The beautiful Balkans on horseback

My husband and I decide we are up for a horse-riding adventure. We’ve done a few and have realised it’s the only way to travel: the truest way to experience an up-close and personal with a country and its people. You’re out of your comfort zone, there’s no turning back, you must abandon all control and anything can happen. There’s nothing like extreme vulnerability to induce trust and affection in your guide and his horses. But gratitude for surviving your holiday aside, it’s not hard to fall for everything the trip has to offer.

We arrive in Apriltsi, a small Bulgarian town at the foot of the central Balkan Mountains, after a three-hour drive from Sofia. You get a sense of the level of hospitality, aesthetic and food quality before you can even smell a horse, and here there was an instant whiff of the authentic. The Bulgarians might want all the ubiquitous capitalist junk, but so far it hasn’t reached the central Balkans.