sauteed sausage. Interestinngly, the potato based dumpling called halushky in Slovak is called sztrapacska in Hungarian, whicle the common Hungarian flour-based galuska is called strapacky in Slovak... 
August isn't the best time to fly fish - the mid summer heat waves tend to put coldwater trout off their feed - but the waters here were fed by high mountain runoff. In fact, since we hadn't brought waders, we ran into the brick wall of wading the Bela - it was painfully cold to walk into the water in only sneakers and shorts. Luckily, the Vah ran behind the town and had trimmed banks allowing us to hike a few kilometers upstream and still cast from the bank.
Later we moved over to the even cheaper Hotel Pod Sklanou, located on ulica Hradska 37, where a room was even cheaper and only a three minute walk from the alpine river Bela. Here we met a couple of Romanian fly fishermen from Sibiu who were delightful to talk to... in Romanian. 
The method of choice in these fast cold rivers is called "Czech nymphing." Basically, you trawl for trout. You tie on two or three heavy nymphs, let out almost no line, and stick your rod tip at the top of a run letting the leader lead the nymphs past the trout. Effective, but not exactly my idea of fun. Czech nymphing is used in a lot of trout fishing competitions, such as the 2004 World Fly Fishing Championships which were held on these very rivers in Slovakia. But really... trout fishing competitions? Doesn't that go against the grain of fly fishing in general? 
For one thing, I have never been able to cast more than a single fly without getting completely tangled in the kinds of rats' nests that only can happen in fly fishing, hopeless gordion knots that take hours to undo. I fish with one fly on my line, no indicator, American style, with no apologies.
Apologies, however, were not needed. We did not catch any fish....
Slovakia is home to some of the best fly fishing for trout and grayling in Europe. And I like fly fishing for trout and grayling. My favorite stream is the Revuca, a tributary of the Vag River running just south of Ruzomberok. 
While returning home from Poland we stopped for lunch along the Revuca - no time for fishng (and it was too hot) but just being close to the Revuca is almost enough for me. This is my home stream. Size 14 Olive Hare's ear nymphs tied with a goldbead head. Does. Not. Get. Better. Than. This. Hopefully, me and Fumie are heading up into Slovakia soon for some fishing.
The Revuca is located in a national park, and when Czechoslovakia was communist it served as a hunting preserve for party members - the result is that it remains a wild and unspoiled region with lots of game wardens checking for fishing licences. Which is a good thing, if you like quality catch and release wild trout fishing.
When we go to the Revuca, for fishing we usually stay at a small restaurant with guest rooms called the Bodega, located south of Ruzomberok in the hamlet of Podsucha. Basically, the Bodega is a shepherd's and lumber jack bar with local food at local prices. On weekends bicycle fanatics - and Slovakia is full of mountain bike fanatics - pedal down to the Bodega from Ruzemberok to eat the starch plate special and drink beer and bellow out amazingly loud Slovak folk songs all afternoon. My kind of place. Come on, you do not complain at 8 EURO a room, and 2 Euro for lunch, with ear-crunchingly loud Slovak folk singing thrown in for free. The Bodega specializes in local dishes of the mountainous Liptov region, and that means starchy, cheesy dumpling dishes. In Slovakia, that means halusky, known in Hungary as sztrapacska.
Halusky is made from flour and potatoes mixed into a gnocci-like dough, slathered with sour cream and sheep cheese, and smothered in fried bacon cubes and lard. Not for the kosher crowd at all, I'm sorry, but then, nothing in Slovakia is. I bought lunch for the band - at these prices, I can afford to splurge. Sztrapacska is an old peasant food in Hungary... like a lot of peasant dishes you don't find it in too many posh restaurants, and every restauarant in Hungary wants to be posh these days. As we approached Podsucha I asked the guys in the mini bus "Hey, who likes sztrapacska?" ... And my kontra player, Puma, answered "Who doesn't like sztrapacska?" 
Well, Feri likes shnitzel - or lapos hus as he calls it ("flat meat") which he couldn't get in Poland. And Feri (our cimbalom and flute player) is actually from a Slovak minority family in southern Hungary. Go figure... There is a weekly show on the Hungarian version of the Food network - Paprika TV - about Slovak cuisne. Basically, everything is made by exceedingly cute old peasant ladies with flour, potatoes, and cheese. Sometimes milk is added. Everything has fried bacon bits added. Everything is white. (I have a nephew who would love Slovak food.) At least the Slovaks have a living folk music tradition. Slovaks, at least in the Liptov region, like to drink beer and then feel compelled to sing, which in other regions would be called "shouting happily at the top of your lungs." It is loud. But it is real. The Liptov area used to be home to a lot of great bagpipers, but today the tradition has shifted to heligonka, a great huge honking alpine diatonic button accordion. Last year I got to try one out at the general store in Vkolinec, which is a sleepy UNESCO heritage village where the shop owner doesn't have much to do all day besides diddle around on his accordion. He was a bit unnerved to hear me crash through a bunch of syncopated Lousiana creole tunes from the late, great Amedee Ardoine...