Bulgaria

18-31st of July, 2008

Bulgaria was a place of fun and relaxation for us (not that the rest of the trip wasn't...).

After slipping down the side of the massive queue of cars at the border, much to the disgust of many hot, sweaty, frustrated motorists, we cruised down the highway towards the capital, Sofia. We thought we'd give Sofia a miss and stay in a small village on the outskirts, and then head south-east to Velingrad where there was cool mountainbiking. This small village did have a hotel, but unfortunately it had closed long ago. And the directions we got to the next town were hopeless and we ended up riding around in circles during the 40 degree heat of the day.

So that being the frustrating case, we thought we'd just ride the 30km to Sofia and stay there. Luckily it was a Sunday afternoon, so traffic wasn't too heavy. We stayed there for a couple of nights and ate at a really cool vego restaurant. Twice. Such was the lack of vegetable material in the rest of Eastern Europe.

It took us 2 days to ride to Velingrad, much of that in spectacular lightning storms. The lightning was a little too close for comfort at one point, striking the ground about 20m away from us and scaring the crap out of us with a loud crack.

We stayed in a sweet 4 star hotel in Velingrad, and watched the last few days of the Tour de France... poor Cadel, bridesmaid again.

We spent a week in Velingrad and spent the first few days resting, and then we met this cool guy called Vasil who runs a mountain biking cooperative and makes trails all around the area. Got some good track notes from him and then went off exploring!

This lovely guy gave us some local brew on one of our rides. It was potent, ouzo-esque.

Sweet singletrack, on a day ride out of Velingrad.

One of the big days we did involved 100km of fun asphalt and dirt road mix, of which we spent about 50km hopelessly lost. But we eventually found the track (the tracks were generally well marked, except for some key spots that meant we were kinda stuffed if we missed them and ended up lost for hours at a time). The finish of the ride was 20km of descent down a good asphalt road (we didn't have time for the dirt road descent, because we'd spent too long lost and it was getting close to dark).

River crossing on the 100km epic day. We weren't lost at this stage, but about 300m later we took a wrong turn and added 15km to the day. Oops.

After Velingrad, we rode 100km to Plovdiv which was a nice fast ride; we managed to average 30km/h! It started as a nice fast descent down a horrendously scary windy road filled with suicidal drivers, and then a flat as a pancake plain with a slight tailwind, and baby-bum smooth asphalt.

Carpet snakes were on the menu in Plovdiv.

Bulgarian drivers are probably the worst and scariest in the world. Forget India and South America (though we haven't seen Iran or Iraq yet...), but think about this: the road toll is typically over 1000 people per year, and with a population of 7 million people, this is just ridiculous. They try and mark the "black spot" areas on the roads, and you'll see one around a blind corner and think, "ok, fair enough," but then we saw one on the highway to Plovdiv, on a dead straight section of highway with no intersections and excellent visibility. Only in Bulgaria could they have made this a black spot area. Only in Bulgaria.

From Plovdiv we thought very hard about our lives, and very hard about the drivers in Bulgaria being incompatible with our lives, and our conclusion was to preserve our lives and catch a bus to Istanbul!