Сamping at the Black Sea
January 16th, 2025
I only got around to writing about my summer adventures in the winter... This summer me and my friends from university went camping to the shore of Black Sea.
I took a sleeper train to the nearest town — it was my first time traveling alone. Not going to lie, it was very romantic. Friends picked me up from there and what happened next wasn't just a short drive to the shore, but a journey to another reality that lives by its own laws. The whole trip was otherworldly and feels like a dream.
We camped on the mountainside by the sea. Every day we went swimming and cannonballing from the pier, in the cleanest water of the most beautiful turquoise color I've ever seen, and you could often see schools of tiny little fishes gliding through the water. We often jumped off the pier right into the schools of fish!
This time we chose to sleep in hammocks instead of tents because of the heat, and when we were sleeping, we looked like giant pupae in silk cocoons hanging between the trees.
Hammock sleep is very comfy, actually, if you do it right. You need to hang it between trees at such a distance that the hammock is stretched enough to be almost a flat horizontal surface, and then you have to lay in it sort of diagonally, so it's even more stretched out. I slept like this for several days and never had any pain in my back.
I was always the first one to wake up in the morning. Every day I woke up around 7, brushed my teeth and went to the beach alone to stare at the waves. One day on my way back from the water source I found... a turtle! I've never saw a turtle in the wild before, yet alone such a big one!
I carefully grabbed it and rushed with it to our camp, where everyone was still asleep. I raised it over my friend's hammock and screamed, "WAKE UP! WAKE UP!!!"
He slowly opened his eyes, stared at the turtle for some time and then it dawned on him that he is looking AT A FUCKING TURTLE. Then I woke up everyone else in the camp the same way :^)
After I showed the turtle to all of my friends, I ran with it back to the place where I found it and gently put it on the ground.
A couple of times a jay came to visit us in the mornings, squeaking and not letting us sleep, lol.
One day I got woken up by raindrops falling on my face. The rain turned into tropical downpour very quickly, and we didn't even have time to take down hammocks and clothes that were drying on the trees. All of us crammed into one tent we used as a storage and waited the rain out.
The other day we decided to make a short walk up the mountain we camped on. It was very sunny, but the tree crowns were so dense that you couldn't see the sky or the sea. After waddling up steep paths for a while, one by one the friends began to tire and say they wanted to go back. Suddenly, the trees thinned out and the sea emerged. And there were red ribbons tied to the tree branches all over the place, with pine cones, stones and seashells.
My friend decided to take one rock with a hole in it as a souvenir. He began to untie it from the tree, and all of the girls suddenly turned superstitious and started begging him not to touch it — so he doesn't piss off the spirits of this place. He took it anyway and I tied my hair with it, lol.
Friends were completely exhausted and decided to go back, but me and that one friend were too curious to see what else we can find and we continued the journey, just the two of us.
The paths were getting more intense and increasingly difficult, but the higher we were, the more often the path suddenly turned to the edge of the cliff and rewarded us with a breathtaking view of the sea. We started seeing different trees and flowers that didn't grow in other places.
And then we found ourselves in another weird place: a random Hindu shrine in the middle of the forest.
My friend thought about it and said, "I heard that there's a lodge of yogi somewhere high up on this mountain, and it seems we're on the path to it." Now our journey had a specific goal.
But the rest of the way was rough — we didn't plan on doing such a long hike, it was originally intended to be a short walk. We didn't take any water with us and we started getting thirsty, but we were already so far away from our camp and any sign of civilization. Time started to pass very slowly and it felt like we'll never reach our destination. We slowed down a lot so we wouldn't sweat and lose even more water. I didn't even want to think about the fact that we'd have to come all the way back.
And we reached the lodge.
And.. we weren't alone there! We met a family of parents with three small daughters in frilly dresses in the lodge. And, can you believe it, they had a big bottle of water. I explained our situation and they shared their water with us!
On the way back we found another path home — a straight and wide road, instead of twisting mountain paths we took before. We were running down this road as fast as we could, overwhelmed with happiness.
The next day the two of us wanted to explore another mountain, this time we prepared and took plenty of water with us. That was one of the most beautiful days of my life.
On the highest point of that mountain there was a cell phone tower. We climbed it and sat on top until the sun went down. It was so pretty up there — we called our friends who stayed in the camp and screamed at them that they should hurry up and join us before the sun sets. While we waited for them, we perched on top and listened to our favorite songs.
In about an hour they showed up with a bottle of wine, right on time. We guided them how to climb up, all four of us crammed on that small platform on top and we watched the most beautiful sunset of our lives, while taking turns putting on songs.
The scenery changed every second, so watching the sky for an entire hour wasn't boring at all. Sun beams constantly emerged in new places, clouds took different shapes, sometimes leaving a shadow on the water surface.
And then came the night. I was usually too sleepy to hang out at night. I crawled into my hammock as soon as darkness fell, while friends went to sleep almost in the morning, but there were a couple of days when I stayed up late.
We wandered along the beaches with flashlights, met other weird people roaming in the dark. The most memorable acquaintance was a guy with a giant pirate flag and a guitar who made a campfire in a remote part of the beach, attracting whoever was out at such a late hour. He played guitar and smoked hookah. He told us he's a federal agent on vacation.
We sat around the campfire with him for a bit, then me and friends went swimming in the moonlight. I forgot to take swimwear, so I was swimming in a dress, we were swimming towards the moon and the moonlight reflection felt like a wide road we were walking down. It was a surreal experience.
