The trip through the Turkish outback was dark, long, and monotonous, but I was quite tired from my day of scampering through the Cappadocian wilderness. One thing I hadn't thought about before my previous day's adventure were the possible consequences of hiking around in 30C+ heat for 6 hours wearing my recently purchased plastic sneakers. As usual, when trying to sleep on a bus, I took my shoes off to get comfortable. I admit, they were olfactorily noticeable, but the locals on the bus weren't that much better off. At our first rest stop I woke up and started putting my shoes on to go get a snack. One of the bus-waiters approached me as I was getting off the bus and, in broken English said,
"Sir, this way please... I must speak with you", and I responded cordially. He leads me by the arm around the corner of the parked bus and leans into me real surreptitiously like and says,
"Sir, your shoes... they are very very bad", in heavily accented English.
The poor fellow looked awfully embarrassed having to inform me that my foot stank was a closed-space problem. I took it in good stride and, begrudgingly, agreed to keep my footwear on for the rest of the journey.
I awoke shortly before the bus entered central Istanbul. I worked the cricks out of my body best as I could in the confined space of the bus seat. They gave us pre-packaged muffins and instant coffee just before we arrived at the main bus depot. Even though I completely agreed with the bus-waiter's call on my stinky feet, I still felt ejected from the bus after the shoe fiasco. I felt the bite of the chill Istanbul morning air as I exited one of the bus depot buildings searching for a place to buy a ticket into Bulgaria a.s.a.p.. Following Lonely Planet directions I quickly found and bought a ride to Burgas, Bulgaria leaving in about 90 minutes... enough time for a quick bite of breakfast, my last real Turkish coffee, and a new pair of socks for the next leg of my bus journey.
Now when I planned this leg of the trip out, I thought I had it all figured according to the map I was using. And, in a perfect world, it should of worked out as I had envisioned it. But, alas, transport between Turkey and Bulgaria at the crossing I had chosen is not the most profitable in a direct line. The bus meandered for several hours through the Turkish countryside picking up passengers in many villages and towns. It was very beautiful, but my limits for this type of travel had been exceeded... I just wanted to get where I was going already.
It had been a few months since I had done a land border-crossing and the uniqueness of the reality of the situation was refreshing. We went from multi-lane highway to mountain road, with a brief march on foot through a forest covered border-crossing, before getting another glimpse of the Black Sea to the east from curving mountainside roads. I had been engrossed in my Lonely Plant for awhile now and really had my heart set on getting to Sozopol. I just wanted a nice chill place for a night or two to gather my thoughts. The bus approached Burgas from the south and had its last rest stop at the turn off to Sozopol. I felt really torn about being lazy and just heading in to Burgas, or making the effort to figure a way from a highway-side rest stop to a village 15 kms away. As it panned out, I met a kiwie fellow went by the name of Chitty at the rest stop who happened to be on the same bus with me. Turned out he was meeting his other kiwie pal in Burgas to begin their eastern Europe journey... guess I'm going to Burgas...
Since I hadn't planned on going to Burgas originally, I hadn't researched possible hostels or accommodations, or maps for that matter. Luckily, Chitty had a smart phone on hand with a little google maps action. After consulting some google maps, we determined the general direction of the hostel we needed to get to in order to meet Chitty's buddy. Awesome. One minor problem confronted us at this point. Our google maps was in English, using the English alphabet, while all the street signs were written in Cyrillic (like crazy Russian alphabet - just think, Burgas = Бургас in Cyrillic). So even though we knew where we were and where we needed to get to, signage was NOT going to help us in our journey. So I got to thinking, who in Burgas, Bulgaria might speak good English and be open to helping out a couple of foreigners without running some sort of scam?... we just happened to be walking past a bank of some sort as this thought skittered across my brain and I, naturally, came to the conclusion: ask a local bank manager, they ought to know English! Even though I had already been through 13 countries at this point in my journey, I forgot how enthusiastic locals can be when encountered with the opportunity to help out native English speakers... bizarre type of cultural privilege, for sure, but we got our directions sorted out right quick. Eventually, we sauntered up to a blacked out glass door with a little sign above indicating the hostel of our choice. We buzzed in and a raggedy looking 20-something guy answered. The hostel turned out to be more of a downhill mountain biker clubhouse/tattoo parlor with a few extra rooms for rent to pay the bills. The hosts were cool and promptly directed us to the bar.
After a night of swapping bar tricks with mountain bikers, the kiwies and I went for a walk around Burgas to soak in some Bulgarian culture. At this point in my journey, I was feeling a little tired of all the history and sites. Don't forget, I had just been through 13 or 14 other countries touristing it up. The boys weren't very impressed either and were eager to get moving on to the next tantalizing destination. After a brief consultation of our combined Lonely Planets we determined the location of the bus depot that might get us to Sunny Beach. Apparently, this was supposed to be quite the "cultural" spot around the time of year we were there... college spring break was about to happen and the kiwie boys were at the beginning of their journey and chomping at the bit for some... culture. So we caught the bus and off we went.
We got dropped off at the bus depot in Sunny Beach, a little bit off to the side of the main Sunny Beach drag. I pulled out my Lonely Planet and the boys pulled out their smart phones. After a few ridiculously over-priced tourist pits we decided to shoot for cheap-and-close-to-the-beach. Following sketchy directions communicated in very bad English we found the "hotel" we were gunning for. Now, I say "hotel" because, well, we arrived literally on shoulder-season. This meant that pretty much everything that was going to happen in Sunny Beach, was going to happen in like 4-5 days. Street vendors were setting up, hotels were preparing, and the place we chose to go to was little more than a ghost-town; so much so that when we walked into the lobby, the lights were out and NOBODY was anywhere to be seen. Being a bit of a miscreant (just a bit mind you) I took it upon myself to explore this unlocked, apparently shut down hotel. I mean come on... can you say harmless mischief and FUN? So we tooled around the premises for like 20 minutes checking out the rooms and layout. We had just about given up when I decided to go down a dark hallway behind the concierge desk. Upon my return some sort of care-taker eerily appeared, kind of like a spooky butler in Dracula's castle. We chatted the guy up and as it turned out, the hotel was indeed open for business (regardless of its no-power-or-staff appearance). We negotiated a room for something like $20 US/night for the three of us and promptly settled down in anticipation of the heralded "culture" we were about to experience.
~ My camera died at this point. So, sadly, no more pics till Romania, but you can optimize your travel-blog experience by doing a brief google search for photos from Sunny Beach, Varna, Golden Sands, and Ruse all in Bulgaria. ~
I'm not entirely sure how to communicate the atmosphere of this tourist-based-economy city to anyone who hasn't lived in such boom-and-bust places. Suffice to say that, regardless of all the bling-bling of neon signs, street-hawkers, and seedy "legitimate business people", it felt like a hollow coconut waiting to be filled with some delicious, tropical, fruity alcoholic beverage. We wandered around this shell of an economy along luxuriously organized city planning tourist routes trying to find some place with... well... people. It was kind of like Mad Max meets good urban planning. Pretty bizarre. We managed to find some trouble to partake of, but ended up calling it an early night with admonitions of the great things to come at our next destination... Varna.
It wasn't hard leaving Sunny Beach. Sure it was sunny and there was plenty of "cultural" potential, but we weren't willing to waste 4 days waiting for it to happen. Another local bus got us to Varna at which point we needed a cab, because our hostel of choice, X Hostel, was a wee bit off the beaten track. Once we arrived the colossal bad-timing of our sojourn through Bulgaria became exceedingly evident. The "culture" wasn't going to happen for at least another half a week. Gah! Oh well, some good came of it. I met a couple of German fellows who were pretty cool, Rene and Marco. Rene was doing a work exchange in Varna and Marco was traveling through. Rene took us out to experience some Varna night life... which was... interesting.
At this time Bulgaria was pretty much still a recovering second world economy. So when people went out to "clubs" it was a once a month kind of thing where everyone dressed up REAL nice and behaved... posh-like. It was also just days away from the tourist explosion that occurs in this part of the world around spring break, so the air was thick with anticipation, and people were generally tourist-cautious. Our group still managed to have a good time. Eastern Europeans take their dance-club dancing pretty seriously, so some of our antics pushed some limits, but I think, overall, everyone enjoyed the spectacle.
The next day Rene took us to visit Golden Sands, a kind of hot spot.. or it would be in 3 days! So once again we experienced the ghost-town quality of businesses getting ready for an influx of thousands of college-break revelers. Rene had "industry-worker-cred" at lots of the places around the beach area... so we took full advantage. It was pleasant, and we spent some time frolicking in the Black Sea. At the end of the day.. did I mention that I was feeling pretty burned out from traveling for over 9 months?.. we ended up back at X Hostel for a huge potlucky-kind of dinner involving, what I estimate to be one of Bulgaria's favourite past-times, drinking Rakia. Apparently, as a kind of throw back to communist times, most towns and villages in Bulgaria have access to a local community distillery where people may bring whatever fruits grow near their domiciles and convert them into high-proof... Rakia. It was a good night... the morning kind of sucked.
At this point the kiwies were ready to dig in and wait for the "culture" to happen in a couple of days. Me? I was burning through credit to stay alive and just wanted to get to my dad's place in the Czech Republic a.s.a.p.. Fortunately for me, Marco had a rental car and was heading for Bucharest, Romania... my next destination. So, I made a deal with Marco and off we went northward to the border crossing at Ruse.
Even though Europe has been out of the Cold-War for like 24 years at this point, the Eastern Bloc still had a very... trying-to-not-be-a-third-world-country feel to it. Albeit it wasn't like Laos where the highway from the capital city to the 2nd largest metropolis consisted of 100m chunks of paved highway interspersed with 200m pot-holey mud tracks, it still took the better part of a day to travel the 200 kms from Varna to Ruse. Marco and I decided to save the border crossing for the morning... that, and he had booked a 2-bed suite in Ruse, and had no one to fill the second bed. We definitely experienced some Bulgarian culture that night; so much culture that we nearly missed the noon check out at the hostel we were staying at. After the "where am I going today" transport of South America and Southeast Asia, the pre-booked, personalized travel of India, and the spontaneity-based travel through Turkey... the border crossing between Bulgaria and Romania left me VERY grateful that I was in a rental car. There was no sign of bus or train type transit anywhere around the Ruse border crossing. In fact, the road to the Bulgaria-Romania border looked like little more than some country road that all-of-a-sudden opened up into a huge truck-stop like border crossing. They pretty much just waved us through upon seeing our Canadian and German passports.
"Sir, this way please... I must speak with you", and I responded cordially. He leads me by the arm around the corner of the parked bus and leans into me real surreptitiously like and says,
"Sir, your shoes... they are very very bad", in heavily accented English.
The poor fellow looked awfully embarrassed having to inform me that my foot stank was a closed-space problem. I took it in good stride and, begrudgingly, agreed to keep my footwear on for the rest of the journey.
I awoke shortly before the bus entered central Istanbul. I worked the cricks out of my body best as I could in the confined space of the bus seat. They gave us pre-packaged muffins and instant coffee just before we arrived at the main bus depot. Even though I completely agreed with the bus-waiter's call on my stinky feet, I still felt ejected from the bus after the shoe fiasco. I felt the bite of the chill Istanbul morning air as I exited one of the bus depot buildings searching for a place to buy a ticket into Bulgaria a.s.a.p.. Following Lonely Planet directions I quickly found and bought a ride to Burgas, Bulgaria leaving in about 90 minutes... enough time for a quick bite of breakfast, my last real Turkish coffee, and a new pair of socks for the next leg of my bus journey.
Now when I planned this leg of the trip out, I thought I had it all figured according to the map I was using. And, in a perfect world, it should of worked out as I had envisioned it. But, alas, transport between Turkey and Bulgaria at the crossing I had chosen is not the most profitable in a direct line. The bus meandered for several hours through the Turkish countryside picking up passengers in many villages and towns. It was very beautiful, but my limits for this type of travel had been exceeded... I just wanted to get where I was going already.
It had been a few months since I had done a land border-crossing and the uniqueness of the reality of the situation was refreshing. We went from multi-lane highway to mountain road, with a brief march on foot through a forest covered border-crossing, before getting another glimpse of the Black Sea to the east from curving mountainside roads. I had been engrossed in my Lonely Plant for awhile now and really had my heart set on getting to Sozopol. I just wanted a nice chill place for a night or two to gather my thoughts. The bus approached Burgas from the south and had its last rest stop at the turn off to Sozopol. I felt really torn about being lazy and just heading in to Burgas, or making the effort to figure a way from a highway-side rest stop to a village 15 kms away. As it panned out, I met a kiwie fellow went by the name of Chitty at the rest stop who happened to be on the same bus with me. Turned out he was meeting his other kiwie pal in Burgas to begin their eastern Europe journey... guess I'm going to Burgas...
Since I hadn't planned on going to Burgas originally, I hadn't researched possible hostels or accommodations, or maps for that matter. Luckily, Chitty had a smart phone on hand with a little google maps action. After consulting some google maps, we determined the general direction of the hostel we needed to get to in order to meet Chitty's buddy. Awesome. One minor problem confronted us at this point. Our google maps was in English, using the English alphabet, while all the street signs were written in Cyrillic (like crazy Russian alphabet - just think, Burgas = Бургас in Cyrillic). So even though we knew where we were and where we needed to get to, signage was NOT going to help us in our journey. So I got to thinking, who in Burgas, Bulgaria might speak good English and be open to helping out a couple of foreigners without running some sort of scam?... we just happened to be walking past a bank of some sort as this thought skittered across my brain and I, naturally, came to the conclusion: ask a local bank manager, they ought to know English! Even though I had already been through 13 countries at this point in my journey, I forgot how enthusiastic locals can be when encountered with the opportunity to help out native English speakers... bizarre type of cultural privilege, for sure, but we got our directions sorted out right quick. Eventually, we sauntered up to a blacked out glass door with a little sign above indicating the hostel of our choice. We buzzed in and a raggedy looking 20-something guy answered. The hostel turned out to be more of a downhill mountain biker clubhouse/tattoo parlor with a few extra rooms for rent to pay the bills. The hosts were cool and promptly directed us to the bar.
After a night of swapping bar tricks with mountain bikers, the kiwies and I went for a walk around Burgas to soak in some Bulgarian culture. At this point in my journey, I was feeling a little tired of all the history and sites. Don't forget, I had just been through 13 or 14 other countries touristing it up. The boys weren't very impressed either and were eager to get moving on to the next tantalizing destination. After a brief consultation of our combined Lonely Planets we determined the location of the bus depot that might get us to Sunny Beach. Apparently, this was supposed to be quite the "cultural" spot around the time of year we were there... college spring break was about to happen and the kiwie boys were at the beginning of their journey and chomping at the bit for some... culture. So we caught the bus and off we went.
We got dropped off at the bus depot in Sunny Beach, a little bit off to the side of the main Sunny Beach drag. I pulled out my Lonely Planet and the boys pulled out their smart phones. After a few ridiculously over-priced tourist pits we decided to shoot for cheap-and-close-to-the-beach. Following sketchy directions communicated in very bad English we found the "hotel" we were gunning for. Now, I say "hotel" because, well, we arrived literally on shoulder-season. This meant that pretty much everything that was going to happen in Sunny Beach, was going to happen in like 4-5 days. Street vendors were setting up, hotels were preparing, and the place we chose to go to was little more than a ghost-town; so much so that when we walked into the lobby, the lights were out and NOBODY was anywhere to be seen. Being a bit of a miscreant (just a bit mind you) I took it upon myself to explore this unlocked, apparently shut down hotel. I mean come on... can you say harmless mischief and FUN? So we tooled around the premises for like 20 minutes checking out the rooms and layout. We had just about given up when I decided to go down a dark hallway behind the concierge desk. Upon my return some sort of care-taker eerily appeared, kind of like a spooky butler in Dracula's castle. We chatted the guy up and as it turned out, the hotel was indeed open for business (regardless of its no-power-or-staff appearance). We negotiated a room for something like $20 US/night for the three of us and promptly settled down in anticipation of the heralded "culture" we were about to experience.
~ My camera died at this point. So, sadly, no more pics till Romania, but you can optimize your travel-blog experience by doing a brief google search for photos from Sunny Beach, Varna, Golden Sands, and Ruse all in Bulgaria. ~I'm not entirely sure how to communicate the atmosphere of this tourist-based-economy city to anyone who hasn't lived in such boom-and-bust places. Suffice to say that, regardless of all the bling-bling of neon signs, street-hawkers, and seedy "legitimate business people", it felt like a hollow coconut waiting to be filled with some delicious, tropical, fruity alcoholic beverage. We wandered around this shell of an economy along luxuriously organized city planning tourist routes trying to find some place with... well... people. It was kind of like Mad Max meets good urban planning. Pretty bizarre. We managed to find some trouble to partake of, but ended up calling it an early night with admonitions of the great things to come at our next destination... Varna.
It wasn't hard leaving Sunny Beach. Sure it was sunny and there was plenty of "cultural" potential, but we weren't willing to waste 4 days waiting for it to happen. Another local bus got us to Varna at which point we needed a cab, because our hostel of choice, X Hostel, was a wee bit off the beaten track. Once we arrived the colossal bad-timing of our sojourn through Bulgaria became exceedingly evident. The "culture" wasn't going to happen for at least another half a week. Gah! Oh well, some good came of it. I met a couple of German fellows who were pretty cool, Rene and Marco. Rene was doing a work exchange in Varna and Marco was traveling through. Rene took us out to experience some Varna night life... which was... interesting.
At this time Bulgaria was pretty much still a recovering second world economy. So when people went out to "clubs" it was a once a month kind of thing where everyone dressed up REAL nice and behaved... posh-like. It was also just days away from the tourist explosion that occurs in this part of the world around spring break, so the air was thick with anticipation, and people were generally tourist-cautious. Our group still managed to have a good time. Eastern Europeans take their dance-club dancing pretty seriously, so some of our antics pushed some limits, but I think, overall, everyone enjoyed the spectacle.
The next day Rene took us to visit Golden Sands, a kind of hot spot.. or it would be in 3 days! So once again we experienced the ghost-town quality of businesses getting ready for an influx of thousands of college-break revelers. Rene had "industry-worker-cred" at lots of the places around the beach area... so we took full advantage. It was pleasant, and we spent some time frolicking in the Black Sea. At the end of the day.. did I mention that I was feeling pretty burned out from traveling for over 9 months?.. we ended up back at X Hostel for a huge potlucky-kind of dinner involving, what I estimate to be one of Bulgaria's favourite past-times, drinking Rakia. Apparently, as a kind of throw back to communist times, most towns and villages in Bulgaria have access to a local community distillery where people may bring whatever fruits grow near their domiciles and convert them into high-proof... Rakia. It was a good night... the morning kind of sucked.
At this point the kiwies were ready to dig in and wait for the "culture" to happen in a couple of days. Me? I was burning through credit to stay alive and just wanted to get to my dad's place in the Czech Republic a.s.a.p.. Fortunately for me, Marco had a rental car and was heading for Bucharest, Romania... my next destination. So, I made a deal with Marco and off we went northward to the border crossing at Ruse.
Even though Europe has been out of the Cold-War for like 24 years at this point, the Eastern Bloc still had a very... trying-to-not-be-a-third-world-country feel to it. Albeit it wasn't like Laos where the highway from the capital city to the 2nd largest metropolis consisted of 100m chunks of paved highway interspersed with 200m pot-holey mud tracks, it still took the better part of a day to travel the 200 kms from Varna to Ruse. Marco and I decided to save the border crossing for the morning... that, and he had booked a 2-bed suite in Ruse, and had no one to fill the second bed. We definitely experienced some Bulgarian culture that night; so much culture that we nearly missed the noon check out at the hostel we were staying at. After the "where am I going today" transport of South America and Southeast Asia, the pre-booked, personalized travel of India, and the spontaneity-based travel through Turkey... the border crossing between Bulgaria and Romania left me VERY grateful that I was in a rental car. There was no sign of bus or train type transit anywhere around the Ruse border crossing. In fact, the road to the Bulgaria-Romania border looked like little more than some country road that all-of-a-sudden opened up into a huge truck-stop like border crossing. They pretty much just waved us through upon seeing our Canadian and German passports.
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