By Chris Weidner

For Daily Camera

When God created the world he gave some land to every nation, says an old Bulgarian legend.

But he forgot about one, and for a time its people had nowhere to live. To remedy their grief, God gathered small parts of all the land he gave away - only the best parts - and put them together inside a small country he called Bulgaria.

It's a nation that could fit twice inside Colorado, with room to spare. How could I have known the immensity of its virtues?

When fellow Boulder climber Heidi Wirtz (aka "Heidi Almighty") invited my wife, Heather, and me to climb with her in Bulgaria, I didn't exactly jump at the opportunity. October in Bulgaria conjured visions of dark, dank forests, ice-cold rock, ceaseless rain and, well, vampires (vis--vis the 2012 discovery of 14th-century Bulgarian skeletons with iron rods through their chests).

Not that I have anything at all against vampires.

But did we really want to gamble "Rock-tober" -- the best month for rock climbing everywhere on the planet -- on a wild card like Bulgaria?

And what of the cuisine? I hadn't eaten meat in more than a year, and I planned to keep it that way. I imagined greasy pork sandwiches, chicken stews and liver pies. Nary a veggie in sight. And bread. Stale, white bread.

But the allure of adventure often trumps logic. Perhaps that's why we agreed, albeit reluctantly, to meet Heidi in Bulgaria.

As our plane descended through thick, black clouds into Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, I looked over at Heather (a vegetarian of 15 years) and said, "I think we're going to be hungry for a while."

The smiling faces of Heidi and her Bulgarian friend, Ruslan Vakrilov, instantly washed my worries away. Ostensibly, Rus (rhymes with Zeus) was our photographer, shooting photos for an article Heidi is writing for Climbing magazine. But he quickly assumed roles more critical to our daily life, like translator, driver, tour guide and event coordinator.

Without Rus we were as helpless as Dracula in a tanning booth.

Rus guided us to six different limestone crags and one granite bouldering area -- all of which we would have been lucky to find without him. There is no climbing guidebook, and the narrow roads are a maze.

Maybe that's why Bulgaria seems like European climbing's best-kept secret. While no single cliff equals any on the Front Range in terms of climbing volume, each has a special character unlike anything in Colorado. From Lakatnik's sunny slabs to the gymnastic overhangs of Malkata Dupka (Small Cave), which seems to hover above the quiet river valley of Zgorigrad, it's as if the Bulgarian legend was conceived with climbing in mind.

The reality of life in Bulgaria proved far richer and more colorful than I could have imagined. Forests, densely packed with deciduous trees, blanketed the landscape in autumn hues reminiscent of New England. After one rainy day we enjoyed two sun-filled weeks without a single raindrop. It was, in fact, too hot to climb in the sun.

And the local diet? Lots of meat. But to our astonishment, Rus himself was a vegetarian! Meatless meals could not have been easier. Grocery stores and farmers markets burst with fresh, local produce that comprised our nightly Shopska salad: tomatoes, cucumbers, shredded sheep cheese, olives, parsley and red onions mashed with salt and olive oil. We feasted on banitsa (a traditional egg pastry), homemade yogurt, fresh sheep cheese, bean soup and dark bread.

Halloween night was our last in Bulgaria, and part of me hoped to visit a cemetery to see about the vampires. But my body was so exhausted from the climbing that my companions and I crashed early instead.

As I fell asleep, the words passed down from Ruslan's grandfather came to mind: "Our land is not big. We don't have huge things. But we have a little bit of the best of everything."

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