THE GOOD SHEPHERD
Everyone we told reacted in the same way. “Bulgaria – what are you going there for?” It wasn’t the yoghurt; it was to experience the beauty of unknown mountains. We ignored the scepticism of our friends and booked our flights.
Day one of our adventure in the Rhodopes passed without drama. The green hills and verdant forests rolled by. We didn’t meet a single soul in 20 kilometres. We made it to our lodgings in one piece, as did our luggage, and enjoyed our supper of soup
(with yoghurt) a mince dish (with yoghurt) and a berry tart (without yoghurt)
On day we two we got lost. I would like to say a little bit lost, but honesty must prevail. We were properly lost, without a guide, but armed with a map and a “roadbook” with instructions such as: “ignore any turnings which are also in a worse shape as the road becomes more invisible”.
And that is what happened. Our path melted away, swallowed whole by an army of conifers.
We had not set eyes on anything that walked on two legs. We had met sheep, horses, bugs and a dog who had emerged from a barn next to our hotel and had been following us ever since.
He was a handsome specimen of no recognisable breed and with a will of his own. He would pant at our heels, swim in the water troughs, beetle off searching for something elusive and return even more full of energy.
So there we were, huddled around the map and pointing in different directions when our dog started barking and our good shepherd appeared.
I assumed he was a shepherd although his jeans, T-shirt and corduroy jacket didn’t look particularly shepherdly. He had a canvas bag over his shoulders and he would later reveal its contents: some exotic-looking mushrooms.
He strode purposefully towards us. He had clearly sensed our distress and he would assist us.
Mission Impossible — or nearly. We had mastered a few words of Bulgarian: “please” and “thank you”. They didn’t help. We spoke loudly. He spoke loudly. We showed him the map and turned it around a few times. There was a lot of head shaking and hand wringing, but finally we had a word we all understood: “Trigrad”, the name of the village we were staying in and where we would be returning after completing a circular route via
Zhrebevo.
“Trigrad,” he announced, and then the mission was on.
We of course had failed to mention “Zhrebevo”, or important words such as “to”, “from” and “via”. We had been saved and so we followed our shepherd at breakneck speed into the wilderness. He stopped at a spring and filled our water bottles for us and then off we marched.
At some stage the penny dropped. We were no longer lost. He was taking us right back to where we started and we would be arriving soon! We would lose out on our day’s itinerary. And then began the difficult part. We would have to convince our shepherd that we could find the way ourselves or we could try and lose him.
We didn’t do either. We indicated that we were tired and we sat down and took out our sandwiches. We thanked him profusely and we all shook hands. He left.
We had a pretend nap, fed the dog our scraps and retraced our steps carefully, hoping that our shepherd was dozing after a meal of mushrooms and that he wouldn’t have to rescue these foreigners again. © Helen Nevin
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