Bulgaria

Farewelled by half a dozen community dogs from Bucharest train station, we set off for Veliko Tarnovo in central Bulgaria. Alone in our little train cabin, we devoted the first hour or so of the painfully slow ride through Romania to attempting to learn some of the Cyrillic alphabet so we could at least know when to get off the train. Our train was ultimately bound for Thesalonikki in Greece, fairly inconvenient should we miss our stop. We ‘checked out’ of Romania at Giurgiu, a process which involved the snatching and subsequent disappearance of our passports by the border official and the inspection of the roof compartments of the carriages for contraband vodka by the customs official. This done, we proceeded through the grey area to Ruse where, after a lot of muttering about ‘Australians’ into walkie talkies, we checked into Bulgaria. While at Ruse, we were turfed off the train and left standing on the freezing platform while they undertook a not-very-well rehearsed shunting manoeuvre which resulted in the train having the exact same number of carriages and direction as it did pre-manoeuvre.

Very few Bulgarian train stations are clearly named and those that are named are named in Cyrillic only so we’ve taken to sitting at the front of the train so at least we can see it pull into the station. We also entertain the locals with a lot of poor pronunciation and finger pointing. Just before arriving at Veliko Tarnovo, a very agitated man entered our little cabin and began yelling Излезте с колата at us fairly wildly. Completely unnerved, we used our best Bulgarian to say ‘No Bulgarian, English only’, to which he spat ‘English schminglish’ with complete disdain before producing his train conductors card. Turns out we were in the cabin he wanted to use as the conductors cabin. We moved out and five conductors moved in and promptly began taking off their clothes and settling in for the night.

We arrived at Veliko Tarnovo at about 8pm and walked from the train station along a winding, dark, scrub-lined road (the type our mothers told us never to walk along in the daylight, let alone at night in the middle of Bulgaria) into town to our hostel. The next morning we woke to the most dramatic view across the valley. The houses seem to cling precariously to the cliffside and are in various stages of disrepair.

Houses cling to the cliffsides

A typical Bulgarian house

Veliko Tarnovo has a very impressive set of ruins and we spent a morning exploring them. The same set of ruins is also the setting for the Sound and Light Show which takes place once 300 euros have been collected. Basically, uninformed tourists pay and the rest of the town gets a free show from the bottom of the hill, albeit without the sound. It’s impossible to know whether the show will go ahead so we hung around hopefully at the bottom of the hill with a considerable group of locals and were eventually rewarded with a bells-only light display circa 1985.

Veliko Tarnovo by day

Blurry sound and light show

We spent a good few days wandering through the beautiful old town. We hiked through the Bulgarian hillside to Albanasi, another old monastic town, and Glenn went riding with some local bike enthusiasts through the Bulgarian countryside.

Bulgarian food is superb. Bec was in her feta cheese/olives/salad/yoghurt element and Glenn was loving all the different manifestations of pork. We both enjoyed the variety and quantity of Bulgarian beer. We ate in the same restaurant several times because the food was so good and the menu so long it would have been possible to eat there every day for six months without ordering the same dish twice. The shropska salad proved the favourite. We went to the local market for fruit and veg and the nameless (for us) local street food which resembled a toasted pocket of ham and cheese filled with ketchup and mayonnaise.

We left Veliko Tarnovo and spent a night in Plovdiv before taking the scenic (but very uncomfortable on account of the hardness of the seats and the choice of music blaring from the mobile phones of the local teenagers) narrow gauge railway from Septemvri to Bansko. Very slow but beautiful rail journey. From Bansko we caught a bus to Blagoevgrad to cross into Macedonia.

A Bulgarian churchyard with death notices posted on the gate

Bulgaria is excellent and we’re lucky to have seen it before it succumbs to tourism and the euro. Even the owner of our hostel referred to his people as harsh people but we saw nothing but helpfulness and compassion. The Bulgarians always seem to have their wallets open for something: people begging outside restaurants never walk away empty handed, women selling holy pictures on trains always make a sale and we watched two young women buy two slices of pizza and a bottle of water and place them in front of a homeless woman in the street in Plovdiv.

So onwards to Macedonia………..