Just a Little Hike to 2,800 Meters Above Sea Level (Part I)

Posted by in Dispatches

Moon MountainWhen Svetla’s friends Hristo (pronounced Christo) and Vera invited us for a little “hike up a mountain,” I expected both the hiking part and the mountain to be somewhat “little.” As it turns out, it is Monday and I am not yet fully recovered from a two day, 13 hour (of solid hiking/climbing), chilly, beautiful and breathtaking (figuratively and literally) adventure. It all started Friday night when Hristo and Vera picked us up in their car at Svetla’s parents. We were leaving late, and from what they were telling me, the perilous windy and delapidated roads to Pirin Mountain would not be quickly negotiated. Boy were they right…

Pirine - Getting ReadyAfter stopping for supplies, including fresh tomatoes, a head lamp, bread, wine and about 11 kilos of feta cheese, we sped out of Sofia along the bumpy cobblestone stretch of the highway leaving the city. While we drove over the first few kilometers of stones, I kept thinking how each one was laid by someone, who were they, and what were their lives like? (I mean, there are a lot of stones in a stretch of four-lane highway for a few kilometers…) Hristo is a stellar pilot, but that did not dampen my fears nor lessen my pulse as we suddenly (at 120 km/hr) encountered parts of the mountain highway that were under construction. There are few signs and even less decals indicating where you are in your speeding chunk of metal in relation to other speeding chunks of metal and sharp edges of asphalt that give way to steep and trecherous declines. But the little road carved into the mountain is under construction – or as the signs say, “recovery”, like an alcoholic we joked on the way back – in preparation for Bulgaria’s inevitable inclusion into that big shiny supranational club, the EU.

We made it up to Bansko, the little ski village that, much to Svetla’s horror, has now become another turbo-resort. The secret little hideaway for devout boarders has morphed into a glistening Whistler-style vacation eutopia for anyone with some money to spend and a penchant for large post-and-beam homogenous chalets that offer everything from MTV to heated beds, no doubt. Svetla had told me how gorgeous the “little village” was, and of the traditional houses, restaurants and taverns. The fact that they still stood resolutely, like strong cultural indicators from the past amid the wild west-like building frenzy, was perhaps her only reconciliation. I was reminded of a discussion with a friend, Michael LIthgow, where he told me about a writer who says using the word “development” to describe the kind of money-grubbing, thoughtless plundering of the earth, only to install lookalike boxes for easy living, is a complete mistake and misnomer. If only I could remember the writers name…

moon_mtn.gifBansko was where the Mountain Jazz Fest was happening, but we arrived just after 11 PM and caught the crowds leaving the stage. So, we headed a little further up the mountain and met with the other hikers at a rendez-vous point. We set up Svetla’s little dome tent in the dark (with the help of the moon and the headlamp) and sat down for a few drinks and some snacks. The crew that we camped with that night were not the others we were to meet up with the next day, they had got their much earlier than us and headed by foot two hours up the path. So we sat with these other friends of Hristo and Vera’s and I underwent what will probably be one of several language challenged sessions. This is when everyone around me is Bulgarian and I am the only Anglophone. Not always wanting to divert a lively discussion into annoying English, I often sit quietyl and study the conversation like some kind of colonial anthropologist. I’ve actually developed quite an ear for intonation and can often guess at what everyone is talking about – “Ah, OK, so you’re saying something about Evo Moralis and sex.” Followed by, “Oh, woops, OK, scratch that.” Bulgarian is a beautiful language, that often has words that sound a lot like English, like when I was having a frontroom chat with Svetla’s dad, and I thought that he was talking about Hizbollah, but of course, he was talking about the upcoming election (izbori in Bulgarian) for Bulgarian’s presidency. At any rate, it was a good evening, although the characters we had tented with decided to party until 5 AM, keeping this intrepid traveller furiously awake with them. At the time, I thought that surely everone else was being kept awake and so it must be some weird cultural etiquette: campers can party as loud and long as they want. I relished the thought of being the insensitvie foreigner, who not understanding the cultural mores, stupidly asked them to shut up.

Due to the incredible nature of the second half of this adventure, I have made it into two parts. That, and Svetla and I are late for a garden party in downtown Sofia, so I will resume with the telling of this tall tale tomorrow…