Slovenia is the wheel deal! A cycling holiday in one of Europe's last hidden gems will take your breath away

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Surely, if Prince Charles was ever to come back in another life, he would return as a farmer in a national park nature reserve in the Slovenian Alps.

Breathtakingly beautiful wildflower meadows. Hay cut by hand and draped to dry over a medieval timber rack (kozolec). Self-sufficient homesteads with beehives. Tidy, square vegetable patches that grow enough produce to last a family a year. Folklore galore. Slow pace of life.

It is no exaggeration to say that Slovenia is one of Europe’s last secret special places. And there’s no better way to sample this gentle former Soviet Bloc country than trundling on a bicycle tour through the valleys of the Julian Alps, the south-eastern end of the mountain chain that stretches across Europe and, in the opposite direction (west), to Lyon in France.

Fairytale landscape: The 15th-century church on Bled Island (above)

Our holiday with Inntravel encompassed five days and six nights, cycling an average of 20 miles a day, largely off-road on well-maintained paths.

Day one was an easy pedal around Lake Bled. Often used as the totemic image of the area, it has an island in the middle with a 15th-century church. The unreal colour of the water is just like the sapphire blue on holiday postcards, whose manufacturers fake it by enriching the tones of the sky and sea.

Then, lunch of soup served in a bowl made of bread (£2), couldn’t-be-fresher grilled trout (£10) and a £13 bottle of wine at the Gostilna Vintgar restaurant in a gorge a few miles away.

Some in our family who had opted for electric bikes glided serenely up the impossibly steep hill to Bled Castle, while others, defeated by the gradient, hopped off and pushed!

Electric bikes may be frowned on by ‘proper’ cyclists, but they are a revelation. Press the ‘turbo’ button on the handle-bar and . . . whoosh, anything is possible.

They’re heavy (55 lb), but who cares when you can go turbo? And they’re expensive to buy (more than £2,000), but a joy to hire on holiday.

Every day, we were given a detailed itinerary with map instructions. Even so, we got lost in forests a couple of times. It would have helped to have had GPS maps downloaded to our phones — a facility which Inntravel says it is set to introduce.

Like many guided cycling and walking holidays, this one began with the dodgiest hotel (a communist-era place in the woods, which claimed to be the ‘first zero-waste hotel in Slovenia’, with refectory meals of assorted dumplings).

We moved on to a plush spa hotel and ended in a Renaissance manor with a seven-course tasting menu for dinner, which our children said was all ‘foams and dust’. Inntravel arranges for your luggage to move on each day.

On day two, we cycled through the Triglav National Park past so many butterflies and orchids that you might expect coachloads of visitors sponsored by Kew Gardens, but we hardly saw a soul.

We picnicked among purple loosestrife, meadowsweet and lady’s bedstraw. And refilled our water bottles in the glacial melt of the River Radovna.

Nearby was a memorial for the Slovene resistance fighters killed during World War II by the Nazis, with a chilling story of how a baby had her throat cut by her Partisan parents to stop her screams alerting the Germans to their mountain hiding-place.

Pedal power: Hugh Gordon cycled around 20 miles a day during his tour (stock image)

This is a country of people whose respect for natural beauty is a badge of honour. The absence of litter makes you think that dropping the smallest item is a crime that must carry a mandatory five-year prison term. A more simple answer was given to us by a local: ‘We Slovenians have more human culture than any other nation.’

This national pride was confirmed by a public notice on the edge of a wood, which said in wobbly English: ‘One begins to believe that a forest is the biggest masterpiece of nature on land. Therefore carve at least a small piece of that gigantic magnificence of the forest which we all need so badly in your heart.’

Radovljica was our favourite town, where we stopped at a cycle repair shop to tackle a niggly front brake. It also has an Olympic-sized public, open-air swimming pool and, predictably for parched pedallers, a wine bar called Vinoteka Sodcek, where the ebullient English-speaking Monika dished up three large glasses of Slovenia’s best wine, a platter of local cheese and a mini Alpine mountain of cured ham — all for less than £20.

Day four led us across the border to Italy for a foolish dip in the icy waters of the Fusine Lakes. Sadly, Edelweiss restaurant was closed that day, so we had to make do with a choice of pizza slices at an underwhelming lakeside cafe.

And then it was back into Slovenia — the home of the world’s best linden honey and spruce liqueur (£3.50 a glass).

We experienced the right balance of cycling, lazing and noshing. All under the watchful peaks and eyries of the awesome Julian Alps.

Unlike some other former communist countries, where visitors are still met with granite, soulless stares, Slovenia’s people are extremely friendly. While searching for a picnic place one day, a farmer’s wife suddenly appeared and happily guided us past the barns where her family was making cheese to the perfect spot under a massive sweet chestnut tree.

If you’ve never thought of going to Slovenia, start thinking now.