JULY MORNING

It was Saturday night and we were in the kitchen. Lora was busy making salads, heating up soups and frying meatballs for the sizeable Bulgarian birthday party gathered outside in the dining room. I was standing in front of the wood-burning stove that heats the water at Lovna, a glass of rakija in hand, drying out after having become caught in a downpour on my way down off the mountain. The stove, a large, antique, cast-iron-and-enamel contraption connected by pipes to a capacious tank suspended from the ceiling in a makeshift swathing of foam and gaffer tape, occupies an entire corner of the kitchen, which is a spacious and chaotic place with cartons of beer stacked beneath a table that sags beneath the weight of the countless jars, bottles and sundry other containers that have been dumped upon it, pots and pans all over the place and, more often than not, a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. The ceiling sags in the middle and both the tile floor and the plain, cinnamon-coloured walls shine with several decades’ worth of cooking grease. Lora sighed melodramatically as she pulled up beside me.

‘I’m so tired,’ she said, before explaining that she’d had friends around to her apartment the previous evening and things had gone on late. She then caught me by surprise by adding, ‘And I want to go up to the lakes in the morning to watch the sunrise. I have to leave here at two o’clock.’

‘You what?’ I said.

I didn’t know anything about Lora except that she lived in Sofia, loved skiing, and worked as a volunteer at the hut on weekends. She was a blonde-haired, olive-skinned, limpid-eyed beauty, the kind of woman who might have caused me a lot of grief had I been twenty years younger. As it was I took a big swig of rakija and, feeling my throat catch fire, looked out the window. Darkness was falling and a misty pall of rain hung over the meadow, blurring the outlines of the trees that enfold it and restricting visibility to less than fifty metres. At that moment I couldn’t think of anything worse than getting up at two in the morning to climb a mountain.

‘It’s a Bulgarian tradition,’ said Lora, explaining that on July first every year people all across the country went out en masse to view the dawn. ‘Usually they go to the beaches on the Black Sea coast, she added, ‘but since we only have lakes here, they will have to do.’

I subsequently discovered that this curious practice had begun in the nineteen eighties and was something of a throwback to the hippie movement of the sixties with roots as diverse as ancient sun worship, midsummer rituals and underground protest movements against the then ruling communist regime. The occasion takes its name from the Uriah Heap song ‘July Morning’, which was released in 1971 but, due to the repressive nature of the government, didn’t become popular in Bulgaria until some years later. This was all very well, yet I still wasn’t convinced (even though my pretensions as a travel writer more or less demanded that I participate). Then, as it so often does, fate took a hand.

First Ivan, the ‘hijar’, or hut keeper, said that he was going to go, despite the fact that he’d barely had a couple of hours’ sleep the previous night and his eyes were hanging out of his head. He had no sooner declared his intention than Nat and Georgia, a young Australian couple who had arrived that evening, also put up their hands. Traipsing through southern Europe they had reacted with typical antipodean gusto to the scene at Lovna, relishing the cheap beer, hearty food, and the mood of easy camaraderie that existed in the hut. Marching up to the lakes at dawn, they seemed to think, would be the icing on the cake of their Bulgarian mountain experience.

Confronted with my fellow countrymen’s enthusiasm – to say nothing of Ivan’s gritty determination – I realised that I couldn’t very well not go along without losing all shred of credibility. I therefore grit my teeth and resolved to make the most of things, hoping that I would at least get a story and maybe some photographs from the outing.

At some point Nat and Georgia went off to their room, hoping to catch some sleep before the big adventure. Ivan and Lora also disappeared, which left me alone in the hut with several diverse groups of hard-drinking Bulgarians, all of whom insisted that I join them in their revels. As I had already decided that there was no point in sleeping that evening, I accepted their invitations, merrily clinking glasses and shouting ‘Na zdravie!’ ‘Cheers!’ along with them as I emptied one glass of rakija after another. In this convivial way the hours sped past.

Needless to say I had some lovely encounters. There was the young couple who sat quietly playing cards in the corner and insisted I try their rakija, which was distilled from peaches and very good. There was Momchil, an ebullient young man who worked as a truck driver in London and was here at Lovna with the birthday party; his rakija was distilled from grapes and, he assured me, was totally ‘pure’, without added sugar or any sort of chemicals, which was enough of a recommendation for me and I drank it with gusto. There was a quartet of four good old boys who didn’t say what their rakija was distilled from and, what’s more, didn’t appear to care, but who shared it with equal abandon, along with their supply of meatballs and peppers and white cheese coated with a fiery layer of paprika. Finally there was Simeon, who didn’t give me any raki at all but rather tied me down with some demanding conversation, the tenor of which he announced at the start by asking me what I thought of Edward Snowden, the ex-CIA whistle-blower, and Australia’s role in the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance.

Simeon was indeed an interesting character. With his hulking size and shaven head, he resembled nothing so much as an English football hooligan. But within minutes of talking to him I realised that he was a gentle, sensitive soul who wanted nothing more than to discover the meaning of life. Admittedly, with at least a gallon of rakija under my belt, I wasn’t in the best condition to appreciate the concepts he was explaining and struggled with terms like ‘genetic imprinting’ and ‘molecular manufacturing’; but I could appreciate his serious nature and understood his predicament when he said he wanted to go and live in India, in order to study spirituality, but the India government would only allow him to stay six months. He couldn’t understand such restrictions, he said, when the human spirit was transient and life so brutal and short.

Meanwhile was I by chance acquainted with Enrico Fermi? he wanted to know.

At the same time as I was trying to follow Simeon’s abstruse discourse and drink vast amounts of rakija, I had to deal with a soundtrack on the television that was straight out of the nineteen eighties and included songs like the brooding ‘Big Log’ by Robert Plant, Lionel Ritchie’s bubbly ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’, and the Human League wailing ‘Don’t You Want Me, Baby?’ Is there any wonder, then, that when Nat and Georgia reappeared, refreshed from their nap at a little before three o’clock on Sunday morning, I was feeling somewhat daunted?

They, of course, were aghast that they’d missed all the fun…

By now we were at the business end of things. There was still no sign of either Lora or Ivan. But as the rain had stopped and stars had begun to appear in a clear cold sky patched with ragged scraps of cloud, there was no question of us not going. We therefore decided to set a start-time of 3.30 a.m., at which point, we resolved, we would set out for the lakes regardless of whether the other two joined us or not. Having come to this decision I heated up some leftover coffee and we settled down to yet more rakija, laughing at the idea that this traditional Bulgarian occasion might turn out to be an all-Australian expedition.