Bulgaria! - Part 2

We were promised a trip to the Rila monastery up in the mountains and a long journey from Sofia. So long – a long, long, way. Probably further than the 10th century when it was built. We rattled on and on for what seemed like days, with passengers nattering in our ear, the nearest chap and his wife intent on discovering how much my husband earned, how far up the ladder he’d progressed, how many staff he had, how prestigious our home was and so on until we were ready to make a break for freedom out of the small windows, and to hell with our luggage. When we did arrive for some reason we were only allotted an hour to look round, which gave us just enough time to admire the small church with its faded artwork and overpowering smell of candles and musk. The church was manned (guarded perhaps) by an extremely tall, emaciated monk with a long flowing black beard and hooded eyes and it was impossible not to compare him with pictures of Rasputin. He followed us round at a discreet distance replenishing the thick candle stubs and ensuring nobody helped themselves to any of the icons.


The following year we went back to Bulgaria – minus our passenger pals – to the small village of Dospei, where we had hired a villa for two weeks. Visions of pristine stuccoed frontages and neat bougainvillea round the door kept me going throughout the bumpy ride from Sofia airport. Manicured lawns (so said the blurb) where a sunlounger awaited tired travellers, fully equipped modern kitchen. Wonderful. Our taxi slowed down at the edge of the village to allow two fed up looking cows and an old lady with a poking stick to amble past, then came to a halt outside a somewhat dated house with a weedy garden. We took his number in case we needed to escape to somewhere more St Tropez and less Peckham, and let ourselves in. The house was around 20 years old and would have been beautiful had it been cared for. We had a first floor balcony leading off the landing, three bedrooms, two downstairs rooms plus a rather basic kitchen. Water was sourced from a well which was pumped into the house by a noisy generator which made scary banging coughs at irregular intervals in the middle of the night, rather like an inept burglar determined to let us know he was there. There was a predominance of wood which gave the house the look of a cabin in the woods, but we did find it cosy once we’d worked out where exactly the kettle was and how the cooker worked. The garden was a meadow, unkempt, weedy and bumpy. Well, we were on the side of a large hill. Every morning and evening farmers would pass by on their tractors, wave hello, shout something incomprehensible and make their slow trip onto the fields. A lot of their work was logging which seemed such a pity, but it was a hard life out there. Following the farmers were the chickens who sometimes had herders behind them, sometimes not. They were apparently so used to the route they could make it on their own. Following the chickens at some point came the cows, stoic, smelly, skinny and wont to nibble the bushes on the edge of our garden. The old lady in charge kept apologising – we think – but we didn’t mind at all. We didn’t fancy the bushes for lunch.