Bulgaria

Ah Bulgaria - another of these countries that we knew very little about before we arrived but found to be very friendly and wished we could have stayed longer! The challenge of a new alphabet (did you know that the Bulgarians invented Cyrillic?) was fun and by the end of our time we could have a fair guess at what signs said.

We had originally planned to spend three nights at Veliko Tarnovo, a hilltop town in central Bulgaria, and three nights on the Black Sea coast at Sozopol. Unfortunately, due to uncooperative train and bus schedules (the summer season has already ended and frequencies have dropped a bit) we ended up spending one night in Ruse, two in Veliko, one in Burgas and two in nearby Sozopol. A bit more moving about than we might have liked but we did get to spend time in more places!

Ruse is pretty nice for a border town. After another of our late night border crossings we found ourselves once more on the Danube River in the morning.

Then by (mini) bus to Veliko Tarnovo. Will we ever find ourselves on a proper-sized coach again? VT is beautiful and justly deserves its reputation as the nicest hilltop city with a citadel in Bulgaria, at least based on our sample of one hilltop city with a citidel in Bulgaria.

The nationalistic "Four Kings Monument" built by the Communists

The river makes several loops through the city, through a deep gorge. Lots of rock climbing potential - including the "Executioners' Rock" at the citadel, where unfortunate souls were thrown to their deaths!

Burgas was fairly unremarkable so let's skip straight to pictures of Sozopol and our seaside relaxation.

A fairly typical Sozopol old town street showing the traditional "Black Sea" houses

Our plan had been to catch the 1200 bus from Burgas in order to be in Istanbul by 1900. Unfortunately this was to be a day of cock-ups.

#1. Tickets for the 1200 bus were sold out so we had to subject ourselves to another night bus - departure 2200, arrival 0500...yuk
#2. Went to the movie "Inglourious Basterds" - although we were told it was in English, large parts of it turned out to be in French or German with Bulgarian subtitles (actually quite funny)
#3. Decided to take a punt on a random platter for two with ingredients not translated into English. Turned out to be a massive meat platter - with the two of us not normally eating a lot of meat it gave us bursting bellies and the "meat sweats" on the bus!

Everything worked out fine in the end and we're now in Turkey. I guess our next blog will be about Istanbul or perhaps our upcoming "Active Turkey" tour.

Făgăraş Mountains and Sylvia the Love Machine

Before I get too carried away with our tramping adventure, I had better tell you something about Romania that Sylvia forgot to put into her last post. It would seem that Sylvia has been something of a sensation over here. The local men have been falling for her in droves!

The first was the train conductor between Cluj and Brasov. He spoke little (no) English but told Sylvia, first in Romanian then in English, "I love you" and pointedly examined her hand for a wedding ring. Sylvia's second admirer was a drunk guy at a bus stop who told her in three different languages (English, Italian and presumably Romanian) that she was a beautiful girl :-) Of course we all knew that already and it's probably all going to her head.

OK now the tramping. We had planned to do four days tramping in the Făgăraş Mountains near Brasov, but by the time we'd got organised on the first day it only ended up being about 3.2 days. We needed to obtain a stove (thanks Raluca :-), a billy, a decent map and some advice on transport. In the end we took a bus to a nearby town called Zarnesti and then a taxi from there. The taxi saved us 24 km of hitching or (more likely given the hitching conditions) walking, and considering the condition of the "road" I think the driver earned every cent of his ~20 Euro fare!

We only ended up walking a couple of hours that night to a pleasant campsite on a spur leading up to the main ridge.

Bears can be a problem - we took such precautions as putting all our food into my pack and stringing it up a tree!

On the second day we continued climbing and traversing along the main ridge. Unfortunately the weather wasn't that great so we were glad to find a pleasant refugio to stay in instead of camping again. We'd all been a bit cold the night before.

Mmm, cosy

Water is a bit of a problem along the Făgăraş Range. We ended up carrying a lot, and topping up where we could. Fortunately this spring was marked on the map otherwise we would never have found it.

Rubbish is another problem in the Romanian mountains. We encountered a similar scene several times a day, despite there seeming to be very few people up here (we only saw one other party along the ridge)

The next day dawned windier but warmer. Unfortunately the dark clouds came in again and it got pretty cold on the ridge. We made the decision to drop off the ridge a couple of valleys earlier than we'd originally intended to. This meant we didn't get to climb the highest mountain in Romania (Moldoveanu Peak, 2544 m) but as you can see, everyone was much smilier once they were off the ridge ;-)

Before:

After:


We camped down in the valley that night.

If only she'd brought us beer

The next day we walked out down the valley then plodded the 12 km or so to the town of Victoria, only managing to hitch the last 2 km or so! But a lot better than nothing.

Once we got to Victoria, all we had to do was wait for the train, and endure a very slow train ride back to Brasov. This is a Personal type train, the oldest, slowest and most frequently stopping of all Romanian trains.

Are we there yet?

Romania

Our grand mission with Cris in Romania was to go tramping in the Fagaras Mountains. However, our tramping adventures are exciting enough (yes, they are - promise!) to be the subject of a separate post. Here's some other Romanian highlights:

Friendly Romanian #1: Thomas whom we met on the long bus ride from Budapest. Here he is taking us out to the local student pub in Cluj for a drink (photo: Cris).

Our first Eastern Orthodox church. Religion is prominent throughout Romania, particularly noticeable when (even on the bus) people cross themselves if passing a church.

Transylvannia has a significant Hungarian population, who are actively campaigning for their own state. This big statue in Cluj is a general who is famous for killing lots of Hungarians (photo: Cris). It was built by a pro-Romanian mayor who also embarrassed the locals by painting all the rubbish bins in the colours of the national flag.

For the real Transylvannian experience we visited the local Cluj graveyard. It is local custom to 'baggsie' a grave before you are dead. Sometimes they even fill in the first two digits of your year of death. We heard stories of some that are still on 19-- oops! Better get that re-carved.

From Cluj we progressed on an entertaining train journey with friendly Romanian #2 (Andre) to Brasov, which is quite possibly, but maybe not, the best city in the world. They also have a huge Hollywood-style 'Brasov' sign erected on the local mountainside. I went for a run up to it after dark, which I was later told was rather dangerous as that's when the bears come down to feed. It's not just vampires that eat you here...

In Brasov we stayed in a hostel with comically named rooms. The three of us shared this room, leading to hours of ... innuendo, as you can imagine (photo: Cris). This hostel also gifted me an extremely case of bed-bug attack, whereby my whole face was a swollen red blob and I couldn't open one of my eyes. [also attracting attention from a drunk local who was either appalled or amused that I seemed to have been beating her, I'm not sure which - Mark]

Our last four days we enjoyed the hospitality of friendly Romanian #3 (Raluca), who we couch-surfed with. Here she is having cooked us a local speciality of polenta with two types of cheese.

Doorhandles and doughy tubes

Here are a couple of random things about Romania that I'd like to share with you.

1. Doughy Tubes. These are not strictly Romanian (actually they're Hungarian, make sure you don't get that wrong!). They also have a proper name but doughy tube will do for you and me. They are something like doughnut dough, but in a tube, spit roasted over charcoal then coated in your choice of yummy stuff such as chocolate, cocoa, cinnamon etc. Yummy! Eating a whole one by yourself can make you feel a bit ill.



2. Doorhandles. Romanians like to take their doorhandle off then take it away with them when they leave the house. I guess it helps with security but it can lead to all sorts of problems!

Raluca, our lovely host in Brasov

Budapest

What excitement! Our train from Graz was rather full so we ended up spread throughout a couple of carriages. At our change in Vienna, Cris got off at the right station but Sylvia and I accidentally stayed on the train for one station too long (my fault). By the time we got on a train returning to the correct station, we'd received a txt from Cris saying that he was on his way to meet us...somehow we eventually ended up together on a train to Budapest. Then we got down to some serious sightseeing.

Who do you reckon would win in a fight? This guy (he has spiky axles)...

...or this guy whose horses are cool, calm and collected?

Random collection of Kiwis

Traditional fatty meat snack (basically deep fried dough). That's Phill in the middle - he is a really nice guy and let three friends of friends (or friends of friends of friends) crash in his lounge. It was quite mean of Cris to steal his undies.

Do any of these treatments appeal to you?

They do thermal baths in a big way in Budapest. This is the amazing ceiling of one of them.

What a moustache.

Us with Phill

A very famous statue warning of the dangers of running with icecream on a very hot day.

Standing near the citadel in Buda, looking across the Danube at Pest. (there is also a pest in the foreground, hahahaha)

A bit harsh!

Sylvia at the National Market

Graz, Austria

Although Austria was not in the original plan, the offer to stay at Marcel's pad in Graz was hard to resist, and it is on the way (sort of).

Local Austrian food, mushroom soup and a bun... no wait, soup in a bun!



The famous double spiral staircase. Messes with your mind.

The second day it rained heavily so our only real achievement were to meet Cris Lovell-Smith at the train station (he'll be travelling with us for the next few weeks so you can get both sides of the story by reading his blog too - http://cris.lovell-smith.com/trips. If he says anything bad about us, it's all lies) and checking out the awesome lab where Marcel works. We played in the 3D virtual reality simulator, which made us feel quite seasick quite quickly.

On our last day Marcel took us on an adventure to a nearby gorge, where the Austrian Alpine Club has set up a staircase of wooden ladders spanning the 800m climb. It was awesome! We then did a circut around and over a hill to find the dragon's cave. No dragons, but lots of mud and good photography opportunities.

Photo courtsey of Marcel. With two super-keen photographers about Mark and I got lazy.

Triglav National Park

Before I go any further in this post, I would like to make something clear. You may have read in some other blogs of people's adventures in Triglav National Park recently. However, those people are copycats and you should not associate with them - it was SOOO our idea first ;-)

Triglav National Park is Slovenia's only national park, and contains Triglav - Slovenia's highest mountain at 2864 m. It is a beautiful place of trees, lakes, rivers and the mountains of the Julian Alps. We met our friend Marcel (who lives in Austria) and camped there for 3 days of walking and sightseeing.

One of the first things we did was to check out the local pizzeria/pasteria, where we found the biggest pizzas any of us had ever seen!

"Now I wish I hadn't got this stupid salad" (Photo: Marcel)

Marcel seemed to quite like his too.

The next day we went for a walk. We could have caught a cable car up 1000 m like everyone else but thought it would be much more fun to get lost instead.

(Photo: Marcel)

(Photo: Marcel)

Other folks were having fun up there too. This guy hung around for a while.


Lake Bohinj - we camped right next to it.



This is how the tracks are marked in this part of the world.



Ruined mountain hut with Triglav in the background

On the second day, Sylvia decided her knees weren't quite up to another long day so we parted company. Marcel and I headed on the 7 Lakes circuit and Sylvia headed off to the Slap Mostnice. With a name like that, who could resist?

Mark, overlooking Lake no. 2 (Photo: Marcel)

Lake no. 1 (Photo: Marcel)

We even had to walk on snow! (Photo: Marcel)

When Mhairi was here, she did a day trip from Lake Bohinj to climb Triglav (far distance). It only took her 12 hours versus our 11 for a much shorter circuit! So we take out hats off to her. (Photo: Marcel)

On the way back, we visited the source of the river Sava, the biggest river in Slovenia. It's not so big where it emerges from this cave...(Photo: Marcel)

...and immediately tumbles over this waterfall. That's the viewing platform you can see, tourists pay 5 Euros to walk up the gorge below. (Photo: Marcel)

Lake Bohinj again

A cool arch that Sylvia saw on her walk.

The Slap Mostnice. No it's not a gentle form of corporal punishment but a waterfall. Sylvia managed to get lost and thereby avoid paying 2 Euros to walk up the gorge by the normal route.

On our way out of the park on the third day, we spent some time in beautiful (and very touristy) Bled. There is a great castle on a steep crag overlooking the town and lake, and a monastery on an island. It used to be the custom to paddle out to the island and ring the monastery bell. Now they've locked it up and they charge tourists to ring it! It doesn't seem to stop them, as the bell was ringing almost constantly as we walked the 6 km around the lake.