JJ Weeks

Let's play a game! I call it ‘don't wake the hibernating bear'. *Losers may be eaten (bears are very hungry in April).

You won't ever see a bear really, not unless you're bushwacking on the northern slopes of the Pirins, says ChatGPT. Except oh, that's exactly what I came to be doing. Okay, spoilers here, I didn't die, and no, I didn't see a bear. But I think I did come pretty close.

Bansko in April felt like a Sunday in a month of Sundays, half-asleep and huddled up against a wall of snowbitten mountains thawing for spring. Skiers had packed up their neon salopettes and fled with powder memories, while summer hikers had yet to unpack their selfie sticks and £300 trekking poles from beneath their mattresses. I’d spent the morning wandering the quiet cobbled lanes of the old town, where crooked chimneys poked skyward from haggard old houses, and timber balconies hand-painted with double-headed eagles sagged with a half-forgotten charm. The town was clearly exhaling; shutters were half-closed, stray dogs sunbathed on warm pavements, and elderly men soaked in the sun while playing cards in total silence. Perfect, I thought. Time for a nice, gentle walk.

I goose-stepped my way up the town, passing large hotels with ‘Out of Office’ signs posted in Cyrillic typeset, and dubstep-playing après-ski bars serving drinks from plastic menus. By the time I’d reached the cable car station, I was ready for a real adventure. I leapt into a car, eager for altitude; a whole two days had passed since I’d last ventured up a proper mountain.

The doors wheezed shut. The machinery groaned. The cables lurched… and then stopped, leaving me there, dangling mid-air, swaying in the crosswind like a Great Dane’s ballsack. I agonised over the graffitied walls and nervously calculated the hypothetical distance to plummet downward if the whole contraption were to give up on its will to live. It was several minutes of motionless hanging, so long that my mind began to flirt with the possibility, “Ah. So this is how I’m going to die. In a suspended shoebox above a Bulgarian spruce.”

Needless to say, it was fine (only a respectful dribble of pee came out). The car juddered back to life, winched me toward the snowline, and spat me out onto a landscape still half-locked in winter. At the top, the comforting hum of Bansko had certainly faded beneath the alpine plain, and thick drifts now swallowed my boots as I was confronted with a rank of razorback mountains.

From the Banderishka meadow, I trudged through resin-scented forests, tiptoeing my way past an ‘Avelanche hazard zone!’ sign (Avelanche: the kind of spelling that inspires only confidence) to a gentle gradient where the snow was melting in patchwork. Having ascended halfway to Baikushev’s pine, the route had started feeling a bit hairy and bear-y, and the snow had gone from crumpling underfoot to nibbling at my ankles with its shrill, icy teeth. I’d found myself post-holing through shin-deep crevices, my reluctance growing with each subsequent leg haul.

I soon decided to ditch my frosted fate and hedged my bets on a forest that felt… hedgier. I picked a bearing and off I went, la-dee-da-ing my way along a forlorn footpath, the sort of route where, if you vanished, people would just shrug and say ‘Ah, well, he had a good run.’ It was littered with obstructing tree trunks like nature’s own booby traps, and an explosion of springtime vegetation, including the first suggestion of crocuses emerging through the lingering late-season ice. Sunlight spattered through the pine sprigs and distant birds chirped wholesome little melodies.

Slowly, the noise began to fade and the forest grew still, unnervingly still. Only the pine trunks creaked and trembled as I emerged into a dead-quiet clearing, where I saw the tracks of something large, pawed, and probably karmically hungry (Bulgarian Bigfoot?). The clearing was dominated by a huge and haphazard hut, decaying in its state of abandonment. Its windows were shattered, its door hung crooked, and the whole structure leaned as if haunted by its own existence.

Curiosity tugged at me and I caved, sticking my whopping great nose through a few of the fractured window panes. As my eyes adapted through the gloom, I just about distinguished a dark, skeletal interior, strewn with rotten, splintered beams and utterly derelict under a slump of debris … then I heard something from within.

A low rumble. A shard of glass shifting under weight. Something … moved.

Oh hell naw, I thought. I legged it. Probably a personal best in the 50-metre coward dash as I scurried zestily away, like a thirsty Jack Sparrow to the nearest rum.

It wasn’t hard to imagine the headlines if I’d stayed: ‘Local Bear Annoyed by Specky Brit’ front-page on the Bansko Herald; ‘Blog Hero Ginger and Bankrupt Found in Stomach of Bulgarian Wildlife’ plastered across the Daily Mail; or ‘Going Outside: Certain Death’ as a gentle feature on MumsNet. As relieved as I was to still have all seven of my limbs, I do admit: even now, I would quite like to see a bear. Maybe I should just watch Paddington 2.

Back near the upper gondola lift, I tried to soothe my jitters in a mountain hut, nursing a beer with my third arm (good thing I kept the other six for balance). After a while of basking in the sun, I decided to get back to my mischief. I had just the thing in mind, and crunched my way up one of the deserted ski slopes. At the top, I psyched myself up, set my shoulders back, wide and heroic, and inhaled deeply; this was either going to be legendary or require significant dental work. Every rational neuron in my brain politely suggested I walk back down like a normal functioning adult. I ignored them all and absolutely bombed it; I slid down on my arse, gaining pace like a rogue shopping trolley, flicking up slush and letting out a high-pitched ‘whee’ that definitely didn’t belong to a grown man, until I kerplunked at the bottom in a dizzy heap. It was ridiculous. Undignified. But immensely fun. One more item ticked off the bucket list I’ve never written down.

I don't know what I thought I’d achieve on that mountain, but I’m fairly sure the Bulgarian mountain rescue would’ve referred to me as ‘that idiot’ for years if I’d been successful. But after coming down, the remainder of the day was spent at the pace of a trot and a canter. I’d tucked into strudel in a sleepy café, lounged in my lone hotel room, and read from my hotel balcony as the evening grew long. But that calm, of course, could never last…

The next morning, I’d landed myself in something of a dilemma. In yet another masterstroke, I'd booked a coach from Blagoevgrad for 08:40 am, fully aware at the time that I had no way of getting there for the departure. Why did I do that? No idea, but I had. I knew there were no buses, certainly no trains. And Blagoevgrad was a full hour away. On Easter bloody morning of all times.

Hitchhiking it was to be then. And after having spent the early hours rummaging through Biffa bins for scraps of cardboard, I marched to the outskirts. I passed abandoned Soviet blocks, half-built resort projects from Bulgaria’s boom-and-bust years, and a river swollen with glacial runoff before setting out my stall at a petrol station's corner, bracing my friendliest expression and adorning my carefully inscribed sign.

Slight hiccup: it was 7:00 am on Easter morning. Where were all the bleeding cars?

It was around then that I met Ellie, a digital nomad who, astonishingly, not only lived in Bulgaria despite being from Devon, but also needed to get to Blagoevgrad, and now. You couldn’t write this stuff. Perfect. So, we teamed up, flagging down the sporadically populated road and cursing anything with wheels that didn’t immediately stop (including wheelbarrows piled with coal and children on wiggleboards). Eventually, we’d had enough and gave in, splitting the cost of a taxi and then the joy of some anecdotes.

I came to learn a few interesting things about her. She’d travelled to ~70 countries, bought a house in Bansko for £22,000 (!!) during covid, and that there was a whole English-speaking community living there who couldn’t speak a word of Bulgarian between them. Who'd have thunk! Her next escapade? Her first BBC piece, a jaunt in the North Caucasus to cover an Islamist insurgency in Georgia. Rather her than me.

Lucky though it was, when we parted ways at the station, a small part of me wanted to shake its fist at the universe. Not for the cost, but for burglarising me of another glorious hitchhiking prophecy. Ah well. My only regret is not sticking my thumb out at that bear instead. I reckon he would’ve stopped…Read more