I see reports of poor weather back home and across other parts of Europe but I can report it’s hot here in Romania. I’m not bragging because it’s too hot to do much of anything, so we’re sitting in the shade of our campsite, occasionally making the hundred metre journey to the pool for a swim.  Okay, now that was bragging.

For the most part, we’ve had great weather, a few times the skies have darkened and thunder has rumbled above but it’s added atmosphere and often taken the edge off the heat.

The summer season has not really kicked off yet on the Bulgarian and Romanian Black Sea coast and it’s sometimes strange because we’ve passed through some wonderfully picturesque places that still have the shutters down and feel like ghost towns.  But I found the hordes of tourist numbers in other countries a bit overwhelming at times, so I’m not complaining.

I’d mentioned Sozopol in my last post and I’ll mention it again because we wanted to treat ourselves to dinner at one of the restaurants perched on the cliffs above the sea.  I decided to go a bit native and try the traditional Bulgarian pigs’ ears.  There’s a photo included and while I wouldn’t order them again, they were tasty enough… but a bit gristly and not very meaty. 

We found the most amazing park for the night in Nessebar right by the harbour and port.  It was a minute walk from the old town and practically in the shadows of an old Byzantine Church.  Less motorhomes make it this far east, that’s probably because it lacks the facilities most retired Western Europeans crave but it means perfect pitches are always available and finding a deserted wild camp is easy.  The agricultural north coast of Bulgaria was so rural and incredibly peaceful we found a pitch amongst the wildflowers while an elderly shepherd tended his flock nearby.

The ancient Thracian sanctuary of Begliktash is a collection of rock formations and carvings used to measure the passage of the sun, moon and stars across the skies, it’s just a significant as Stonehenge.  It was also practically deserted.  No major arterial road ran by it, no fences keep you at a distance, you were free to clamber across the stones like the ancients did before us.  At another Thracian site I went to enter a tomb while a couple of snakes slithered back into holes in the rock wall just like in an Indiana Jones movie.

Bulgaria took some time to get our heads around but once you realise it’s not what you were expecting you can begin to get a sense of it.  One thing that did take us both by surprise was the English accents in Nessebar which is a short journey from Sunny Beach.  It’s been a package holiday destination for Brits for decades and it felt strange to have travelled four thousand miles over mountains, through parched lands and across seas, only to be surrounded by masses of people who’d flown in from home.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not scornful of that type of travel.  I enjoy a package holiday too, it was just we’d gone months barely meeting anyone British and right here, at our the most Easterly point, was whole families from grandma to the kids all red faced, sweaty and complaining about the heat.  It was kind of disorientating.

Another thing I can’t quite understand is the Bulgarian obsession with cheap vending machine coffee.  They’re on every street corner but they’re neighbours are Greece and Turkey who both have a good coffee culture yet the Bulgarians are content with powdered Cappuccinos. They also microwave bakery goods so between the cheap coffee and microwaved buns… snacks are hit and miss.

The border crossing to Romania was fairly straight forward but it was here that we suffered the biggest calamity of the trip so far.  With the no man’s land of the border behind us I went searching for the Romanian Leu I had organised back home.  I found them easily enough but I also found four hundred quid worth of Bulgarian Lev I’d also bought, that would have been handy back on the other side of the border.

One month from now we’ll be back in Blighty, there still seems so much to do before we get back home.