Bulgaria

Driving through Hungary, we had commented on their extremely zealous use of whipper-snippers. There were guys in teams working away along the sides of roads, around houses, in fields… with no lawnmowers or tractors, we figured it must be really hard work keeping the grass at bay. In the paddocks the farmers were walking their motorised ploughs in front of them, one man against the field. Then we got to Romania, and realised that the whipper-snippers were technologically advanced. Here, they were using horse-drawn ploughs or in some cases just a hoe. And the grass was being kept down with scythes! “Raking the hay”, which is something that, where I grew up, took an afternoon on a tractor, was here a family in a field, literally with rakes and pitchforks, gathering it up by hand into heaps. Plots of land in Romania are therefore small enough to be manageable by a family, and they make a nice diverse patchwork of hay fields and vegetable plots – no livestock grazing though. The fields are not wasted on sheep, goats and cattle; they were up in the hills and alongside (or on!) the roads, being moved along by their shepherd. One of these old, leather-skinned shepherds flagged us down as we were driving along a remote mountain road. He spoke no English, but his desperate miming and cries of “Cigarette!? Cigarette!?” made it clear that he had run out of smokes up here!

But now we were in Bulgaria, and things were different here. As soon as we crossed the border the fields of pale green wheat were vast and rolling, and the shining rows machines we saw at the tractor dealerships had to be the answer. How Bulgaria gets new tractors when the rest of the area is slaving away with scythes, we didn’t work out. The roads were also better here – Romania had bitumen most places, but it didn’t extend to the footpath, so the towns were still dusty looked rural, even when they were a thriving metropolis. We also found that the Lonely Planet guide was right when it said that in some towns the locals would stare at any sort of car that drove in. We hadn’t really planned to discover this, but a slight map fail (which we were using as we didn’t trust the GPS after it previously thought a farmers track through a field was a quick way to get the highway) had us trundling in Ernie into a little village with a few cobblestones but mostly just dirt roads. Once we worked out that the road did not actually continue, we backtracked past all the staring locals and the chooks we had run off the road on the way in, and realised that they all drive their cars to the edge of the village, park, and walk the rest of the way. They must have wondered where the hell we thought we were going!

We arrived in Bulgaria in the town of Ruse, which had a nice town centre with a fountain. We mainly stopped there to use an ATM and also bought icecreams from a very friendly Bulgarian girl – always nice to get a good welcome to a new country! Then we trundled off to visit a rock monastery – a centuries old monastery carved into a cliff face. At the carpark there was a chap selling honey, honeycomb and bee pollen. Bee pollen is now getting to be known as a super nutrient dense product, and is hard to come by except in fancy health food stores, and here this guy was selling bags of the stuff cheaply! Bargain! There are so many roadside places selling bee products, and we also saw hundreds of their hives dotted about the countryside.

Bee hives

Honey on the roadside

There were no campsites in the area, so instead of a long, late drive, we decided to find ourselves a “wildcamp” spot. After some failed attempts at reversing the van into a wooded area by a rough gravel road (and finding out just how hard you can ram the footstep under the van into the earth without wrenching it off), we decided to park up at the entrance to the road instead. We had a view over the valley, and the road was so bumpy, pitted and uncared for (it went through a ditch full of water), we figured no-one would be turning off the main road to discover us. Apparently not so. At around 9pm cars started rolling in. The road (really we should be calling it a track) went straight up the mountain to nothing. It wasn’t marked on a map, and there was no village or through-road, so we were super puzzled about all these cars (not suitable for off-roading) that were going up there. Clearly it was a cult meeting in the dark on the mountain top. Clearly they would come down and murder us.

Clearly they didn’t.

Nonetheless we got on the road early (easy to do when you’ve woken at 5am to Liam “I think someone is outside”. There wasn’t.) and had a beautiful morning drive as the countryside was waking up fresh and bright. It’s always the same – the first night of wildcamping is terrifying, after that you realise that you will not be murdered in your van, and it’s easy.

We headed to the coastal town of Varna and found most of the bars and cafes to be still under construction. Eventually we found a place for breakfast though and found a nearby campsite “Laguna” to stay at. The campsite was pretty dubious, but right on the beach, and anyway, we just needed to SLEEP. After a few hours of napping we walked along the beach to the resort area, which was just the tackiest place you could imagine. It’s like old carnival rides + touristy tat stores + overpriced tiki bars + fast food restaurants. Not really our style, so we wandered back along the beach looking at all the interesting shells and beach flotsam (a new word for Liam!).

The following day I decided it would be cool to visit what the guidebook described as a “25 metre high carving of a horse”. This is the horse that is on all of the Bulgarian coins, so it’s pretty important. And it turns out to be just nearby where we wildcamped the first night…. Chances are we parked on a tourist route! The place was very busy, and while the horse was indeed like the coin, the guidebook should have used better grammar and written that it is a carving of a horse 25 metres high UP. So the horse is not gigantic, it is in fact smaller than life-size, it is just very high up.

The carved horse

The matching horse on the coin

We headed onwards to Veliko Tarnovo and checked in at a British-owned campsite. The girl at the desk was British but apparently not the owner. “What are the chances of there being another Brit working at the camp”, we thought. Quite high it turns out – in that little village area along there was more than 1000 British expats! Quite the community! We got parked up in time for a storm to hit, and it rained and rained and rained. We took a cab in the super cute town, which sits on top of a dramatic mountain ridge and looks down over rivers, stone bridges and the university. We didn’t do much wandering around though as the rain simply never stopped. Turns out the campsite has to regularly tow campers out, and the season before their in-ground pool burst its banks due to the high volume of water pouring from the heavens. But we got out!

We planned to do a lovely sight-seeing drive through the valley of roses as they were in season to be flowering, but it turns out you don’t see much. These are roses used to make rose oil, so they were small and mostly hidden in the bushes. We drove onwards and upwards to mountain top and way up high found a lake and a campsite. It was windy, but great views.

Then it was down from the mountains to visit the little town of Melnik – officially the smallest town in Bulgaria. Melnik is the site of an old Greek township which burnt down, and the ruins are still scattered on the hills in between the sandstone cliffs. We wandered through them, checking out the art students scattered about making drawings, but our true goal was the wine cave.

Melnik also has its own grape, aptly named “Melnik” (woah). The guy at the wine cave was very brusk “ah, you want to try wine, here, here, drink”. Turns out he had a big tour group coming in right after us, and they went into the cool, dark cave for their tasting session, while we wandered out to finish our wines on the little terrace. We sat on tree stumps with croqueted covers, and when we finished the wine and decided to buy some, the man was soooo much more friendly all of a sudden. He filled 2 litres of each of the red wines from the cask straight into plastic bottles, carefully stuck on labels and warned us that it would only be good for 1 month. Absolutely no problem for us!

Check out the wine jerry cans!

That evening we stayed in the backyard of another pair of Brits! The slightly hippie couple had turned their place into a nice campsite. The following day we headed out through the town, past the storks in their giant nests on the powerpoles (they have special platforms for them to build on the poles, otherwise they create giant clusters of nests on the church steeples!) and onwards to Greece!