The final 2 weeks of our Bulgarian venture were spent camping in a valley outside of the village of Voditsa, volunteering for the set up of the first year of LunaDolina Festival. The festival was organised by a small group of Bulgarians, British and Belgians, living in Voditsa and surrounding villages.
Nick, Gracey, Ewen, Lisa and I piled into the van, picking up Kathy from her house in Voditsa + her daughter Elly who lives opposite her (both ex-Newcastle) + her partner Dancho (Bulgarian) + Raul (French) on the way. Raul cycled from France, with a tent and an accordion, it took him 2 months. He hates his bike and wants nothing more to do with it. On the last few metres of his journey he found a puppy, a week or so old with maggots in it's feet and covered in sores. Eyes closed, barely responding, but alive. Lunan we called him, after Lunadolina. And began mission cure the puppy.
Priority tasks were to build toilets and to build a cooker. Naturally, Nick, Raul and Ewen were on the shitters, Gracey and I were on building the wood-fired, mud brick stove AKA the petchka (ΠΏΠ΅ΡΠΊΠ°) under instruction from Lisa and Kathy. The men had a clever system for ground levelling, spades, spirit levels and funny spy-glass things to look through, we used a big pan with water in the bottom. Mud, sand, water and scrap metal, making it up as we went along... It looked like a space ship emerging from the hillside, but it worked! and cooked lunch and dinner feasts over the following 2 weeks for all of the volunteers as the numbers grew from 4 to 24.
The stage was built, signs were painted, stairs were made from the chill-out area to the campsite in the forest, cafes constructed... Our most valuable learned skill, how to dig a deep, narrow hole in hard ground for a tall wooden post, and the importance of proper, actual proper, level ground below constructions...
In the morning we'd wake to the sun rising, light the fire on the stove for coffee and toast. The wasps wanted Baba Ivanka's honey as much as we did, flicking 3 to 15 off the slice before you bite, there were some (funny) stung lips and a (not so funny) stung tongue. A rota for lunch and dinner cooking, Chai and cheesecake and coffee at break times. A cold beer in the evening and accordion around the campfire. Hilariously messy translations of each of our best jokes in Bulgarian, English and French. Two of the Bulgarian boys from the village disappeared into the dark forest (with the jackalls and wolves and wolverines) to find wood for the fire and came back casually with two whole trees.
Grace and I walked into the village, early one morning. On our way down an old man called and waved good morning to us as we walked past, in his other hand he shook a dead rabbit in the air. On our way back up the track, he hobbled out of his gate, grinning, holding something behind his back, talking to us in Bulgarian. He pulled from behind him... TWO GIANT PEACHES. If anybody thought the generosity we'd been experiencing from the Bulgarians could have been something to do with us being blonde or girls or the only non-Bulgarians on the beach at Karadere, they should talk to John, the big Welsh electrician who lives near Voditsa. He'll describe how overwhelmed he has been by the Bulgarian kindness since he arrived a few years ago, the open-arm welcomes and continuous generosity.
We spent a day exploring the residential streets of Popovo. We were in one of the poorest areas of Bulgaria, people living there put us all to shame with their food growing and inventive use of absolutely everything. The houses and flat blocks were built during communist times, when workshops in metal, wood and glass were available to everyone, each home is beautifully unique with fences made from metal cogs and radiator parts.. Vegetables grow on every spare inch of land, squashes dangle from balconies, beans trail fences, and grassy pavements along the roadside have been dug up into community veg patches.
For our weekend off we went back to the farm with Lisa, Ewen, and Lisa's daughter Zoe who had arrived from Ireland. Our final dinner at the farm with our surrogate family, we were honoured to be asked if we'd like to share their last leg of goat with them, they have killed two over the 4 years they have lived there. Spectacular roast dinner on the wood-fired stove, plum rakia, Ewen did an impressive dance with a flaming axe, a tree trunk, and a drum beat and Zoe wowed us with her fire poi. PASS ME MA FOK'N SPOON in an Irish accent. So much love and laughter, thank you Lisa, Ewen and Zoe XXXX
Lisa powered us by SaraLara and Foaly in the cart from Osikovo to the festival site for the final few days of set-up. Traveling by horse and cart is officially an extreme sport, and Lisa once was an amateur rally driver... Their farm at Osikovo sits at the top of a near-vertical, rocky, dusty, pot-holed track. The van always stays parked at the bottom. One evening, Gracey, Nick and I had been sitting in the front seats with Lisa at the wheel. Lisa decided it would definitely be better if the van was up there outside the house, so that we could load it up with festival stuff... Reversing a few metres to get some speed she foot-slammed the accelerator, we flew at the track, bouncing and clattering to a metre from the top when Gracey squeezed her nails into my arm, the engine roared and in a dust cloud we started sliding backwards... Before we backwards flipped to our death, Lisa pulled the handbreak and reversed us back down where we laughed and made to climb out, clearly the van wasn't capable of making it to the top. Before we could get the door handle we were flying again, jabbing our seatbelts back on as fast as we could. Three tries later we had made enough speed to climb over the brink where we found Ewen and Zoe grinning. Laughing at our white faces, Lisa assured us "ONLY PANIC WHEN I PANIC."
Back at the site, a 30x15ft rainbow cloth needed to be put up, a canopy with a central post and ropes along the cloth edges attached to wooden steaks, hammered into the ground. It needed 8 people to control it and stop it blowing off into the valley, rips in it were painstakingly repaired with needle and thread, torn, repaired again, the post was painted pastel stripes, wooden steaks were hammered into the ground, and moved and hammered and adjusted and hammered, it billowed in the wind as we held it in place and we all winced at the sound of it ripping on thistles in the grass, we lost pound-of-butter-sized Lunan somewhere underneath... After 10+ trial attempts to put it up, it finally got attached to it's pole and fastened into the earth.
Lunan got better, we bathed him in salt and tea tree oil in a wheel barrow, squeezed the maggots from his toes and pus from his sores. He marched around the festival site, ears pricked, tail wagging, barking, biting peoples toes, eating and eating... We found him one evening in the staff kitchen, lying on his back, catatonic, crying, stomach the size of a football.
I wove a cave out of willow, climbing to the top of old trees to collect thin stems of new growth, axe wedged under arm. Fell out of willow trees with axe wedged under arm. Last minute organised chaos, Thursday evening before festival Friday. The missing parachute cloth appeared at 5:30pm, which meant digging one more deep, narrow hole in hard, rocky ground, for it's central post (the look on Nick's face..) and scrambling up hawthorne trees to attach the ropes. A huge stripey jellyfish.
Friday morning we woke up to discover the wind, that apparently never blows in Bulgaria, had torn the rainbow cloth from the ground and it danced around wildly, hanging on by 2 pegs. It spent the festival twisted up and bound like a naughty maypole. Friday night there was wind + rain. Site-manager Claire signed-off all the working volunteers, declaring that she'd probably get sacked in the morning but she wasn't gunna be part of no fascist festival. Realising that the stage was a dry place, she marched everybody in the crowd to dance on stage while Bram played his set. Saturday morning, the previously purple painted stage had a 5 inch thick mud carpet.
Yoga under the trees, blind archery, meditation, drum circles, taught to do a Thai foot massage on Nick's goaty, 6-week unwashed feet. Nick did a brilliant Feast of Fools slapstick sketch. Learnt about seed-swapping and soap making. We watched Samsara and Jungle Book in the cinema in the trees. The village pensioners came to sing, we painted their faces and they taught us the steps to dance the Horo.
We played the cardboard box game with the 90 year old bee-keeper. Nick and I had an intense experience with a beautiful, multi-coloured woodpecker. Later Nick got confused and accidentally rubbed cow shit all over his face, before plunging his head into a drinking trough.
We had a dazed, post-festival staff after party in the forest, drumming, a violin, a bbq, showing each other our most freaky body parts. Emotional goodnights. The 'who's going to give Lunan a home' dilemma was solved, Gracey and I didn't have to bribe the vets to forge his injection dates so that we could pay lots of Euros and order him a last minute passport and fly him back to Wales in our hand luggage... Instead he got a happy home with a Belgian couple who snuck him back to Belgium in their van.
Tuesday morning we packed up and Lisa rode us to to the main road by horse and cart, it was tearful, and then she was gone into the distance. Standing road-side, we looked at each other as it became apparent that our chances of a lift would be unlikely, we were on a main road with nowhere for cars to pull-over, lorries whizzed past at 60mph blowing us into the bushes. We began walking in the direction of the next village, even if we didn't get a lift for the whole day we could pitch our tents and camp in a field, but the road-side path soon became overgrown with brambles, metres thick. We walked back to where we began...
Then an actual Hummer pulled over, and we got a ride to Sofia listening to Elvis.
Wtf is this life.
Wtf is this life.
The driver was a Turkish someone who knew all the police and the hotel owners and the owner of the petrol station and the owner of the cafe. He said very little to us, other than that he'd been up all night taking cocaine in a club and was likely to fall asleep.
A few days in Sofia, felt like we were in Enter the Void.
THANK YOU BULGARIA XXXX
So much generosity.
So much laughter that Nick got salt-burn under his eyes.
And for teaching us that wood ash from the fire cleans dirt and oil and burnt food from pots better than any Fairy Liquid.
