Traffic was relatively light as I
stood beside my bike at the side of a road junction miles from the nearest
town, admiring a particularly attractive vista of distant mountains sandwiched
between green meadows and a bright blue sky dotted with white, puffy
clouds. It was one of those views you have to chisel into your memory
because its expansive grandeur simply cannot be captured through the dimensional
confines of a photograph. A black BMW slowed and stopped beside me.
The window on the passenger side lowered and the lady inside, wearing big, bug
eye sunglasses, asked me a question in what I assumed to be heavily accented
Bulgarian. I responded with a shrug and apologized, offering my regrets
that I spoke only English.
“You’re not the only one, mate”
came a male voice from the driver’s seat, in a distinctive English
accent. The lady thought for a moment, then asked in English but
definitely not an English accent, “Which way to Kostenets?”
I am asked for directions a lot. There must be a general assumption that
someone on a bicycle must be intimately familiar with the territory.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I really
don’t know. I’ve only just gotten here myself.” She looked at me,
then asked “Which way is Greece?”
“Greece? You mean the
country?”
“Yes, the country.” This one
I felt pretty good about. Only the day before I had ridden on a road
which came from Greece. Traffic was brutal.
“Take a right at the sign and
drive into Dupnitsa. From there it is
straight to Greece.”
“Then we will go the other way.”
“Pardon?”
“Kostenets
is the opposite way of Greece. So if that is the way to Greece, then the
other must be the way to Kostenets,” and they drove
off in that direction. Hard to argue with the logic.
Losing your way in Bulgaria is not
much of a challenge. Anyone can do it. The Bulgarians, being the
friendly bunch they are, seem willing to help set a wayward
traveler back on the correct path . When I stopped to consult my
map, locals would gather near me to point down a road and offer suggestions in
meaningless Bulgarian chatter. Very kind on their part, but I couldn’t
possibly understand a word of it. I found it productive to smile,
point the same way they were pointing, shake their hands, utter some form of a
thank you then depart in the mutually pointed direction. Somewhat removed
and outside their line of sight, I could stop to view my map
uninterrupted. The pointed direction always turned out to be the correct
one.
There are two essentials to
traveling in Bulgaria without a Bulgarian. The first is a good innate
sense of direction. When on the wrong road, my first clue something was
amiss was a feeling in my gut. It never failed me, and allowed me to make
correction before going very far the wrong way. The second
essential is a good road map of Bulgaria with every town and village
spelled out in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Some road junctions
have signs indicating directions in both alphabets. Most will have
them only in Cyrillic, especially in the less traveled rural areas.
In some of these situations there is just enough similarity with Latin letters
to decipher what is on the sign, and other times you can work it out by
the process of elimination. But there will always be occasions when you
just can’t figure it out, and still other times when there aren’t any signs at
all. That’s when the good map is its most valuable.
Bulgarians are proud of the
Cyrillic alphabet, and rightfully so. It was developed in what is now
Bulgaria by two Byzantine brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius. One can’t
help but wonder why Cyril gets the immortality of attaching his name while
Methodius melts into history. Perhaps they flipped a coin.
