I was cutting a hedge in one of Snowdonia's picture postcard villages. The sun was shining, it was Saturday morning and a man was loading up his family car for the journey home. I asked if he'd enjoyed his holiday. "Fantastic thanks, really great."

The kids were helping him bring stuff to the car and walking straight across the road without a sideways glance. He reminded them to watch out for traffic but they kept forgetting. A while later he came across to the hedge and asked "Where on earth do people from Snowdonia go on holiday? What more could you possibly wish for?"

I replied that up until two weeks ago I had slept in my own bed every night for the past three years. The appreciation of the landscape and the chill out factor are cumulative - a spell not to be broken if possible.

However, I had just come back from Triglav, Snowdonia's twin national park in Slovenia, the alpine end of old Yugoslavia. Anyone who likes Snowdonia should love Triglav unless they suffer from vertigo - some of the walks and mountain passes challenge common sense. Wales and Slovenia have much in common. Small countries, a unique language and plenty of mountains. Each has a national park in the North of the country named after an iconic mountain. Snowdon for Snowdonia and Triglav (which means three heads) in Slovenia.

The rain keeps Snowdonia green (hydroelectric too) and produces wonderful waterfalls for which the local word is rhaeadr derived from rhedeg dwr meaning running water. In Triglav they have so much rain they say "the rain has children" and their word for waterfall is the onomatopoeic slap, the sort of word that travels well.

Mountain walking is well catered for. Masses of routes are signposted by the Slovenian mountain club with red and white "fried eggs" painted on boulders making ordnance survey maps less essential. Instead of day trips you can trek the whole week staying in the many catered mountain huts serving excellent food and drink - dawn and breakfast above 2,000m are much better. But make sure the hut is open to the public. I pulled myself up through a storm to dry off in the sanctuary of the hut on my map only to discover it was one that you needed a key for. At least there was a porch I could shelter under and hang things up to dry.

I know size isn't everything but the Triglav mountains are huge, almost three times the height of Snowdon. The North face of Triglav has a sheer cliff that's 1,200m up and a magnet for limpet-like mountaineers. Being mainly limestone the mountains are white and dazzling in the sunshine. The kind of rock which is soft and easily worn away by the successive onslaught of wind, rain and frost releasing rich nutrients into the ground which in turn create an abundance of wild mountain flowers.

In Snowdonia we boast the presence of arctic alpine plants on the higher north facing slopes. Their significance is in being the most south-westerly European distribution of arctics as opposed to their abundance - a Slovenian farmer wielding a scythe cuts more alpines in one sweep than in all of Snowdonia.