August 19, 2012
Swiss Miss: Sadovo - Dospat
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THEY'RE breaking off bits of Bulgaria and flogging them. If it hadn't been Sunday then we could have bought some and brought them home for you. We're generous like that, prepared to carry large stones if that would please you. But it is indeed Sunday, there was nobody to serve us, and it seemed cheeky to help ourselves.
There is a long and unrelenting climb out of Sadovo, as there seems to be everywhere in Bulgaria, and there were two main occupations all the way. The first was tobacco growing and, once grown, drying beneath horizontal beams topped with plastic sheeting, so the leaves look like withered bats.
The second was chiselling bits of Bulgaria, heaping slabs of unshaped stone beside the road, and carting them somewhere for shaping into floor and wall tiles. Thousands of tons of the country lay heaped, and sometimes palleted and shrink-wrapped, beside our road. We didn't see any quarry to produce them and we were grateful truck drivers paid to shift them didn't see it their job to work on Sundays. The noise and fumes from laden trucks grinding up that hill would have been intolerable.
Instead, the most laden thing all morning was our Swiss Miss, a slender, tanned girl called Céline, from Sion - a town we passed weeks back on the day we visited the headquarters of the UCI, the world cycling authority, at Aigle. She pulled up after I had shaved and then washed my shirt in a roadside fountain not put there for that purpose but invaluable if you've spent the night in a field.
She pulled up abruptly, climbing the hill far faster than us with just two lightly-laden panniers, and barely said a word. Her ears were filled with a music player.
It seemed common politeness to acknowledge other humans in a limited space and a break with the friendliness of cycling not to greet bike riders as family.
Steph gave her a beaming "Oh, hi!"and got a nod back. The challenge then began to see how long it would take to force her to speak. I started with a question that demanded an answer: "Where are you from?"
"Switzerland," she said.
"And where are you going?"
"Istanbul."
"Ah, just like us."
She looked alarmed at the direction the conversation was taking. Was she scared we were going to suggest riding together? She was evidently far faster than us.
And then...
"Vous parlez français?
So that was the problem.
She told us she had taken a train on her first day, because it had rained, and again in Kosovo and then in Albania, where she found herself on a motorway. We talked about how she planned to ride into Istanbul, since every journal that has mentioned the road from the west has said it is merdique, a hell's highway.
We told her we planned to go south, to Bandirma, and take the ferry to the city centre.
"But it wouldn't be right for me to do that," she said. "Riding into Istanbul, that's symbolic for me."
We said we could see that but that that didn't change the problem. A problem increased because she didn't have a map that included anything but the city's outskirts.
"I'll have to inquire," she said, as though that wasn't what she'd just been doing. And with a wave, she rode off.
She is staying in hotels, not liking camp-grounds and not wanting to pitch in the countryside because she is toute seule.
We on the other hand are in a clearing beside a pine wood. We abandoned our first option when we saw the stripped rib cage of a dead cow, gnawed white by animals unknown. Could it have been a bear? Whatever it was had scattered the rest of the animal over quite an area.
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I have never heard there are bears in Bulgaria. But there are in neighbouring Romania. So are there bears? Native bears or visitors from across the border?
We stowed our bags a distance from the tent and hoped for the best. Perhaps the Swiss Miss had the right idea after all. Few people get eaten by bears in hotel beds.
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