Bulgaria! - Part 3

Dospei had three bars, one small general store selling pretty much everything Dospei residents needed. Fresh bread, if you got there quickly enough, fruit, tasteless pale cheese, a modest choice of meats and many tins. We lived on bar food which varied from chips, chicken, more chips, omelettes, pink strange round slices of something or other with chips and shopska salad which can be found all over Bulgaria. Think English salad with white cheese, only tastier.

A few days into the holiday we were having a cool drink outside the bar when a lissom girl of around 20 struck up a conversation in English to the delight of my husband. She was a Bulgarian living in Florida with her American husband and came home every year for a few months to be with her boyfriend. We absorbed this startling revelation and bought another round. Her boyfriend was a dead ringer for Tyrone of Coronation Street fame, and seemed to have a similar personality, even though he didn’t speak English. Our new friend Eva would translate, he would nod wisely, ask a stream of questions, Eva would translate again. She inevitably became bored with this back and forth, and poor Tyrone would have to sit silent supping his pint and playing with his key ring.

Finding our friends made a great difference to our holiday, and they were as hospitable and as giving of their time as you could wish for. Ty took us to the home he shared with his grandmother, further up the mountain and half hidden in scrubby overgrown woodland. He, explained Eva, was renovating the place so when grannie died he would have a lovely home. It was pitiful to see how little he had managed to do with no help. The roof was falling in, all the window frames were rotten and there was no electricity. Grannie was a real hard nut, one of those wiry and resilient old ladies who seem to predominate all over Europe. She must have thought her grandson a proper wuss, wanting a roof and electricity. Ty had a jeep of which he was immensely proud. It looked to be ancient to my eyes, and he carried bottles of fuel around with him to top up the engine in case he got stranded in the middle of nowhere. This was worrying, particularly as he insisted on taking us all on a picnic further into the mountains where, I felt sure, no Shell station existed. We packed snacks and the sweet fizzy drinks Ty seemed to like, fruit, bread and cheese and cardigans. It was, Eva warned us, cold up there. So – a picnic in freezing conditions. Great. We perched uncomfortably at the rear of the jeep, and I watched the dirt track rattle by underneath us through what remained of the floor. The forest grew more dense as we climbed, and we passed the mouth of the stream which gurgled its way past our house down in Dospei. We stopped so I could pick wild flowers, which our friends thought ridiculous, and quite right too of course, and just as mad as the collection of smooth veined pebbles I picked up by the edge of the stream. Like we didn’t have enough luggage to take home. Ty used this interlude to top up the jeep, and I checked the remaining bottle anxiously. How much further, I wondered? Would our parched bodies be discovered by the tourist board huddled together for warmth? Who would feed the cat?

The picnic was great, we didn’t need the cardigans as the air was crisp and Alpine-like with blue skies and the cool breeze a welcome relief from the suffocating heat in the village. The bouncy journey back down the mountain kept us awake and luckily nothing fell off the jeep either.

Buoyed up by the success of his impromptu day out, Ty announced a few days later, via Eva, that we would have an overnight stay. A surprise overnight stay. In Greece. That’s right, the land of the bazouki, ancient ruins and feta, which Bulgarians insist Greeks stole from them. The good news was that he obtained a car from somewhere, solid floor, full tank, the lot. The bad news was that the border was a hell of a long way away. In the spirit of adventure we of course agreed, provided we could pay for the petrol and the hotel costs, and it was decided.

When we arrived over the border and opened the door, the fierce heat almost knocked us out. Even Eva, pale as a ghost, sprung a dainty sheen of sweat and slicked wet hair back from her face. My husband’s glasses steamed up and began a slow slide down his nose, and my wavy hair which I’d been at pains to straighten immediately retracted like a coiled snake waiting to spring, and spiralled up like Harpo Marx’s. Only Tyrone seemed unaffected, striding off to find a bar, fresh as a daisy. The man must have been asbestos.