August 21, 2012
Attack of the black widow: Tesel - Smoljan
WE HAVE always enjoyed meeting people wherever we ride. We may not share a language. In fact we rarely do, because real touring starts where people no longer understand you nor you them. That is the point of travel. The rest is a variation on staying at home. Which isn't to say we don't speak French or English when it's a common language, of course.
Just sometimes, though, spontaneous friendships along the road have an edge to them. And so it was today. We started the morning with a descent and, thirsty from all the hard work of not pedalling, we stopped at a village shop for a bottle of cold drink. In Bulgaria, shops often double as bars and place tables and chairs outside.
It was around one of these tables that we settled with the thousandth bottle of ice tea of the ride. We were happy to be joined by an elderly but nimble woman in black with whom we had exchanged smiles and some words which neither felt we needed to understand for the message to be relayed. She brought with her two children, a boy of about nine and what we took to be his younger sister.
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I can no more tell you what she said than she could tell you what we replied. But we got the drift: the boy had had an operation and there, on his side, was the long scar that proved it. It was a straight and red line that will be with him for life but, despite all the gestures and grimaces, we never worked out what had led to it.
As we got up to leave, after the appropriate sympathising, we did understand the underlying message. We were tourists from the richer side of Europe and the plight of children was considered right to ask for money. The woman didn't put out her hand; she drew the oblong shape of a bank note in the air, pointed to her mouth to suggest food, then at the children to suggest they couldn't remember their last meal.
We feigned not having understood and rode away with a wave, feeling guilty as I'm sure all decent-thinking people would, but at the same time resentful that children had been pushed forward in an act of begging. And two children, it has to be said, who didn't seem the slightest undernourished.
Today we have ridden into a predominantly Muslim area. There are more mosques than churches, although there aren't many of either. The women are more likely to be copiously dressed in black, although that could also be a sign locally of widowhood.
(As a matter of morbid interest, I know you will be fascinated that when burials are conducted in Bulgaria, the dead person's head sticks out of the coffin. Odd in which directions travel can broaden the mind...)
Our descent ended beside a reservoir which hid a German wartime airfield, drowned by a dam which locals will tell you is the highest by altitude in the country. And then started a 30km climb to more than 1 600 metres, a grimp that the sparsely provided contours of our map never suggested would be there. We climbed through another of Bulgaria's idyllic valleys, although with the feeling that it would have been just as agreeable at only half the length. We rose past a sign telling us that the col-we-had-never-expected was open and grovelled on past a yellow snowplough and a giant horizontal corkscrew which broke up the more recalcitrant drifts.
The climb ended suddenly on a plateau, barely the size of a soccer pitch, that had a chapel, a cross, taps for spring water, and a locked hut for hikers.
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We whizzed down the other side, although only to 1 000m, and stopped early. Not that that needed an excuse after 30km of climbing.
I have now the novelty of working on a computer which, unless I react within a second, turns everything on the screen into Cyrillic lettering. It is illuminating the first time but effing annoying after that.
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