Letter 10

The next morning found us at the Bulgarian border post of Bregovo. It was in the middle of nowhere. The whole border crossing complex on both sides only consisted of four small buildings and the office on the Jugoslavian side was unoccupied. In Warsaw we'd heard a lot of bad reports about Bulgarian customs officers, how they wouldn't let travellers into the country without a bribe, would confiscate things at will and be nasty for no reason at all. We made sure that we had a bottle of vodka displayed in a prominent place and a few packets of cigarettes laying around. We also made sure that only the cassette tapes we'd had enough of were visible because we'd heard that the customs officers often pocketed them if they saw them - especially Western cassettes.

Not a soul was in sight at the Bulgarian side of the border as we drew up to the line and switched off the engine. There was no sign of life inside the customs office either and we could have driven straight across, but for the fact that we knew we'd need a stamp in our passports to get out of the country at the other end, so we put the kettle on, made tea and waited for something to happen. After about 10 minutes a man in a well worn uniform sporting cheap white framed plastic sun glasses came waddling towards us down the middle of the road from the Jugoslavian side. He was grossly overweight, sweating profusely and the shoulders of his jacket were covered in dandruff - a slob.

He was very casual, didn't speak and just held his hand for our passports on the way past us continuing down the road into Bulgaria and disappearing out of sight around a bend in the road some fifty metres distant. There wasn't another soul in any of the buildings and no sign of life anywhere else although we presumed that there must be some kind of habitation around the bend. It was sweltering and we took our cups of tea outside and stood in the shade of the customs office verandah. It was a full thirty minutes before he came back, by which time we were wondering if he really was a border guard or merely a passport thief.

He ignored us and went into the office, stamped our passports without really looking at them and pushed them through a slit at the bottom of the window. I picked them up without speaking and got back in the van and started the engine at which point the barrier came down and I went back to the office to see if there was a problem. He indicated that he was only the passport control officer and we must now see the customs officer -kustom kontrol, kustom kontrol, he said waving his arm towards the next empty office. I tried to ask where Mr. Kustom Kontrol was. He knew what I was trying to say but he didn't want to help. Instead, he ignored me and closed the window.

Another 15 minutes passed before a dumpy little man with an even shabbier uniform made his appearance and took the passports from me. He studied them at length reading every entry and then turned to me pointing to my surname and indicated that I should pronounce it.

-McLaren, I said

-MutsLaren, MutsLaren, Muglaren?

-Near enough, I replied.

He looked up at me. I worried.

Then with a big smile he said -McLeod, Sherrrifff McLeod. Yew arrr Sherrrifff McLeod.

I agreed.

From then on we were good buddies, all laughs and back slapping. He didn't want to see inside the van or anything, he just wanted to talk about Sherrrifff McLeod which I assume must have been all the go in Bulgaria at the time. I'd never actually seen Sherif McLeod (apart from once when he got in the way when I was switching channels in a hotel room) but I put up a good show by shooting my pretend six gun and twiddling it around my index finger before putting it back in my pretend holster. And he loved it. Ten minutes and six episodes of Sherrrifff McLeod later I asked him to stamp our prepared customs declaration so that when we left the country, we'd be able to take all our stuff out with us. He looked at the list and said he wanted to see all the items on it to see that we really owned them and wouldn't get Bulgaria a bad name by claiming at a later date that they'd been stolen.

Out came the video camera, four still cameras, the computer, the computer printer, transistor radio and a number of other items rarely seen in most Bulgarian households and, for a second, his eyes lit up. Then they closed up to narrow, piggy like slits and he called the passport officer over to see it all. He'd already mentioned something about not giving Bulgaria a bad name and now I was worried that he would think that we were going to write and distribute anti government literature or something and it looked for a while as though we were going to have problems. He wanted to know why we travelled with a computer, were we going to sell it? I told him I was an author but couldn't make myself understood too well so I went to the shelf and came back with a travel book, I pointed to the computer and then to the book and made typing motions with my fingers - and he understood.

He understood that I'd written Frommers Guide to Eastern Europe on $25 a day and that I was a celebrity. Together they went through the book and although they didn't understand a thing in it, they obviously thought I'd made a rather good job of the maps and marveled that I'd managed to get the principal Bulgarian cities in the right places. They nodded approval and murmured complimentary things pronouncing it to be a very good book and told us to go which we did after promising to send him an autographed copy of Frommers Guide to Eastern Europe. We still hadn't had our customs declaration stamped but didn't want to push our good luck any further and so left them smiling as they stood in the middle of the road waving goodbye

So into Bulgaria we went. Bregovo, the village closest to the border crossing, unlike the towns and villages on the transit routes, seldom plays host to western vehicles. It's a tiny village tucked away in a kind of T junction formed by the borders of Romania, Jugoslavia and Bulgaria, well away from the regions most frequently visited by sane Westerners used to functional plumbing. We parked in the village square to pack away our camera equipment and everything else we'd taken out to show the officials at the border and that done, we sat in the front seats to study the map. I reached up to pull down the sun visor and out of the windscren saw that the population of Bregovo had turned out in force on the pavements to stare at us as though we were from another planet and, I suppose, we did present something of an unusual sight to them.

An unimaginably expensive clean, white Mercedes van topped by a home made Polish roof rack with all manner of things chained to it and bristling with padlocks. Four black water containers which we used for our showers at the end of the day hung down from the sides and an agricultural, pump up insecticide sprayer (our high pressure shower and van cleaner) hung off the back. At the front of the roof rack was a king sized, screw topped, plastic bucket which served as our washing machine - we looked like a travelling shop. And as we drove further into the back blocks of Bulgaria we realized that to see a Western vehicle of any description was a rare event let alone one with a couple of loonies dressed in shorts sitting in the front seats.

Mind you, their transport was just as much a curiosity to us. Flimsy, primitive looking carts with solid rubber tyres powered by donkeys rather than horses stood in a huddle in the village square under ancient grape vines planted in holes in the concrete. The most decrepit looking Russian motor bikes and side cars, the riders wearing leather flying helmets of WW1 vintage, coursed the streets and the few visible cars were without windscreens. There was also a collection of weird looking tractors with corrugated iron bonnets, some of which had open topped water jackets around their single cylinders and the water could be seen bubbling away and spilling onto the street as they moved. They were only one step up from the horse and buggy in that they had a bench seat where both driver and passenger could sit beside each other.

Home made motor cycle powered carts seemed to be very much in vogue and these were of a hybrid design which incorporated the front half of a motorcycle welded to the front of a regular horse cart. A two metre long chain drove the carts front wheels and the only brake was that of the front half of the motorcycle. I resolved to avoid them, especially when loaded with half a ton of sand or fifty bags of cement. The people here didn't come running up to us waving their hands and smiling like people in Hungarian villages, they just stood, open mouthed and stared. More people came out of the houses to look at us and they just stared as did the collection of donkeys in the square. The air was perfectly still not a leaf rustling on the vines, the only sign of movement was when a fly would land on someone's face and they'd wave a hand to move it away. It was as though aliens had landed and zapped the whole village into a kind of suspended animation a collection of peasanty Marcel Marceau's.

As we drove down the street on the way out of the village I blew the horn just to see if their heads turned. Only five minutes later we realized that we had no Bulgarian money so we had to go back through the village to the border post again to the official exchange counter. Most of the people in the village where still where we left them but the exchange counter was deserted. We left again twenty minutes later having exchanged US $50 and, once again, drove back through the village where, once again, the villagers were still standing in roughly the same positions as last time - we were obviously too quick for them.

Our dollar at the exchange counter had got us 2.5 Bulgarian leva and at the same time we bought coupons for 100 litres of diesel at 25 cents per litre. This made us somewhat sick as, according to two guide books, diesel was $1.00 per litre. Because of this we'd filled up our tanks and canister in Jugoslavia at 50 cents a litre thinking that we were going to save some money. As in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, fuel could only officially be bought with coupons purchased in Western currency and, therefore, at the official, low, exchange rate. By now we were becoming a little more streetwise and approached petrol pump attendants direct. They were not only willing to sell petrol but willing to sell it below the normal price to get their hands on some hard currency.

Exiting the village near the border a second time we found ourselves in yet more flat, boring country growing the same old corn and sunflowers that we'd seen in the last three countries, we we're getting sick to death of corn and bloody sunflowers. And here in Bulgaria I don't know why they bothered planting them at all, horrible stunted brain damaged looking things they were, all miserable and thirsty with weak necks. Forty kilometres inside the border two Polish registered cars were coming towards us and the driver of the lead car flashed his lights at us and stopped. We all pulled up at the side of the road and the Poles (two families) wanted to know the descriptions of the guards at the border we had just come through. We told them what the two men looked like and they were somewhat disappointed and agreed between them to park up somewhere and cross the border after 3pm when the next shift would be on.

We offered them tea and gave the kids an apple each and began talking about what we, and they, were doing in this out of the way part of Bulgaria. Our trip turned out to be far less of an adventure that theirs. They were on a trading holiday and they'd set off five weeks beforehand with less money than they needed to keep them going for a week. It seemed tremendously courageous to me who'd never have considered going on a holiday knowing that I didn't enough money to last the distance but they said that it was impossible on the wages they earned, to ever save enough money for a holiday and so had to do it this way. They'd taken a few things with them from Poland to sell in Czechoslovakia, bought something else with the proceeds to sell in Hungary and so on and were surviving on their wits and the knowledge of what sold, at what price, in different countries. In this fashion they'd already done five countries including Romania. They were also earning a living by changing money and they gave us 7 leva per dollar as compared to the official rate of 2.5. We found out later that the going black market rate was 10 but we didn't begrudge it because they're doing us a service and they had to make some money too.

Every year hundreds, maybe thousands of Poles travel Eastern Europe in this same fashion, some for holidays but most in order to earn more money than they could in a regular job in Poland. Something we learned from them is not to trust Eastern European maps when looking up places near borders - they are deliberately wrong for military purposes. This, to me, seems to smack at paranoia especially these days when spy satellites are able to photograph in such detail but in Poland, at least, it is illegal to photograph bridges, post offices and railway stations. I must add, however, that in all the time we spent in Poland we didn't see a bridge, post office or railway station that we thought our friends would like to see snaps of. Leaving them, we were soon in the mountains although which mountains we didn't know because of the lack of information on the map, but whatever they were, they were awfully steep and had the van labouring in first gear in some parts. They were nevertheless superb, covered in beech trees, and the glimpses we had of the valleys were stunning. We went up and up for close to an hour before reaching the top of one tree covered peak where the Bulgarian Government Tourist Guide booklet said there was a caravan park in a village.

It wasn't there! The village consisted of only four houses, a shop and a filling station and was surrounded by trees so it was hard to believe that a caravan park could have somehow been mislaid in such a small area. We parked at the back of the garage and went around to the front to ask. The man told us to go back where we'd just parked and we'd see it. We did...and we didn't. There was however, another man sitting on a log smoking a clay pipe so we asked him if he'd seen a caravan park. -Yes, he said. -See where that white van is parked - that's the caravan park. The official Bulgarian Tourist Organisation's caravan park was there alright. We were in the middle of it and there was room for at least another two cars - we were glad to have arrived early.

There was one saving grace, one thing that made our night's stay there worthwhile. At the back of the garage there was a toilet (footprints) and a shower. AND, the water was hot and limitless. We couldn't believe it. Hot water, the first real hot water service we'd seen in months. It was wood fired but plenty of logs were outside ready cut to fit in the hole in the furnace and within ten minutes of lighting it the safety valve was blowing great clouds of steam. We spent hours in there, showering, washing our hair, our clothes, the cups and plates, carpets, curtains and anything else washable we could lay our hands on including the outside of the van which we sprayed with our agricultural sprayer using hot water and washing up liquid.Another gem was the toilet, the first clean one we'd seen in a long time, in fact it was possibly the cleanest toilet I've ever seen, before or since! How come the cleanest toilet I've ever seen was located on top of a mountain in Bulgaria? - because the shower was over it! We had to stand with one foot on each side of the hole while we were showering - the shower drain was the toilet hole.

-What pack of brainless plumbers apprentices could have been responsible for such an idea? I asked Alicja. -The contents of their septic tank must be cooked.

-Don't knock it, she replied. -Even the Hilton doesn't offer the choice of a hot or cold toilet flushes.

The feeling of cleanliness made a great deal of difference to the way in which we viewed our surroundings and we sat outside in our Czechoslovakian collapsible chairs (the collapsibility of which was actually a production fault rather than a design feature) on the little patch of grass, kept mowed by half a dozen geese in need of toilet training. A few hours later a group of East Germans in two cars arrived. One of the cars, although brand new, had electrical problems which I tried to help them with and later they came over for a talk. One of them, an eighteen year old guy who was with his father, spoke near perfect English and we invited them in for a beer.

They told us a little about life in their country and I must say we didn't envy them one bit. Ernst, the father said how lucky we were to have a radio cassette player in the van and a $5 clip on electric light we'd bought in Czechoslovakia. They looked all around the inside of the van and were speechless at the luxury we were living in. To them our standard of mobile accommodation was something quite out of their reach, something it would have been silly to set their sights on and something which West Germans living only a hundred and fifty miles from his home could have bought with one month’s wages. As the conversation progressed I began to feel guilty at being so rich.

These people couldn't get out of their own country except to another in the Soviet bloc and even then there was no guarantee that they'd be issued with a passport even for that. They said to us that the trip we were doing could only be a dream for them, a totally unachievable ambition. When Ernst left to go back to the tent for the night, his son opened up to us and told us that he was going escape from East Germany. He said that the family had discussed it many times at home and that his Mother told him to go, and not worry about them. Ernst though, wouldn't say yes or no, only that he'd go along with his son's decision. I could see the fathers dilemma. His son could have a much better life in the West and every father would want that for his boy but if this happened, he'd never see him again and it would break his heart.

The boy said that he was going to make his escape to Austria from Hungary on the way home. He didn't exactly know how but said he'd reconnoitre the border for a few days before running across. This would be his last holiday with his parents and they would drop him off somewhere in Hungary, say goodbye and wish him luck. Imagine driving away from your son at the roadside somewhere in a strange country and looking at him through the rear view mirror knowing that you'd probably never see him again. He asked us about life in the west and if we thought that he could get a job and so forth and he was hoping for advice from us.

How can you advise someone to leave his family and head for a better life in the West. And just think of the holiday they must all have been having with all that on their minds. I felt so sorry for them all. He said that if he hadn't any family, he'd go like a shot but he didn't want to hurt them. I was glad that in my life I've never had to make such a decision. He said goodbye and went back to his tent and they were gone in the morning when we woke up but I know that I won't be able to forget the experience or his face, not ever.

From books I've read and from people I've talked to over the years, I thought that I understood what communism was about but to actually see it's effects in this way - people being imprisoned in their own countries - really drove home to me that I'm lucky to have been born in the West. I was here on their turf and they couldn't stand on mine. The same goes for flies too but we never really spend much time thinking about them do we? It was whilst sitting in my Czechoslovakian collapsible chair on top of this unmapped Bulgarian mountain with the cleanest toilet in Christendom that I began to philosophize about flies. I don't remember exactly how it started but it was probably something to do with the un toilet trained geese.

When we discovered the hot water and gave the van a spring clean, I opened the back doors and in so doing liberated into the clean, Bulgarian mountain air, a small swarm of flies which had been travelling with us for a considerable distance. It got me thinking. All the time, during the trip, we seemed to collect flies in the van and they were always difficult to catch because, unlike a car, there was so much room for them to move around in and every evening we would open the back door and shoo them away. By the end of a day's travel we would sometimes have flies in the van which had been with us for hundreds of kilometres and crossed international frontiers.

I thought deeply and profoundly about the problem from the fly’s point of view. There you are in the middle of the road minding somebody else's business, when along comes a big white thing on wheels and you try to move out of the way but WHOOSH, you find yourself being sucked through an open hole in the side of it. You buzz around for while until you think you've found the way out but there's something in the way, something sort of transparent which doesn't let you through no matter how hard you bang your head against it. Then, when your head is throbbing through banging on the windscreen for eight hours, a door opens and there you are in a strange country, strange smells from strange food and you can't find your buddies anywhere. The stuff in the garbage bins just doesn't smell right, even the manure heaps have a weird sort of tang about them and all the time there's this banging still going on in your head. You're worried, what if the local flies are hostile? you may be a capitalist fly and they could all be commies. -I'm sorry but you can't shit on that piece of meat if you're not a member of the workers co-operative. I think it must be a very stressful situation for them.....so I squash them.

In the morning we drove down these lovely mountains and on to Sofia. The outskirts were standard Soviet bloc. That is to say dull, dreary, uninspiring, slogans on hordings and hundreds of apartment blocks, until we came into the centre which was quite a surprise. The streets are uncommonly wide, most of them a generous 6 lanes with service roads at either side and yellow brick pavements. In fact it all looked unexpectedly modern and well laid out. It was Sunday and there was no traffic, not just no traffic but no traffic. I don't think we saw more than 40 cars in the whole drive through the capital. I wondered at first whether they were expecting an earthquake or something and they'd all left town but later in the week it wasn't a hell of a lot different. We drove around town until we ended up at the Alexander Nyevski church. We turned a corner and suddenly this thing was there, huge, enormous, massive, gigantic shit it was big. Stupendous seems like a good word but I wanted to save stupendous for the Aghia Sofia in Istanbul. I suppose you'd call it almost stupendous. Now I'm not one for churches, in fact we've studiously avoided most of them unless the book said there was one with something special, but this one is something on its' own.

It was built at the turn of the century as a memorial to 200,000 Russian soldiers who died in the Russo- Turkish war in 1877-78 and, according to the guide books, liberated Bulgaria from Turkish rule - some liberation? The roof line, covered in the domes typical of Eastern Orthodox religious architecture gave the appearance of a central grapefruit surrounded by a dozen or so egg yolks all covered with gold. Inside was an enormous domed ceiling (the inside of the grapefruit) and smack in the middle of it was a big painting of your actual God. You could tell he was God because he was much bigger than the rest of the sycophantic saints and angels surrounding him and anyway, he was sitting on a huge gilt covered commode. At ground level were three huge altars made by a Bulgarian, a Russian and a Czech and until we saw Aghia Sophia in Istanbul, it was undoubtedly the most awe inspiring religious edifice we'd ever walked around. Breath taking may be a better phrase but it could have been the candle smoke.

Only a couple of minutes walk away was a museum with a sign outside in English advertising ancient Roman relics and we bought a ticket hoping to catch a glimpse of Carlo Ponti. He wasn't there but the sarcophagi, busts, statues and seventeenth century religious icons more than made up for it but as we were strolling through the main room I heard English voices coming from a small ante room to our left.

-Wot 'appened to 'is 'ooter?

-They're all like it, look at 'em. It's the bit that sticks out most init, the nose. That's why they're all broken look.

I was taken aback - the sound of a couple of cockney's in a Sofia museum was the last thing we expected to hear - and we hurried through the doorway to get a look at them. A pretty young Bulgarian girl dressed in a uniform was showing around a bloated lobster of a man in his mid twenties dressed in shorts, socks and sandals and a black T shirt with a Tottenham Hotspurs slogan on it. Beside him in a tasteful, figure hugging, blue summer dress stood his stunningly attractive wife, guide book in hand, next to a statue of Octavian "sans 'ooter". I approached the lobster and we were invited walk around with them on their guided tour, for which they'd already paid the young Bulgarian guide.

Before we could get started he turned to me and asked.

-Ere, wot's necrofilleeyer?.

-Yeh, said his wife. -Wot is it? - she won't tell us.

I asked how the subject had arisen and they told us that there had been a statue in the previous room which the young guide had said was "necro summfin" and that in trying to explain the story which went with it, she'd mentioned the word necrophilia but wouldn't explain what it meant.

I wasn't sure how I should explain it either but began by saying -Necro? - from the Greek? - it means dead.

-Yeh?.

-Yes, necropolis? - a place for dead people, a cemetery?

-Yeh?.

The pretty young Bulgarian was now blushing.

-Necromancy? - communication with the dead?...necrosis - dead skin?.

-Oh yeh? so wot's necrofilleeyer then - dead somefin'?

The pretty young Bulgarian guide was now standing ten feet from us.

I drew him to one side.

-It means fucking dead people, I said.

-Ow dyah you mean fucking dead?.

-You must have heard the expression - I'll just slip into something cool?.

-Do wot?.

-Ok. I don't mean the people are fucking dead. Necrophilia means people having it off with other people who are dead.

-Jesus Christ. Hey Shirl' jew 'ear that? It means rumpy bumpy with corpses.

-Wot?.

-Necrofilleeyer - it means bonkin' dead people.

-Oh, that's understandable then.

-Understandable? wot jew meen understandable - shit!.

-No, I mean its understandable why she didn't want to tell us wot it meant..... ere, where's she gone?.

Den' and Shirl' were a great laugh and we enjoyed there company for the next couple of hours over lunch in their hotel where I asked them why they'd chosen Bulgaria for their holiday.

It had apparently been advertised at a discount in a Shepherds Bush travel agent's window and was a tour centred in Sofia with day excursions to places of archeological interest. They had found as soon as they got on the plane that their fellow vacationers weren't as much fun as the crowd they'd been to Spain with the year before and so were doing Sofia on their own. Neither of them knew where Bulgaria was, were disappointed because there was no swimming pool in their hotel (especially in view of the lack of beaches) and in Shirl's words -not much of a place really is it? The travel agent had, upon Den's enquiry, assured him that Bulgaria was sunny and Den', assuming all sunny places to be Spain, or at least similar, had booked on the spot. -Don't fink I'd come again though, he grinned, looking up at the flaking ceiling in the dining room.

We spent six days wandering around this deserted city wondering where all the people had gone and concluded that it must be Europe's most overbuilt city from the point of view of the people to space ratio. It was clean and quite modern but lacking in atmosphere because there weren't enough people on the streets (the exact opposite of Vienna) and because the shops were hidden behind such tiny windows. We checked into a camp-site only five kilometres from Sofia city centre which was enormous with literally hundreds of tents but the facilities were abysmal; only two cold showers were available for three hundred campers and the six toilets might as well have been non existent, they were of the footprint type and became blocked in no time - everybody visited an adjacent field which was strewn with paper.

When we checked in, the manager wanted to see the receipt for the money we changed on the border and he stamped the back of it with the date and how many nights we were staying. In this way the government makes sure that you at least change some money at the official exchange rate and don't go to the black market for all your needs. If you can't show a stamp for each night you spend in the country, you are fined 200 leva for each unrecorded night. 200 leva is a lot of money in Bulgarian terms, the average tradesman earns approximately 250 per month.

The camp-site cost us 24 leva per night but for people on Eastern European passports the charge was 5 leva. It wasn't bad value for money because of the free nightly entertainment which had us in fits. A band played old Englebert Humperdink songs while a woman with a voice like an opera singer with the shakes sang the chorus, one line ahead of them. "Please Release Me Let Me Go" took on a whole new meaning. Folk dancing too took up an hour of every evening and was performed by plaited virgins in national dress costumes and Doc Martins hob nail boots accompanied by effeminate looking restaurant waiter look alikes who no father would want his son to associate with - let alone his daughter.

The nightly finale however, wasn't to be missed. Two farm labourers, a man and a woman, walked through the burning embers of a fire in their bare feet to the accompaniment of a "musician" playing the Bulgarian bagpipes. The sound of the Bulgarian bagpipe is.... well, I'm unable to describe it. But when I was a kid, my father caught a hedgehog in a trap by mistake and the Bulgarian bagpipes sound very similar to the noise it made before we let it out, but with Middle Eastern overtones. An Italian couple told us that they'd seen the same show every night for two weeks. That there were only two sets of fire walkers who traversed the embers on alternate nights, and they could be seen at one of the chalets nursing their feet on their off days.

The subject of hedgehogs came up again while we were in Bulgaria. Alicja read a tourist book which said that on the Black Sea Coast, where the bulk of Bulgarian resorts are located, there had been a problem with snakes and the authorities had bought in two railway carriages of hedgehogs which had in a short space of time, wiped them all out. I wondered just how easy a task it would have been to catch two railway carriages full of hedgehogs. How many hedgehogs is two railway carriages full? Even if they were travelling first class with less hedgehogs per carriage it still must have presented quite a problem - we certainly didn't notice any hedgehog breeding establishments on our way through the country. That hedgehogs could even kill snakes was news to me. I did know that mongooses?...mongeese?...mongi?...oh stuff it! - those Indian mongy things - could kill them, but not hedgehogs.

We had the only Western car in the camp-site apart from three Italian campervans travelling together. A fascinating collection of Eastern block transport managed to struggle through the gates every evening though, Trabant, Muskvitch, Warszawa, Volga, Lada, Zis, Skoda, Sirena and some others that I couldn't identify because the names were in the Cyrillic alphabet. After the evening meal the owners would bury themselves up to the elbows under their bonnets in an effort to keep their vehicles going for another day or week. In fact car repairs were quite a social occasion and amateur mechanics would wander from one broken down car to another offering help and advice. A large number of hard to get spares changed hands too - everybody carries spares in his boot in Bulgaria.

Of course, we too still had a problem with our back axle oil seal and all the time, in the back of our minds, we had entertained the vague hope that we might be able to get it fixed in Sofia. Not being able to find a resident English speaker, we went to the British Embassy to ask if they knew of a place. I walked up to the reception desk and said to the man -I've got a problem. Without taking his eyes off me he pointed to Alicja and said -is that it? To me, there's something different about the British. Humour figures in practically every conversation and even though I've had the chance to observe many conversations between people of other nationalities, none seem to use so many funny, throw away lines as the Brits. Right in the middle of all this foreigness and officialdom there was a certain sanity in the insane humour of the man at the reception desk of British Embassy. He wasn't even trying to be funny, just using humour as a friendly ice breaker and to put us at ease, to let us know there was nothing to worry about. A sort of comedy routine followed in which we used well worn jokes from old Monty Python TV shows, modified to fit the situation, and it was all of five minutes before I actually got around to telling him about our problem.

-What a pity, our mechanic is on holiday, he said. -But if you can wait here a week until he comes back, I'm sure he will be able to get you out of trouble somehow. Anyway, we have plenty of tools here which are at your disposal. I'll get you the address of a place which holds stocks of parts for diplomatic cars and if you can get the part you're looking for, come around to my place after work and we'll have a go at it.

The meeting with this man, whose name I never got around to asking, and the time spent with Den' and Shirl', had put us in high spirits and we left the embassy on our search for an oil seal knowing that even if we didn't find one; even if the car broke down in Bulgaria; we'd still have someone to look after us. A separate book could be written on the two days we spent looking for the oil seal but suffice to say that there wasn't one in the country and it would take a month to get hold of one after lodging an exorbitant sum of money as a deposit. I mentioned it to a German guy at the camp site one evening who told me that he wasn't surprised; he couldn't even get parts for his bicycle! The German and his wife were doing a two year trip of Eastern Europe, Turkey and Syria on push-bikes, an expedition which made our little sojourn look like a Sunday afternoon drive.

We used the camp site as a base for exploring Sofia and the countryside round about and one day we went for lunch at the Sofia
Sheraton hotel - what a place to have lunch!. Exquisitely decorated and the service couldn't be faulted. Two extra large orange juices, entree of a salad with fetta cheese which just melted on the tongue, two of the best main courses on the menu, absolutely delicious cheesecake for desert and two pots of coffee set us back a whole $10 including a tip for the waiter. Just as with our 50 cent breakfast at the Warsaw Holiday Inn, it just didn't add up - a big international hotel charging $10 for a lunch for two which would have cost at least $50 in Australia. What else is Bulgaria giving the Sheraton? it sure isn't business because the cost of accommodation was a pittance too!

Finding shops in Sofia wasn't easy because they have tiny windows with practically no attempt at a window display and no signs on the outside to let prospective customers know that it's a shop. This may seem peculiar to Westerners but in a society where supply can never meet demand there's no need to advertise. And when it's the state that's responsible for the shortfall, they'd rather the customers didn't know where the shops were. One shop we went into appeared to be small, almost boutique size, but once inside it opened up to a big department store on four floors and took a couple of hours to get around. For this part of the World, it was well stocked with consumer goods mostly made in Russia, Latvia and Lithuania. As, by this time we'd had a fair bit of exposure to Russian goods, we knew roughly into what grade of crap to assign the various items we saw.

Things were certainly cheap enough. We saw an electric oven with two hotplates on top for $10 which although heavy appeared to be well constructed and we tossed up whether or not to buy it but decided in the end that we didn't have enough room in the van. The best atmosphere in Sofia was at the fruit and vegetable market which sold everything from Chinese mushrooms to salsify and colourful squashes, the likes of which we didn't see anywhere else in Europe or Turkey. Wizened old ladies wearing head scarves and with skin like leather sold all manner of vegetation; bundles of dandelion leaves, stinging nettles, sorrel, wild oregano, roka and other herbs picked from the fields and hedgerows.

There were people selling clay pots for olive oil and others with enormous skanes of dyed wool which hung up in lines of various colours giving the whole place a middle eastern rather than European feel to it. The metal workers occupied one corner of the market selling buckets and samovars and agricultural hand tools like scythes and mattocks. All of them squatted naturally on their haunches like Asians - Sofia was some sort of dividing line in this respect - from here on most people sat in this way.

For the non package tour Westerner, finding one's way around Bulgaria in a car presents something of a problem as the maps and road signs are in different alphabets. On all the maps issued by the Bulgarian Government Tourist Agency, the street and place names were in the Latin alphabet but these names bore no relation to the names on the road signs which were in Cyrillic. It would have been a simple matter to have printed major city names in both alphabets on the map but it seems that they just hadn't thought about it. The whole country uses the Cyrillic alphabet, in fact two Bulgarian monks invented it, and although Bulgaria is not noted for its profusion of road signs we'd have been in a lot of trouble if it hadn't been for the fact that Alicja had been compelled to learn this alphabet in school.

When car number plates, restaurant menus, no parking signs, toilet signs and everything else is in another alphabet and the second language is Russian, communication is severely limited for the Westerner but some of the sights to be seen in the country needed no explanation. As we travelled through the country away from the regular tourist spots we saw a way of life unchanged this century. Women in villages beating the family's clothes with clubs as they washed them in road side streams; they worked alongside the men in the fields, drove the donkey carts, threaded tobacco leaves onto long pieces of string and could be seen working as shepherdesses driving small flocks of sheep from place to place to find feed. In the mountains, bee hives dotted the landscape in amongst the olive trees and herds of black goats at intervals blocked the road.

Only fifty kilometres south west of Sofia we stopped to make tea and answer a call of nature and I walked up over a small hill to be confronted with a family, husband and wife and three children, surrounded by sheep and clad only in sheepskins. A scene from the middle ages which I thought had long disappeared from Europe. Their Jackets and leggings were sewn together with a criss cross of sinews, their vests were of coarsely knitted, un-dyed wool and upon their feet were shoes of birch bark. They had, as far as I could see, no dogs and each carried a long, straight pole and no baggage of any kind - perhaps they had a hut nearby?, I didn't find out. I was more startled than them but they were obviously wary of me and when I smiled and offered a cigarette none stepped forward to take it. I don't know why but I was frightened, perhaps it was because they didn't smile back at me, and I scurried back down to the road and the van. It seems such a small incident now, as I relate it on paper but, at the time, it shook me for it was the last thing I expected to see - almost like meeting cavemen.

I recalled a conversation we'd had with a lady in England who said that Bulgaria would surprise us. -You'll be surprised at just how up to date Bulgaria is, she said. She'd been on holiday to a resort on the Black Sea coast four years running where, of course, a totally different impression of the country presents itself. The communist government always put the acquisition of hard currency before looking after it's own people. One of Bulgaria's most vaunted but, by Westerners, seldom visited attractions is the Rila Monastery south of Sofia by 120 kilometres. Seldom visited, probably, because of its location which makes it a little too far from the capital to be on the list of one day bus excursions but without doubt it was, for us, the most spectacular sight since leaving England.

The setting for the monastery is unique and the approach to it through the tree covered mountains with their cool bubbling streams and quaint wooden bridges over the waterfalls is spectacular. The first glimpse of the place is from the top of a mountain almost level with four others which all slope down at a sharp angle to form an inverted cone. Slap bang in the middle, where all the tree covered slopes meet, is the stone walled monastery with its four golden domes. The original monastery was built in the tenth century and from the vantage point of the mountain top with the sun glinting on the domes its' hard to imagine that anything has changed since that time, not a single sign of human habitation - a truly breath taking scene from a bygone age.

The monastery is a large complex built something like a castle in that it is surrounded by high stone walls with huge wooden entrance doors. Once inside the courtyard the high outside walls form four storeyed arched wooden walkways with dozens of rooms leading off them and an Orthodox church sits in the middle. Inside the church, colourful religious frescoes covered every square inch of the ceilings and walls except for the wall behind the altar which was taken up with a gigantic carved wooden altar which took seven years to complete and another two to cover in gold leaf. In the monastery museum was a small wooden cross standing 16" high, said to be the most intricate wood carving in the World. It depicts 140 biblical scenes and has 1500 figures carved in it, most of them no larger than a grain of rice.

The cross took the Monk Raphael over 12 years to carve and the strain on his eyes eventually blinded him making him unable to complete the base. He must have had an incredibly steady hand and his implement could have been no larger than a pin. -Stop playing with your implement or you'll go blind. The museum was full of interesting things but one which caught my attention was a monks passport from the 1400s. The monks from Rila traveled great distances to monasteries in Russia, Jugoslavia and Greece and they carried with them a passport which was an elaborately decorated metal box which had upon the inside of the lid, a silver etching of the founder of the monastery.

I've never been one for the cold, colourless severity of Western churches and cathedrals where God is portrayed as being distant, miserable and unhappy. What I liked about the Rila Monastery was that it was a comfortable and happy place where although you knew you were in a sacred place, you could have farted and it would have been OK. Not like when you fart in English cathedrals and can't show your face in the souvenir shop afterwards. Or perhaps you don't fart in cathedrals? I do and get a great schoolboy kick out of it, in fact by the time we reached the Rila Monastery I'd already farted my way through some of the greatest cathedrals in Europe. These days only a handful of monks still live in the monastery and one of them, a shepherd, we saw every evening taking the sheep for a walk. They behaved like puppies running everywhere, stopping to grab a mouthful of grass and then in unison, they would all turn round to see that the monk was still following them and then run on again.

They felt insecure without him and when he took a turn off the track out of their sight, they all came running back bleating to look for him. To me, never having seen a natural sheep, it was strange to see their long thick tails reaching right down to the ground swaying back and forth as they ran. I had forgotten that sheep are long tailed animals. We had come to Rila for the day but were so impressed that we tried to book into its one and only hotel for a week. The standard wasn't too bad for Eastern Europe but there were no vacancies and, instead, we had lunch there. It was a government owned establishment built during communist times when they had no problem acquiring land in the most suitable places and this was indisputably the most suitable place.

The restaurant terrace afforded an unobstructed view all the way down the valley to the monastery which was the only building in sight. Having travelled to many countries in the course of my fifty years on the planet I can assure the reader that the view from this restaurant makes it one of the best places in the World to take a lousy lunch. But at $2.10 for the two of us we didn't complain. By now, being something of an expert on Eastern European toilets, I decided to check out the facilities in the hotel foyer. The toilet bowls were of Western style rather than footprints but the previous occupants had obviously all been Eastern as evidenced by the pedal bin in the corner which was full of restaurant serviettes which had been used in the absence of toilet paper. They could easily have been flushed down the toilet instead, but old footprint habits die hard - it stank.

Unable to get into the hotel we checked into the camp site next door and were more than happy with our surroundings on the banks of a river surrounded by the mountains and forest. The manager, a good looking man in his thirties spoke perfect English which he'd learned with the aid of tapes and books as well as having done a two season spell as a waiter in a Black Sea holiday resort. His accent was far better than mine! He was most apologetic about the condition of the facilities in his camp site explaining that he'd only been there for a few months and when he'd taken it over, things had been far worse. There had been no water on the site apart from the river and only 6 electric lights despite the fact that the site had been in operation for 25 years and that people made pilgrimages to Rila from all over the World. Like everything else in Bulgaria the camp-site was owned by the state and the state was broke.

Even now there was only one male and one female toilet block with a total of six toilets to serve seven hundred campers. The manager had had to pipe water from 500 metres up the mountain from the only accessible place where he could get a sufficient fall of water to give enough pressure. No pumps had been available to draw water from the river. The Government hadn't allocated any money whatsoever for the improvements he was making and he'd even had to steal the water pipes from a construction site. There was no money for flush toilets or even taps and he'd got around the problem by piping the water straight into the toilet bowls where a torrent of ice cold water, which only minutes before had been snow, raged out of control. Sitting on an ice cold, gurgling, continually flushing toilet/bidet (even taking into consideration the savings to be made on toilet paper) took more getting used to than we could stand and we used the hotel toilets just up the road.

As the only Westerners at the camping site we were accorded the status of royalty and the manager introduced us to two families, friends of his who spoke English and who told us stories about their lives under communism. They said it had always been common knowledge among the population that the fences which formed the borders with Turkey and Greece were all electrified and that anyone who touched one of them would be dead. It wasn't considered necessary to electrify the fences at the remaining borders with Romania and Jugoslavia because nobody wanted to escape to another communist governed country.

It was, at any rate, forbidden for anyone to go within 15 kilometres of a border fence, except at crossings where the guards wouldn't let them out anyway, and anyone caught near a border fence was put in jail. One of the men told us that he was in the army in a detachment guarding the border fence between Bulgaria and Greece. His detachment consisted of forty soldiers and NCOs, one military officer and one political officer. Every day they had a political lecture about how bad things were in Greece and how, in the West, workers were exploited by capitalists. After he'd been there a fortnight and was having yet another of these lectures, he asked the political officer how come the only instructions they received from the military officer were on how to stop Bulgarians crossing to Greece.

He wanted to know what to do if he should encounter any Greeks trying to escape to Bulgaria to get away from these terrible capitalists mentioned in the daily political lectures. The lecturer mumbled something about Bulgarians not having the protection of the Bulgarian government if they were in Western countries but nothing about Greeks entering Bulgaria and he was clearly embarrassed. The next day, Boris, our friend, was woken early and told to pack his things. He was moved to another detachment in another part of the country because they didn't want him infecting the rest of the soldiers with these thoughts. For some reason he still is unable to fathom, he was promoted to sergeant and had to stand all day guarding a flag with another sergeant in the middle of nowhere. The first thing he said upon meeting his counterpart under the flag was -how come you got this job. The other man replied -Oh, I was in this political lecture down on the Greek border and..........

A regular job here brings in 250 leva per month which can buy you 5 pairs of the lousiest quality shoes imaginable. A poor quality Russian Lada car which is a 1960s Fiat made under licence costs 4 1/3 that's four and one third years wages and the waiting list is 15 years long. If you don't want to wait that long, you can buy one from someone who's name has just come up after 15 years of waiting and the going rate is just under double i.e. 8 years wages and at the end of it you get a car that's always breaking down. On the other hand, if you are a high party official or your dad is one, things can be different. The government recently bought 600 new Mazdas from Japan and sold them to party officials and their kids for 5,000 leva each. The official reason for this was that the party officials are poor.

There's no freedom of speech in Bulgaria, say anything against the party or the system and you are in trouble. Our friend said that everyone has a friend or two who can be trusted but you never criticize the state when talking to a stranger because they could be a police informer. One night we asked about a camp-site about 7 kilometres from Rila which we'd seen in the current Bulgarian camping guide. It closed 15 years ago. In the week we spent at Rila we saw only two other Westerners and our van attracted an uncommon amount of attention. People stared quite openly and without embarrassment when we used the electric hot plate outside the door with the pressure cooker on it and would return to their tents and bring the rest of the family over to look at it too.

We felt sorry for them as they lived on bread, fetta cheese and water melons which was all they could get at the local shops and they didn't even have hot water unless they light a fire. I was sitting one evening at a portable table at the side of the van typing notes for this book on a lap top computer, a pack of Western cigarettes at my side on the ground and a steaming cup of coffee on the table in front of me. I heard a rustle and looked up to see that I had an audience of forty to fifty people. I didn't know what to do and was overcome with a feeling of disgusting and undeserved wealth. I didn't want to pack up and deprive them of their show nor did I want to stay and feel the embarrassment so I turned the lap top around to let them see the screen and beckoned them to come closer.

They all stood shy faced but not budging until one little boy looked up at his father and got the nod of approval. He came across to where I was sitting and then everybody followed. Nobody said a word but they all bent down to see the screen and then passed my ash tray and lighter around so that everybody could get a look at it. When they'd all seen the computer I shut it down and they retired to their tents. They'd been terribly shy and their shyness could easily have been taken for a kind of hostility because it was accompanied by solemn facial expressions and a refusal to smile. The evening before we left, we caused something of a sensation with our Polish agricultural sprayer. After filling it with warm water we took it down to the river to wash our hair, me standing in the river and pumping the bottle whilst spraying Alicja's hair and vice versa. (I'll say one thing about my wife, in all the time I've known her, she's never had a dirty vice versa). All the kids gathered round and a guy who had been fishing downstream moved up so that he could watch us. As word spread, the whole camp site turned out to watch us and we felt distinctly uncomfortable. Upwards of two hundred people stood on the banks staring at us and not one of them cracked a smile.