When people asked where we were going this year, the answer of Bulgaria inevitably led to the question of why. My answer was because I hadn’t been there. Often that seemed to be seen as a rather thin reason, so sometimes I mentioned the local wine industry. When people in Bulgaria asked where we were from they generally hadn’t met anyone from NZ, and one ticket lady at a museum smiled broadly (a rare occurrence) and said how exotic that was for her. An exception was a guy at a railway station who had been to NZ twice and was very keen to live there. I got chatting to him because he was standing beside a young lady wearing an All Black sweater – apparently he had just explained to her the relevance of the name and the fern when I walked by and commented about it. Only one person mentioned Lord of the Rings while we were there. When we were asked how long we were visiting for and said nearly a month, most people were surprised, and pleased, that anyone would want to spend that long in their country. They are used to tourists who fly in for skiing in the winter and beaches in the summer.
Getting to Sofia, the capital, was done with Qatar Airways which has little walls around its lying down seats, but you can lower the one with the person beside you so you can have a chat. This airline was a first for us so we spent a couple of days in Doha. Getting through immigration proved difficult for me as they had a machine that required you to put onto it your four fingers of each hand. I held up my right hand to show there was a problem, which required getting one of those gentlemen in the immaculate white robes to actually do something, and it took a while. If you can’t make a direct connection there on Qatar Airways you qualify for a five star hotel at a big discount. Doha is memorable to us for the heat, at least one amazing bit of architecture, the range of nationalities of people doing the work there – nine different just in our hotel, and the lack of obvious commercial activity. It is the usual Arabic oil/gas financed invention of a city without a soul. The metro is nice to use. When we checked in to move on to Sofia we went looking for the lounge and eventually found one of the eighteen Qatar Airways have. The huge airport was a bit confusing for us old guys. The five hours to Sofia was a daytime flight in clear weather and easily one of the best flights for window gazing I have ever had. A few of you had the same secondary school geography teacher that I had, known as "Spanner", and this was a continuous geography lesson he would have loved. We flew over Kuwait City, across Iraq, along the valley of the Tigris River for quite a while, over Mosul where the Kurds and various Islamic fanatics continue to argue, skirted around the top western corner of Syria thus prudently avoiding any of it’s airspace, across Turkey and right over Istanbul, and then over the Black Sea and on to Sofia. Best possible way of spending time on a plane.
I had organised a pickup from the airport and it is always a small relief when someone is there with your name on display. He was a friendly chap which we found later not to be the usual demeanor of Bulgarian service providers. Usually I organise the travel between places in advance, but I had found the Bulgarian Railways site to be impenetrable so had to give up on that, and finding sites to book buses was equally confusing so relied on doing it as we went along. I asked a couple of younger locals about the railway site and their comments indicated I was not alone in my incomprehension. Bulgarians are very proud that a bunch of their long dead under-employed monks were responsible for the cryllic script, not Russians as I had always thought. Personally I wonder why they had to create such a thing when a perfectly useful script already existed. I presume some sort of literary nationalism is responsible. I should know more about it because it’s not my first encounter, but thank you to Google Translate. However, most websites do not fully translate and even on one page some bits are and some not. A lot of patience is needed and I am not well known for that virtue. In past travels I have avoided paying for roaming on my phone, but it was quickly clear that a combination of cryllic and often no road names meant finding our way around easily was not possible so our provider, 2 Degrees, should have a healthy profit this year.
Sofia proved to be a pleasant city in the middle, with tree lined roads, lots of pedestrian-only streets, an astonishing amount of small shops, plenty of graffiti, lots of good restaurants, and a nice wine shop just down the road from our hotel. We soon worked out that Bulgarians are not given to smiley service or acknowledging strangers. If you are walking along a street and the only other person is coming the other way towards you, a nod or hello is met with surprise or concern. Being chatty and enquiring with waiters was met with almost amazement and comments about how unusual it was to meet such friendly people. One chap said he had never been treated in such a way and what a complete contrast it was to normality. They also indicate "yes" by a very slight sideways movement of the head, and "no" with a little forward nod. You have to be aware of that and watch carefully to catch it. All these are normal social mannerisms for them, and once communication is established they are mostly as friendly and helpful as anywhere else. It’s an eastern European thing – I always remember a guide in Russia saying tourists are obvious because they smile. One can think of historical reasons why this is.
Which leads nicely to a bit of an historical summary. In common with the rest of the Balkan Peninsula and surrounding countries ancient history is a series of invasions and assimilation. There were two independent Bulgarian empires before the Ottoman Empire (Turks) laid their not so heavy hand over the Balkans and surrounding areas in the late 14th century. They seemed to be more transactional than most empire builders, and didn’t directly impose their religion and values as long as they weren’t challenged and the taxes got paid. So you could have a christian church but it couldn’t be higher than a moslem mosque and preferably only one storey high, even better if it was below ground level. If you didn’t want to convert that was fine but you paid more tax. If you wanted to get rich it was best you adopted Ottoman dress and outward customs, but what you did at home was your business if you kept it to yourself. In the mid 1800s a local independence movement began and in 1878 Bulgaria celebrated its independence. But that wasn’t the happy end. WW1 had them on the wrong side and they ended up a much smaller country. In WW2 the King, Boris 3, tried to be neutral, but when Germany wanted to invade Greece the route led through Bulgaria and Boris had to join the Axis or be forcibly invaded. No Bulgarian troops fought for Germany and Boris 3 is remembered for stopping the transport of 48,000 Jews to Germany and assisting many to escape to Palestine. After a meeting with Hitler where local legend has it that Boris was screamed at for three hours, he mysteriously died and no one knows if the Germans or the Russians were responsible. Then quickly came a communist coup, so in 1945 Bulgaria embraced the delights of Stalin and his mates. Nationalism and Industrialisation followed and a bunch of guys in long grey coats were in charge. Forty years later that disintegrated and socialism was abandoned. Property was returned to the original owners, imagine the chaos that included, oligarchs appeared, the usual Balkan mixture of gangsters and politicians arose along with local mafias, and eventually Bulgaria took its place as the poorest and most corrupt member of the EU. So far they haven’t been allowed to adopt the Euro but they are trying. At present they are about to have their sixth election in two years and everybody I have asked about this is heartily sick of the whole process. My feeling is some populist puppet of an oligarch financed by Russia will end up in charge but who knows. One younger man we talked to about the current situation said that 1998 was a very low point economically and things have been getting better ever since, so it’s not all gloomy.
Walking around the cities, both large and small, you don’t see much evidence of economic problems. What is obvious is more people smoking than in Italy or France, a predilection for botoxed lips, plenty of tattoos, men with buzz cuts or shaved heads, lots of babies in prams, a delight in family life, heaps of places to have coffee or a drink, and generally they are getting on with the better life than it was. Relics from the past include some old ladies with straw brooms and rubbish pans on a long handle doing a bit of tidying in public places, and you should never assume a properly smooth footpath will stay that way. An interesting statistic is that the average life expectancy is 71, NZ is 82, and patently all the cigarettes and alcohol play a part in that. In common with all other ex-communist countries, old people remember fondly having no worries about a job, education, health or a place to live, and the young ones wonder why they would think that way. One thing that surprised us is that this country must have the shortest school year of any. They have just restarted after three months off over summer.
As usual we did the Free City Walk in Sofia and one memorable bit was the statue of St Sophia. It is high up on a tall column and replaced one of Stalin. The sculptor has admitted the female figure has a fairly close resemblance to an Italian actress with the same name. He also created the lady with a few buttons undone on her top garment, which made the religious lot a little upset. We had two longish walks to visit the Tourist Information place and each time it was closed despite a sign saying it should be open. We also went on a day trip to a famous monastery and when we all got back on the bus to return two people were missing. We had been sitting beside these young ladies who could be described as self-infatuated, and after twenty minutes of efforts by the guide to find them we had to leave them behind. Subsequently we found out they tried to get on another bus, complaining about the shabby treatment they had received, and that bus driver refused to accept them. They probably found some mug male to drive them back.
From Sofia, we went south to Melnik, a very small town, famous for its wine and being a sort of living museum. There was one inconvenient bus a day from Sofia so I had lashed out and booked a car and driver. The company I did that through turned out to be associated with the airport pickup outfit and the same friendly driver had volunteered to take us there. Melnik had been an important trading town close to the Greek border but by 1900 that advantage had diminished and the 20,000 population is now in the low hundreds. Tourism and wine keeps it alive. We stayed in a small guesthouse up a steep rocky then dirt road at the end of the town. Our hostess was a delight, attentive and soundly opinionated, and for a reasonable cost delivered and collected us when we visited a couple of wineries. One of which was shaped like a barrel. She recommended three of about six local places to eat. The nearest was very local, which means meat rules, and lots of it. The English translation of the menu mentioned sausage, so I ordered it. It was actually two, about a foot long each and not skinny. I made it through one.
Nearby was another famous monastery and a view of the steep eroded sandstone mountains around Melnik. We trekked to the bottom of our town, caught the very local bus to Rozhen and walked up a steep road for more than a couple of ks to the important monastery. It was a notable day for some reason and lots of visitors were there. We looked around and then went to walk to view the nearby sandstone pyramids, but it was all misty and vision wasn’t good, so we went back down the long hill, found lunch, got a local woman entrepreneur to force her husband to taxi us, very speedily, back to Melnik and then watched the mist go away.
We had three nights in Melnik which apparently was two more than usual for tourists and then hired a taxi to Bansko, a ski resort town. Our accommodation was a very reasonably priced hotel. The driver and we had trouble finding the place as the hotel name and street number were obscured by trees. We disembarked from the taxi where it should have been and I went looking. I found a front door that was unlocked so I went in, rang a buzzer several times, nothing happened, went out and got Kay and the bags, and we were unloading behind the reception desk when the delightful female half of the owners showed up. I mentioned the trees were a bit of a problem for identifying the place. We were only there for a night so we walked about, it was a nice touristy place, looked at the obligatory sights, and the next morning were woken by the sound of chain saws at work on the trees outside. The husband owner had offered to drive us to the local railway station and we went out with our bags at the agreed time. He brushed off the wood chips and we hopped in his very small car, his wife came out and it appeared we had not paid the reasonable cost. Luckily we had sufficient cash available, and off we went to the railway station where we caught the only remaining narrow gauge railway train in the country, heading for Plovdiv. The train rattled and click-clicked its way scenically through some rough country which included a small spiral. The aforementioned guy who had been to NZ was on this train and came and got me to stand out between carriages as this happened. Not quite Raurimu but pretty close. Plovdiv is the second city in Bulgaria and the last bit of the train trip was on a real train for about an hour. We had tickets with seat numbers and found a compartment that tallied with them. Almost. I put our bags up on the luggage rack, sat down, and then a typical unsmiling railway employee came in and talked very loudly to us. One of the other passengers eventually explained in English we were in first class but had second class tickets. I managed to get the bags back down without squashing anybody and we went looking for two empty seats corresponding with our ticket numbers. There were none, and we stood at the end of the carriage behind the engine for the rest of the shortish trip and gave up on using the railway for the rest of our stay. At least on a bus the seat numbers only have one class.
Plovdiv has a population of about 400,000, and used to be the capital of the southern half of Bulgaria when the Ottomans split the country in two. It is a very pleasant city, claiming to be the oldest occupied place in Europe with lots of history. The Romans got involved because it had thermal springs and lots of their stuff has been uncovered. This was where we had our first Airbnb and it was a very nice central apartment. But it soon became very obvious that right above our 6th floor roof, construction work was underway. This involved some sort of jack hammer removing a layer of plaster and the intermittent noise was horrible. I contacted the host and we agreed, eventually, that if it continued we would leave and get a refund. It stopped at about 6 p.m. and there was nothing while we were there the next day. But the day after….
While in Plovdiv I did two walking tours, one about communist architecture, and one about street art. They made me feel quite intellectual but I still think the less creative street art is anti-social scribble. I only did the art tour because the visitors doing normal city tour included a loudly spoken English young man with an upper class accent and, seemingly, a firm opinion of his superiority. I knew I would not enjoy his company and might say something unnecessary, so I took the alternative choice. Maturity late in life is interesting. On our first night in town the restaurant we went to had its menu on A4 paper attached at the top to a clipboard. I was flicking over the pages when a strong smell of smoke and an urgent warning from Kay alerted me to a very small t- light candle in front of me. It had burnt a neat circle through the first page and quick action was taken to stop it. The waitress nicely told me it happens all the time.
To get to the bus terminal for the transport to our next place required a taxi. A usually simple thing to do but not so simple when there is no Uber and the local taxis require a phone call. Telephone conversations in a foreign place are fraught with potential misunderstandings, especially when you are not entirely sure of the correct pronunciation of place names. Luckily a guide from a tour had given me his contact info, because we were such nice friendly people, and said please call if you need help. I WhatsApped him and it was all solved. WhatsApp has been extremely useful on this trip, especially when dealing with Airbnb hosts. I think Europe runs on it. The taxi cost about $5 and in general taxis have been a bargain, apart from leaving the Sofia Airport.
The next place was a small city, Karlovo, famous as the birthplace of the national hero when getting rid of the Turks and obtaining independence. We stayed one night, had a look at the hero’s museum and a waterfall that was touted as beautiful, but really was underwhelming. Another hour on the bus and we got to Kazanlak which is world famous as the biggest producer of rose oil and rose water. I am sure you have heard of it. It’s been doing this for ages because roses grow very prolifically there and they have cornered the market. It takes about 5,000 kilos of petals to get 1 litre of rose oil, and in this town you can buy lots and lots of rose related stuff. Our Airbnb provided little soaps that were pink and shaped like a rose bloom with a suitable smell. The rose museum was pretty interesting and fulfilled my museum requirements of being specific and easily seen in an hour. Both of these towns had nice town centres with pedestrian-only streets and good restaurants, with prices about half of the cost in larger places.
Traditional Bulgarian food revolves around lots of meat, usually grilled, as are the vegetables which include the biggest reddest capsicums we have ever seen. Your standard greens like broccoli, beans and peas do not exist, but salads are a big deal and a menu will have a wide selection. Most salads have either " cow white cheese" or "cow yellow cheese" in abundance and it is, in my opinion, tasteless and processed. Portions are generally not small and sorting out a reasonable sized meal can be a bit of a challenge initially. There are plenty of very good restaurants in the big cities with a good range of food choices. There is a lot of Italian influence and pizzas are everywhere. Wine by the glass is usually just one choice each of white, rosé, and red. In the more local places they appear to serve the cheapest possible of these and are not at all interesting. As you move up the cost scale the single choice becomes a lot better. Only one restaurant offered a choice of two. Top end food prices are on par with middle of the road NZ restaurants and wine is cheaper. We tend to organise our own breakfasts and one of the small challenges we faced was buying milk. The little convenience shops have all the soft drinks, lots of alcohol, salty yogurt drinks, but no milk. It required a bit of questioning and sometimes a lengthy walk to find the real stuff.
We then bused a few hours to the Black Sea coast, starting with Burgas. Once again a nice Airbnb, that came with a pigeon living outside the bedroom window. Our host sort of warned us about it, and it had an early morning start each day, making the annoying repetitive cooing noise that pigeons do. But earplugs fixed that and we were literally right in the centre of the city so there were other morning noises as well. We knew it was the centre because on the square outside our entrance was a plaque on the ground like a big compass showing the exact middle.
Travelling in the rural areas made me wonder where all the meat consumed in Bulgaria comes from. We saw a lot of agriculture but it was all cropping, the only animals seen apart from a few horses were about three lots of small herds of sheep or goats being tendered in medieval style by a herdsman and a dog. Also at one of the monasteries we visited there were ten cows, this was quite exciting so I sent a photo of one to the Agricultural Correspondent. All the cropping was on flat or gently rolling country and everywhere else was either a village or covered in scrubby bush, that sometimes might have qualified as forest. There are ranges of high hills that may become mountains, only once did we see real bare rock mountain tops. A few times we did some zigzagging up and over these hills. The villages all have houses with orange tiles and none looked particularly prosperous. In some places it was clear the vineyards had been abandoned and the vines were all over the show. The road to Burgas on the coast had lots of large solar farms which looked like lakes from a long way off.
Fifty one years ago I found out the Black Sea is blue, and nothing has changed. Burgas has a lovely big park between the city and the sea, and in common with the other coastal cities the beaches are money making commercial areas lined with places to eat and drink and play. I even saw beach tennis which is sort of like playing tennis on a beach volleyball court and having to hit everything on the full. Apparently this is the place for packaged beach holidays if you can’t afford Spain. The two biggest tourism towns were originally set up by the communists back in the 50s and cleverly named Sunny Beach and Golden Beach. They are packed solid with apartments and hotels, and all the devices to take your money at such places are there. I am told beer is cheap. We passed through.
We had two surprises in Burgas. First was coming across a restaurant that had Babich Sauvignon Blanc on its list, and it turned out to not be the only place with some NZ wine. The second related to Kay and I playing cards while waiting for our meals. We were in a very nice restaurant, halfway through a game, when the chief waiter cautiously approached and informed us it was illegal to play cards in restaurants in Bulgaria. I explained that after fifty years of marriage we had nothing new to talk about, but that didn’t work. Given there are casinos everywhere one wonders quite why, but we were told it related to gambling. We obeyed and on following nights carried on playing without any problems.
We did a day trip to a small old peninsula town called Sozopol which was nice enough and unsurprisingly a bit touristy, but it was nothing compared to our next stay at a bit bigger peninsula town called Nessebar. There we stayed in the Panorama Blue Family Hotel which had a very hard bed with a pilled bottom sheet, luckily for only one night. But it did have a spectacular view. The Lonely Planet warned that Nessebar was excessively orientated to tourists, and even at the end of the season we were certainly not on our own and not short of shops to look in. It is actually quite spectacular and we enjoyed meals sitting on the top of cliffs with the waves smashing into the rocks below.
It was very hard to find out online if we could get directly from Nessebar to our last stop at Varna, the affable main city on the coast. Our reception lady at the hotel was able to say there was a number 33 bus at 10.30 and inspection revealed a rather dilapidated sign at the bus stop supporting that. So we trundled our bags down there the next morning hoping it would actually happen, and right on time it did. Varna had a similar park and beaches as Burgas and we had a pleasant walk there on the first afternoon. The next day we did the city tour, only three of us, with a guide who was a polyglot older lady with interesting opinions. At one stage she picked up lots of chestnuts that had fallen on the footpath and we asked did she roast them. The answer was she put them under her pillow when sleeping and the subsequent eminations were good for her brain. She also told me smoking was necessary for dealing with the stress of being Bulgarian and it was good for countering constipation. We followed that by a visit to a rather good Archaeological museum, but endless displays of pottery and other stuff from ancient graves eventually wore me down and I was pleased to escape. The best thing I learned was that boomerangs existed in ancient times outside of Australia. In a similar vein one of the cultural heritages of Bulgaria is their very own bagpipes. In most cities you will hear the untuneful screech of these on a street corner where a player is looking for contributions, maybe to encourage him to go elsewhere. I had thought we would do a day trip out of Varna on our second day, but it was all too hard to organise so we went to a naval museum. There we learned about the glories of the Bulgarian navy which appears to be a little bit bigger than NZ’s. They had a few cool old weapons and helicopters lying around outside.
My itinerary said we would return to Sofia by train or bus which involved six to nine hours of travel. A few days before I wondered if we could fly, and found it was a fifty minute flight, a compelling reason to abandon the original plan. But all the normal economy seats were gone, and I told Kay we would have to go the long way. She got stuck into the Bulgarian Air website and found some very expensive seats still available and booked them, I have not enquired how much it cost. So we went up-and- away back to Sofia and a hotel near our first one, which features a see-through shower right beside the bed where I am presently resting. Shopping has now been completed but there is a bit of cash left for breakfast and a final fling at the airport.
I am now in my little compartment on our flight Doha to Auckland. Because we were in Doha for about eight hours we were allocated a hotel room. It turned out the hotel was a half hour drive from the airport, which meant going through a crowded immigration hall where my lack of fingers again caused a delay, and we had to be back at the airport two hours before leaving. The time actually in the room was nice but not very long. Then when we made it back we found the flight was delayed for an hour and a half. First world problems.
So how was Bulgaria as a tourist ? It is not an overwhelming place like India, it doesn’t have any top ten world famous sights, the script and language can pose a few problems for independent travelling, but it is a nice place to go to. The food is fine, they make some pretty good wine, and once you get used to the service style the people are helpful and pleased to see you, things are reasonably priced, and it is relatively easy to get around because it is a small country. The population is a bit over seven million and land area is less than half that of NZ. It has lots of history and our safety was never in question. Interestingly in Bansko I talked to a Dutch woman who had a business setting up facilities for remote workers who could live anywhere. She said rents and apartment costs were low by European standards, the necessary infrastructure was fine, English is widely spoken, and the top personal tax rate was 10%. Plus skiing and beaches. She had plenty of customers and I can see why. We enjoyed being there.
Dennis.