The Grants' Bulgaria Blog.

Elly’s back!

(It’s raining today you see, so more shopping is out of the question)

Right, so we were up to last Thursday.

Thursday 22nd: So, I do believe that in one of the two previous posts Stu introduced Boris (our host in Bansko) to you all. It is a pity we didn’t photograph him because he really was a lovely bloke. We ran into him after having dinner on Wed night and he asked us what we wanted to do whilst in Bansko. Humf, or Stu, clapped their hands together and said ‘We want to go up the mountain!’ Boris replied with ‘Yes yes, oh but of course! I’ll find you a driver, would you like me to find you someone who can take you up? They can show you a good restaurant too. Come in my car now, I’ll drive you around and show you the city. Come! Come!’ Humphrey says he’s a lot like the German ranch owner on Malcolm in the Middle if any of you remember that show.

Anyway, onto Thursday. We started the day with yet another wonderful Bulgarian breakfast. I mentioned in my Sofia post way back when that the BG breakfasts were great, and I still hold firm to that opinion! In Bansko we were served banitsa - crispy pastry rolled up and shaped like a log with white cheese in the middle. Next came small bread rolls with white cheese and homemade blueberry jam. Humphrey in particular loved the jam (Stu and I are quite used to it now) and is hoping to find some to take back to Ausland. We drank big cups of black coffee. It was good and exactly what one needs before attempting to climb a 2914m mountain.

Mt Vihren (the aforementioned 2914m mountain)

We were collected by our driver and unceremoniously dumped at a random lodge 1800m up the mountain. Seems Boris’ friend/in-law/second cousin thrice removed didn’t share his friendly nature. The lodge was occupied by a rather grubby man who had already started drinking (at 10:30am) and very begrudgingly found us a map to buy.

Then we started walking. Up. I think this part of the day will be better told in pictures.

It was really very pretty with a bit of a pine forest down the bottom and alpine sort of plants growing around the place. We were very excited when we first reached the snow and threw snowballs around for the next half hour. The thing about snow, I realised, is that it’s cold and wet and you tend to forget that it’s cold and wet until you become cold and wet. Unfortunately I only had jeans to wear and I really am deeply ashamed that I had to wear them in the snow. I put thermals on underneath before they got too wet but I did miss my bushwalking shorts which are probably safely tucked up under Rhiannon’s house somewhere.

At roughly 2400m in altitude we stopped for lunch and scrutinised the extremely high and steep climb ahead of us. A solitary walker came cruising down and we stopped him to ask about how long it will take. Despite language difficulties we managed to learn that we were only halfway, which wasn’t very encouraging.

So we finished eating chunks of salami and cheese (how barbarian of us) and casually climbed 150m. Casually? I mean struggled. The snow was very soft and powdery and every step ended in either losing our leg up to beyond our knee or falling back half a metre. The incline felt like it was 60 degrees, but Humf reckons it would be lucky to be 40. The ridge offered strong winds, an awesome view of how far we’d come and the final ascent of about 300m which we unanimously decided to not bother with. Too late in the day you know, we could have done it easily no worries!

This one is a panorama – click on it to see the whole thing!

Then we went down. This was the painful part. A slope that took us an hour to struggle up was behind us in seconds as we went down the only way possible: on our bottoms, apart from Stu who went penguin style on his stomach. We walked on down the mountain and ended up on the road and after walking on that for an hour we hitch-hiked into town and had a good dinner and slept for 11 hours. Bliss.

Friday 23rd: A rather uneventful day really. Breakfast was awesome again and the banitsa was replaced with deep fried dough balls with white cheese inside and a big bowl of juicy plump grapes and green apples. I guess today really started off the insane amount of travel we had to do in order to reach the Nairns in Târgu Mureş. I suppose we could have flown the distance, but there aren’t any stories in flying. Next post can be the ‘travel’ post and I’ll orchestrate it so that Stu writes it meaning I get to write the ‘shopping in Romania’ post, a topic I’m very fond of.

I’m very much enjoying being on holiday. It’s not so much the fact that we’re in Eastern Europe and we’re taking a holiday and seeing more of Eastern Europe (which is as cool as it sounds) but travel in itself is really fun and I’m feeling very refreshed and feeling much better about being away from home. Of course, it’s wonderful having Humf here, the three of us have grown much closer and there’ll be a thousand memories and in-jokes that we’ll be sharing for the rest of our lives. However, if Humf answers another question with ‘da’ (the Bulgarian and Romanian for yes, but Humf uses it as his generic answer) then I’ll probably thump him. Consider yourself warned Humf

On a side note, daylight savings ended on the weekend so the time difference is now 9 hours

Have a good one!

Elly xx

Tags: Bulgaria, food, holidays, mountains, photos

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 8:54 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.