Although the omelette was lovely, the 8 o'clock breakfast made for a late start. Heading up the rocky track through the trees was easy at first gaining height slowly. Concrete tanks of dirty water, similar to ones I saw yesterday, were for fire fighting, according to a sign translated by Google. I missed the odd diversion off the main track without feeling I lost anything important. The route of the Kom-Emine then shrunk to a path and began climbing steeply. Leaving the trees behind it rose up at an even higher angle to the top of a ridge. From there, easy walking for several kilometres of grassland allowed me to enjoy the surrounding scenery. At the end of this plateau I could see Kom Peak in the distance, beyond another red and white TV tower.
Being Sunday people were about walking in ones, twos and small groups. One guy passed pushing his mountain bike up a hill, a motor bike driven by a person in bright yellow gear was repeatedly revving hard, and three Quad bikers raced by. I stopped at a restaurant on the Petrohan Pass for a kebab in bread and a Coke for lunch. The quad bikers were there, middle aged blokes like myself. One said something in Bulgarian and pointed to his head. I shrugged my shoulders in incomprehension. Later I realised I had a leaf stuck in my hair.
A little before I reached the restaurant there had been a piped spring with a good stream of water. People were lined up with large, cooler sized, mineral water bottles waiting to fill them up. There seems a general preference for spring water compared with the municipal supply. I only needed to fill my one litre water bottle and I was kindly let in by the man at the spring. Not sure if the people in the queue behind felt quite so generous.
Leaving the busy road at the pass, I climbed up towards the TV Tower turning off left before I arrived onto a series of forest tracks and paths onto the treeless ridge on which Kom Peak lies. As the afternoon wore on, shadows lengthening, I made the final climb up to the summit. It was around 5 pm when I arrived, alone in empty space except for a small metal tower and a memorial to someone. A cold wind was blowing but visibility was good, I could see a lot of mountains, some I had walked over, others I had not. I took a few photos, emptied an annoying bit of grit out of my boot, celebrated with a Mars bar, then retraced my steps down to the ridge, quietly pleased with my achievement.
The Bulgarian E3 ends at Kom Peak with the Kom-Emine trail, there was then a gap before the E3 continues in Rumania at the Djerdap dam, which both turns the Danube into a large artificial lake and links Serbia with Rumania. To reach this point from Kom I could have headed north on a road route used by the blogger "German Tourist", cross into Serbia then follow the E4 route to Djerdap. However, my plan was to follow a more southerly route via Dragoman. From there I would travel to Sofia and return home. Next year I would return to Dragoman, follow the Sultans Trail to Dimitrovgrad in Serbia, then travel up the E4 to Djerdap. This was a longer route, however it made it easier to split the trips, catching a flights to and from Sofia. In addition when I walked the E4 in Serbia a few years ago, a GPX track of the route had not been published. I managed to work out much of it from the book "Rambling through Serbia at a Slow Pace" published by the Mountaineering Association of Serbia, but I knew I went wrong in some places, for example, I never managed to climb Veliki Krs, a prominent ridge. A GPX track had now been published so I could follow the correct route.
My plan from Kom Peak was to follow a route I found online on the TEAR (Trans European Alpine Route) website to Dragoman and then catch a train to Sofia. Unfortunately the route started over long grass and juniper bushes for the first kilometre or so. I decided to avoid this section by following tracks on the map on my GPS. Of the first track I tried there was no trace. An adjacent track worked out but by now the sun was setting, lighting up the jet vapour trails high in the western sky. I pitched my tent on a spot selected just before the after light of the setting sun disappeared. Not ideal, tufts of vegetation are making lumps in the groundsheet, but it will do.
31.8 kilometres walked today with a total ascent of 1600 metres.
No comments:
Post a Comment