Bulgaria: A horse ride into the Balkans

Perhaps given that Bulgarians themselves seem to be still asking those questions, it's not surprising that the rest of us are.

In contrast to most of its Balkan neighbours, recent history has smiled on Bulgaria but according to British historian, Professor Richard Crampton, an expert on Bulgaria, after eons of Ottoman and then Soviet colonisation, Bulgaria suffers a "victim complex" and does not smile back. Indeed in the latest euro barometer, Bulgaria rates as the most discontent nation in the EU. My theory is that, like a beautiful girl hidden under a paper bag where the gaze of the world's adoring eyes are denied and its poet's tongues silenced, she has no idea just how alluring she is. Of course she's not bloody smiling. Yet! Paradoxically her humility and mystery is one of Bulgaria's great charms so here's to hoping a little exposure and flattery won't go to her head.

My husband and I decide we are up for a horse riding adventure. We've done a few and have decided it's the only way to travel. The truest way to have an "up close and personal" with both the country and its people. For starters you're out of your comfort zone, there's no turning back, you must abandon all control and anything can happen. There is nothing like extreme vulnerability to induce uncommon trust and affection in both your host guide (22-year-old Nicko) and his horses. But gratitude for surviving a holiday in the saddle aside, it's not hard to fall for every appeal this holiday has to offer.

We arrive in Apriltsi, a small town at the bottom of the central Balkan mountains, after a three-hour drive from Sofia. You quickly get a sense of the level of hospitality, aesthetic and food quality before you can even smell a horse. Mercifully, there was an instant whiff of the authentic. The Bulgarians maywant all the ubiquitous capitalist junk but, so far, not much has reached the central Balkans. What you get is all the flavour of seasonal produce without the waste of endless choice. Wine was always available and delicious although their beloved Rakiais the national tipple. The accommodation is simple, clean; the homes mostly white-washed with red tiled roofs and spectacularly unadorned. The Bulgarians are more gardeners than builders. Every window sill and courtyard is crammed with colored splashes of potted plants and grape vines.

Our steeds, mountain horses bred by the Turkish army, are bomb-proof and fit enough to take us five to seven hours a day across the Stara Planina park, a national park of 717 square kilometres, up to a height of 2000 metres. Over six days we will ride 160 kilometres. Even for a riding fiend, it seems like a ridiculous amount of time in a saddle but something strange happens to time on horseback. No sooner have you had your first canter, scaled your first sun-dappled beech forest, gasped at your first vast, blue-hazed panorama, than its time to dismount for lunch.

Our overnight abodes are, without exception, deeply romantic. The first night we get a faded blue wooden dairy set in an alpine valley of wild horses and sheep whose neck bells tinkle away like a soundscape from Heidi. In the summer months solitary shepherds still watch and live with their flocks. Purportedly, there are still wolves and bears in the park although, an evening of scanning the juniper thickets above the tree line, doesn't reveal more the odd red deer.

Our second night we stay in the Kaloferski monastery, now home to only three ancient nuns but boasting a 17th-century orthodox Bulgarian chapel of rare beauty. Its interior walls covered in naive Christian icons with a chandelier of disproportionate size and splendour. Dinner on the cloisters' balcony with the high mountains peaks dressed in light from a swollen moon is neither of this century nor earthly.