Welp, yay!

Hahaha. Ok, so, renting a car when you don’t know the language of the rental agent is really difficult. But we did it after like half an hour of gesturing and writing down times and giggling. Drove about 2.5 hours almost straight south, ending up in the mountains very close to Greece. The road followed a curvy river that would have been nauseating except that our adrenaline from fear of head on collisions kept the sickness at bay. Kate, who was driving, kept screaming when we saw a car, but she insisted that that was her “everything is ok” noise. We passed a bunch of small, red-roofed towns built along the base of the steep valley walls, and every once in a while an old church or fortress built high up into a cliff.

And then we got to the caves! Oh lord, they were awesome. Seriously, really really cool, I’d never been in a real cave cave, not the kind that you picture from tourist books- low, tunnely, stalactites everywhere, goo. But this one, yeah. Small caverns then tunnels then big caverns then wide cracks in the rock, all with different shapes of rock. It was heaven. Seriously. We were being herded by a guide who had to retrace his steps and shove us along with a thick-accented, annoyed, “Hurry up!” Unfortunately we couldn’t touch the goo, which had a slimy appeal, but in some places stalagmites (the bottom pointy cave cones) had started to form on the concrete path through the tunnels.

And, just up the hill we had a brief (English!) tour through a cave dwelling dating to about 6000 years ago. Weirdly late in the game, since there were large civilizations at that time not far away, but the mountains are quite remote for people limited to walking. I guess the place was a pottery workshop-there were several fire places and a kiln, which apparently could reach up to 600 degrees C, way hotter than I would have thought. But we could see three separate periods of habitation in an excavated part of the floor. (Ash and clay and dirt when people lived there, and river sediment when no one was there.) Funnily enough, there were also human bones from 300 years ago when Bulgarians hid there from invading Turks.