September 13, 2012
Another fine mess...: Radno - Cirpan
YOU'LL REMEMBER that line from Laurel and Hardy. Or, if you don't, ask someone Far Older. Stan and Ollie used to be big news back about... oh, heck, I don't know - about the time Stalin was waving at rockets from the Kremlin balcony. In that atmosphere people were happy to laugh at anything.
Well, having faithfully followed this railway line north in the belief that it was my pencil line, I had to get myself out of the fine mess. And I'll say straight away that what followed was a compendium of disasters which will never erase the memory of a good day.
First, it took an hour to get out of Radnovo. You've never been there so I'll explain that it's about the size of Hubcap, Oklahoma, or Jambes-en-Air in, well, wherever that might be in France.
Radnovo is a crossroads with a bit stuck on one side and that infamous railway line that provides a station signposted from the centre. My map told me to cross the line and take the first minor road left. Of course, it didn't work out that way because the scale suppressed much of the detail. Which meant, as I passed him for the third time, I had to ask a man standing on a triangle of grass and wringing what interest he could from watching his dog pee against a tree.
You'll know that asking your way anywhere can often be painful. Just rarely someone will know the answer and give it succinctly. The rest of the time, you can lose the will to live.
The problem in lands where you don't speak the language and they don't speak yours and you can't find common ground in a third language is that people assume you don't know where you are. How they think you got there I never know. But you are proffering a map, you are miming suppressed panic and, when you point at where you want to be, they look aghast and say Nee, nee, followed by a finger stab at the map and the slow pronunciation, in this case, of RAD-NO-VO. Well, yes, I know that.
"Pero..." I say, my brain telling me that mixing in Spanish or anything else is just what will make this poor man understand better, and I point more urgently at where I want to go. The fact that I can't pronounce it doesn't help, of course.
The man looks at me, unsure of how it can be that I know where I am and then points at all the roads radiating from town and begins listing where each goes. Information I can see for myself and which isn't of any use.
By now the man has begun to believe that the map can't be right. He has put on my reading glasses over his own. And then he spots this village I want, just four kilometres from where we stand. And he says its name slowly as though hearing of it for the first time.
"Dobre, dobre..., he starts saying. It means "Good, good" but in this case means "bad, bad." And then he has a go at directions. He waves me back the way I have come and I get the impression that I have left town in the wrong direction, which I know I haven't. So I ride off out of sight and, lo and behold, a fat man in a doorway and then two guys in building overalls put me progressively on the right road, which turns out to have been only 150 metres from where I met the dog man.
Life was perfect then. So good that it couldn't last. I pedalled happily through empty fields and soft meadows, through places that called themselves villages but didn't have a dozen addresses between them. And then I got to where I didn't want to be.
Now, I haven't mentioned this before because, I suppose,I didn't want to be too pointed. But a lot of drinking goes on in eastern Europe. In Turkey it was tea but in Bulgaria it is beer, from breakfast onwards. Only the men - in the bars, anyway. I don't know where the women are.
That makes it bad news to ask advice outside a bar. Not only will they never have heard of this place four kilometres down the road, even when shown a map to help with the pronunciation, but in this particular village they began having fun at my expense. I couldn't understand what they were saying, of course, but the laughter and looks in my direction are the evidence I offer the court.
After being shouted at by a dark-haired teenager who looked and sounded aggressive but who, on reflection, was probably asking "What language do you speak?" and in his beery state couldn't grasp why asking it in Bulgarian wasn't likely to be useful, I shrugged a "Well, if you won't help" shrug and began to move away. It was then that a cuddly man of about 40 realised they had made fools of themselves at some lost foreigner's expense and he walked to his car and gestured me to follow.
He drove a short distance out of the village, took the first turning left and stopped at a crossroads, a journey of about 500 metres that had been beyond anyone outside the bar to describe. And there he pointed at an unmade road and held up four fingers to indicate the distance and waved me on my way.
It wasn't a wonderful ride and now and then I had to walk, but it was part of the adventure. The irony is that it was just when the road improved - from tractor-rutted dirt to narrow, cracked concrete beside a lake - that things went properly wrong. My back wheel dropped into one of those long cracks and, in struggling to get out, pulled the tyre off the rim. I was lucky indeed that I didn't fall and twist the rim out of shape.
There was no question of mending the inner tube. It had two snake-bite slits longer than any patch I have ever seen. And this was just the moment to find that the two spare tubes I had, which I believed to be in perfect if repaired state, had several dozen holes apiece. Don't ask me how. I have no idea. All I know is that the whole thing took half a lifetime to put right.
And once done, I rode on, got lost, came right again, found the byway I wanted had been closed off, joined the steadily busy road to Cirpan, and pulled off to sleep in a vineyard.
A dreadful day?
Not at all. Looking back, it was a great day!
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