Dobra Voda

With Xmas approaching I’m beginning to get a handle on things, though life in the mountains is proving surprisingly eventful. Two days after I moved into the cottage the temperature plummeted. Then on Sunday afternoon, with the thermometer outside reading a brisk minus five degrees, the sky turned dark and portentous and the next thing I knew rain began to fall and afterwards snow. I went out and stood in the yard letting the soft white flakes fall on my head, oblivious to the fact that my hands were turning numb under the spell of the wild and untamed beauty of my surroundings and a stillness so intense I felt uncharacteristically humbled. The snow fell noiselessly on the cold hard ground and blood pulsed in my ears as I stood listening to the mournful chirping of a bird somewhere nearby and further off in the hills a sporadic jangling of what sounded uncannily like sheep bells, the only sounds in what was otherwise a deep and compelling silence. 

Monday was a whiteout but by lunchtime Tuesday conditions had improved to the point where I felt encouraged to try and walk to Dobra Voda, the trekkers’ hut lying back down the mountain a bit, to see if I could find Wi-Fi. Truth be told I was made slightly uncomfortable by the fact that several days had passed since I’d been in contact with Jennifer, who might have been wondering what had become of me although not necessarily. Before leaving the cottage I placed a big lump of pinewood in the stove hoping it would still be burning when I returned home, thereby saving me the trouble of restarting the fire. Outside the silence persisted while snow lay thick on the trees and also covered the ground up to a depth of about twenty-five centimetres. This wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things but for someone who grew up on the east coast of Australia it was a big deal indeed and I marched along in a state of childlike excitement, enthusiastically plying the six-foot-long beechwood stick I’d cut for myself the previous afternoon and feeling like a character in Tolstoy.

The snow softened the lineaments of the track but you had to be careful when you sunk into it not to hit a rock or the edge of a rut thereby twisting an ankle. Away from the house mist blurred visibility to an eerie twenty metres, an exciting development that increased my Russian novel fantasies. Now and then in the distance I thought I heard the mysterious jangling of bells but I may have been imagining it, weather like this being known for playing tricks on one’s mind. The tips of my fingers tingled with cold but otherwise I felt quite comfortable, wrapped up in an outdoor jacket, gloves and beanie with the hood of the jacket pulled over the beanie. Close up the appearance of tracks in the snow revealed that while the valley have been short on humans it was anything but empty, with ample prints of dog, fox and, most excitingly, the cloven feet of wild boar crossing the track from one side of the forest to the other.

The trek took about twenty minutes and it was another ten minutes downhill to the hut on the winding mountain road. Set back amid the trees Dobra Voda was a big, gloomy old communist-era building, three storeys high with haunted-house-like dormer windows projecting from a steep-pitched roof lined from one end to the other with blackened brick chimneys. The name in English means ‘good water’ so I wasn’t surprised to see a spring gurgling away in the forecourt. Colour-coded wooden signs hung on trees indicated a series of walking trails winding off into the forest while a handful of dogs chained up out back set up a clamour, their efforts abetted by the furious barking of a tiny black creature on the end of a chain who in darted in and out of a wooden box by the front door like a demented cuckoo. I tried the door but found it locked so moved further down the building, encouraged by the sight of along the way of a decal saying ‘Wi-Fi’ pasted on a dark window through which I could just make out rows of tables in what seemed to be a kind of dining room or auditorium.

Indeed, the situation was looking distinctly promising. The dense mist, vast, semi-derelict building, wild dogs and apparent absence of another human being endowed the hut with a dark glamour that appealed to the more adventurous side of me. The hounds continued to bay enthusiastically for my blood, straining against the chains that restrained them. However the problem of gaining access to the building was solved when I found a side door that proved to be open. This lay adjacent to a covered barbeque area with a long bar erected from house bricks and led into a kind of anteroom furnished with a table tennis table, white metal freezer and a pair of scarred wooden chairs and featuring a map of Europe, several decades old, hanging on a mottled white wall. Conditions were significantly milder in here so I divested myself of jacket, beanie and gloves which I draped over one of the chairs before progressing through a second door.

To my delight I found myself in a dimly lit and comfortable-looking, if rather dated, bar. Tables covered with faded plastic cloths stood in disorderly rows around the room. Behind the counter against the rear wall I noted a well-stocked beer fridge and tiers of glass shelves lined with an enviable array of spirits. Heat radiated from a blackened wood-burning range while a nature programme of some kind, featuring polar bears frolicking in an icy wasteland, was showing on an old television set suspended in a corner. I noted an empty coffee cup standing on one of the tables beside a pile of freshly ironed sheets but there was still no sign of any actual person. In fact, apart from the narrator’s voice on the television there wasn’t a sound in the whole big building. This rather eerie circumstance might have suited me quite well had I known there was Wi-Fi and been informed of the password.

As it was I poked about, peering through a pair of swinging doors into an auditorium-like space next door and poking my head into a vast and airy kitchen lit by a long row of windows looking out onto bleak forest. Snow had begun to fall again, the flakes dropping down onto the bare treetops. Pots and pans stood neatly arranged on benches and I noted a bowl of chopped-up carrots and another of freshly washed potatoes. Sensing a movement over my shoulder I turned to see a tall, thin, cadaverous old man with wrinkled mud-coloured skin and thinning grey hair gazing at me with an imperious expression. Though surprised and aware, what’s more, that I’d been caught snooping I greeted the man cheerfully and received a solemn nod for my trouble. A similar gesture greeted my enquiry about Wi-Fi and I watched with interest as the man walked behind the bar and scribbled the password on a scrap of paper which he handed to me without a word.

As things seemed to be going well I asked for a cup of coffee and, to help keep my strength up, a glass of rakija to go with it. I expected the latter to be a single shot but when the man brought it to the table where I’d set up with my computer it proved to be quite large, almost filling a large water glass and sufficient therefore to knock one’s proverbial socks off.

Thus provided for I proceeded to deal with my emails. This took about an hour during which time a US soap, dubbed into Bulgarian, replaced the nature show on TV while snow continued to fall. At one point an elderly woman whom I assumed was the man’s wife came in and, sitting down nearby, spent a couple of minutes complaining about the weather before standing up with a groan and disappearing again.

When I left the hut I decided to take a slightly different route home. My head swirled pleasantly with rakija and I felt satisfied that I had found a reliable source of Wi-Fi within easy walking distance of the cottage. With snow falling steadily I crossed a whited-out meadow and entered the forest where red, white and blue flashes daubed on the trunks of trees guided me steadily uphill along the line of a frozen stream. Once again I was struck by the stillness of the forest and the matchless silence, unbroken save for the plodding of my boots on the snowy ground as I scaled a built-up section of path that wound steeply upwards over the sheer rim of a crag. Up here the mist formed a dense and obscuring pall but to my delight I knew exactly where I was.