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Nesebar
By mcdog | July 24, 2007
We slept in. Seriously slept in. I blame it on not setting my watch to local time. Fool. So we felt it was too late to go to Burgas but thought that we would go to the bus station anyway to check the bus times for the journey the next day and to catch a bus to Nesebar. The staff in a ticket office told us to pay on the bus but didn’t say where to find the bus stop. A nearby taxi driver offered to take us for 20 leva. We declined and he produced a very unofficial-looking printed price sheet from the boot of his cab. We also declined his reduced offer of 15 leva. After wandering around what turned out to be the back of the station and then joining possibly the slowest information queue in Bulgaria, some kind soul told us that the stop was on the main drag by the traffic lights.
It was about a 100 metres back to the lights and sure enough there was the bus stop, the queue and the bus. Nice timing for a change. The fare was a half lev each and we sweated the 5 kilometres to Nesebar, where we were dropped at the end of the causeway to the old town.
Nesebar is a rocky outcrop about 850 metres by 300 metres. It’s steep and cobbled lanes are packed with restaurants and shops and the ruins of old churches. We stumbled upon a former church, still in good condition but now an art gallery, built in the characteristic Nesebar style of horizontal strips of white stone and red brick but were unable to see inside as it was closed by a chain across the door.
After a breakfast of fruit and herring salad, an unusual breakfast but then it was also an unusual time for breakfast, we wandered to the top of the outcrop where we saw restaurants with fine views over the sea. However the strong smell of sewage here made us glad we had eaten further down the rock. It was very hot and we retreated back to the causeway where a man with a megaphone kept insisting that a boat was leaving for Sunny Beach. So we jumped on board and took our seats for the trip back ‘home’. The man with the hailer metamorphosed into the skipper and the voyage began. The woman sitting next to Herself sounded as though she was facing Arctic gales but the waves were only a few inches high and we survived the journey. It occurred to us that we didn’t know where in Sunny Beach the boat was headed but fortunately the jetty was only a couple of hundred metres from our hotel. Arriving by boat gave us another view of the beach and an overall view of the town.
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