14. Gate to the Rainbow

14: GATE TO THE RAINBOW

The trail pinches to a deer path. My phone loses signal. The rain smells like metal. I tuck a two-dollar plastic sheet under my arm and pick up my pace.

Three nights till the full moon.

“Keep going down,” a voice says.

I step past a boulder and the mountain tips—path dropping fast, clouds boiling under me, and somewhere below: human sounds.

Tonight I either find the Rainbow…or I zip myself into a clear plastic coffin and shiver till dawn.

Welcome to Go and Find Out. I’m Jonny Wright.

This is a story of losing yourself in the world.

I left my home, my job, and the USA in order to learn the old-fashioned way: with first-hand experience.

In these episodes, I ask big questions about life, not from an armchair but from roadsides and mountaintops, from temple halls and dance halls.

Join me as I hitchhike around the world, embrace the unexpected, and let go, one step at a time.

If you’ve ever thought about living a life outside the box, keep listening.

Because it’s never too late to begin your next adventure.

You don’t need to hitchhike around the world. The adventure is right in front of you.

Let’s go and find out.

I found out about the rainbow on my trip last year, the same way most people find out about the rainbow: through word of mouth. While I was in Slovakia, I met a Danish girl named Lina. Lina said she'd heard about this weird gathering happening the next month. Lina said it was some hippie thing. She didn’t really know.

A week later, what she sent me wasn’t a flyer, or a link, or even words. It was just numbers. Coordinates.

I tapped them into the map, and the screen zoomed in until the roads disappeared and the beige pixels stretched into nothing. The pin dropped in a blank patch of Bulgarian mountains. It looked less like a destination and more like a dare.

Was this place real? Or just another traveler’s myth—like El Dorado, or Shangri-La, but hidden in the folds of Google Maps?

Now, you might say that I’m a kind of ‘hardcore’ traveler with my hitchhiking and couchsurfing and the rest, but I’m definitely not a wilderness trekker (at least, not yet!). I don’t carry a tent, or a lick of camping gear. The warmest clothes I had were a long-sleeved shirt, a thoroughly uninsulated raincoat and a pair of pants. I was intimidated by how rugged the land looked. At the same time, I thought, Hey, it's summer! I thought. Well, summer makes you cocky. I went anyway.

So I found my new goal. I had my coordinates, and my only job was to get there. I hitchhiked south through Hungary, Romania, and most of Bulgaria.

I make it to the nearest city to the coordinates. The city’s name is Plovdiv, in the south of Bulgaria. After a night there I start my way up into the mountains. My only act of preparation is on my way out of town. I stop by a paint store and buy a paper thin plastic drop cloth for two dollars. Just in case it rains, I can use this to make a shelter. A drop cloth. I mean, I’m not even in the right department. Painting is not the same as camping.

I hitchhike out of the city toward the looming mountains. At first it feels simple enough.

I ride with an old couple on their way back to their mountain home from grocery shopping. I sit holding grocery bags and bottles of milk on my lap as we wend our way up the switchbacks. Villages shrink to clusters of roofs, then to lone houses, then to nothing. By the time they drop me off, I’m standing alone by a stream, the last building behind me. No more cars. No more people.

Ok, time to walk.

The road gives way to dirt, then to loose rock, then to trail. The trail narrows until it belongs more to the cows than to me. Their bells clank in hollow rhythms, and I bow my head as I weave through the herd, an intruder in their pasture.

I’m happy to be on a path instead of a city street. It’s exhilarating to leave a city and wind up in the woods. The scents change just as often as they do in the city, but instead of smelling trash and then fries and then trash, here it's a sequence of pine and then conifer and then bluegrass. Each breath feels clean. But clean doesn’t mean safe. The trail bends away from the coordinates, away from the pin on my map. And to the right there’s only cliffs and forest too thick to push through.

I walk and sing, sing and walk. I’m getting closer, but I’m not yet close. By the time I notice, the sun is already folding itself into clouds. A chill clings to the sweat on my skin. The pleasant walk has soured into calculation. How far till dark? How far from shelter?

I take stock: no sign of people, no fires, no music. Just silence pressing in.

If I turned back now, I wouldn’t make it a quarter of the way before dark. I’d be stranded.

The only structure I’d passed was that abandoned hunting shelter. It was half a shack, open to the rain, littered with empty liquor bottles and jugs of something brown. Better than nothing, maybe. But not much.

I check my phone. No signal. I text Lina again anyway. Nothing. For all I know, those numbers she sent were a joke. A prank. Maybe there’s no gathering at all.

I really want there to be a warm and welcoming place with fires and soup and people who say, ‘welcome in, friend.’ I should stop. I know I should stop. But hope dangles like bait on a hook.

And that’s how the trap works.

The want overrides the fact that the odds are against me. So my feet start moving again. I guess this is pretty close to the dictionary definition of ‘delusional.’

Because now it’s too late to turn back, too dark to find another way, too wet to pretend this was a casual hike. The rain begins to fall. The thunder is closer now. The woods compress.

One foot in front of the other. Each step takes me further from safety.

The birds have already vanished. The air feels abandoned. The green branches reach down for me as if the forest itself were closing in.

In a last ditch effort, I start to run deeper, not knowing where it will lead. One foot in front of the other, and each footfall takes me further from safety. But at this point, it’s the only thing to do. The birds stop calling. They’ve left the skies for their nests. The emerald branches reach toward the rain. It all flashes by as I use the last of my energy to gain just a little more ground.

And then I see it.

A shape breaks through the storm—perched high on a jagged rock, cross-legged, spine straight, hair wild. For a second I think my mind’s playing tricks. A man—or some vision of one—sits there in lotus, shirtless, eyes shut, palms open to the sky.

I stumble closer, teeth chattering, and croak out the question: “Rainbow?”

His eyes snap open, huge, blue, and feral. He looks straight at me, face unchanged. Then in a rasp: “Keep going down.”

And that is all he says.

It sounds less like advice and more like a riddle. A password. A warning.

Keep going down.

I find a trail nearby that snakes down the slope, and follow that trail, almost giddy with excitement and relief. My heart pounds as I run, peering past every tree and fold in the land, watching for another clue of civilization.

That was a near thing back there. I was beginning to think I would walk forever, mile on mile, until I collapsed. There’s a kind of thrill you get when you realize you may have made a mistake. I admit that there’s something in me that enjoys these kinds of moments. The moments of genuine uncertainty. The moments where your expectations are overturned by what’s happening now. You get real sober and your eyes widen. And then comes the laughter. Because it's also so…energizing. You see the great scale of nonhuman life practically swallowing you up, and you see your own body as just one spoke in a wheel. The goal becomes at once, crystal clear: to survive.

Now I walk,

Up ahead I catch sight of another figure. A woman in a long dress. I stop, wary. She looks like she’s waiting for someone. But when she sees me, there’s a spark in her calm eyes and she approaches.

“I’m Eluah. Come with me.” Immediately, and with no hurry, she turns and walks down the path, a pint-sized dog bouncing along at her side. She points to a broad, flat rock. “Sit.” I obey without thinking. She pulls charcoal and paper from her bag, her eyes moving across my face, and then her hand begins to move over the rough surface of paper.

I shift my weight, uncomfortable. Her gaze doesn’t waver. Ten minutes of silence—the only sound the scrape of charcoal.

Finally she hands me the page. A face stares back. Mine, but stripped—hair wild, eyes wide, caught between curiosity and fear.

“There you are,” she says. Three words that felt heavier than any welcome. Without another glance, she disappears into the trees.

I look down at the paper, unsettled. Is that how I look to them? Is that who I am?

I hear sounds, human sounds now, and walk further down the trail. The trees begin to clear.

Then, like the rise of a curtain, a massive plateau opens out. Unfolding before me is a scene from another time. A city of tents, spread over the blond meadows beneath a sky that seems much bigger than the one I’ve been hiking under. Out in the distance big clouds and mountain peaks stand together like brothers. Mottled pots atop fires, nude people carrying buckets of water. Children running between their legs.

After hours of nothing but rain and shadows, it looks like I’ve stumbled into another century. A place where time stopped, or never started.The miniature scale of the people and their shelters makes it feel like this was a whole civilization enfolded in the majesty of the place that had been living and dying and birthing and dancing for thousands of years. I feel myself thrown somewhere in the past, to one of those centuries that go by without recognizable change. Just land and humans doing their thing.

I still don’t know what this rainbow is. All I know is that now / I’m in it.

Down onto the plateau, through the paths. People smile at me as I pass. “Welcome home!” a bearded man shouts. The way he smiles at me feels genuine, but something in me recoils. I don’t trust like that.

Another man sidles up to me, squinting at the clouds through his glasses. In a German accent, he says, “do those clouds look like spiders to you?” but he doesn’t seem to be looking for an answer.

Now it really is getting dark, and I have no energy left.

I cautiously search out a spot to bed down. It’s strange, there’s plenty of land and lots of tents, but no markers to show anybody’s territory. Where am I allowed?

I spread the drop cloth on a patch of slanted, wet, needly ground. It sticks to itself, then to my face as I crawl under, shoes tucked in like pets. The ground is ribbed with roots; every breath fogs the sheet and drips back on my lips.

“Ask for help.” “Don’t.”

I try to relax, but all the pieces of my body feel so out of place: Fingers warm, toes numb, spine tingling, skin wet. The night hisses.

I try to sleep. I learn instead. I learn how long an hour is. And another, and another. I learn how loud your own heart gets when you need it as a furnace.

Outside, laughter and footsteps. Sex. Fires crackling. A whole human world just beyond the plastic. Inside, it’s just me and the sound of my own furnace heart.

I could ask for help. Someone would take me in, I know it. But I don’t ask.

It’s the strangest kind of loneliness—being surrounded, and still unseen.

What this whole rainbow gathering was would have to wait until tomorrow. Whether it was a bunch of camping enthusiasts or a death cult, I didn’t know yet.

I find out more the next day, after a midday meal.

The Rainbow’s a month-long, no-electricity campout that’s been migrating since the ’70s—open door, anarchic, lots of stories, lots of contradictions. It isn’t a party so much as a practice.

I would describe the Rainbow as one step away from a cult, and a baby step at that.

Later that day I find myself talking with a shirtless man with curly locks. He casually tells me he’s starting a cult. Still in the planning stages. He says it the way someone talks about their startup. ‘No big deal, but kind of a big deal.’ Since when did we normalize calling your cult a cult? I thought the cult part of a cult was supposed to be the big secret. That’s usually the reveal halfway through the documentary: ‘oh, it’s a cult!! Honey, we joined a cult!’ This guy says he’s currently networking with people to get a sense of who might be interested in joining. His primary mode of networking is…sex. “I try to have sex with anyone who’s interested. It makes things easier.” The words ‘makes things easier’ sound vaguely comforting to me. I nod, trying to look neither surprised nor too much on board.

He says he’ll be making pasta over by his campsite, and that I’m welcome anytime. I thank him, and / don’t show up for the pasta.

That first time, everything felt so different and strange that I didn’t feel free to be myself there. I kept my guard up. I observed more than I participated. Kind of how I am in most circumstances, just…more so.

But this year I’m coming to the gathering with an intention. I want to drop all my masks and simply be.

It's a quiet afternoon, and I'm listening to the sounds of life around me from the comfort of my newly acquired tent. Yes, I'm in a tent for the first time on this trip. Someone was giving it away. One of the crossbars is broken, so it has a tendency to collapse during the night. Still, it's a whole lot better than the straw mat I had when I arrived here. No cars, no city rumble. I hear a ukelele being tuned, swimmers splashing in the lake just below my little ridge, and distant hand drums and saxophone float across the lake's water.

I step out of the tent for a walk. dotting the hillside are tents of every color, between them tall yellow grass. There are nude figures bright against the water. Smoke rising far off from the big outdoor kitchen. Hundreds of potatoes half sliced over there, trenches of flame heating twenty-gallon cauldrons of water. To the right of that is the communal fire in the meadow, smoldering at this morning hour, and around it, dancers and loungers and acroyogis and anyone doing anything they feel like doing at that particular moment.

Where am I? The scene is so quaint that I almost forget. Ah yes, in North Macedonia. I'm on the shore of a lake named Mavrovo. And around me is not a circus but a rainbow gathering.

I didn’t come for safety. I came to see if I can let go—and be ok with that.

The camp hums around me. Someone waves me over to join a circle near the fire. My chest tightens. My hand twitches like it might rise in return. Instead, I shove it into my pocket.

Why do I pull back when every part of me wants to lean in? I stand there caught, breath shallow, the warmth of the fire on my skin but not inside me.

The whole place glows with ease—soft lake water’s glow, children running free through tall grass, a hundred voices rolling together like surf. And still my shoulders tense, my jaw locks.

I turn away, back to my tent on the ridge. The moon hangs above it all, wide and watchful, as I crawl into the dim collapse of nylon and breathe out slow.

Tomorrow is the full moon.

Tomorrow I find out if I can finally let go—or if the Rainbow swallows me whole.

That’s it for this episode of Go and Find Out. Thanks for spending this time with me—seriously. It means a lot that you’re here, listening to this story.

I’d love to hear from you—thoughts, stories, weird travel tips, whatever’s on your mind. Drop me a line at goandfindoutpod@gmail.com, and I’ll do my best to write you back.

This show is created by me, Jonny Wright, with music by me unless otherwise noted.

If you’re enjoying the ride, follow along so new episodes come straight to you every other Thursday. And hey—if you’ve got a second, leaving a quick review or rating really helps spread the word.

But more than anything, I hope this episode sparked something—however small.

A question, a dream, a reminder that your life is still unfolding.

The only real adventure we have is right now.