Margaret Williamson
February 2011

Margaret wrote the following piece within a 600-word limit for a competition. Winner or not, it's well worth sharing for the insight it gives into the kindness of the poorest of people to the passing travellers (particularly the cyclist).

I often travel through Bulgaria with my husband, cycling and motorhoming. In the rural villages, the younger folk have left to work in towns and cities, at home or abroad, leaving the elderly to subsist on the produce of their gardens, their chickens, goats and bees. And yet they have not forgotten the tradition of sharing with strangers and we've been handed many a bag of fruit or vegetables where we camp. Trying to respond, we gave one dear old woman a box of chocolates in return for the plums, which reduced her to tears. This recent event takes me back to my first journey across Bulgaria.     

It was August 1989 – the summer before the fall of the Berlin Wall - and blisteringly hot at noon. My partner and I were cycling from England to Istanbul through the Iron Curtain countries of Eastern Europe: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia lay behind us, though East Germany (the DDR) refused entry to Capitalist Cyclists in those days. That country was avoided by reaching Poland via West Germany, Denmark and Sweden (with the help of an occasional ferry).

Riding through a tiny Bulgarian village, we spotted a wooden bench at the side of the road and stopped to rest our bicycles and our legs over a bite of lunch. Almost immediately, an elderly peasant woman, well wrapped against the sun in headscarf and long pinafore, bustled out of the nearest cottage and addressed us (not surprisingly) in Bulgarian. Assuming it was her bench, we apologised and began to pack up – but not before she had returned with a cloth, bread, goat's cheese, tomatoes from her garden and an enormous watermelon. She indicated that we should stay and enjoy them, offering water and proudly refusing to take the money we offered.

Knowing the dire poverty in which the people were living, the utter scarcity of any kind of food in the shops and the long queues we often joined for bread, we felt extremely humbled. We left with hugs all round – and several pounds of watermelon on the rear carrier. Sadly, we had to relieve ourselves of that weight, giving the melon away in the next village and hoping news didn't travel as fast as we did! Watermelons seemed to be a kind of local currency, as we were given bottles of sweet fizzy pop in exchange – which we then gave away in the next village … and had to refuse another watermelon!

I've often wondered what would happen if a pair of sweaty Bulgarian cyclists had turned up to sit on a garden wall and eat their sandwiches in an English hamlet in 1989. I fear they would not have met with such spontaneous generosity, despite the wealth of our country.

We continued cycling to Turkey, to fly back from Istanbul to England (and to college) after our 7-week ride. So many memories of people, places and politics, but pride of place must go to this warm-hearted old lady, who couldn't even write her own name for us. The kindness of strangers, in the poorest of places, indeed!

Much has changed in over two decades, especially in Bulgaria and other former Soviet countries. My partner became my husband and we are still cycling and travelling together - and we still prefer the values of Eastern Europe to those of the West.

(564 words)