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North Coast
By mcdog | August 2, 2007
The guy brought the car round to our hotel at 0930hrs, ran me through the procedure in case of an accident, gave me a small wallet of papers to carry at all times and then he left. A few seconds later I remembered that he’d said he’d tell me the route to take to get out of town but he’d vanished. We grabbed our bags from the room, loaded the car and went for breakfast at a cafe across the road. We even got the ‘full English’. Then it was into the car, pay the parking fee and with a little guesswork at junctions we were on the ‘main drag’ leading out of town and off to the wide blue yonder. We turned right at the roundabout and started to worry about finding a filling station, there was not much fuel in the Fiesta. There was no need to worry, we found a garage after about three miles and filled the tank, 75 leva or about twenty five quid.
Then we exercised the lower gears by following a bus up the long winding hill through deeply wooded countryside on the road to Varna. We saw very few houses on the hill but passed through a few villages before crossing the huge bridge at the city of Varna. We saw a few ships entering and leaving the port but I was concentrating mainly on traffic, road signs and remembering that the gear lever was on ‘the other side’.
We didn’t stop in Varna and took the road out of town to Balchik. We saw road signs for Albena and, as a friend had recently bought an apartment there, we decided to make a quick visit to the resort. At a toll booth we collected tickets and drove into the town. The street was very crowded with pedestrians and with cars parked on the pavements. So we found a patch of pavement to park on and walked the few feet to the beach. We had a drink of aryan at a nearby cafe. Aryan is a handy drink when driving in this country, it’s a mixture of yogurt and water and, if ordered with ice, can be very cool and refreshing. The beach was not as crowded as Sunny Beach and there was a game of volleyball nearby watched over by a very serious umpire ( or is it referee?). After the drink we joined the long queue to pay our toll for entering, or leaving, the town, 4 leva, and then turned north onto the coast road for Balchik, just a few miles further.
Balchik was a charming place and we went to look for a hotel for the night. We had read about the Balchik Hotel in the Lonely Planet guide and eventually took a room there though there was no fan. Why did we take the room? I’m not too sure but I was intrigued by the L.P.’s description of the Soviet-era style hotel.
We took a stroll along the front in Balchik, past people swimming in the sea. On our other side was a terraced garden with what appeared to be a wedding conducted in English, presumably a phoney wedding run as some kind of tourist entertainment. Ahh well, to each their own. On the walk back we were dragged into a restaurant where the chef told us that he bought his fish early in the morning from the local boats. So we had fish. A couple of beers later and we were back in the hotel, hoping for a stronger breeze and dodging mosquitoes. We saw an incredibly fast centipede run up the wall of our room and in total disregard for the diversity of species killed it with a sharp blow to the head with a sandal. In spite of the heat, I slept very well, Herself did not. So it goes.
Topics: bulgaria01 | 2 Comments »
November 30th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
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Added to my RSS reader
July 6th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Some of us even don’t realize the importance of this information. What a pity.