Riding with Katia and fanny in a beat-up Russian Lata curving down the road towards one of Katia’s fish restaurants we swooped over a very a very strange woman barely dressed, tall 50-something and red-haired with a bouncing walk carrying a large hoe over her shoulder. Katia skidded to a stop, she ran up and hopped in. “Vanka” she says with a smile. Vanka works at the Rila Monastary and has the key to the old guest’s kitchen and feels that by having this key God has given her some power to heal people.

She feels Fanny’s forehead when she says she has a headache. She asks to see my hands as if to read them but then rubs them instead, front and back, stopping to turn her own palms up and show me her calluses from the farming. She has short hair, and looking sad says elegantly and playfully “my daughter works in London and my son in America.”

“I am going to tell you something Bulgarian” Vanka says and begins; “when God was giving all the people of the Earth a piece of land to live on the Bulgarians arrived late. The land was all given away so God took pity on them and gave them a piece of paradise.” She continued to speak animatedly left after a bit turning back at the last moment to clutch my head in her strong hands and give me a big, loud kiss on the ear.

“A special woman” said Fanny shaking her head (which means “yes” in Bulgaria) as Vanka bounced away, “she knows a lot of places in these mountains. She says there is a special place with seven lakes up there.”

That afternoon I stored my bike in Katia’s Rilets Hotel and shouldering a small pack with water, space blanket, a candle, lighter and the bare essentials struggled up the valley side looking for any sign of a path up over the valley wall and into the peaks where on the map mountain huts existed serving food and giving shelter. I only came across one small monastic building, shrine, one fresh spring after another, postcard icons nailed to trees, the forest thick and green with pine and fern, some strange orange and white blazes marked enthusiastically pointing the way to somewhere.