Pyramids and hell fire

We are on our way to the next trek, but first we need to do some laundry.

We leave ghost town Bansko and head for somewhere we think might be real. Maybe we can find a town with people. The next largest inhabited place is Blagoevgrad, I have given up with the Cyrillic alphabet, but even so, this one is pretty much impossible to pronounce.

It is a town the size of Talavera or Tunbridge Wells, but smaller as everyone seems to live in large slab block housing, although some of it is pretty much abandoned.

We have a couple of addresses of launderettes, but they are proving impossible to find. We drive Dora around town several times, but can’t  find them.

It starts to rain, hard. A young women and her son come to the rescue and suggest several dry cleaners (chemical cleaning- as she calls them). The first one is a failure, but the second, even though no communication beyond sign language takes place. We work out they do the laundry at 8 lev a load (about €4 which seems OK), but they are about to close, so we vow to return the next morning.

We find a place to park Dora near a large supermarket and head off to find bread and dinner. The supermarket, Metro, is more like a cash and carry. Everything is in vast quantities, but they even have large tanks filled with live fish, some like small sharks. We head back with more food than we had anticipated.

The next day we head back to the dry cleaners, dump five loads on them for 80 lev (€20), this has been the cheapest wash day so far. It won’t be ready till tomorrow though so we decide to head off and do the next trek.

It is too late to do the trek today, so we just need to get to the trailhead for tonight, so we find a couple of touristic endeavours on route.

The first we come upon by accident, it is not mentioned in our guide, pyramids, this sounds interesting.

The village is tiny, and unlikely to have seen an international tourist, maybe some of the inhabitants have yet to have heard that the soviet block no longer exists.

We leave Dora in the main square.

We push on trying to find these pyramids.

The houses start to deteriorate.

Then the road goes the same way. We are glad we left Dora behind.

Then, no road.

Apparently they have an EU grant to upgrade the road. They are obviously expecting a lot of tourists to these pyramids!

The road works end in a large car park, which has already been finished, trouble is, no one can get there now.

A women sits in the sun and as we approach, quickly relocates to a small hut. I think we may be the first customers….this year.

It is a nice path, but we are still unsure of what is on offer.

We climb steeply up a ridge, and discover she has had another customer, someone else is checking out pyramids.

The pyramids are sandstone stacks, eroded from the mountainside. Some have large stones balanced precariously on top. It has been worth the climb.

Interesting, there is the inevitable fairy tale about how they were formed, but not a great deal about the real geology. Do people really think the storeys are more beautiful, more elegant than the fact? Unfortunately the vast majority probably do!

The next valley along and the sandstone is much redder, probably some blushing princess fell to her death here, or maybe there is more iron oxide in the rock, who knows!

Precarious rocks about to slip off.

Gives you vertical, no wonder she fell to her death!

It would be nice to find a path back down into the valley, but it is to steep, so we have to return the way we came.

A lovely and unexpected walk, we head back to the village and Dora.

Back in the square we fill Dora with water and head further up the valley.

Our next destination, a monastery.

A highlight of any tour of Bulgaria. Our guide tells us that Bulgarians don’t consider you have visited Bulgaria without seeing the Rila monastery.

What is all the fuss about?

It is an hours drive, up a steep sided valley.

Larger than we expected, already the monks are trying to rack in the money, the car park charges. We elect to park in a free layby ten minutes down the road, we don’t like giving money to religious organisations, it may be used to indoctrinate young people with their filthy ideas.

Besides, the opulence of this monastery indicates they had more than enough money to afford a comfortable living. And in time of crisis, they could sell the valuable assets. SM

The church is the main draw, well its paintings anyway, and there it sits in the middle of the courtyard, incredibly gaudy, all those patterns, all that colour, a bit too much for me.

Surrounding the church, presumably the rooms for the monks, almost a palace, there was no hardship for these guys!

Some beautiful craftsmanship on the timber.

And the paintings, well judge for yourselves. They do nothing for me.

There are so many of these, it gets to the point where it is difficult to judge good from bad. These are less than a couple of hundred years old, so they don’t even have age going for them, not exactly original in style, subject or colour.

There is certainly a lot of paint, every surface is covered, every untrue story of the bible is depicted, in all its irrelevant glory.

And of course that is plenty of horror-show, they couldn’t resist a bit of eternal damnation.

Such a forgiving god is…

well..

pretty unforgiving really.

A what is it with snakes and serpent like things?

What I found intriguing about this image was that god seems to be defecating hell out of his arse, really strange, the odd things some believe!

Pretty fountain though, with a golden bird, wash away the nastiness.

Our next destination, and stop for the night, another ski resort.

Borovets seems a little more local, maybe more for the Bulgarian skiing rather than the cheap Northern European, but still pretty much everything is closed.

Many of the shops look completely ransacked.

And the streets are pretty much deserted.

Except for the contractors that are refitting out this large hotel which sits at the bottom of the ski slopes. Maybe they are hoping to attract more from the north, more with the money. In these times of austerity people need cheap places to ski!

There is a complete mix of properties here, more large gargantuan edifices.

As well as tiny chalets. I don’t think Borovets has a planning department.

Surprisingly, a few tat shops remain open. We tease the owners by looking interested in some fridge magnet. And a couple of restaurants, with local fare!

Maybe they do attract Brits here!

We go in search of information. The trek up the next mountain is long, maybe six hours. This is Ok as we now have longer daylight hours, but we could cut a couple of hours off by taking the gondola up half way.

The trouble is, no one seems to know whether it is running or not.

I think we will have to assume that it isn’t and make an early start tomorrow.

Sticking around here will be a bit depressing, with everything being closed down. We head off out of the village, trying to gain a bit more height, trying to reduce the length of the walk tomorrow. This isn’t because we are lazy, this is to give us more contingency.

And this is perfect, in season, this would be crammed with vehicles, but not now, we are on our own, it will be a quiet night, just us and the noise of the stream running nearby.

GDR