August 23, 2012
Joyful moments at dawn: Zinsifovo - Svilengrad
THERE ARE things that happen only to other people. Or they happen in touring accounts written long, long ago when the world was different. Or they were just made up.
Well, this morning we had just one of those magical moments. For we woke under a perfect dawn sky to the sound of a woman crooning in the distance. She was unseen on the other side of the hedge and the trippety-trappety bridge to the village. Who she was singing to, or what the words said, I don't know. Maybe she was comforting a baby freshly woken. Or perhaps milking the family cow. Or maybe she simply liked singing. Whatever the reason, she crooned in a gentle but confident voice, unaware of her delighted audience, paused for some minutes and then started again.
Her song had an unfamiliar tone, as though it were a folk tune sang to harmonies we rarely use. And then she stopped and we got on with packing and our lives moved on with neither of us seeing the other.
Our plan for the morning was to visit the hilltop site where Alexander the Great received the prophecy that Rome would become a great empire. There were ruins to be seen and a church that played revolutionary Bulgarian tunes, which is always worth a moment of life. But the reality was disappointing. The ride up the valley was a joy but the climb to the foot of the final hill a let-down. For the road petered out into an unsurfaced parking area from which a downhearted man was trying to sell T-shirts, sun-warmed bottles of water and anything else he thought of appeal to tourists.
Beyond him, three large-beamed women in black dresses patterned in white and yellow were washing lumps of stone in one of the varieties of horse trough familiar across eastern Europe. Water from a spring runs into a concrete trough from a tap and the water brims into a succession of lower troughs that run on for 10 metres.
When the women had finished, they placed the stones out for sale with handwritten descriptions, then walked back up the slope with shopping baskets, to stock up with fresh supplies.
'You can't blame people for trying to make a living,' Steph observed, 'but it does look very much as though they're pillaging.'
We don't know if they were or weren't but the sound high above of cascading stones, as though falling down a cliff, increased our doubts.
Discouraged, we looked up at the long rise we'd have to make on foot to what looked nowhere as good as we'd hoped, turned round and rode back down the valley to where we'd turned off.
We gave up on climbing by foot but we did a lot of climbing by bike. For a start there was a long, demanding rise north. And then we turned on to an uncoloured road on our map which rolled up and down along a plateau with dramatic drops and just as eye-watering climbs. But what a delight. We were in deep Bulgaria, on roads so quiet that in one village a woman had spread her duvet across the road and was cleaning it with a hose and a broom.
And so it went on all day. Up, down, one astonished village after another, another set of waves from another set of men outside a makeshift bar. And then, after more than a week in the high hills and low mountains, we finally made it to the plain on the edge of Svilengrad. We had been expecting level ground for days now, but day after day has been as hilly as before. Now, for all we loved the beauty and tranquillity of the mountains, we are delighted to have both wheels at the same level. And Svilengrad marks, too, the end of Bulgaria and, soon, a brief return to Greece before entering Turkey. It all seems so very far from home.
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