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Bulgaria Is Full of Kind Strangers & Bears
Here you go: a lively, descriptive, sometimes deceptively cheerful recounting of a time when my well-being (and maybe even my life) was at the mercy of winter storms and rugged strangers.
Like the actual experience itself, this section of Soul Shaping Tails will end too soon.
Enjoy.
We were rescued by a mountain of a man — a self-proclaimed champion of the 100-mile barefoot race in Japan back in ’92. Or maybe it was South Korea. His English was bad; my Bulgarian was worse. But he was strong and eager and drove a car that could outrun the bears.
By the time we’d met him, I’d been reduced to a tear-stained, soggy human being. Everything ached. Finally sheltered from the brutal winter storm in a small cantina which the British would have called a canteen, I held the hot tea in my pink and clammy fingers. I had pulled my unsteady metal stool as close as was possible to the warmth of the cracking fire licking the inside of the stove. Len did the same, and we watched as steam rose from our soaked-through jeans. We still had over 13 kilometres to walk toward the only village that we hoped would offer a bus ride home. We hoped that…
