ROB CAMERON

“Could you,” I once asked a train-mad friend “travel right across the Czech Republic using only the slow, stopping trains?” The answer was yes, as I and another friend proved in 2007. We spent 19 days covering 2,000 kilometres, setting foot in over 80 towns and villages, and crossing the border into Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Austria. This is an audio diary of that journey.

When the EU’s Schengen zone expanded in 2007 to include much of Central and Eastern Europe, one of the least enthusiastic countries was Austria, where fear of foreigners has long dominated the national debate. But in the far east of Austria, along the River Danube that forms the border with Slovakia, the reality of Schengen has changed both attitudes and lives.

The Czech Republic may be a landlocked country but its historical borders once stretched as far as the Adriatic. People still yearn for the sea – there were even plans in the 1970s to build a tunnel to Yugoslavia. Most have to content themselves with an annual trip to Greece or Croatia, but a pair of Czech adventurers are building a boat… out of plastic bottles.

When communism collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe, previously unobtainable goods flooded the market. Today, shops and supermarkets offer broadly the same food and drink as in the West – a tangible result of global capitalism. But something is dawning on Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians: the labels are the same, but the contents might not be.

January 1st, 2023 marked the 30th anniversary of the break-up of Czechoslovakia; one of the few cases in history when a state has been divided up without a single life being lost. Today the Czech Republic and Slovakia enjoy a harmonious, friction-free friendship – tinged with a touch of regret perhaps for what was once a happy marriage.