“And again, as always, I couldn’t just sit around at home, so I started on a new adventure. My heart longs to be on the road, to see new places! I am now getting ready to go to Spain, to follow the El Camino or Camino de Santiago trail,” wrote in her blog Alena Sapoundjieva in May, member of the Sofia Travellers’ Club. 

In her story, shared by other travel buffs, she says her grand passion is to travel around Latin America, but that she has now decided to “take a break” and to go countries like Iceland, Norway, Portugal, France and Andorra. “Until the end of this year I shall be travelling around Bulgaria and Europe to take in the historical and natural sights,” Alena says. She is a frequent guest, with her stories and photographs, at the club for people devoted to one passion – travelling the world.

The Travellers’ Club brings together people wanting to share their personal experience of their travels, tell stories of places off the beaten track, help others who are getting ready to start on long journeys. But there are quite a few who want to hear stories of distant lands and, even if it is just for an hour, forget the dreariness of the day-to-day grind.

The idea of a Sofia Travellers’ Club was actually born during a long journey Margarita Angelova took abroad. And she set about making it work and, together with friends, rented space in the centre of Sofia which they furnished themselves, using a great many atlases, guide-books and travelogues for ambiance. Besides meetings and presentations, the club now hosts first aid training courses in the event of accidents up in the mountain or on the road – interest in them has been rising and more than 300 people have now undergone training. Margarita Angelova says that each journey to places unknown is an intimate personal experience. It changes one’s view of life and helps get to know the world better:

“During my travels around the world I made a discovery about myself. Although I have always considered myself a freedom-loving person, I am actually prone to prejudice. But travelling people will open up to the world, try out new things they never even knew existed. And when you come back from your travels, your view of the world is changed, you are brimming with new ideas. In the three years the Club has been in existence, I noticed interest in travelling has been snowballing. People are out to find new challenges, get out of their boxes, their homes and long for new experiences they can share with friends. As we say, a journey is only over when it has been shared. A journey may last one day, three months or even a year. Each person has a different idea of what travelling means. It is getting more and more difficult to tear oneself away from theworld wide web and civilization while one is on the road. It is getting more and more difficult to discover places no one has seen, described in words or taken photographs of. Telephones and the Internet are everywhere and people post pictures and information about faraway places right there, on the spot. Lonesome travellers are not all that popular. In our day people set out on a journey to meet new people, to connect with the world.”

“Travelling is part of human nature,” Margarita says and adds:

“People come up with all sorts of ways to find adventure. The more people want to see the world up close, the more each one of us wants to demonstrate what we are capable of and reach the limits of our abilities. A young explorer came to us – Antonia Houbancheva, who has been researching bats. She has been on several expeditions to Panama, Hawaii, Africa. There she has lived in jungles, among wild beasts. To us Antonia is an emblematic traveller. She sets out on her travels all by herself and there, gets to meet the local people, descends into caves and crevices, places inaccessible, inhabited by bats. She loves nature, snakes, frogs, lizards. She is free of any fears or prejudices and is entirely devoted to her mission. It is so inspiring to meet someone like that. Meeting people like Antonia has often triggered a thirst for adventure in people who have always been apprehensive of travelling and they have become the most ardent members and story-tellers of our club.”

English version: Milena Daynova
Photos: travellers-bg.com