Leaving Bulgaria, we didn’t want to go back through Romania and everyone confirmed that the road back via Serbia was good, so we booked a hotel in Trieste and planned for a long day of driving. The road from Sofia to the border and from there onwards about 100 miles or so wasn’t so great, but from there on it was full-on autostrada and we made excellent time through Belgrade, across the rest of Serbia, and across Croatia back to Ljubljana. My friend Liz and I had been trading text messages to see if our trips might intersect, and we managed to rendezvous there in LJB for drinks and dinner. We showed her the cool kids bar and the excellent restaurant, where we had another (identical) Slovenia feast, and then Loren and I drove the last 120km or so to Trieste, arriving at about 2am. I’ll post more about Sofia itself in a bit…

PS: I’ve been putting together a map of the trip; it’s not quite done yet, but you can check it out here: http://maps.google.com/?mid=1185862802. Photos are gradually being uploaded here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdwelle/sets/72157600934673287/

The next day we drove the short distance to Sofia, stopping for a snack in Ihtiman (which I of course called AHitMan), and yet again still managing to arrive late in the day just as the booking agents and tourist offices were closing. We found a couple of hostels, a crappy “one-star” “hotel” in an old apartment block, and newer several four-star business hotels, but nothing in the middle. Finally one of the nicer places pointed out a three-star around the block that we hadn’t noticed and we got a room there for €65, I think.

The following day we began our return trip, leaving Ayvalik to drive back north and west into Bulgaria, intent on staying the night in Plovdiv. I’m not sure what held us up, or if we just underestimated a bit, but 400 miles, a car ferry, a border crossing, and whatever else put us into Plovdiv just as night fell, with an outdated map and no real idea of where we were. As it happened, they had pedestrianized a whole bunch more of the town since the map we had was made, and so we were engaged in the task of trying to drive to a hotel which — if it was even still in existence — was entirely impossible to drive to. At least in the dark, hungry, and tired. We eventually found an alternate place (no lift, but just fine otherwise) and _ran_ to the nearest bar for a drink. And this is where we discovered Bulgaria. Booze is usually fairly expensive in all of Europe, and name-brand American booze can be ridiculously overpriced. On top of that, prices are often essentially at the bartender’s discretion, especially in places like Romania and Turkey. We ordered two Maker’s Marks and two beers and the kid _looked up_ the correct price and rang up a total of something like €7. Basically half price, and an honest price at that. Welcome to Bulgaristan!

Plovdiv was bustling downtown, with a nice pedestrian mall (in the urbanist sense, not the American Mall sense) and a very high-tech internet cafe built right into the old Roman stadium. I walked around the old town and saw some nice paintings by a post-war Bulgarian painter who was popular with the Party bosses for his sympathetic representations of peasant life.

The name of the beach town in Bulgaria was Lozenets. Did we stay there one night or two, now I can’t remember…? I guess it was just one. We had driven to the end of the road again here and found a rather bleak, wind-blown town on a bluff, had a beer, turned around and found a place with a few more people and a nice, clean friendly pensione. We had a good dinner, although we still hadn’t quite learned that “Pectopant” wasn’t the _name_ of the restaurant, but the word “restaurant” itself… In the morning I walked across town and down to the beach and did my exercises and had a swim. Although this was the same Black Sea as in Vama Veche, and only ~200 miles to the south, here it was clean and blue, and the beach was much nicer and nearly clean as well. We learned later that Lozenets is a popular weekend beach destination from Sofia.

We took off around mid-day and drove backroads towards the Turkish border, cruising slowly up and over a range of green hills. This was our first non-EU border crossing and it took some time. We had to get stamped by four guys in four different offices, in a specific order. Even so, everyone was friendly and the English-speaking turks waiting in line with us helped us along. Once across the border the road got a bit bigger and we made it to Kirklareli for late lunch. My first impression of Turkey was *so* much different from anywhere else we had been. Much busier, everyone out on the streets, a million little shops, clearly prosperous enough, lots of commerce everywhere. We got money and found a cheap and clean looking place to eat, and the owner welcomed us iand brought over his daughter to practice her English. The food (basically mini-hamburgers) was nothing to write home about, but the experience was notable. These people were happy and open and having fun.

After lunch we got on the road and hightailed it to Istanbul, making good time once we hit the autobahn and hitting town about 7 or 8pm, I guess. My Turkey guidebook was ten years old and all the hotels had changed, but we found a good one without too much trouble. Loren and I had slightly (but not hugely) different ideas about what made for the ideal place to sleep, but the basic idea was two-star with A/C and a lift in cities and pension or agriturismo outside of cities.

Vama Veche is the last town on the Black Sea beach in Romania heading south, just before the border with Bulgaria. We had had our full of transylvania and made a log day of it getting here, enticed by descriptions of what used to be a retreat for the faculty of the university of Cluj.

Well. It is sort of a counterculture place. Hippies camp on the beach and with nudist families, and they all eat at the “Linea di autoservire,” a sort of Automat that seems to be popular here. At night they drink beer or booze mixed with juice. And drink. And drink. It’s ‘alternative’ in that not _all_ the beach bars play _only_ techno. Quite an innovation.

Basically, the place is a dump. A campground with a couple of restaurants, neither of which are much good, nor anywhere near as cheap as they should be. Both ends of the beach have a smell that turns you back in the other direction, and most of it - as is the rest of this country - is littered with trash. This fact alone is so depressing; one can’t help but draw a connection between litter in the streets and rivers and a littered mental landscape. How can you run a country if there is trash everywhere?

We headed south this morning and were greeted by a smiling, multilingual Bulgarian border guard. Actaully, he only seemed to be there to collect the road toll (legit), but had a glance at the passports and French car docs just for the heck of it. Things changed noticeably more or less as soon as we crossed the border… First of all, hardly any trash. The towns and villages looked better, and there were far fewer abandoned construction projects. Lots and lots of real estate development, with for sale signs in English. Stopped for lunch in Varna and found a relatively civilized small port city with leafy streets and friendly people. Drove south through Burgas, a larger, more industrial port and it was a bit gritty, but nothing like the cities in Romania. We’re now south of there at a smallish beach town, more or less at the junction for the road to Turkey, where we’ll probably head tomorrow.