More Bulgaria - lots more!

We ended up buying a plot of land for a Ski Lodge which is a joint project with the kids. It is right underneath a drag lift line at Stoikite, near Pamporovo.

From Stoikite

I'm standing at the corner of the plot and Tich is right under the draglift. It's North facing, obviously, being on the ski slope, so will be cold but will have a "Santa" type snow cover for much longer.

This will be built in 2008. Here's the view from the guest bedrooms, towards Perelik - the highest mountain in the Rhodopis.

From Stoikite

To fund this project, we found another plot only 6km from Chepelare, up 5km of mountain road. South facing, with views across to the Chepealre ski slopes. It's a big block to be subdivided in to 6 and than summer holiday chalets put on them.
Here's the plot,

From Zornica

and the view.

From Zornica

Finally, we just loved Bulgaria so much that we found ourselves a little mountain hideaway.

From Chereshevo

It's 26km from the ski fields, over towards the Greek border. The Med is only 40km away, but there's no road yet (goes back to communist days when this would have been an escape route to "the West").

From Chereshevo

Have a look at the photos on Picasa - click the "pictures of our travels" link on the right.

Bulgaria

Something else to make travel by car interesting in Bulgaria is that the road signs and all other signs (except for some adverts) are in Cyrillic. Now for those of you not familiar with Cyrillic - it's really easy. All you have to do is substitute one letter of the alphabet for another eg. P=R, B=V, M=M, but m=t, and then there is a circle with a line through it which is an F and so on. When you are navigating and the road map you have is in Roman letters but NOT English spelling and the road signs are in Cyrillic, I'm sure you can imagine the chaos. At one stage we showed our Roman lettered map to a Bulgarian garage person (who couldn't speak ONE word of English) to ask directions to a town, he called his mates to help (they couldn't speak a word of English) - we were surprised that they had no idea where this large town was, but after 10 minutes realised that the map looked like 'Cyrillic' to them, just as it did to us. Happily the Bulgarians seem to be an amazingly helpful people and didn't give up on us until they eventually were able to work it out and show us the way. I'm happy to say that despite the above Mike and I are still married. We are currently in Bulgaria and having a ball and doing business at the same time. We have, today put in an offer for some land here and tomorrow will be looking at another block. While the roads and potholes are a nightmare, the Bulgarians whom we've met and the scenery and food have more than made up for it. Have been here for 3 weeks and are here for another 3 or 4 days before heading to Dalyan, in Turkey. We don't have any fixed plans after that except for Christmas in Italy with my Italian relatives. Between January and end of March (when we are off to South Africa for 6 weeks) plans are still hazy. We have the option of going back to Turkey for a while, or stay in Italy until the end of February or go back to UK (in winter !!!) and earn some more pounds to keep us going. If we don't find jobs easily in Turkey, I suspect we'll be heading back to the shores of 'Old Blighty' to accumulate those poonds.

UK to Sofia - by Peugeot 106

We said goodbye to the Mull of Kintyre at the end of October and drove down to England over a few days, saying 'au revoir' to various folk, before heading on our journey south to Turkey, via Bulgaria.On Monday 6th November, we left Dover by Speed Ferries and arrived in Bologne at 10 am. We pretty much drove straight through France, Belgium, Holland and Germany to the Austrian border that first day (not sure what speed, but it took us 10 hrs to travel approx 800 kms including an hour on the ferry). Those Germans really know how to drive, and vestiges of the excellent lane discipline could still be see nas far away as Croatia. Stopped at motorway services for the night - back on the road again at 6.30 am. Traveled straight through Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia to Bulgaria.

From Zornica

It was motorway all the way from Dover to 70 kms from Bulgarian border crossing in Serbia (apart from a short stint through Slovenia villages). The trip was uneventful and as quick as you'd want motorway traveling to be until the Serbian border. Just a word of warning for those wishing to emulate, the RAC instructions printed out from the web do NOT match the road signs, nor do the road signs OR the RAC instructions match the motorway map you are about to buy! Makes it interesting - especially as in the small villages no one sprechenze engliski just when you need directions. After turning off the Serbian motorway for the Bulgarian border we ground to a complete halt and had to stay in the dark and cold, single file for over an hour, not able to find out why the traffic wasn't moving. Eventually we were able to head off and up this goat track for the last 70 kms until we reached Bulgaria where the goat track deteriorated to a goat track with very large pot holes. Getting out of Serbia was exciting, I wasn't sure if they were going to let us out. They had let us in ok, once we'd paid them 125 Euros for the pleasure of driving straight through without any planned stops, but at the Serbian/Bulgarian border we had problems. Firstly there were literally thousands of trucks lined up at the border (about 2 km of trucks nose to tail), secondly they seemed to want to hold onto us. Fortunately the Mercedes we were driving had been disguised as a shonky Peugeot 106 so they must have realised we had no more money to give them, so they reluctantly let us go after gesticulating in our best Serbian sign language that all we had in our suitcases were clothes. Entry into Bulgaria was the complete opposite to Serbia. While rather 3rd world in a way, it was a pleasant experience. The folk were friendly and helpful. However 10 minutes into Bulgaria we hit a very large pothole in the dark and got a puncture. It was freezing cold, the only torch we could find was the camera light on a mobile phone and the wheel nut on the Peugeot is a trick one that is on so tight we weren't able to loosen it. So we could tell we were going to have a fun time. Anyway, we had no sooner started panicking when a mobile mechanic with flashing orange lights and a jolly "ha ha ha welcome to Bulgaria" (the only English words he could say) arrived and helped us change the wheel. We were so grateful that when he asked for "10 mumble mumbles", we thought he'd said 10 Euros, which we happily paid him. We found out the next day that it was 10 leva (about $8) and not 10 euros (about $16) that he'd asked for.