Death by hospitality! We are hardly surviving being treated to the local specialities and nightlife and kindness day after day after day! Do we really hear ourselves complaining about this? What kind of great life do we have? But we are exhausted! Our near two weeks in Bulgaria are coming to a conclusion, as tomorrow we will be crossing the border into Turkey! We are pretty stoked to be hanging off the edge of Europe! We will be shooting straight for Ankara to visit Berna, and then we will have four weeks to explore Turkey (and especially Istanbul) before we begin our long journey back to Canada via Berlin and London over a period of a week.
Since our last entry, we stayed with two HC hosts in Sofia, the capital with the highest altitude in Europe, and we survived the roaming urban packs of wild dogs! Ruth and her friends took us to a great Halloween party, so we did get to celebrate one of our most favourite holidays, even if the only costumes present were a newspaper pirate hat and a pair of ski googles. It was the spirit of the event that matters. And her demon cat tormented us the rest of the night. Then Dimitirius (an expert in dead languages) and his mom and Baba took over caring for us, showing us around the city with an informative, quirky post-communist commentary, and took Mike hiking up the gorgeous mountains that surround Sofia. They could barely keep up with the bare-chested 80 year old mountaineers that leap up and down the mountain range daily, accompanied only by their whittled walking sticks. The path they climbed led all the way to Mount Olympus in Greece, but they settled for a view of Sofia from 1500 meters.
We took a day off from the hospitality club to wind our way hitch hiking through the red, orange and gold forests of the Rila Mountain range to explore the Rila Orthodox Christian Monastery, a stunning ancient holy place nestled in the quiet forest where the sun set over the rocky horizon by 14:30. Having a hard time tracking down where the monastory reception was, we were directed to the "man with the long beard in the church" who then pointed us to "the man with the longer beard in room 74", an eventually solveable riddle after we tracked down which spiral staircase did not have a "no passing" sign, and how to proceed, as the doorbell chiming a monastic tune went unanswered. Eventually, with the assistance of a couple of Aussie backpackers, we found the man with the longer beard, dressed all in black robes and headpeice, scaring away the evil spirits by banging on a peice of wood with a metal rod in preparation for the afternoon church service. Once the praying and candle lighting and icon kissing was complete, he showed us to our bare but sufficient sleeping quarters. And after the busload of Japanese tourists left, it was just us and the Aussies and an elusive gaggle of monks and nuns, so the rest of the evening was pretty quiet. And the sturdy gates shut us in at 20:00. So that was really it for the night.
In the seven-hilled town of Plovdiv over-looking a 2000 year old Roman amphitheatre, we stayed in the cozy nest of Milen and Mariyana, and were thrilled to be introduced to their favourite Emir Kusturica movie "Black Cat White Cat", of which they personally subtitled into English, just so that they could share the sheer joy of this film with their unBalkanized guests. The zealous soundtrack has been bouncing around in our skulls ever since, giving some humour to our more bored moments waiting for a hitch hiking lift. It was great to share ideas with them about travelling and the future (and North American style nachos - after 15 months without our favourite snack!), and they in turn took us again into the mountains to search out fortresses, and discover the mystery of all the red and white yarn tassles tied on tree branches all over Bulgaria. Every spring time, tradition dictates that you give your friends red and white bracelets - the most popular Bulgarians have nearly a whole sleeve of them - and they are worn until you see the first migrating stork arriving, at which point the bracelets are tied onto the nearest tree of the siting. While we have missed the stork season, we have spied their massive nests sagging over the tops of telephone poles and church steeples, more than a meter in diameter.
Our most quizzical hitch hiking lift to date brought us to Stara Zagora: two small white vans with Netherlands license plates and very unDutch, but very friendly, drivers took us on board for part of their monthly journey from Holland to Iraq. They were travelling for business. We didn't ask what type. Dutch wasn't their first language. But they were really sweet to us! I am sure that Bulgaria sees alot of odd traffic passing through, being the cross roads of Europe to Asia and the Middle East.
In Stara Zagora, Nickolay and Ivo and their buddies treated us to a tour of their city's historical sites that they had never visited before, let alone had many foreign tourists. But we were impressed with the pebble mosaic terrace of the 2000 year old excavated Roman home, and the remains of a 6000 year old Neolithic dwelling. Did anyone else know that Bulgarians were the creators of yoghurt? We were refreshed to meet the rare species of "Balkan vegetarian", to hear tales of the recent Rainbow Gathering in Bulgaria, and to be introduced to drinking as an art form (as opposed to competitive sport): where else does a group of mid-20's guys prepare three different types of fresh salads late in the evening as a necessary accompaniment to their liquor of choice: rakia (plum brandy).
A paint delivery truck raced donkey carts, and wagons drawn by horses sporting smart red pompom hats, up the narrow mountain pass to deliver us to the medieval capital of Veliko Turnovo and its friendly hostel. It was nice to chill out in this town for a bit and do our own thing, especially exploring the castle fort and its church's surreal interior decoration. Then the next day, an enthusiastic Turkish semi-truck driver scooped us from our perch under an overpass, describing to us using a small handful of Italian, French, German and English words, fanciful tales of his home country and its cuisine, and his disgust with the Bulgarian "highway" that he and hundreds of other semi trucks drove weekly from Bucharest to Istanbul. By the end of the story, the road before our headlights had degraded into a cobblestone single lane road winding past old ladies on bicycles squeaking between cottages. That 24 hour drive takes alot of patience. But we learned how he manages it: by stopping frequently to buy almonds from the roadside stands, preparing instant coffee with his kettle, its plug wrangled into the cigarette lighter, and today by treating his new friends to a fresh fish and salad lunch at one of the dozens of highway Turkish restaurants catering to him and his colleagues. And this evening he made a special pit stop to have the pleasure of acquainting us to his national drink, Raki (which is more like Greek Ouzo than Bulgarian or Serbian Rakia), which degressed into a long evening of food and drink and Turkish jokes, which delayed us from arriving at our next host's house by a whole day. But we made it!
Now in Svilengrad, only a few kilometers away from both the Turkish and Greek borders, Georgi and his family and friends are giving us a great Bulgarian send-off. And living so close to the biggest border-crossing in Europe, they are well prepared to help us out with all the tips that we need for journeying onto the next continent. We'll up date when we arrive, probably not until after the initial culture shock has finished sweeping over us!
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