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Published: December 2nd 2008
commute
dull and grey.(part1 -
Dead Leg (1))
The map arrived on a cold, dark, wet London morning in January.
The map was a glowing ray of adventure and mystery on a cold, dark, wet London morning.
An Adventure that would see me facing death in a cold, dark, snowy paradise.
Bulgaria - March 1997 They say that a journey of a thousand miles starts with one small step, but that's not true - a journey starts long before a shoe is tied, before a bag is packed or a ticket booked. Travel starts in your head. When an idea grabs you and you know that you must go. When your everyday routine screams boredom at you and a cold, wet morning feels like a commute though a graveyard of dreams.
When a map like that turns up, you know that a journey has started, right there, at that point in time.
My oldest friend and perpetual beach-bum, world nomad and snow-searching junkie, Oli had ended up in Bulgaria with a Kiwi friend and fellow snow-junkie, John. They had gone there to spend a season in the cheapest country in Europe with ski resorts. They intended being a month - they had stayed for three.
Oli had written me a scribbled letter - this was before we all had emails, mobile phones or blogs - it was the letter of a mad man. garbled talk of a secret snow paradise, the best spot in Europe, army tanks, strong alcohol and crazy fire jumping ceremonies.
At the bottom of the note was the map - thin, wiry lines made a diamond-shaped country which was apparently Bulgaria, and halfway along the southern border was a dot marked 'Smolyan'. This was where they were, and where we had to get to.
At that point, the fire had started, the journey had begun for myself and my fellow adventurer, Nic.
Grumpy old women at the inpenetrable Bulgarian Embassy could not deter us. The flights were packed, but we squeezed in. A wall of hustling taxi drivers at Sofia airport, all wearing matching brown patchwork jumpers and large, brush like moustaches could not slow us down.
We had a contact here, holding a sign with our names on it. Luckily, he had a brown jumper and a big moustache to set him apart.
Our contact was the uncle of the local snowboarder our friends Oli and Kiwi John had met, called Dancho. Dancho spoke perfect English, rode a snowboard like a pro, and also held the secret to the Paradise we had read about on the Map.
As Danchos' uncle drove us into Sofia and we caught our coach to the village of Smolyan, Nic and Me began to see the country we had entered.
It was warm and dry here, far too warm to snow.
Sofia was an impressivly large, yet brutally concrete soviet-built city that felt like it was crumbling into dust. A bit like a large, unkempt Coventry. Stately boulevards were dusty deserts of honking Skodas (the communist car of choice).
As we a clattered along the motorway we passed the petrol stations of Esso and other multinational oil companies. The forecourts were closed and empty.
After 3 of these ghostly gas stations, we passed a long queue of Skoda and trucks lined up along the narrow motorway. They were all waiting to get into a small dusty carpark where there was a shiney, fresh Esso petrol tanker parked up, being siphoned off by the local mafia and sold on to the waiting motorists.
In 1989, along with a lot of the Communist Soviet Bloc, Bulgaria had its 'Autumn Revolution' and was launched head-first into the cut throat world of 20th century capitalism.
A naive financial free-for-all ended in 1996 when Bulgarians suffered a series of monetary disasters, with government mis-management, 311% inflation and wildly fluctuating foriegn exchange rates which created massive currency speculations (often engineered by criminal gangs for huge profits).
Money wasn't the problem - supply of the basics was, and often that supply ended up, like the gasoline here, in the hands of local groups of 'mafioski'.
After a 5 hour, winding bus journey through fields and mountains, we reached Smolyan after dark, with big hugs and slaps and laughs of 'what the hell are we doing here??'. Meeting up with old friends in the wilds of a foreign county always has a large slap of surreallity about it.
Oli and Kiwi John marched us off to a tall concrete block where Dancho and his wife were holding a party. Up here in the mountains after dark, it was cooler than Sofia and tell-tale piles of dirty snow and slush lay along the sides of roads.
Dancho, a slim, rugged Slavic guy welcomed us warmly and his wife, Christina produced a pile of warning food and bottles of Mastika - the strong alcohol we had been promised. Slowly, everything was coming together.
We all chatted, caught up with stories from home and I attempted my first words of Bulgarian with the locals, which all seemed to work better as the sticky, aniseedy Mastika and the pungent joints of local weed were passed about.
After a few hours me and Oli stood on the small balcony looking at the thin strip of Smolyan laid out along the side of the valley and he pointed at a crumbling building that was missing some of its outside walls and said to me
"See that? Thats the hospital. "
"really? looks like a building site!"
"Yep. You dont want to end in there!"
Famous last words. A week later these guys would drag me in there and I would find myself trapped in that building, with doctors drilling holes through me.
But first, the good bit with snowboarding, army tanks, wild bears and men with big knives....
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