Es wird schwieriger und schwieriger, alles im Gleichgewicht zu bringen. Und, wenn ich “alles” sage, meine ich: mein neuestes Experiment mit NoSurf, dass ich erst für 4 Tage versuchen habe (und es ist nicht so schwer, wie ich gedacht hatte); die 7×7 Anforderung, Bulgarisch – so viel wie möglich-, ausgehen, mein kleines Rakun denken, jetzt noch mehr, wenn ich mit ihm nicht so leicht reden oder chatten kann. Ich frage mich, ob alle diese Spannung (und vielleicht die wichtigste Sache von meinen Monaten in Bulgarien underbewusst vermeiden) lohnt sich.
Diese Tage waren hier ein Paar von Zandas Freunde, die den ganzen Weg von Latvia bis hier mit Autostopp gefahren sind. Ich habe es sehr interresant gefunden – sowieso finde ich Autostopp sehr toll – also habe ich ihnen gebeten, einen Interview mit ihnen machen. Einer Tag wird ich ihn hochladen, wenn ich mit den anderen Teilen des Podcasts fertig bin… Sehen sie, was ich meine, wenn ich sage, dass es schwieriger und schwieriger wird? Ich habe auch andere Aufnahme von einem Paar Konzerten, wohin wir heute und gestern gegangen sind. “Langsam langsam!”, als wir in Griechenland sagen mögen. Ich frage mich, ob etwas ähnliches, im Geist und in der Mentalitát, auch in Deutschland geben könnte… Bin ich ein bisschen zu stereotypisch?
Raider II ist so ein tolles Lied, gerade höre ich es nach langer Zeit zu. Ich habe viele Male geschrieben, wie ich so merkwürdig finde, dass Steven Wilson als Musikant nicht weiter bekannt ist. Na ja, ich kann mir vorstellen, dass viele Leute das gleiche sagten, oder schon sagen, wenn ihren Lieblingssänger nicht von anderen gewürdigt wäre. Wer weisst, was von Musik das ich lieben würde, nie werde ich zuhören. Das Leben ist nicht so kurz, aber trotzdem ist es, um alles zu entdecken.
Am Dienstag bin ich nach vielen Tagen endlich gelaufen, aber ich konnte sogar nur 20 Minuten gehen – warum, weiss ich nicht. Ich war sehr enttäuscht darüber… Allerdings habe ich mich heute gefreut, weil ich 10,5km in weniger als 60 Minuten gelaufen bin. Das ist mein bester Tag bis jetzt.
Ich schreibe, und ich schreibe, und so geht es. Schreiben auf Deutsch braucht Zeit, weil ich alles so gut wie möglich beschreiben will, und wie wenige Fehler so möglich machen (eine Kindheit von Overcorrecting – das ist mich), und das Schriff und das Denken benutzen, um zu üben. Auch wenn ich deshalb sehr langsam schreibe, weil ich die ganze Zeit online Lexikons und solche Sache benutzen brauche, es macht mir vielen Spass. Deutsch gibt mir ein sehr einzigartiges Gefühl, dass ich damit komplett and kreativ mich äussern kann.
It was in our on-arrival training, from Nasko, that we first heard about this place, the Seven Rila Lakes:
There aren’t seven of them in this picture
but you’ll just have to trust us.
Our Lithuanian EVSer friend Rasa, who we also met on the on-arrival, really wanted to see the lakes, so she motivated us to go see them this weekend. Maria and Vicente were unavailable in one way or another, so it was Rasa, Zanda and me who set out to visit the lakes. The decision and “plans” were made only the day before. We met up near our house in Opalchenska, but then had some problems figuring out how we could: 1) make the first step out of Sofia 2) get to the lakes in the first place. Googling around for help wasn’t so useful, either… Sometimes it is like this in Bulgaria: the way to get to any given place is not so obvious, and often even Google isn’t enough for a clear answer, or, even if it is, things can always turn out to be very different in reality, as you’ll soon realise from this “little” story.
The beginning of our trip was just a taste of what was to come: we lost some time in changing buses and getting lost in the outskirts of Sofia that were closest to where we thought the bus or train station of Ovcha Kupel would be, but found no station. Somehow, mostly thanks to our luck and unexpectedly understanding hurried directions in Bulgarian, we got to Gorna Banya train station, where we got our train to Dupnitsa for 4,5lv each.
Gorna Banya railroad lady.
Picture by Zanda.
1.5 hours later, we were sitting outside Dupnitsa’s train station eating shopska salata and kartofi sas sirene (4,5lv for both), mulling over what we should do next. Our original plan for visiting the lakes, after all was said and done, was to be home not too long after sunset, because Boyan (another EVSer we met in the on-arrival who lives in Sofia) would be having his birthday party that night and we really didn’t want to miss it. It was already 2 o’ clock, however, and we had no idea how much longer it would take us to actually get to those lakes. Finally we discovered a bus to Sapareva Banya, the town closest to the lakes, and hopped on for another 1,40lv, which, contrary to all our previous experience, we paid before getting off the bus, and with no physical ticket left to us to prove it.
Obyadvam v Dupnitsa.
Composition by Zanda.
So there we were. Sapareva Banya. Home to the Balkans’/Europe’s hottest/something-est geyser (as we briefly had the chance to discover through the bus’ windows) and other hot-water-related activities – it really is a thing in Bulgaria. We were there, but the lakes were still a long way away. If you looked at our relative position using Google Maps, you’d think we were rather close, but we had to also move vertically and somehow climb that imposing mountain right in front of us… We knew there were ski lifts involved, but that was about it. We looked for help and directions in a nearby government building, where after looking around for a bitwe eventually found the guard (I had to struggle to keep a straight face while writing that). We asked him “how go seven uuuuh, lakes”, or the equivalent in Bulgarian, and he replied that there was no minibus (as we had let Lonely Planet make us think!) and that the only way up was by taxi. “Where taxi?” He pointed towards the entrance of a shop.
The “taxi” was actually the telephone number of the taxi driver, stuck on the window of the shop. We decided we would ask the man to help us call. We went back and this time there was also a woman there. When we asked her if she knew English, she replied “Deutsch!” I happily started talking to her in German (I wasn’t expecting I’d have to do that when I got out of bed that morning) and explained the situation. She called the taxi for us, offered us coffee, and warned us that the ski lifts might have stopped working soon. We agreed on the price with the driver (18lv to the ski lifts) and rode off for the 15km or so of winding road to the ski lifts.
The taxi driver was a peculiar but funny guy: in his late-thirties, wearing a Metallica t-shirt and having a Beatles song I’d never heard before playing on his taxi’s sound system. I think he misunderstood my saying at some point “mnogo barzo” (very fast): I meant that our visit to the lakes would be very quick, as a reply to something relevant that he had asked me, but he probably interpreted that as permission to start racing up the mountain. He didn’t miss a single opportunity to tell us, in a mixture of lively Bulgarian and very bad English and even German when we didn’t seem to recognise the words in Bulgarian, all about Sapareva Banya -in which he apparently had the monopoly of taxi driving- and the mountain up which we were riding the taxi. He kept repeating the words skala and kamak. At some point he stopped to show us a rock in the shape of a turtle, which when seen from a different angle also looked like a human face. Apart from that, the view was breathtakingly beautiful, on a mountain side dense with forest.
Turtle Rock
After we almost crashed on the way, we finally reached the ski lifts. It was 4 o’ clock. 2 hours before, Zanda had said that “she had forgottten there had been a winter this year”, because the weather was so warm that day, all the trees had already blossomed etc. 2 hours later, we were surrounded by snow and people were actually taking the ski lifts for their intended use. We were greeted with the announcement that the ski lifts would be working for just another half hour. That meant that we had to make the decision there and then: give up and go home, cursing our luck, or take the ski lifts and stay on the mountain for the night in a ski lodge we were assured would not cost more than 15lv per person.
We went up.
“No time to explain – hop on!”
View from the ride.
So we reached the “base camp” for exploring the lakes. But guess what? None of us had expected that our little excursion would involve getting anywhere near snow. Yeah, 2200 or so metres above sea level in March? Never would have guessed… It was still relatively warm (or should I say, not too cold) because the late afternoon sun was still shining and making everything look beautiful, but we were nowhere near prepared enough for this. Thankfully, we all had at least a jacket of some sort wtih us, but no ski boots or anything for hiking in snow. Because the other thing we didn’t really know was that in order to reach the lakes from the hotel/lodge/chalet you had to walk for at least an hour or so. We tried walking up the mountain outside the lodge in our normal shoes before it would have got got dark and found out for ourselves that it definitely wasn’t such a good idea. Still, we had great views and it felt really good climbing this winter wonderland.
What didn’t feel so good was how we had just decided to not go to Boyan’s party. People started calling to see where we were, because we had told mostly no-one that we’d be visiting the lakes, and absolutely no-one that we’d be staying there for the night, and thus miss the party. It felt bad, especially because we just knew that people would believe that we didn’t care about the party… But we had to make a choice. There will hopefully be many more parties in our lives still. Chances of visiting this extremely beautiful place, on the other hand? Hmmm… Still, even when you make choices like these consciously, you can’t help but feel a little bit of regret.
Anyway, the lodge/chalet had all of its cheaper dormitories booked, mostly by annoying little children *Gargamel face*, so we had to take the 100lv per room per night three-bed one, which we managed to haggle to 90lv. But that room… that room! Its biggest problem was the heating – or the lack thereof. Zanda even resorted to using her Russian, which I hadn’t heard her speak before and I gather she doesn’t want to as a matter of principle, to complain to the manager about it. He came to the room and “turned on” the heating, which meant making the radiator from freezing cold to pleasantly warm to the touch. Yes, our room flirted with temperatures not much higher than zero for the duration of the entire night. But at least we had a television to forget our shivers with. Switching the batteries from one remote control to the other, we managed to tune to Animal Planet – the only channel not in Bulgarian or dubbed in Bulgarian – and had baby pandas, the Summer of the Sharks and Aina the elephant lull us to sleep. Meanwhile, the other animals in the room were about to transform into butterflies in their barely warm enough blanket cocoons.
Fortunately, the next day was much better. We woke up early, had breakfast, rented some ski boots from the basement of the hotel and headed out, ready to find those bloody lakes! The skies were clear and deep blue, the snow was blinding white and deep, the view was magical… It was perfect. And then it happened: we discovered the first lake.
Pointing at it, in case you missed it.
It hadn’t seriously crossed our minds that the lakes could have been frozen. When it did, we comforted ourselves by thinking that if they were, somebody of all the people we met on the way would have told us, or would have tried to stop us from going there. But then it made sense: why would anyone want to stop us when we were showing such determination and conviction? The locals must have thought that we must have known that the lakes were frozen, and that we simply didn’t care.
An hour and a half or so after we started hiking from the lodge, we reached the second lake (we even walked over it) and another lodge next to it. There we had some tea and cherished our moments in the frozen wilderness. Yes, the lakes were frozen, but we had made it, and that was the only thing that counted.
To cut this long story short, by the time we had reached the ski lifts to begin what we thought would be the long way home, we were already happy and satisfied with the way things had turned out.
But the cherry on the cake had yet to come.
Even though we had the taxi guy’s telephone number safely in our phones, we really didn’t want to strain our wallets any further, and so preferred to try our luck with hitch-hiking all the way back, which was the original plan actually. So we signalled to the first car which was looking like it was about to leave the area of the ski lift, ran to it and asked the couple -that could have been our parents- if it would be okay for them to take us to Sapareva Banya. Not only did they take us there, they got us lunch at Hotel Panorama in Panichishte -some of the best food we’ve had while we’ve been in Bulgaria – and told us that they could also take us all the way back to Sofia, since that was their final destination as well. If they were chainsaw murderers, they kept their hobby to themselves.
Another thing that made me personally proud of our contact with this couple was that 90% of our communication with them, like in most of the trip actually, was in Bulgarian. When all you want to do is express you gratitude, you don’t care about how correct your language is; you just blurt out whatever you know, even if it’s just words, phrases, or saying mnogo mnogo vkusno, mnogo mnogo blagodarim vi!
2500g of guyvetch-y goodness for five people…
Only later did we realise that this picture
Zanda took was of the couple that would
buy us lunch and drive us back home to Sofia…
We decided that we should send it to them
to show them our appreciation.
This was our Sedemte Rilski Ezera adventure. It was a very inspiring trip to us, as you can probably tell by the length of this story and the compositions by Zanda (here’s a link to ther facebook album of our trip). For me it captured nicely the spirit of EVS and travelling in Bulgaria: international friends, looking for spontaneous adventure and a more deeper understanding of their host country, at the same time discovering all of its treasures and short-comings and that in the end it’s the people that matter the most. We might not have exactly found what we were looking for, but what we got in return proved to be just as valuable, if not more. And in the end we also got to see Boyan and tell him happy birthday, for his real birthday was two days after the party. Τέλος καλό, όλα καλά.
Oh, and another thing before I sign off that I keep having to learn again and again:
I can’t remember for how long it’s been a dream of mine to see the Northern Lights. To be overwhelmed by their sheer other-worldliness, to lose myself in this phantasmagoria, the proof that magic is nothing supernatural, nothing more “super” than nature at its very best.
This dream of mine was never closer to being fulfilled than now. From the moment I learned that I would be coming to Denmark I started planning my Great Pilgrimage to Hyperborea. The cheapest, if by far the most time-consuming, way to get as close to the Arctic Circle as possible was, I soon found out, to InterRail all the way up from Denmark to Northern Norway. It was not hard to find two other people that shared my dream and felt like joining me. These are some of our stories, of three travellers hungry for adventure, out to see the magic of the world and finding it. Even if not exactly as we expected it when we first set off…
Ana and me woke up early on the 13th day of October. We had a train to catch — the first of many. We packed our bags full of food like bread, carrots, apples, La Vache Qui Rit-type cheese, baked beans… we had heard legends of people going to Norway and dying of starvation because supermarkets were too expensive. We definitely did not want to suffer the same fate. After we made sure that our bags would weigh less than half as much on our way back, we set off. We saw the sun rise over the lazy cow-dotted plains of Jutland, passed to Fyn and before we knew it we had already crossed Zealand and were in Copenhagen Central Station. This was our rendezvous point with Cedric. We didn’t have difficulty spotting him coming out from the train from Hamburg, he was sporting a backpack almost one and a half times larger than my own. If my own bag contained roughly equal parts clothes and food, Cedric’s was almost bursting at the seems from the weight of several tins of ravioli, bottles of wine and beer. We would soon be very thankful he had been extra mindful when it came to food… And so it began.
What will stay with me from this trip:
• We did not see the Northern Lights. Mission failed. All of our nights north of the Arctic Circle were beautifully overcast. But even if they hadn’t been, people told us that it wasn’t a good time of the year to see them. “The aurora is at its most impressive after a big drop in temperature… The best time is in January or February, when it’s really cold and there aren’t so many clouds”. Then why do so many sites say that October is a good time? As far as the Lights go, this is indeed our theme song for the trip.
Play us off Keyboard Cat!
• Cedric’s cool. Riding from Malmö to Göteborg, the city in which, in a parallel universe, we would have changed trains for Oslo, Cedric realised that something was missing from his otherwise stuffed backpack. It was his wallet. Of all places, it had to be Sweden where we would find our pick-pocket. How many of us think of Sweden when we hear about pick-pocketing? I’m beginning to get tired of Nordic nimble fingers. Of course we couldn’t just leave Göteborg and ride into the unknown before Cedric had exhausted all possibilities regarding the whereabouts of his wallet and, most importantly, its contents. He had lost his money, his bank card and his ID. What would you, dear reader, do if this had happened to you on the first day of a long-awaited trip? Ana and I agreed that, for one, we would be freaking out badly. Cedric, however, kept his characteristic cool during all stages of grief. “I’ll get by, I’ll survive. I’m just annoyed that we had to miss the train to Oslo and our plans got messed up”. The next day, in Oslo, when the German embassy told him that at least he could take the next train back home, he didn’t hesitate even for a minute to follow us through. Again, “what’s the worst thing they can do to me? At most they’ll just send me back to Germany. It’s where I’m going eventually anyway.”
• Jan. He was our host in Bodø, the small town we stayed the longest in Norway. He took us to lots of very Norwegian places around the town in his car (including Saltstraumen, even though it was at high tide and wasn’t at all impressive), showed us some new for us electronic music (he was a big fan!) and some documentaries about Life, the Universe and Everything with him, one of them he had made himself. W even talked a little bit about video games.
He helped us a lot by taking us to Fauske where we begun our…
• Hitch-hiking. On the 5th day, we had to hitch-hike from Fauske to Narvik (οur CouchHost Jan was so good as to drive us from Bodø to Fauske. In retrospect, if he hadn’t done so we might not have made it through to Narvik at all). With good spirits we prepared our cardboard sign. On one side it read “NARVIK” and on the other “N↑”. For hours we tried and tried on the side of the E6, aka the Arctic Highway — a name that makes it sound much more majestic than it really is. We jumped around at incoming cars, thumbs outstretched, our best smiles as bright as tiny flashlights in the afternoon light.
Tens, hundreds of cars passed us by, few drivers gave us any kind of sign, let alone stopped. Later, we realised that the reason was probably because no-one wanted, or had enough space to carry three extra passengers. We were in the middle of nowhere, 100klm north of the Arctic Circle, moose crossing signs around us, Narvik was 250klm away. Disappointment set in. We began to make our way back to Fauske where we would make our way back to Bodø by train, our ultimate Plan B. And then the unexpected, the unreal happened. A car stopped in front of us after we had already started walking back. A big man in a blue sweater came out.
“Do you want to go to Narvik?”
“Yes!”, I said. This was strange. We were going to the opposite direction, with Narvik facing our backsides and already half-empty backpacks. How did he know that we wanted to go there?
“We will take you there. We will take you to Narvik!”
I froze. I did not know what to make of it. These two people — this man and his wife — were obviously not going to Narvik. However, they wanted to make a detour, a 10-hour one both ways at that, to help us out. In my mind appeared a pair of scales. Weighing down the one side was fear, disbelief, the kind of feeling that would never let you hitch-hike, the feeling people transmit to you when they tell you that in every CouchSurfer lies a hidden serial killer just waiting to kill you in the most tortuous of ways; on the other side there was trust, willingness, adventure, the sense that everything can happen if you just give it a chance. It didn’t take long at all for the latter side to win this recurring internal battle.
Enter Lisbeth and Finn-Ove. They saw us trying to hitch a ride while they were going back home after shopping. “I feel sorry for them”, said Finn-Ove. “How sorry?”, asked Lisbeth. They turned around, picked us up, filled the tanks in Fauske and stopped home to leave the stuff they had just bought before setting out for the road trip. What they had just went out to shop were huge boxes of kitty litter. Turned out that Lisbeth and Finn-Ove are professional cat-breeders. My cat-loving side went a little awry at the thought (mind: it’s the same side that feeds my distaste for small dogs) but once I saw the care they put into their pocket felines, my heart melted. Their house was situated in a small Norwegian village under craggy mountains, over delicious fjords and next to deep forest that serves as a home for curious moose… AND a houseful of beautiful and tame cats, a large home cinema and a fresh box-set of Star Wars in Blu-ray (Finn-Ove’s been a fan “ever since he saw the films on Norwegian TV”). What else might a man want?
The next five hours we spent in their car, talking about life, hitch-hiking, cats and their group hierarchy (“fertile females are the leaders”), Star Wars and Norway while outside the windows, fantastic mountains, forests and fjords (and a few moose we stopped to see) were being greeted by the Arctic October dusk that slowly but surely painted the skies black…
Finn-Ove and Lisbeth saved us out of nowhere. We hitched a ride with them for over 250klm of Norwegian countryside. They were an inspiration and a delight to meet and helped me add another experience to fight my fearful and cynic side, a much-needed one: semi long-distance hitch-hiking.
• Betty and her Brain Balancing. Day 7 found us in Stockholm. As usual, nowhere to stay, hey, at least we had a train station to fall back to if all else failed, or at least we hoped that a train station in a capital city would stay open through the night. We sent out an SOS to the world, aka a Last Minute CouchRequest. And voila, one hour later Betty sent us a message telling us she can host us. Off we went to meet this lady that was to be our host in Stockholm, a city which from the two nights we spent there I can say that I loved. It’s a city made of bridges connecting its many islands, with parks and cliffs right next to the river/lake/sea in between. And would you imagine? We saw deer grazing in Betty’s backyard in the morning. Stockholm: breath-taking to walk around in, both at night and during the day.
Back to Betty. Born in Sweden by Hungarian parents, had a daughter (our age) with a man from The Gambia. And I thought I was a child of multi-culturalism… After a much-needed dinner consisting of bread, butter, raspberry jam and Nugatti (read: Norwegian Nutella, only like 10 times better than Nutella), Betty revealed her current profession to us. She is a Brain Balancer. “A psychologist?”, ready to ask was I, but she was quick to add: “Literally, what I do is balance brains. Every brain is to some extent unbalanced. What I do is let the brain listen to its own brainwaves and correct itself in order to move out of ruts and behavioural vicious cycles that activate in situations of stress and fear. This balancing will not alter your personality whatsoever, just open up your possibilities and allow you to step back from your own behaviour in order to be able to observe and modify it.” She invited us to try it ourselves. There is a system monitoring and recording your brainwaves and playing tones into earphones that create a feedback loop for the brain. It is actually very hard to put into words but from what Betty described and from what I can see it looks like a mighty interesting idea. It might sound completely crazy but if I had the money I would try it (ten 90-minute sessions that should be enough to have a permanent effect carry a price tag of close to €2000). I asked her if there is a way to obtain the same results for free and without the brain balancer. She answered that if I purposefully observe myself in weird or dangerous situations and the way I react in order to first be able to witness behaviours programmed into me (do I freeze or go into fight and flight mode?), with some meditation and inner silence I should be able to create the same effects as brain balancing would. Read more here. The interesting thing is that Betty found about this a few years ago through a CouchSurfer of hers and was obviously thrilled. Before that she was a textile designer. Now we learned about this also through CouchSurfing… Around, goes the world.
• Karlstad and Narvik. Two of the nights in the North we had nowhere to stay. No Couchhosts, no money, nothing. I can tell you this: Sweden and Norway are NOT good places to try your life as a homeless person — even though I think that if you have no home, in Denmark at least, the state provides you with shelter. So, in this respect and for a few hours we were far worse off than any Nordic homeless would be. Train stations locked tight, shops and bars closing early, even MacDonald’s providing only temporary shelter and franchise coffee until midnight. A bit of Cinderella magic there. These town were public spaces that after 11PM became non-spaces… In both cases we were outside until the early hours, walking around the city, having our usual incredibly long, deep and often pointless discussions with Cedric (to Ana’s probable annoyance), playing football with plastic coffee cups or trying to sleep at temperatures very close or under 0 °C. Layering clothes didn’t help much to keep warm, nor did running around on the brightly lit but oh, so cold and inhospitable station platforms — the appearance of a semi-friendly fox in Karlstad station, though, at least cheered us up a lot.
But let me tell you, for all the shivering and biting cold, the moments of salvation more than made up for it. When our train from Karlstad to Oslo arrived, all warm and cozy inside, or when the station master in Narvik opened the doors half an hour earlier than we expected, at 6:30 instead of 7AM… It was happiness, the same kind of lizard-brain happiness you see in your dog’s or cat’s face when they lie curled up at your feet.
In Lizbeth’s and Finn-Ove’s car, I told Cedric: “When we get to Narvik, we have nowhere to stay…” -“I know…”, he replied, “I look forward to it.”
• In Oslo, outside the central train station, we asked some police people (how would you call a police man together with a police woman?) where we could find the police station. They kindly drove us there in their police van, putting us in the little cage they have in the trunk reserved for criminals, hand-cuffs and all. We went crazy. Made me want to steal something so that I could travel in this thing again. Guaranteed nice views.
• I had an amazing time with Cedric and Ana. I had never travelled for so long with anyone I had not been romantically involved with before. Many laughs, similar, relaxed and happy attitudes to things going very wrong. It’s true that travelling with people is the ultimate test of friendship and even though I’ve only been friends with these guys a few months I think we passed the test with flying colours.
• Avoid relying on trains if you want to take in the scenery. You will fall asleep more than you would like. You will also read much less than you expect.
• Most of our expenses in this trip were not for food or alcohol, but forcoffee (thank you, Seven Eleven). If you plan to take it cheap (or free), be sure to be able to find or make cheap coffee. We spent €0 on accommodation, if you exclude two of the nights we spent in trains. 5 days of travel in 10 cost us €169 each.
• If you want to go to Scandinavia to drink, you are probably much better off in every way in your own country.
• Catching trains while having a hangover at the same time is very possibly the definition of Not Fun.
• Who’s up for the next travel to Hyperborea? This time to really see the Lights?
