Back on The Cusp (prelude to flying saucer III)

So ... getting to where I am now has involved several highs, but also a number of fairly intense lows. 

As I write this, my overriding thought is basically “I’ve put everything into this flying saucer thing – DAMN, it better be good!” 

That probably isn't the best frame of mind to be in when you're going into an 'adventure'. It's how I feel, though. Shit has gone down. Some of it has been great - like detouring to visit Span, Jits and their family in lovely Antwerp, on my way back to Bulgaria - but some of it has been ... well, not so great.

I think my mistake was leaving my summer camp in Finland early. If there was an “and it all went wrong from there” moment, that was almost certainly it. 

Picture the scene, though: I’m having an after-lunch cigarette at the college where I work in Anjalankoski, in idyllic regional Finland, and the head administrator Alexei is there in our little 'smoking pagoda' with his lady friend. 

He says to me “Entoni, would you like to go to Sweden?”. I ask “When?”, and he replies “At about three o’clock”. He’s paying for the ferry ticket, which ordinarily would set me back about 120 Euros.

It’s the last day of this particular camp (they go in two-week cycles, which is to say that every two weeks one group of students leaves and another turns up on buses that come from Russia), and that means today we're having performances. These involve teachers and students working together on a little stage production for maybe the last 2-3 days of the camp, and then presenting it on the final afternoon.

I obviously don’t want to miss seeing my class perform (especially after being so inspired by my 14-year-old 'music supervisor' Anja, who pretty much pulled the whole thing out of the fire single-handedly), so I bargain: 

“Is there another ferry that goes a bit later?”

Alexei thinks. “I’ll go and check”, he says. 

We agree that I’ll sail from Turku (three hours away by car) at 9pm, and that Alexei will drive me. So I get to watch my guys perform, then I hug them and let them write stuff on me with board markers, and then I leave.  

And there you have it: the decision which set the “everything went wrong” ball rolling. 

The essential problem here is that when another person suddenly suggests out of the blue that I go to another country which I hadn’t planned on visiting, and says “Let's do it today!”, I simply can’t resist. 

And I must say, the journey itself was really enjoyable, in a weird sort of way. We sailed out through the Turku Archipelago, which I’ve mentioned before in these pages as a place that really inspires me. It’s a vast slick of about 2,000 islands off Finland's south-western coast, and some of these islands are for sale. A few are quite large, with whole villages/towns occupying them. Others are mere islets with just one or two houses, or with no human habitation at all.

ISLAND-SPOTTING AT DUSK

Turku Archipelago, off the coast of Finland, 31.07.14

I flew over the archipelago a few years ago, but seeing it from ground level was perhaps even more exciting, because I got a stronger sense of what it would be like if I ever did decide to pursue that whole ‘live on your own island’ dream.

I also got to enjoy some live entertainment on the ferry, because there’s a bar on deck 10 (near the top) where an acoustic live show happens. I hadn't planned to watch the show, but there was a bizarre moment when I was walking past the entrance to the bar, on my way outside for a cigarette, and I heard the following coming from the stage:

“So, what about Australia? Has anyone been there?”

This came at the end of the singer’s rendition of Sweet Home Alabama, so I'm guessing he must have preceded that song with a question about whether any of his audience had visited the US state in the song title, and that he was going to play an Australian song next. But it was just so weird to hear such a remark while making my way around a Nordic cruise ship, on which I was possibly the only Australian passenger. 

(It was  greeted, btw, with total silence).

I froze for a second, not knowing what to do. Should I speak up? In the end, I decided not to. I just headed outside and continued inspecting islands, considering which one I was going to buy. 

As I closed the door, though, I heard the singer start playing the song which his question had referred to. And believe me, until you’ve heard Land Down Under* sung in a Swedish accent on a ferry off the coast of Finland after not having set foot in the country of your birth for seven years, there's a level of weird cultural displacement that you've yet to experience. 

So that was fun. Or at least, it was a pleasantly intriguing mild headfuck. 

Between the overnight voyage to Stockholm and this present moment, essentially four main things have happened:

The first was the camp in Sweden, which I didn't really enjoy. It was, quite frankly, just a bit dull. Unlike the Finnish camps, there are only two teachers in the Swedish one. The other teacher was a charming, soft-spoken American woman called Kelli ... but see, Kelli lives in Stockholm, so after lessons she goes back to the city to get on with her normal life. 

That leaves me pretty much stuck in the camp venue alone – and the venue in question is Sweden’s National Sports Training Complex. 

On the up side that means free gym, and meeting a few interesting people who come to the camp as part of United Nations development projects and the like. On the downside, those people are in the minority. Most of your fellow campers are the Swedish equivalent of folks you’d expect to find at the Australian Institute of Sport, or at a similar facility in any other country. They’re loud, they’re in great enough shape to constantly remind you of your own physical disrepair, and on top of that, many of them are just plain annoying.

A particular source of irritation was the Swedish female gymnastics team, and I mention this because I actually found it quite amusing that I was so annoyed by them. 

On the day they arrived, I remember them swanning past me in single file while I was eating lunch in the dining area. A few hours later, a Hungarian guy who I’d made friends with passed a comment along the lines of “Whoooooaa ... check out that Swedish Gymnastics team, eh?” He’d also been having lunch when they made their grand entrance, and he’d been quite impressed.

At the time when he made this remark, I was still quite poorly acquainted with the team members and I was able to genuinely agree with my Hungarian friend that they were indeed quite attractive to look at.  

Two days after that, I’d pledged to shove a live eel down the shirt of the next Swedish gymnast who I heard giggling for no apparent reason – and for an impossibly long period – while I was trying to concentrate and/or think and/or not go completely insane courtesy of their girly racket.

Moving on ... the second thing was that, at the end of the Swedish camp, I either lost my salary or had it stolen. I think I’d actually slightly prefer the second option, because if the loss of half my summer pay was entirely my own fault, then that makes me kind of a colossal idiot.

LOVE THOSE WINDOWS!

Antwerp, Belgium, 13.08.14

Thing the Third was visiting Span and Jits (two old and dear friends) in Belgium, which was awesome. Antwerp turns out to be a really beautiful and cool city - a fact which I never would’ve suspected had I not gone there. And of course, time spent with these two fabulous human beings (and their kids, and also Span’s mum as it turned out) is always time well spent.

SERIOUS LESSON FROM A BEER EXPERT

Antwerp, Belgium, 14.08.14

Among other things, Span took me to a couple of great little bars and introduced me to the endless diversity of Belgian beer. Probably the best of said bars was this one next to the cathedral, into which the publican has crammed around 1,100 religious statues. Collecting Marys, Apostles and so on is not something that ever would've occurred to me as a good way to decorate a bar, but somehow it really works.  

(Btw, subsequent to a conversation I had with one of the Russian camp leaders in Finland, I also used being in Antwerp as an excuse to do a few little experiments in 'reflective photography'. Don't think I'm in danger of winning any prizes, but it was fun.)

MY LITTLE EXPERIMENT IN 'REFLECTIVE PHOTOGRAPHY'

Antwerp, Belgium, 13.08.14

And here are some examples of people who really know what they're doing, which inspired me to try the technique. You should definitely follow this link, because the page contains some incredible images:

Reflective Photography - 25 Beautiful Examples

Finally, there was my attempt to get out of Belgium and back to Bulgaria. 

That was a total nightmare involving missed flights, being trapped inside airports for hours at a time, public holiday crowds in Brussels that threatened to crush me as I tried to get my wheelie bag through them, weird, overpriced and unpleasant hotels in the middle of nowhere, and a bunch of other stuff which, when added together, seriously made me question why I travel at all.

Yeah, I know ... when I’m questioning that, things are pretty much at rock bottom! 

In fact, when I woke up this morning in Brussels, I’d more or less  decided that this would be my last holiday for a long, long while. Things had just spiralled out of control, financially and psychologically. Courtesy of the various screw-ups - coupled with the fact that both mine and Yuliya’s computers chose this summer to die, within weeks of each other - I was looking at paying back this holiday for a good portion of the next academic year. “And for what?”, I asked myself about 273 times.

So that’s the headpsace I was in as I dove into August 16th. It’s now technically finished - these being the wee hours of the 17th. But after about 15 hours of solid travelling, I’m well over 2,000 kms from where I started.  

I’m also back in Kazanlak, about 20kms from Buzludzha and the Communist Flying Saucer. And there are three other people in this hotel who are going there with me tomorrow. I haven’t actually seen them here yet, because I arrived at 1am. In fact, there’s one who I haven’t even met. But they’re here. I’ll see them at breakfast.

Also, they’re all Bulgarian, which is perhaps as it should be. After all, Buzludzha is their national monument, not mine :-)

At least one of the people with whom I’m going up the mountain tomorrow thinks I’m mad for being here now, and told me so while I was in Brussels. I was talking to her online yesterday, sitting in a cosy cafe and sipping white wine (which is about the only affordable thing in Belgium), while explaining all the difficulties I’d had. The actual word she used was “stubborn”, but then I prompted her a bit and she revised upwards to “insane”. 

She went on to suggest that maybe the cosmos didn’t want me to see the inside of Buzludzha right at the moment, even going so far as to advise that I consult the I Ching. 

Obviously, that only increased my determination to get here.

And so, at 12:30am I found myself winding towards Kazanlak in a taxi with a Serb driver called Todor, who offered me a cigarette en route and asked if I'd like to hear some Serbian narodna muzika (folk music) to help us on our way. 

Great clouds of steam were rising from the highway, the result of earlier rains combined with summer temperatures and high humidity. As well as producing a weird ‘alt world’ atmosphere, they were making it quite difficult to see, and thankfully Todor kept slowing down to compensate for the poor visibility. 

There were moments when no sign of human existence was visible anywhere - no houses, no distant lights from a town, no oncoming traffic. Just us, the steam, the narodna muzika and the darkness. 

Perfect.

So ... for all of the reasons above, along with several others, I'm overwhelmingly glad to be back in Bulgaria :-) 

Now off to sleep, to the melodic sounds of Bulgarian crickets. Obviously I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow. 

Good night!


(*An iconic Australian song from the 1980s.)

Ten Reasons Not to Miss ...

Location: Oslo's Gardermoen airport.
Time: just after 1am.

I landed here an hour ago. My connecting flight to Helsinki leaves tomorrow morning at half past ten, and the cheapest, most basic hotel nearby costs about 80 Euros. Its reviews on booking.com are strikingly vitriolic, and getting there on the airport shuttle will set me back another 15 Euros.

Naturally, I'm not going to pay that. So I'm bedding down on the airport floor.

The particular spot I've chosen is a kids' playground, surfaced with something like astro-turf which is marginally more comfortable than the cold, hard tiles that predominate elsewhere.

I've taken up position directly beneath a piece of play equipment shaped like an aeroplane, designed for small folk to crawl through. At the moment, there's an adult asleep inside it, arms folded over his chest like a movie vampire in a movie vampire's coffin. There are about half a dozen others around me, shifting and starting in their sleep.

The website 'sleepinginairports.com' places Gardermoen at number five on the list of best airports in the world for a good night's rest. Personally I'd have to disagree ... though admittedly, I haven't tried all the others.

Aside from the discomfort, the task of falling asleep is further complicated by a whirl of thoughts. Tomorrow I start summer camp, and the first day of camp is always intense ... so that's on my mind of course. Also, I'll be back in fabulous Finland, which means that "Mmmm, Finland" feeling has begun creeping up on me ...

Even more than that, though, my brain is replaying things I've seen and heard over the past few days. It's been an extraordinary time, with lots of new information to cram in, 'cause this week I finally did one of those things I've been planning to do for years and years ... I went to Sarajevo!

*cue cheers, streamers etc*

I often find that, when a particular city really inspires and excites me, it's quite difficult to write about afterwards. I end up sounding like I'm advertising the city, which is really not the point of Ranting Manor. So I re-wrote this entry several times, trying to make it not sound like a travelogue.

Then I thought: "Screw it! Embrace your inner travel brochure-writing hack! Ride that wild cliche-o-coaster right to the bitter end!" And, you know, other thoughts like that.

So ... here are approximately ten reasons why you should absolutely, positively, and without further ado, visit the heck out of Sarajevo.

REASON #1: THE JOURNEY   

You can fly to Sarajevo from several European capitals (said the flight magazine writer to his audience of nervous flyers, trying desperately to distract themselves from the reality of being 35,000 feet above Earth inside something that weighs more than a house). But you shouldn't.

Why? Well, because you can also arrive by bus, which generally entails travelling through about half of Bosnia-Herzegovina. And that's a super-worthwhile experience ... assuming you're one who's partial to a bit of a road trip, of course :-)

  'MINI-FJORDS' AT DUSK

Near Zvornik, Bosnia-Herzegivona, 15.07.14 

Looking at the distance on Google maps, you'd estimate maybe a four-hour ride from Belgrade, depending on border formalities. But you'd be wrong. Because of the terrain, the bus takes more than seven hours.

You spend most of that time winding past 'mini-fjords' and fjells, sleepy villages where the houses are a tiny bit reminiscent of Swiss chalets (only without the obsessive-compulsive neatness), heavily sedimented rivers and streams, and impressive peaks towering skyward, close enough to the road that you frequently pass signs warning of falling rocks. And since there are basically no passing lanes, you end up snail-pacing along behind trucks loaded with timber for extended periods, as the forests glide past you in slow motion. It feels like the opposite of time-lapse photography.

So yeah ... a frikkin' long journey, to be sure, but a memorable one :-)


REASON #2: THE WELCOME 

On the evening when I arrived, I'd set out from Belgrade at around four in the afternoon. By the time we pulled into Sarajevo's barely-lit and somewhat creepy bus station, it was after eleven.

I was concerned that my small, family-run hotel might not have anyone on night duty. I needn’t have worried, though; the owner and his friends were sitting in the lobby bar, where they seemed to remain almost permanently for the next three days. Before lugging my wheelie bag up two flights of stairs, the owner gave me a warm, sympathetic smile, and handed me a complimentary shot of rakia (slightly sweetened plum brandy – a classic Balkan drink with a 40% kick), to ease the pain of the journey.

I could tell I was going to like this place ;-)


REASON #3: THE TOUR 

I'm not always a fan of the City Tour. Having said that, though, there are some cities in which it really does seem appropriate to join a tour, just to get your bearings and decide which bits you want to explore later at your leisure. Sarajevo definitely falls into that category. There's so much going on just within the architectural fabric of the city, you really need a bit of orientation to help you make sense of it all.

So I signed up for the tour on my first day, and I'm glad I did. Staring around and gazing up in awe, I could fade in and out as needed. Sometimes I'd be focused on the tour guide's nuggets of information; other times he'd be a distant buzz as I lost myself in the details of the street. It dragged a bit towards the end, but it was a necessary intro to a city that's as layered as the outfit of an Australian tourist on an Arctic dog-sledding expedition.

  HAPSBURG ARCHITECTURE ON TITO STREET 

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.2014 

Btw, the tour I took begins on the elegant Ulica Marshala Tita – Tito Street. This is actually a great starting point, because it entails a discussion of the man more associated with the word "Yugoslavia" than any other, and whose death led to its break-up (directly or indirectly, depending on which account you read).

Walking down a 'Tito street' anywhere in the former Yugoslavia is quite a lot like walking down any street in the former USSR that has a statue of Lenin at its main intersection (and there are a ton of those!). It makes you think about the convolutions of history, and about how we 20th/21st century folk manage to take these in our stride, getting on with our little lives while the world around us goes through serial upheaval.

Pretty damn intense, in other words :-)


REASON #4: TWO 'OLD TOWNS' FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

Ulica Marshala Tita is actually the main drag in the Hapsburg part of town, and as my little walking tour progressed, I became more acquainted with that district. Interestingly, though, it's just one of two 'Old Towns' here.

To explain this, I need to delve into a bit of history.

Let's begin with a war. This is Europe, after all – historical home of the "How about we go next door and confirm our Divine Right to rule by killing our neighbours?" approach to international relations.

So ... a couple of entries back, I mentioned the Russo-Turkish war of the 1870s. Not a hugely well-known conflict in the world at large, but Balkans-wise it turns out to be über-significant. It set the stage for a lot of what came later, and in a sense, its outcome still reverberates through the region today.

For example, after the war there was something called 'The Treaty of Berlin', by which Sarajevo was signed over from the Ottoman Turks to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It remained part of their territory until after World War I, at which point a rather intriguing new country called Yugoslavia (which means "land of the southern Slavs") party-popped into existence.

In the intervening 40 years, Austro-Hungary – ruled at that time by the house of Hapsburg – put a fair amount of effort into persuading reluctant Sarajevans that they were living under worthy, responsible rulers. They introduced electricity, tram lines and a bunch of other stuff designed to coax the population out of their tiny alleys filled with fragrant shisha smoke, and into the modern European world.

LOOK - WE'RE IN BUDAPEST!

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

They also vastly extended the city – but very sensitively for the time, they didn't flatten existing buildings and construct new ones over the top of them. Instead, they left the Ottoman centre completely intact, and started construction where the old part ended, extending its main street to the west.

This decision is one that I think almost every visitor to Sarajevo must appreciate and marvel at. In the 19thC, Sarajevo had already long been known as a 'meeting point between east and west', but the new centre dramatically accentuated that idea. Now when you go there, you can stand at the confluence of the Ottoman town and the Hapsburg town, where east literally meets west – at least from an architectural point of view. Someone has even helpfully painted a compass on the ground, to mark the spot.

NO WAIT ... WE'RE IN TURKEY!

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

The Ottoman town, meanwhile, is beautiful. Along the main streets are elegant mosques and medrassahs, a karavanserai and a bezistan (ancient trading place, currently being restored).

Radiating out from the main thoroughfares are poky little laneways, some barely wide enough to squeeze through. If you peer down to the end of them, you find that some lead into hidden courtyards, while others offer a view of the green hills that surround the city. Sometimes the low awnings of the two-storey buildings almost touch in the middle, so you have the impression of walking through a covered maze.

PURIFICATION FONT OUTSIDE THE CENTRAL MOSQUE

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

Granted, you do have to share all of this with a fair number of tourists, but still, it's a pretty magical kinda place.


REASON #5: THE 20thC STARTED HERE

When I was at high school, Modern History was my favourite subject by a long, long way. I just couldn't get enough of it, and I even took an extra unit in which people who knew stuff tried to cram the complexities of revolutionary theory into my 17-year-old brain. It was mind-bending at the time. In fact, it still is.

Of course, the two World Wars were pretty huge on the syllabus, and so we talked a lot about why they happened – both in terms of underlying causes, and of the 'sparks' which ignited each conflict.

In the case of WWI, the spark (as I'm sure most of you know) was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a jittery young lad named Gavrilo Princip, who was part of an organisation called The Black Hand. And that assassination took place in Sarajevo.

To be more specific, it took place on this street corner here:

FRANZ FERDINAND ASSASSINATION MUSEUM

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzigovina, 16.07.14

The story is worth recounting, because there's definitely more than just a whiff of wtf? about it.

See, the Archduke had already had a bomb thrown at him on that day in June 1914. And it had happened on the very same street – on the very same block, in fact. He'd been on his way to an official engagement with his wife Sophie, and the boulevard was lined with spectators. A few of them were members of the Black Hand (who nowadays we'd probably label a 'terrorist organisation', without analysing what that actually means beyond the fact that they were shooting at people and they didn't have a permission note from the government).

Most of the Black Hand guys were armed, but for various reasons, they were unable to do anything at the crucial moment. Several of them, it seems, were just catastrophically disorganised – if you were going to make a comedy movie out of an assassination plot, this would probably be the one to choose. But the third guy in line had a bomb, and he threw it at Franz and Sophie's car.

In a display of ineptitude that appears to have been the Black Hand's unintentional trademark, he missed Franz and Sophie, and blew up the car next to theirs. He then swallowed poison and leapt into the nearby river, but the poison didn't work and he couldn't manage to drown himself, so he was fished out and arrested. Several of his cohorts, who'd been standing along the street concealing their various weapons, were collared too. Most of them died in prison, but one went on to become a history professor.

At this point, one has to wonder what could've motivated the Archduke to attempt another 'pass the crowds and wave regally' stunt on this street, where he'd nearly been blown up just hours before – especially when he was in an open car with his wife sitting next to him. But there you go; never underestimate the idiocy of a European aristocrat, or the disaster that may result from it.

So anyway, after his meeting, off went Archie Dukie down the boulevard once more. Gavrilo Princip was sitting in a tea house, no doubt wondering to himself whether there were any other violent anti-government groups in Bosnia who weren't totally useless, and whether they'd accept him as a member. He saw the Duke's car approaching, and – probably unable to believe his luck – he stood up, went outside and shot Franz Ferdinand dead. Then, you know, political squabbles, Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, Germany declares war on Russia, and a bunch of other European countries all jump in, like baseball players leaping on top of their fighting teammates to form a big pile of flailing guys in numerically-coded pyjamas.

THE 'KENNEDY MOMENT'

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

Btw, just for its curiosity value, here's the car that Franz and Sophie were in when he took the hit. (That's her parasol on the back seat.) Their romance was apparently a favourite topic of newspaper columnists, because the princely Franz Ferdinand had come under huge pressure to marry an actual, pre-selected princess, but he'd refused; he was just too head-over-heels for his Sophie. And although she was actually from a wealthy aristocratic family, the European press painted her as the 'ordinary girl' who had captured the Archduke's heart, and the public's hearts as well. So they were the Charles and Di of their time, I guess you could say.

Looking at this from street level made me think that the incident in 1914 must have been, in a sense, almost Europe's 'Kennedy moment'. But it also re-kindled memories of Year 11 Modern History lessons, in which the masterful Brother Sean (probably my favourite teacher ever, and certainly one of the people responsible for igniting my interest in the past) had brought these events to life so brilliantly and evocatively.

So yeah: an essential street corner if you're a Modern History nerd ... like, say, me :-)

REASON #6: THE FOOD

Balkan cuisine is vastly under-rated. I mean, if you asked your friends to make a list of countries they'd visit on a 'world food tour', how many of them would name a Balkan nation? My guess would be approximately none ... whereas personally, I think there's every reason why they should.

For a start, if you like white cheese (which I do), stop reading and get on a plane right now. I actually don't think I had any idea how good cheese could be until I first visited Bulgaria. Then this month, I found out it's a region-wide thing; you can just as easily find yourself doing the white cheese-swoon in any Balkan country. And I do.

BALKAN DELICACIES

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 17.07.14

Then there are the meatballs, and the super-fresh organic salads, and the little fried mushrooms, and things wrapped in grape leaves and cabbage leaves, and so on ad infinitum.

In Sarajevo, you also get the added twist of the Ottoman influence (although to be fair, it's noticeable in the eastern parts of Bulgaria too). And the results are definitely Food Tour-worthy!

REASON #7: THE SHEER IMMANENCE OF THINGS

At the start I mentioned that I was having trouble sleeping on the airport floor, and that things I'd seen and heard in recent days were adding to the difficulty. Here's an example of something that's been on replay:

“You see those houses just there?”

Five heads turn away from a mildly pretty Jewish cemetery, to regard two unremarkable two-storey semis, each with a windowless, white-washed wall on one side.

"Mm-hmm".

“I was in this one, and the Serbs, they were in that one. Sometimes in the evenings, we could hear them talking and playing cards, probably drunk. And then the next morning, they would try to take our house and we would try to take theirs ... you know?”

"No", I thought, "I don't know. But you clearly do, and that blows my mind."

That little vignette occurred yesterday afternoon, as I was standing on a hilltop overlooking Sarajevo's old centre, half-way through another tour (this one called 'The Siege Tour'). The guy doing most of the talking was a wiry, middle-aged Bosnian man, who drove us around to a series of locations in the hills and near the airport, showing us various 'hot spots' and tearing through half a pack of cigarettes in the process.

In most European cities, the tour guides really know their history. They learn it, they memorise it, and they repeat it every day. But in Sarajevo, some of the guides simply have no use for all that study; I mean, why would you need to study historical events that you were actually a part of?

More arresting still is the fact that this guy's first-hand experiences of being besieged in his own city are far from unique. They're not even unusual. Nearly every Sarajevan over the age of about 25 has at least one ‘siege story’ to tell ... which is perhaps not overly surprising, when you consider that the Siege of Sarajevo (from Feb 1992 to the end of 1995) was the longest of the 20th Century – even longer than the Battle of Stalingrad or the Leningrad Blockade. To find a comparable one in Europe, you have to go back to Gibraltar in the 1780s. And the Sarajevo Siege is in living memory of, say, at least half the people you see there in the street.

A 'SARAJEVO ROSE'

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

As I said: mind thoroughly blown.

You sense this immanence of history everywhere as you walk around. Sometimes it's overt – the museums will put on exhibitions with names like 'Srebrenica 20 years on', and things like that – but elsewhere it's more subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) woven into the architectural fabric. You look up, and you see a whole mess of plaster marks which show you where bullet holes have been repaired. Or you look down and see a 'Sarajevo Rose' – a splotch of red paint marking the spot where a citizen was killed by a shell or rocket impact.

Notice, btw, that behind the 'rose' pictured here you can see the bottom of a wall. That wall belongs to one of the city's cathedrals, and the honeycombing that starts about 20cm off the ground is the result of shrapnel. Chilling.

Sometimes it's even in what you don't see.

During the siege, foreign journalists covering the story took refuge in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, which suddenly became the world's most recognisable ugly mid-range hotel. Although both sides had agreed not to fire on it, the building took any number of indirect hits, and I remember seeing footage of it looking decidedly embattled, with smoke pouring from windows and so on.

HOLIDAY INN

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

Today the wounds are gone, and the building has been completely restored to its original hideous yellow-and-orange self. It stands fairly near the old centre, surrounded by a small, neat garden. But although it's on a main street, its environs are strangely quiet and unpopulated. This near-silent calm, and the utter lack of anything that betrays the hotel's recent past, are more than a little creepy.


REASON #8: THE NIGHT LIFE

When I travel alone I rarely regret it, but Sarajevo was an exception to this, just because the night life is so great.

As I mentioned earlier, I'd come here from Belgrade, where after about 10pm it's all about the 'splats'. These are old boats moored on the banks of the river Sava and converted into pretentious night clubs for beautiful people. They're probably fun if you're under 25 and so hip that it hurts; but as I'm neither of those things, it left me cold and mildly nauseous.

A few scattered clubs in the Hapsburg parts of Sarajevo offer something vaguely similar to that, but the bulk of the night spots are outdoors, in alleyways and small hidden squares. At around the same time a battery of second-rate DJs commence their mediocre noodlings in Belgrade, these little Sarajevan nooks fill with people, drinking coffee and wine, smoking nargile (tobacco pipes) and sitting on tiny plastic chairs under the low-hanging eaves. It's one of the most intimate nightlife settings I've seen anywhere ... and apparently it goes on well into the a.m. hours, every night of the week.

Hence my slight regret that I wasn't there with friends. It would've been great :-)


REASON #9: THE UNEXPECTED

You see things in Sarajevo that tend to undercut your expectations and presumptions about the world.

QUR'AN-READING BABUSHKA

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

A small example: two nights ago I was on the tram into town, sitting behind a woman who for all intents and purposes looked like your archetypal eastern European babushka (granny). Then I glanced over her shoulder, and noticed that the book she was perusing was actually the Qur'an, and she was reading it in the original Arabic. This is not something you'd be likely to see in other parts of southern or Eastern Europe ... but in Sarajevo, it makes a localised kind of sense.

I couldn't bring myself to photograph the babushka directly – it just seemed like too much of an intrusion – so instead I took a shot of her reflection in the tram window.

Likewise yesterday when we were on the Siege Tour, there were some truly unexpected moments. Besides seeing wild horses on a mountaintop, and the burned out ruins of a fabulous late Soviet-era luxury hotel (looking suitably angular and science fiction-esque), we were also set loose by our guide at the top of a disused bob-sled run.

ENTER THE BOB SLED!

Hills around Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 17.07.14

This was built for the 1984 Winter Olympics, which were held in Sarajevo, but it fell into complete decline afterwards. Nature has since moved in to cover the whole thing with a forest canopy, while graffiti artists have plastered the concrete with a rainbow of colour. Walking the length of it, suspended in mid-air, you get a sense of lightness, even as your mind os casting back to try and work out what it must have been like to be here when it was operational. Coupled with that, you also feel a tiny bit intrepid for allowing yourself to enter an overgrown passage on a secluded mountainside in a landmine-infested country ... but it's so beautiful up there, you just kind of go with it. And so the bob-sled becomes another of Sarajevo's unexpected little wonders :-)


REASON #10: YOU'LL MAKE ME JEALOUS!

I have this weird thing where, when people go to places I'd love to visit myself, I feel an idiotic sense of jealously. I said right at the start that Sarajevo has been in my sights for years, and in fact I've applied several times for jobs there. So every time I met someone who'd just recently been, I burned with envy.

The thing is, with some places, once I've been there the envy goes away. But with others, it intensifies. I suspect Sarajevo may turn out to be of the latter kind. When I left last night, it was with a sense of regret, and in the knowledge that there was so much more to see than I'd managed to cram into three days. Of course I had the "Never mind, I'll be back here" thought, but I know that a desire to return doesn't always translate into a future opportunity to actually do so.

So ... go on, then! Go to Sarajevo and make me jealous. You know you want to :-)

See you!



* What is the plural of "metropolis" anyway? I experimented with 'metropoles' (pronouncing the last bit 'eez') and 'metropolises' before settling on 'metropoli', but I think they all sound ok.

The Flying Saucer Chronicles (Part 2)

Not sure why, but in these pages I always seem to end up writing about taxi rides.

Perhaps there's something blogworthy about the experience of arriving in a new place and immediately jumping into a car owned by a 'native'. I mean, I've had plenty of taxi rides that were wholly uneventful, but also plenty that weren't ... and for whatever reason, I often feel the urge to tell you about them.

And so ... here's another one.

At the railway station in Kazanlak I grabbed a taxi, because I frankly had no clue where my hotel was. On the way there, I saw an amazing thing. It wasn't the thing, but it was enough to put my heart firmly in my throat.

My friendly, chatty taxi driver had told me that on a clear day, you could actually glimpse Buzludzha from Kazanlak's town centre. Obviously that was a cue for me to start scanning the peaks which delimit the town's horizons ... but before I'd even finished the visual scan, the driver shot down my hopes. "You haven't chosen a very clear day to arrive", he told me.

One thing I could make out, though, was the Shipka monument. This huge marble obelisk commemorates the Russian/Bulgarian victory over the Ottomans that I mentioned previously, and it stands a few peaks away from Buzludzha at a slightly higher elevation. That in itself was kind of thrilling; while researching Buzludzha I'd seen loads of pics of the Shipka monument on the internet, and so actually looking out the window of a taxi and seeing the real thing hovering there in the sky gave me a little shiver.

This was going to be an amazing 24 hours.

Well, maybe.

When I told my taxi driver about my destination, he offered to drive me to Buzludzha and back for 40 Lev (about 20 Euros) the following day. However, that wouldn't include going inside. Given the monument's advanced state of structural disrepair, it was essential that there be someone else there with me if/when I broke in. If I fell through a floor or something dislodged from the ornate ceilings and landed on me, I wanted someone else around to call for help – though exactly how to do that in this part of the world I really had no idea. Plus, it was just an experience that I wanted to share, 'cause it seemed like fun.

So while the 20 Euro taxi ride was a better plan than any I'd had up to that point, I figured I should keep looking. I'd keep my taxi driver in mind as a last resort, though. He could at least get me up the mountain to see the monument from the outside.

I think it was around 7:30pm when I arrived at the hotel, which was separated from one of the nice parts of town by a spooky alleyway. The road surface had deteriorated to the point of non-existence, so it was one of those times in former Communist countries where you can have an 'off-road experience' in an urban environment.

"Bonus!", I thought :-)

After a quick wash, a check of the wi-fi connection (working!) and a few minutes of just contemplating life on my balcony, I headed outside and negotiated the spooky alleyway. I was thinking I'd find a corner shop, buy something simple to eat, and have a 'night in' catching up on emails, Manor entries etc. I also figured that now I was here, it might be worth doing one more search for people in Kazanlak who could join me for a trek to the saucer the following day.

Unfortunately there were no corner shops to be found. But there were a couple of 'ethno-restaurant complexes' (a new term for me) which looked and smelled very inviting.

I thought "Alright then ... let's do the ethno-restaurant thing, whatever that might entail." I had my laptop, so I could search for fellow expeditioners while enjoying the ethno-meal. Who knows? I might even find a mad local there who wanted to break into a decrepit national monument with me.

As I was approaching one of these complexes – a hotel, bar and restaurant in one, and probably a spa and casino as well – I heard English being spoken in the street. It was coming from two guys who were unloading some things from the boot of a car.

They looked slightly unconventional, so I approached them, thinking there was just a slight chance that they were on a similar mission to my own.

Of course, that would've been too good to be true. But they weren't entirely 'mission free' either.

In fact, one of these guys, a Serb called Miloje, was a professional painter of orthodox icons. His very talkative companion, Larry, was a photographer and a devout member of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Michigan, USA. Some time back, Miloje had been commissioned to decorate Detroit's Serb Orthodox cathedral, while Larry had been commissioned to photograph Miloje's work there. This had sparked a fruitful partnership, and now Miloje was helping Larry achieve one of his dreams: namely, a monastery tour of the Balkans.

I had dinner with these guys in the ethno-restaurant, and it turned out to be one of those dinners that last till midnight. It was clear that we were from very different worlds, with very different world views, but that we had a lot to talk about nonetheless.

They were headed to the town of Veliko Turnovo, a stunning jewel set into a gorge on the opposite side of the Shipka Pass from Kazanlak. (I visited V. Turnovo in 2011. You can read my rant about it here, and I recommend you do.) There's a monastery in the town that was on their 'must see' list, so that was the goal for tomorrow. In other words, they were going my way!

Well, not quite ... but almost.

At the end of the night, just before braving Spooky Alley in the darkness, I put a proposal to them. No doubt you can guess what it was.

Miloje and Larry guessed too. I mean, it wasn't  hard; they'd already heard my "Buzludzha is absolutely the most interesting place EVER!" rant, and they knew this was my reason for being in Kazanlak.

I got as far as "Look, I want to propose something to you both, but it's completely ok to say 'no' if you want to", and they filled in the rest. And most crucially, they didn't say "No".

In fact, they said the other thing – the thing I wanted to hear.

I walked back to the hotel feeling hyper-alive, barely able to restrain myself from doing a Happy Dance in Spooky Alley. In the space of a dinner (which was ethno-excellent, btw), I'd gone from "No plan whatsoever" to "I'm definitely going". If I was a devout man like Larry, I probably would've concluded (as he did) that there was a higher power at work in bringing us all to Kazanlak. But I'm not ... so I thanked the Gods of Chance ;-)

After a somewhat sleepless night, I met them at the ethno-complex, and just after 8am we drove out of town and pulled onto the Shipka Highway. We were looking for a sign that said "Кран" (Kran), which was the last town we had to pass before our turnoff.

IN THEM THERE HILLS ...

Road to Buzludzha, Bulgaria, 10.07.14

Right next to the Kran exit we slowed down for a photo op, and just for a second, I caught a glimpse of Buzludzha in silhouette on the mountaintop. It was a genuine pulse-quickening moment. Then we stopped, and I got out of the car to take a pic. But the monument had disappeared. I scanned the peaks (an activity which I guess Bulgarian people must do a lot), and couldn't see it anywhere.

Still managed a few reasonably nice pics, though :-)

After that, the next landmark would be a statue of Dimitar Blagoev, a.k.a. Mr. Socialist Hero from the previous post who organised the fateful Meeting on The Mountain back in 1891.

Of course, statues come in all dimensions, from fuckoff Rio de Janeiro-sized to the kind that carry an "-ette" prefix indicating their teeny-tinyness. We didn't know where Comrade Blagoev would fit on that scale, but since this was a Communist-built statue, I figured it would probably be large and imposing ... and hence easy to spot. Which, thankfully, it was. In fact, standing as he was on the edge of a field, 12ft high with a hefty white column next to him, the dignified founder of Bulgarian Socialism couldn't have been more obvious if he'd been twirling a feather boa and singing 'Hey, Big Spender!', accompanied by a troupe of 72 dancing marmots and a Mariachi band in 12" pink latex platform shoes.

(I clearly haven't slept enough.)

SENTINEL

Road to Buzludzha, Bulgaria, 10.07.14

We turned off the highway and started making our way along a road which quickly got super-steep and windy. Along the way we came across a small team of construction guys pulling up a section of roadway that looked no more pitted and worn than any other part, and an elderly bearded man in a brilliant blue tracksuit, out for what must have been an Odyssey-sized morning walk. I think we also passed one car. Apart from that, we saw no-one else for the 20-ish minutes we spent climbing the mountainside.

Suddenly, we forded a crest (don't you wish you got to say that more often?), rounded a bend, and there it was: the thing I'd been obsessing about for months. It sat there, somewhat indistinct and blueish-looking in the morning haze, surveying the plains below like an alien visitor trying to size up the world it had just inadvertently landed on.

It was fucking magnificent.

From this angle I got a good look at the huge, elongated star set into the tower behind the main building. The star used to glow red at night, like a beacon, and apparently it was visible in Kazanlak and other towns in the region. In the 1980s, there was a rumour that its surface was made of solid ruby. According to one story, some time after the fall of Communism a bunch of guys came up here with Kalashnikovs (what else?) to find out whether the rumour was true. They shot at the star, and parts of its surface shattered and fell to the ground. When the pieces were gathered up and analysed, it turned out that the material these guys had shot out of Buzludzha was nothing more than red glass.

I don't know if that story is true. But in any case, there it was right in front of me: the 'ruby star'.

Cool with a capital everything.

We drove a little further and came to the main gate, beyond which you have to go on foot. The road doesn't end here, but rather than go right up to the monument, it snakes off down the other side of the pass. Getting any closer to Buzludzha therefore means hiking up a steep, precipitous ridge littered about with exposed rock. It's beautiful, but not entirely inviting to the casual country rambler.

Precipitous or not, at this point I was bouncing around like a kid, taking photos (most of which didn't turn out) and going "Wow!" a lot. But I sensed that Larry and Miloje weren't entirely sharing my enthusiasm. They'd told me they had a schedule to keep; after seeing their monastery in Veliko Turnovo, they'd been invited to stay with a friend in Niş (Serbia) that evening, which meant they had quite a lot of driving to do.

So I put the question to them: were we going up there, or not?

SAUCER IN THE HAZE

Buzludzha, Bulgaria, 10.07.14

There was no direct response, but from what was said, the feeling seemed to be "We'd quite like to, but given our other commitments we just don't think we can spare the time". I thought: what could I do? Could I really just walk away from this?

I tried some gentle encouragement, and let some "Well, we've made it this far – why not go the rest of the way?"-type sentiments hang in the air for a while, hoping one of my companions might pick them up and run with them. But I also knew that it would be horribly inappropriate (and almost certainly futile) to get pushy with these guys. They'd been extremely good to me by bringing me this far, given that hulking great communist UFOs were my thing, not theirs. So I accepted the decision ... though it took me a couple of minutes more to actually make my feet move away from Buzludzha, now that it was SO, SO CLOSE.

And that was how I very nearly achieved a 'traveller's dream'.

We wound down the other side of the Shipka Pass, which offered some breathtaking scenery (as Bulgaria will tend to do), emerging in the township of Grabovo where we were presented with another, albeit rather smaller, weird socialist monument to admire. Then it was on to Veliko Turnovo.

INCONGRUOUS SOVIET STATUARY

Grabovo, Bulgaria, 10.07.14

This, btw, was another benefit of travelling with Miloje and Larry. Rather than go back to Kazanlak, I got to go in their direction for a bit, which meant bonus statues and also checking out V. Turnovo in summer. I'd previously been there in winter, so it was wearing a different coat this time to when I saw it last.

Also, I've raved so much about the town since my visit in 2011 that I've actually wondered a few times if I wasn't exaggerating its beauty a little bit. But ten minutes in Veliko Turnovo was enough to allay those concerns; I hadn't exaggerated at all. It's still one of the most beautiful human settlements I've seen in Europe – or anywhere, for that matter.

(Btw, the town is actually a candidate for 'European Cultural Capital' in 2019. I'm just throwing that in as a way of saying I'm not the only one who's noticed its general fabulousness.)

The day ended with drinks and excellent conversation in Sofija with my friend Irena, who kindly offered me her sofa for the night. It had been a spectacular day all round; leaving Veliko Turnovo by bus had taken me through more of the Stara Planina, and I'd had plenty of time to contemplate my growing love for this country as I stared through the window at mist-shrouded peaks in the middle distance.

As you can imagine, though, the whole "Coming so close and not quite getting there" feeling just refused to leave me alone. And it persisted for the next couple of days.

Luckily, Sofija offers plenty of diversions, some of which I'll talk about about in the next rant. But even while enjoying those, there was this feeling of ...

... er, what was it exactly?

Hmmm. Not disappointment, exactly. It was more like a growing sense of grim determination; a "This isn't over, dammit!" kind of sentiment. Which explains why this rant has an epilogue.


EPILOGUE

So, err, let's see ... how to ep this logue in suitable fashion?

Basically, what I want to say is this: me and Buzludzha are not done. Not by a long way. There will be a 'Flying Saucer Chronicles Part 3', because on or around August 16th I'm going back. And this time, I'm going inside.

I've found a couple of crazy folks in Sofija (including Irena) who are are keen to make the journey up to Kazanlak, and then ascend to the monument and break in. There's also an Irish guy called David who's interested, and a few others from various places may join us as well.

The thing is, at this stage I'm thinking "The more, the merrier". We'll spend one night in Kazanlak before attempting the Buzludzha assault, which will make a weekend of it ... and an evening in one of those ethno-restaurants in international company could be one to remember :-)

For those reasons, I'm going to end this entry in a way that I've never done before: with an invitation. If you're free from August 15th-17th, and you're not too far away (something of which only you can be the judge), then I want to hear from you.

Having been there once, I can make almost all the arrangements – you only need to get yourself to Sofija, and everything else will be sorted. Plus, it's Bulgaria, so it will be affordable ... even if you're an English teacher ;-)

So write to me, and let's ascend to the mothership together!

See you :-)

FOR THE NEXT PART OF THIS MINI-SAGA, CLICK HERE

The Flying Saucer Chronicles (Part 1)

You know those documentaries and photo shoots that focus on 'abandoned places', and take you through a catalogue of them? Yeah, well, I've now got a new respect for the people who film those things ... not so much for what they do (which I admired already), but just for their ability to actually get to those locations.

Of course, they do have cars. And production crews. And budgets. But still.

Let me explain how this new feeling of admiration came about.

As you may know, I've had this little obsession for a while with 'Communist flying saucers' – those buildings you occasionally see in the FSU* and Eastern Europe that look like concrete UFOs. And the best of these (at least in my view) is a place called The Buzludzha Monument, in the mountains of Bulgaria.

I'm planning to tell you about Buzludzha in some detail, for two reasons: first, it will help make sense of the things I've been doing over the past couple of days; and second, I just find it incredibly interesting.

(Too interesting, some may say ... but screw them. They clearly aren't acquainted with the joys of surrendering oneself to a nice random obsession every once in a while.)

Let's start with the bare biographicals:

Buzludzha's construction was completed in 1981, so it's a relatively recent building. It was designed to serve as the Headquarters of the Bulgarian Communist Party.

Here's the thing, though: if you're gonna build a Headquarters of The Bulgarian Communist Party, the sensible place to put it would of course be somewhere nice and central in downtown Sofija. That way, it'd be an easy commute for party members, and for anyone else who had occasion to go there. But at the time when the monument was conceived, there were other factors to consider.

See, up until about 120 years earlier, Bulgaria had been part of the Ottoman Empire, along with most of the Balkans. But during the 1870s this arrangement all began to fall apart. There were uprisings in Herzegovina and Bosnia, and these inspired the Bulgars to revolt as well. The Ottoman response was brutal, with tens of thousands massacred as they put down the insurrections.

When news of this spread through Russia, it provoked a huge wave of sympathy for the Bulgarian cause, coupled with a surge in 'Pan Slavism'. Dostoyevsky, for example, led a movement that insisted Slavic peoples should be freed from their oppressors and then 'united', with Russia (naturally) as their protector and guide.

All of this was a major contributing factor in what became known as the Russo-Turkish war, fought in both the Caucases and the Balkans. One of the decisive battles of that war took place on the Shipka Pass – an eastern high point of the vast Stara Planina mountain range, which dominates central and western Bulgaria as well as eastern Serbia. There, Russian and Bulgarian troops stood side-by-side along the mountain ridges and repelled the Turkish forces. It proved to be a turning point, and not long after that the Sultan was forced to relinquish control over Bulgar territories, signing an agreement that guaranteed their independence.

(This, btw, may go some way towards explaining why present-day opinions about Russia are somewhat more positive in Bulgaria than they are in other parts of Eastern Europe. But that's another story.)

About 20 years later, in 1891, a gentleman by the name of Dimitar Blagoev called a meeting of prominent Marxists and socialists from around Bulgaria. As a venue, he chose a peak in the Shipka Pass, very close to where the Russians and Bulgars had seen off the Turks. It's safe to assume that he was trying to evoke some kind of connection between socialism and Bulgar patriotism, because the purpose of this meeting was to found the first Bulgarian Socialist Party ... which, in fact, he did.

As it turned out, the socialist movement developed in ways that its founders never dreamed of in 1891. It's far from clear, therefore, whether Blagoev and his idealistic Marxist confrères would have approved of the later Bulgarian Communist Party and its policies. But of course, the latter insisted that their roots lay back in that great Meeting on The Mountain. Doing so gave them a ton of 'socialist lineage cred', which would've been difficult to come by otherwise. So once again, this remote peak in the Stara Planina took on a symbolic significance in (at least some versions of) Bulgaria's history.  

Moving forward to the late 1970s: when the plans for a new Communist Party HQ were proposed, the Powers-That-Were decided to opt for symbolism over practicality. And so, for all the reasons above, they stuck their monument up on Blagoev's mountain, over 200kms from Sofija and accessible only via some rather steep, narrow and winding roads. Not a place to which you'd want to transport thousands of tons of building materials ... but there you go.

About 6,000 workers were involved in the construction of The Buzludzha Monument, which meant that they had to a) be in the area, and b) get up the mountain every day. So when bloggers and other web folk say that Buzludzha's completion was "a remarkable feat" (as they often do), they're really really not wrong. The monument was absolutely resplendent on the inside, with vast, intricate mosaics decorating almost every surface. Lenin, Marx and the other biggies put in appearances, as did all the classic Soviet mainstays like triumphant agricultural workers and so on. And it was all wrought on a particularly grand scale that hasn't quite been matched in any other place I know of.

(These mosaics, btw, represented the work of more than 20 artists over a period that ranges somewhere between three and seven years, depending on which account you read.)

And yes ... from the outside, it looked an awful lot like a flying saucer. A communist one, no less.

Tragically, Buzludzha had less than ten years to enjoy the spotlight. In certain corners of the internet, you can find wonderful photos of huge gatherings that were held up there back in the day. Parades of people wave flags along the mountain road, expressing (whether voluntarily or otherwise) their admiration for socialism as they ascend towards heaven / the mothership. The impression is almost of a kind of alternate reality, in which Marx met Spielberg on the set of The Sound of Music.

And then, in 1989, it all came to an abrupt end. One day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Bulgarian Politburo ousted its long-standing leader Todor Zhivkov, who was one of those guys that journalists and historians like to call a 'hard-liner' (he'd strenuously resisted Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reforms, for example). This effectively began a process that saw Bulgaria 'transitioning', like much of the FSU, from Communism to a deeply flawed and horribly corrupt form of democracy – the kind that earned the not-so-affectionate nickname "shitocracy" in Russia during the 1990s.

In this not-so-brave new world, there didn't seem to be much call for massive UFO-shaped edifices perching incongruously on mountaintops, and Buzludzha was simply left to fall apart. It hasn't quite done so yet, but it's well on the way. Successive governments have refused to preserve it as part of the nation's history and architectural heritage ... and internationally, a building like this one is more or less guaranteed to be overlooked by UNESCO, since there's still this bizarre perception in much of the world that Soviet-era architecture was a chronic aesthetic disease from which humanity is still recovering.

And so, it's up there rotting.

Meanwhile, Buzludzha has caught the eye of a completely unrelated group of people, namely the Urban Exploration or 'Urbex' movement. For those not familiar, Urbex is a worldwide underground phenomenon, mostly involving the exploration of abandoned or forbidden places in cities, or "unseen components" of functioning structures like skyscrapers, bridges and the like.

You can legally participate in this to a small degree by joining official tours like Sydney's Tank Stream tour, which takes very small groups under the city's most prominent streets, to see the man-made streams that were the backbone of the city's original water supply. But those who are into Urbex go a lot further, often risking arrest and/or injury to break into abandoned, derelict buildings.

On occasion, they'll go out of the city to a remote location that offers particularly good opportunities for illicit exploration. They'll even travel internationally, if the destination is sufficiently obscure and appealing.

This may all sound like a pointless extreme pastime for bored rich kids (and I guess in some cases it is), but Urban Exploration has its reflective, almost philosophical side as well. It's expressed quite eloquently here by the photographer and urban explorer Timothy Allen, who has been inside Buzludzha and has also photographed it aerially from an ultra-lite during a snow storm (just in case you thought you were pretty courageous and manly):

"These days, in my country at least, it’s very unfashionable to let a significant building die gracefully. Aside from the money-making implications, we tend to feel that we are somehow disrespecting our heritage by allowing them to decay, and so, often we attempt to stop the march of time by tidying them up and imprisoning them behind a red rope, preserving them in a most awkward state of disrepair for future generations to line up and look at from a viewing platform.  The ironic thing is that abandoned buildings feel alive to me.  They are involved in a beautiful natural process that the act of preservation will, by its nature, halt and kill. 

Of course my opinion is an unfairly idealised and overly romantic one ... However, on the rare occasions that I get to visit a forgotten building as magnificent as this one, I can’t help day dreaming about some of the incredible monumental relics I know back home and quietly wishing that a few more of them had been left to grow old and perish naturally rather than being unceremoniously hooked up to the proverbial life support machine of modern tourism." **

So that's the basic idea.

Anyhow, this Buzludzha thingie has been turning up ever more regularly on the wish lists of urban explorers, and people have literally come from all over the world to see it. (I recently read a breathless account of its beauty written by a blogger from Brazil.)

Getting in requires a bit of breaking and entering, since every year or so the Bulgarian government sends someone up the mountain to re-inforce bars across the front doors and seal up any other entrances that might have been created. But the Urbex folks aren't deterred by that. There's always a way in, if you want it badly enough. Almost every blog you read about Buzludzha offers a slightly different description of the unofficial entrance – probably because every time one is sealed up by the authorites, explorers and/or locals make another.

So you could say that Buzludzha has become a 'cult destination'.


ENTER THE NERDLY  

I imagine that by now, you've probably formed a pretty good hypothesis as to how all this historical and subcultural palaver fits into my holiday plans. Let's see if I can validate your theory.

Basically, after leaving Istanbul I travelled up through the north-western corner of Turkey, and over the border to Bulgaria. There I spent a couple of pleasant days chilling out and playing on the beach in Ravda (Bulgarian Black Sea Coast).

As I vaguely mentioned before, Yuliya really, really, really wanted a seaside holiday this year. I thought a couple of days by the beach might be nice, but she was talking about three weeks. Splashing about in the shallows for that long would, quite frankly, kill me. I'm just not that much of a beach person. Plus, her preference for the beach holiday was Bulgaria ... so as soon as I heard that, my thoughts turned to communist space ships, and that's pretty much where they stayed.

We talked about this for some time, and eventually struck a deal: she'd have the seaside holiday she wanted, and I'd join her and Timur for a couple of days on Bulgaria's (relatively) golden sands; and in return, I'd get to go and do one of my silly pointless quests.

So that's basically what I did.

My two days in Ravda, messing about in the gentle waves and on the shoreline, were very pleasant and relaxing, and probably also good for my pasty-ass complexion. But the road did its usual beckoning thing, and so I re-stuffed my wheelie bag, hugged my family, and headed for a place widely known by the English translation of its Bulgarian name, 'Sunny Beach' (apparently somewhat infamous for its badly-behaved groups of young, male British tourists and its beach-walking prostitutes). There I would look for a bus to Stara Zagora, at the eastern edge of the Stara Planina range.

I've previously written about the warmth and friendliness of Bulgarians, and overall, that's a compliment I still stand by. However, for some reason it didn't quite hold true for me east of the Stara Planina, where I ran into quite a few cranky and monosyllabic locals.

SO DON'T ASK!

Sunny Beach, Bulgaria, 09.07.14

Getting information about buses to Stara Zagora was a case in point, as this sign on the ticket window illustrates. The woman at the counter actually slammed her little window shut when I approached, and I had to knock a couple of times to convince her to open it again. (Perhaps I had a foreigner smell.) She then got slightly annoyed at me for not understanding everything she said in Bulgarian, before telling me I had to go to platform 5 (luckily I can recognise Bulgarian numbers) and slamming the window closed once again.

I looked around and couldn't see a platform 5 anywhere. I eventually found it, but only after about 15 minutes of searching the entire perimeter of the building.

Four hours later in Stara Zagora, I got similar but worse treatment from another Window Woman, as she put on her best "Oh for crap's sake, a foreigner. I really don't need this in my day!" routine. That's a reaction I'm accustomed to receiving in certain FSU countries that I won't call by name here, but I definitely didn't expect it in Bulgaria. It took me a second to recover myself and ask where the toilet was – a question which I know how to ask correctly in Bulgarian, but which she pretended not to understand.

From Stara Zagora, a marshrutka (crappy old minibus) would take me to the town of Kazanlak, in the foothills of the Stara Planina. There I would spend the night, before striking out tomorrow into Bulgaria's green and mountainous heartland.

The driver aimed a bit more of the same monosyllabic gruffness at me, and looked like he was about to either a) kill himself or b) just go home and get drunk, leaving us stranded at the bus station. But when the marshrutka got going, that all changed. He struck up an animated conversation with a middle-aged woman in the seat next to his, which continued the entire way and which had him looking away from the road about 50% of the time.

Oh, what fun it is to hurtle down a pot-holed highway with a driver who isn't paying attention. I never get tired of that.

*ahem*

We somehow made it to Kazanlak, and there the mood on the street changed back to its usual 'Bulgarian-ness'. My taxi driver was charming (and spoke Russian), the elderly ladies who ran my hotel were super-charming, and when I'd settled in and made it down the road to a restaurant, the staff there were charming too.

I can't even begin to guess why there should be such a difference. It's odd. Mountain air, perhaps?

Anyway ... time for a(nother) tangent.

The first time I visited Bulgaria, I met a really cool guy called Hristo in Sofija. Hristo is a talented designer, and also a native of Kazanlak. He doesn't live there anymore, though, because (as he told me within moments of us meeting) his lifelong dream was to emigrate to New Zealand. He's since realised that dream, and periodically we exchange messages and he tells me about how much he and his wife are enjoying their lives in Wellington.

I mention Hristo here because, during our several long chats in Sofija, he told me that his home town is famous for two things: producing over half of the world's rose oil, and manufacturing the best quality Kalashnikovs during Soviet times. Which is why (he told me), if you say the phrase "Guns'n'Roses" to a Bulgarian, they'll have a slightly different association to most other people: they'll think of Kazanlak.

As much as I enjoy that little piece of trivia, though, I was here in Hristo's birthplace neither for the guns, nor for the roses. I was here for the flying saucers – or rather, for one particular flying saucer, which lives about 20kms from the town at an elevation of 1,441 metres.

The problem was, I had no actual plan for getting there. I'd tried everything, from cajoling workmates into coming to Bulgaria with me and hiring a car together, to joining Couchsurfing and contacting anyone vaguely interesting who lived in the area, telling them of my plans and asking if they'd like to join.

It seemed that I just didn't know the right people – or that if I did, they were much too far away and/or much too committed to normal, sensible life pursuits like work, family and so on. And therefore, very understandably, they were not about to just throw all that to one side and go Communist saucer-hunting with me on a mountain top in the middle of frikkin' nowhere.

Boiling that down to its essentials, I'd basically arrived in Kazanlak with no means of actually getting to where I wanted to go ... which is why, right at the beginning of this rant, I mentioned how much I admire those documentary makers.

And with that, I think I'll end this extremely circuitous ramble, and leave the rest for tomorrow. Or, to put that another way:

TO BE CONTINUED HERE:

The Flying Saucer Chronicles Part 2


(* FSU = former Soviet Union.)

** I urge you to check out Timothy Allen's photography, which is almost unbearable beautiful. If his shots of Mongolia don't make you want to get on a plane immediately, you're a far more responsible  person than I. You can see some here:  https://www.facebook.com/timothy.allen?fref=ts