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.