August 18, 2012
On a road of stunning beauty: Serres - Sadovo (Bulgaria)
SOMETIMES you sweat for nothing. And sometimes you wish you could carry on oozing because the rewards are so great.
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Today was one of those days. Well, I exaggerate when I say we wished it would go on for ever because, when we finally reached the top of a climb that took all morning and more to get there, we didn't exactly break down and weep in disappointment. We had climbed 1 200 metres and that is perfectly enough when it's as tough as school cooking.
The grimping began the moment we left town. We turned left and up it went, dizzyingly at first, the sort of gradient that makes you wish you'd gone the wrong way but which you know can't last for ever. And it didn't. It eased up a bit and every 10 minutes or so it reached 10 per cent or more. But we got every centime of our money's worth.
We entered a world of our own, a place of hills and mountains and dark trees and scrub bushes, grazed by goats to the shape of mushrooms, the upper branches out of reach. Birds stopped singing. The wind stopped blowing. It was all peace and solitude.
A plunging V-shaped valley chiselled into the planet on our right, diving into a shadowy depth in which now and then we made out the shiver of a surprisingly small river. This is mid-summer, of course. In winter these hills will be thick snow. And when that melts, that idling stream will be turned the sort of torrent that over centuries carved the valley in the first place.
The summit came without fuss, a roller-coaster descent to a fertile valley far higher than the town we left hours earlier. There were erratic and, for this backwoods countryside, evidently prosperous villages. Or, busy and self-occupied, anyway. The small fields were full of crops we could recognise but more usually those that we couldn't. We stopped and looked at a field we concluded must have been green figs.
The border with Bulgaria was still two hours off when we saw the first signs of an era, not long gone, when this area wasn't one of relaxed friendship. Half-crumbling barns beside the road were painted that scruffy dull green and black favoured by armies everywhere. But they had long stopped being used and one, mysteriously, had been labelled "Che Guevara Club" in an uncertain hand of white paint.
There were concrete tank traps in lines across fields, where nobody had thought to remove them. Fences still stood around army buildings that would have even the most myopic of architects weeping. Attached to the railings, faded notices warning against photographs.
This was the West's boundary with the communist world, remember. And the unease goes back further because Bulgaria had the bad luck to be occupied by the losing side in two world wars, followed by domination by the Russians. Now, when you get to the border after a sapping climb favoured by the sort of small fly that adores flying in swarms into your eyes and nose, you find the crossing is facilitated by the Hellenic-Bulgarian Friendship Tunnel. It sounds Ruritanian but, in the history of a miserable century, it is reason to feel better about the world.
(We did wonder what preparations the Bulgarians had made for invasion by the West. But either there were none or they have made a better job of clearing them away.)
We are camped in a field close to the first village over the border. In the middle distance is a crop of maize. The man we take to be the owner of both that and the grazing land where we have landed has ridden by twice in a horse-drawn cart, ostensibly to inspect his crop, more likely to see who are his self-appointed guests. Either way, he doesn't seem troubled.
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