Bulgarian Days

There were still blanks on the map of Europe after all.

Long before I even got there, the Rusenski Lom Nature Park had seemed a reluctant destination. A brief note in the guidebook had outlined the basics: the park consisted of a twisting series of gorges in northern Bulgaria, incised into a limestone plateau by one of the rivers that fed the Danube. But that was about all I had to go on. I’d arrived in Ruse, the elegant Bulgarian city close to the Romanian border, with little to steer me beyond a vague impulse to find somewhere most visitors overlooked.

“I don’t know much about it,” confessed the receptionist of my Ruse hotel when I asked for directions. It took three phone-calls until she found a taxi-driver who knew the way.

The enigma persisted as the taxi careered past flat, unremarkable arable farmland towards a ribbon of cloud, which appeared to be drifting up from a great crack in the land. Then the road sloped downhill, and the earth split open. As the fog cleared there were the terracotta roof-tiles of Cherven village, strewn inside a gorge.

My base for exploring Rusenski Lom was House Petrov, a homestead up on a ridge, with clean simple rooms overlooking the village below.

Owner Yordan Petrov had salt-and-pepper hair, bushy eyebrows and finger-tips stained black with…