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It is two in the morning, the street party has decamped to Simona’s bar and not one trotter of the four promised spit-roast pigs has yet materialized, but we don’t care. Slivovice - the local plum-based eau de vie - is flowing, and actor and accordionist Ivan Urbanek is singing Moravian folk songs with gusto.

‘Under the maple tree,' translates our hostess, Tiree Chmelar, ‘through the window, under the eiderdown, there are four feet! - It’s a real dirty song!’

Ivan changes tempo, throwing back his head and swelling his voice around a soul-searing ballad, as if his life depended on it. Suddenly Tiree’s husband, Lubomir, finds tears rolling down his cheeks. ‘This music is very powerful for me,’ he says. ‘It gets to me right here.’

Lu hasn’t heard these songs since he was a boy. Like so many Czechs, he has lived most of his life in exile. His family left in 1938 to avoid the Nazi occupation, and Lu was educated in Britain before moving to New York. Come the Velvet Revolution in 1989, however, and he felt an irresistible pull to his homeland. He returned with British-born Tiree, bought a crumbling house in Mikulov, southern Moravia, and, with Czech colleagues, set up the Greenways, a non-profit organisation to protect the environment and preserve historic sites.

Using 100-year-old hiking trails and specially created bike routes, they established a Greenway along 250 miles of glorious land between Vienna and Prague, heading west along the Dyje River of southern Moravia and the Vltava River of South Bohemia, taking in such perfect historic jewels as the towns of Telc, Trebon and Cesky Krumlov, before turning north to Prague.

‘What hit me like a pie in the face when I returned,’ says Lu, ‘is that this is perfect hiking country. Whereas in America we’d drive 500 miles and still be on the same plain, here you go 200 kilometres and experience totally different regions - granite massifs, deep forests, fertile valleys, rolling open plains - and a wonderful variety of architecture. I always had a passion for long-distance walking, and doing the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela gave me the idea that when you walk from place to place and muse about the architecture and countryside, you see a whole different country.’

As a foretaste, the Chmelars take us up to the Pálava hills. Past burgeoning elderflower bushes which locals raid to make cordial, through poppy fields and wispy pony’s tail grass, we hike to a high point where we can see the terracotta rooftops of Mikulov, and Austria and Slovakia beyond. Back at sea level, we walk the wooded Greenway between Valtice and Lednice, two of the most impressive zameks (chateaux) in the country, built by the powerful Liechtensteins, who commissioned the finest woodcarvers and artists to decorate their stately piles (all 99 of them) and resculpted nearly 200 square km of landscape to suit their refined tastes, shifting more hills and inserting more lakes and follies than Capability Brown would have dared.

It’s easy to see why the Chmelars are so exuberant about the country. The landscape reminds me of unpopulated areas of France, rolling and verdant, alive with wild flowers, butterflies and birds, with unpolluted skies, unblemished vistas and not a whisper of a jet plane. Hiking is nothing new to the Czechs, however. The Czech Hiking Club was founded in 1891 and, at weekends, you’ll see grandparents and children, lovers and friends, stepping forth on colour-coded trails. ‘We weren’t very inventive,’ agrees Lu, ‘we just took what was there and packaged it. Our aim is to join communities, give them an awareness of their heritage, bring tourists out of Prague and into the countryside, and build an economy.’

The street party is another Chmelar concept, to encourage a little bonhomie among their neighbours, many of whom were on nodding terms only (a hangover from the repressed Communist years). The evening commences with a service in the fine old synagogue - until the 19th century, Mikulov had 12 synagogues and the largest Jewish population after Prague. Heartfelt speeches are delivered by town fathers about reviving the community spirit. We parade down the road, where the Chmelars’ Romany neighbours surprise us by playing not traditional gipsy music, but superb modern jazz. The sky is still prussian blue and there are jugs aplenty of beer and wine (‘pivo’ and ‘vino’ - just about the only words of Czech we ever master, along with the compulsory ‘na zdravi!’ as you clink glasses). After all, we are in wine country (every Moravian, Lu included, has a sizeable cellar) and Bohemia is home to the original Budweiser and Pilsner beers.

It is a great send-off, though perhaps not the most apposite, considering our first full day on the road involves two hours on horseback followed by a ‘demanding’ 30 km bike ride. The idea is that you can do the Greenway by horse, bike, canoe or plain old Shanks’s pony - or pick ’n’ mix. Greenways have teamed up with Palava Tours, a local travel company, who tailor your trip according to the time you can spare (they recommend nine days to cover the highlights; I’d say make it two weeks - everywhere is so enchanting that you keep wanting to slow the trip down).

Tomas from Palava Tours pops round in the morning to hand over a detailed itinerary, descriptions of hikes and bike routes, excellent 1:50,000 hiking maps, vouchers to Greenways-approved hotels, even a telephone card in case we get lost. It transpires that some of the trails are circuits and there are occasional car or rail links, plus luggage transfers. This seems a bit of a cheat at first - I feel we should be doing a continuous journey under our own steam, like pilgrims - but, as the trip unfolds, each day’s activity seems perfectly paced. The trail is planned so that you cover the most beautiful terrain in peace and whisk past less interesting areas. In any case, it would take weeks to do the entire route under your own power.

Horseback was photographer Paul’s choice, not mine, but as we moved in quiet convoy over the hills, past apple and cherry orchards, between velvety fields of golden-green barley that rippled in the breeze like long fur, I wished I was the horsey type. This, as Paul kept pointing out, was thrilling galloping country. I was thankful, however, to descend to a more familiar saddle. After pedalling some way, we reached a no-entry placard. Tomas’s directions advised us to ignore it. We continued down the steep pitted track, over humps like sleeping policemen buried beneath the grass. I gave up and pushed, but Paul bumped down and up the other side. When I reached the top, panting, I looked up and realised I was standing between a tall barbed wire fence and a stark iron watchtower. This was a sobering remnant of the Iron Curtain.

By contrast, the Renaissance town of Telc is the model of Czech architectural gaiety, with its elongated town square of neapolitan ice cream facades. By the time we reached Slavonice, we were well acquainted with the crazy gables, layered up with arches and pediments like toytown building blocks, or flanked with scrolling ‘S’s like Quaker wigs. Facades were further decorated with virtuoso sgraffiti, the top layer of plaster etched away to reveal a contrasting colour beneath. We liked the laid-back atmosphere of this sleepy town, and got chatting to woodcarver Jiri Netik, who was restoring an old house to turn into a school for carvers. He used to be a drummer in a rock band during the Communist era, which provided his passport out of Czechoslovakia.

‘I saw many old people woodcarving in Austria, Germany and Switzerland,’ he said, ‘but at home, the tradition was lost. There were only factories. I decided to bring carving back to my country.’

Under the gaze of sgraffito characters in doublet and hose, we finally set off on our 12 km hike to Landstejn castle. The trail took us through forests with the warm scent of pine and wild strawberries, and out into fields awash with lupins of mauve, indigo and lilac, beautifully constructed mini-Chrysler buildings. At the top of the hill stood a little white chapel and a log bench. It was far more tempting to sit awhile than to march 10 km to Nova Bystrice in time for the narrow-gauge train to Jindrichuv Hradec. Instead we strolled down to Landstejn’s sole bar, called a taxi, and put up our feet with a bottle of Bud.

Trebon is at the heart of a protected wetlands region. Its first fish ponds were constructed in the 12th century, and the area now shelters rare plants, animals and birds, and thousands of tonnes of fish, a smattering of which (pike-perch, carp, catfish, pike and trout) I admit we happily tucked into at Supina restaurant. Greenways has put together a 43 km educational bike route around the ponds, canals and rivers, but we hit town on the same day as a storm and after 3 km ducked out in favour of Berta’s Spa, where we took the peat package, dredged from the local 12,000-year-old bog. It was a curious institutional experience, especially when the white-coated attendant opened the sluices in the bath and a torrent of murky brown water thundered out. I felt as if I were lounging in a vat of Turkish coffee, but apparently it does wonders for the joints.

If there is one town above all I’d like to return to endlessly, it’s Cesky Krumlov. All but marooned amid a meander in the Vltava River, this World Heritage Site is one of those laid-back cultural cities that attracts students, artists and musicians. Of Czech Republic’s 3,000-odd castles, Krumlov’s is probably the most spectacular, with its own joyous Baroque theatre, the oldest, largest and best preserved in the world. I was ready to buy a derelict warehouse overlooking the river until I discovered the director of the Egon Schiele Museum got there first. But he occasionally lets studios to artists, he told me. Alternatively, you can always stay at our pension, Na Louzi, which is truly Bohemian, a woody little place with rickety stairs and a dozen styles of ancient door lock and handle.

Our expedition the following day was my personal highlight, canoeing down the lazy Vltava to the village of Zlata Koruna, then a long, steep hike through pine forests to Klet, at 1042 metres, and back down to Krumlov. As we floated past stands of yellow irises and draping willows, we marvelled for the umpteenth time at the lack of urban encroachment upon such swathes of nature.

The tranquillity was interrupted when a gun shot rang out across our bows. We seemed to have drifted into the set of Deliverance. A bunch of roughnecks with feather-cut hair and Indian canoes was loitering by the river bank, smoke still wafting from the barrel of their gun.

‘Ahoj,’ I said, gingerly. I wanted to add, ‘there, me hearties,’ but ‘ahoj’ is actually the Czech equivalent of ‘ciao’, rather than a pirate greeting.

‘Ahoj,’ they nodded back. We paddled on in tense silence, waiting for more gunfire or perhaps the twang of a banjo, but they were not interested in us. Apparently it’s quite the thing to drop out of society for months and take to the rivers and byways. I was tempted to do so myself.

I haven’t bought a ramshackle house to restore - yet, but I did return at the end of the summer to see a different landscape, now sun-scorched and harvested, and to attend the Valtice Festival, a late August weekend of opera, concerts, picnicking and wine-tasting. Lu was there, expounding upon the latest Greenways project, a wine trail. ‘A great number of ordinary people have vineyards and charming cellars,’ he said. ‘Now you can go from one vintner to another, tasting wine, and if you can still stand at the end, you can buy bottles.’ I, for one, will drink to that.

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