Previously, on The Grants’ Bulgaria Blog…

“We left the three intrepid muskateers in Bansko, amidst the mountains of southwestern Bulgaria. Unbeknownst to them, they were being pursued by a giant green dragon (common in Bulgaria, don’t you know?) as they packed their bags and headed for the bus. Will they survive this encounter? Read on…”

Friday 23rd Oct: Boris seemed to get quite sullen after we told him we were leaving. I wonder if he was disappointed to hear we were ready to leave Bansko? He’s a Banskovite born-and-bred so perhaps he thought our 36-hour stay didn’t do his lovely town justice. We told him we’d try to come back in winter! Are you keen for that, Mum and Dad?

We jumped on a nasty old bus to Sofia in the morning and chugged our way west from Bansko and then north towards the capital. As you can see from the map above, we were sidling around the Rila Mountains which are just south of Sofia. We would have liked to visit the Rila Monastery (a stunning, thousand-year-old monastery about 1100m up in the mountains) but these things are hard to access by bus. We should have taken the lead of some of the backpackers we met in Plovdiv and done more hitch-hiking!

We made it to Sofia in the early afternoon with about 5 hours to waste before our train left. Elly and I don’t really like Sofia. It seems to have all the ugliness of a large city (smog, traffic and lots of busy, grumpy people) without the usual benefits (like good shopping, a larger range of shops/cafes, great architecture etc). Maybe it was our whingeing beforehand, but Humphrey took all of 3 seconds to take a strong dislike to Sofia. It smells bad; I think that was his main impression. I think it’s a telling statistic that we failed to take a single photograph of the city… except the horrendously Communistic train station:

Then we jumped on the train! Best part of Sofia we saw all day. (Sorry, that’s a bit mean.) We had debated all day whether to take the train or the bus… but once we saw our cabin we were glad we chose the former! It might not look much, but it’s so much more comfortable than a tiny, upright bus seat! Eauch!

There was the extra cool factor for the train: it was bound for Moscow!! The surprisingly friendly lady at the ticket office told us to make sure we set an alarm for approximately 5:45am – the ETA for Bucharest – or else we might end up in Russia. We thought that sounded quite appealing, in some ways.

The train ride was uneventful. We got up at about 3am to hand over our passports – firstly to the Bulgarians and then to the Romanians (who looked at them and said “kangaroo?”, to which we all laughed). We also stayed up to watch the crossing of the Danube River. I think a few of you even got special international SMSs as we did so!

Saturday 24th Oct:

The train arrived slightly early. That may sound like a good thing, but it meant stumbling off the train at 5:30am. I even have proof; check out the glorious expressions on their faces! Oh, did I mention it was about 6 degrees C?

We wandered around the train station for a while until a sudden realisation came to us: we literally didn’t know a word of Romanian; nor did we have even the vaguest clue of the layout of Bucharest… Time for a quick google to find some of this essential info! So we found ourselves in McDonalds drinking some very ordinary coffee so we could use the wi-fi internet.

Before long we’d scratched a map onto a piece of paper and took ourselves and our 15kg packs out onto the streets.

Immediately we noticed that Romania has a very different feel to Bulgaria. While we saw glimpses of the same rows of faceless concrete apartment blocks that characterised Bulgarian cities, Bucharest still has oodles of buildings with character!

The language is vastly different, of course. We didn’t find this out until later, but quite a large proportion of people in Romania actually speak Hungarian – especially in Transylvania (the northwestern third of the country), where we were headed. It was quite a thrill to hear a Latin-based language and recognise a decent percentage of the words because of it!

I’ll talk more about our thoughts on Romania in another post, I think.

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We decided to walk to the bus station from the train station. Doesn’t sound too hard, does it?

Well, it was a daft idea. Luckily, we don’t know who to blame for it, but we do know (don’t we, Humf and Elly?) that I, Stu, was the one left to do all the navigation in the streets of Bucharest.

After three-and-a-half hours of resolutely refusing kind offers from greedy taxi-drivers, we arrived on foot at our bus station. Within half and hour we’d jumped on our maxi-taxi (which is what Romanians call mini buses) and departed for Târgu Mureş. It was a very strange way to make an impression of Bucharest. I don’t recommend it; we’re hoping to be able to see a little more of it on the way home!

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Ta-da! We had made it to Târgu Mureş. It was there that we met up with our good friends Jon, Margot and James Nairn who are living and working in Romania.

We had adventures, some of which Elly will thrill you with next time. Stay tunes for descriptions of the wonders of shopping in Romania and possibly even how fun playing paintball is!

Cheers,

Stu.

Elly’s back!

(It’s raining today you see, so more shopping is out of the question)

Right, so we were up to last Thursday.

Thursday 22nd: So, I do believe that in one of the two previous posts Stu introduced Boris (our host in Bansko) to you all. It is a pity we didn’t photograph him because he really was a lovely bloke. We ran into him after having dinner on Wed night and he asked us what we wanted to do whilst in Bansko. Humf, or Stu, clapped their hands together and said ‘We want to go up the mountain!’ Boris replied with ‘Yes yes, oh but of course! I’ll find you a driver, would you like me to find you someone who can take you up? They can show you a good restaurant too. Come in my car now, I’ll drive you around and show you the city. Come! Come!’ Humphrey says he’s a lot like the German ranch owner on Malcolm in the Middle if any of you remember that show.

Anyway, onto Thursday. We started the day with yet another wonderful Bulgarian breakfast. I mentioned in my Sofia post way back when that the BG breakfasts were great, and I still hold firm to that opinion! In Bansko we were served banitsa - crispy pastry rolled up and shaped like a log with white cheese in the middle. Next came small bread rolls with white cheese and homemade blueberry jam. Humphrey in particular loved the jam (Stu and I are quite used to it now) and is hoping to find some to take back to Ausland. We drank big cups of black coffee. It was good and exactly what one needs before attempting to climb a 2914m mountain.

Mt Vihren (the aforementioned 2914m mountain)

We were collected by our driver and unceremoniously dumped at a random lodge 1800m up the mountain. Seems Boris’ friend/in-law/second cousin thrice removed didn’t share his friendly nature. The lodge was occupied by a rather grubby man who had already started drinking (at 10:30am) and very begrudgingly found us a map to buy.

Then we started walking. Up. I think this part of the day will be better told in pictures.

It was really very pretty with a bit of a pine forest down the bottom and alpine sort of plants growing around the place. We were very excited when we first reached the snow and threw snowballs around for the next half hour. The thing about snow, I realised, is that it’s cold and wet and you tend to forget that it’s cold and wet until you become cold and wet. Unfortunately I only had jeans to wear and I really am deeply ashamed that I had to wear them in the snow. I put thermals on underneath before they got too wet but I did miss my bushwalking shorts which are probably safely tucked up under Rhiannon’s house somewhere.

At roughly 2400m in altitude we stopped for lunch and scrutinised the extremely high and steep climb ahead of us. A solitary walker came cruising down and we stopped him to ask about how long it will take. Despite language difficulties we managed to learn that we were only halfway, which wasn’t very encouraging.

So we finished eating chunks of salami and cheese (how barbarian of us) and casually climbed 150m. Casually? I mean struggled. The snow was very soft and powdery and every step ended in either losing our leg up to beyond our knee or falling back half a metre. The incline felt like it was 60 degrees, but Humf reckons it would be lucky to be 40. The ridge offered strong winds, an awesome view of how far we’d come and the final ascent of about 300m which we unanimously decided to not bother with. Too late in the day you know, we could have done it easily no worries!

This one is a panorama – click on it to see the whole thing!

Then we went down. This was the painful part. A slope that took us an hour to struggle up was behind us in seconds as we went down the only way possible: on our bottoms, apart from Stu who went penguin style on his stomach. We walked on down the mountain and ended up on the road and after walking on that for an hour we hitch-hiked into town and had a good dinner and slept for 11 hours. Bliss.

Friday 23rd: A rather uneventful day really. Breakfast was awesome again and the banitsa was replaced with deep fried dough balls with white cheese inside and a big bowl of juicy plump grapes and green apples. I guess today really started off the insane amount of travel we had to do in order to reach the Nairns in Târgu Mureş. I suppose we could have flown the distance, but there aren’t any stories in flying. Next post can be the ‘travel’ post and I’ll orchestrate it so that Stu writes it meaning I get to write the ‘shopping in Romania’ post, a topic I’m very fond of.

I’m very much enjoying being on holiday. It’s not so much the fact that we’re in Eastern Europe and we’re taking a holiday and seeing more of Eastern Europe (which is as cool as it sounds) but travel in itself is really fun and I’m feeling very refreshed and feeling much better about being away from home. Of course, it’s wonderful having Humf here, the three of us have grown much closer and there’ll be a thousand memories and in-jokes that we’ll be sharing for the rest of our lives. However, if Humf answers another question with ‘da’ (the Bulgarian and Romanian for yes, but Humf uses it as his generic answer) then I’ll probably thump him. Consider yourself warned Humf

On a side note, daylight savings ended on the weekend so the time difference is now 9 hours

Have a good one!

Elly xx

Welcome to part one of several “road trip” blog posts. We’re currently hanging out with the Nairns in Transylvania (which is just the slightly cooler name for north-western Romania) so we have more time to sit down and write about our awesome trip so far.

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Monday 19th: After we’d spent 4-5 days hanging around Haskovo with Humf we started getting itchy feet (that’s not a comment on our bathroom hygiene) so we decided to leave as soon as possible after Humphrey had endured a 3 hour Turkish lesson with us. Elly and I were pretty blasé about the lesson because we knew Mirem (our teacher) would not be able to resist spending the whole lesson grilling her “new student” on rolling his Rs and curling his Üs and Ös. We were right – Humf was exhausted by the end of it and Mirem didn’t even notice that Elly and I hadn’t done our homework! Mwah ha ha! (evil laughter)

Tuesday 20th: So on Tuesday morning we said chao chao to David and Rob (the only surviving Australians in Haskovo at the moment) and hopped on a bus to Plovdiv.

Plovdiv is the second largest city in Bulgaria and it’s quite a nice place. Elly and I went there once for some post-birthday retail therapy – it’s probably got the best shopping in Bulgaria. It’s also got a beautiful Old Town, which is the section of the city that has retained and restored all of its historical and cultural buildings. There’s a large Roman aphitheatre in the middle of the Old Town – it was revealed by a landslide about 30 years ago! – and it makes for a rather impressive centrepiece.

We stayed at the Hikers’ Hostel in the Old Town. I mention it by name because it was a nice place – one of the cheapest places to stay in Plovdiv but a really well-equipped hostel. We made the mistake of accepting an offer to stay in the 8-bed dormitory rather than the separate 4-bed dorm we orginally booked. Three of our roommates (a Brit, a Belgian and a Swede… sounds like a Dad Joke, yes?) stumbled back to the hostel at 5am and woke us all up. There may even have been some hostel-room shenanigans between Mr. England and Miss Sweden, but I conveniently seem to have repressed any memories I might have had of hearing heavy breathing and whatnot.

Wednesday 21st: we jumped on a train to the tiny town of Septemvri – the only notable thing about Septemvri is that it you can get off the standard rail and jump on to the narrow-gauge rail the winds its way up into the Pirin Mountains.

I won’t repeat all the details of the train journey, since you can read all about it on Humf’s Amazing Blogalogue. But I have to mention it here because: a) it was great, b) it happened, and c) I have photos:

Thursday 22nd: we spent the night at a great little hostel/hotel in Bansko – a small ski resort town about 1000m above sea level at the base of the spectacular Pirin Mountains.

But I’ll fill you in on the details in the next instalment!

You can expect lots of stunning pictures of snow and huge peaks and coldness.

For now, here’s a very old-school method I devised of mapping our trip. Here’s a representation of Days 1 and 2 on the map (Haskovo is on the right… Plovdiv in the middle… Bansko on the left):