Our Bulgarian Odyssey

Part I: Driving

OK, we complained about the Serbian roads, but things took a turn for the worse as soon as we crossed the border into Bulgaria. Our road atlas (unfortunately, the coverage on our navigation system ends at the eastern edge of Austria!) showed a four lane highway from the Serbia/Bulgaria border all the way to Bulgaria's capital city, Sofia. Instead, we found a potholed two-laner, with regular uncontrolled lane closures for construction (or maybe just REALLY bad potholes). Yes, this means weaving your way through traffic on a one-lane highway. As we approached Sofia the road eventually did become four-lane, but the pothole frequency and depth increased, so it was hard to say it if was an improvement or not.

Part II: Finding a place to stay

Bulgaria is not exactly a tourism hot-spot, and so none of our campground listings or guidebooks mention where to camp near Sofia. However our road atlas (yes, the same one that was wrong about the four-lane road) showed a little tent symbol not too far away from Sofia's ring road. So we decided to see if we could track it down. Eventually, we spotted a sign that said "Camping" (luckily, that word is pretty universal!) on a frontage next to a busy arterial into the city. After about 20 minutes of gut feeling navigation through Sofia's apartment blocks, and in the waning light, we found ourselves at the gate, where a handful of stray puppies watched as the campground manager filled out the archaic form (technically supposed to be registered with the police) detailing where we foreigners had spent the night.

Part III: Camping

The campground looked like something built for a communist-era "back to nature" campaign. It was mostly a collection of run-down cottages, with a grassy area where we nestled in between the only other tourist, a young couple from Poland in a tent and a Spanish family in an RV with a dog that seemed to be recovering from surgery. (Maybe veterinary services are cheap in Bulgaria?) Instead of the typical "sanitary block", we were instructed to use the toilet and shower in the bathroom of one of the cottages. The cottage smelled of mold, and the shower looked like it was missing its bathtub and curtain. There was a showerhead coming out of the wall, and a drain on the floor. When we showered, the entire bathroom got wet and steamy. Perfect environment for the slugs living there. (Luckily, out next Bulgarian campground, near the Rila monastery, was much, much nicer!)

Part IV: Stereo Shopping

Strangely, although Sofia feels like a (barely) second-world city in many respects, its ring road is full of brand-new shopping centers. And the most popular type of store is the electronic mega-market. We were intrigued, since we'd been looking for a small speaker system to hook up to the iPod, and couldn't help stopping at the MediaMarket to look around. They had more speaker systems than I'd ever seen, and the store was so new that they weren't sure of the price of the one we were interested in. After going to downtown Sofia and checking prices on cnet at a smokey internet/online gaming place, we realized that Bulgarian electronics cost the same as American electronics. But we were so enthralled with buying stereo equipment in Bulgaria that we continued our quest, this time a the Technopolis, which was even bigger than the MediaMarket, and walked out with a Altec-Lansing speaker system covered by a Bulgarian warranty.

Part V: Wine Touring

Supposedly in the communist days, the Bulgarians supplied the majority of the wine for the USSR. And all the vineyards went out of business when Gorbachev started an anti-alcohol campaign, and then the eastern bloc collapsed. But our wine book mentioned that things were turning around again, and that the Diamanitza winery near Melnic was doing wonderful things. So we decided we would do some wine tasting. We found Melnic on our map near the Greek border, and headed that direction in hopes of finding the winery on the way. Melnic turned out to be a dusty tourist town (or the closest thing to a tourist town in Bulgaria), with inflated prices and alas, no Diamanitza. We were hot and hungry, but we were on a mission to find what our book called "probably the best wine in Bulgaria". After a complete wild goose chase of following signs with no arrows down partially paved roads, we decided to give up and get something to eat. And then it happened. We spotted a tiny sign on a building in the middle of nowhere that looked like an old factory. The security guards didn't speak English, but another employee did. We couldn't taste because the person who does the tasting wasn't there, she said. She thought we could buy the wine though, but after a quick call on the cell phone, she decided that wasn't possible either. But she drew us a map to a bottle shop in the nearby town (which we had driven through three hours earlier!), where we found the wine for less than half of the price of similar bottles in Melnic.

Part VI: Leaving

With our newly purchased wine and speakers in hand, we headed towards Greece. Approaching Bulgarian exit customs we gathered all the paperwork: our passports, the insurance card, the registration for the camper, and our copies of the forms filled out by the campgrounds to let the police know where we had spent our nights. There were about 20 cars in the line in front of us. We pulled up behind them and waited. And waited. And waited. In the 104 degree heat with no air conditioning. Ultimately, it took us two hours to clear Bulgarian exit customs. and we didn't even have the forms we had so carefully saved. It was by far the worst border crossing we've done in Europe!

The photos here show a bus stop in Sofia, and the Rila Monastery.

-SK