You have to get up super early when it's your turn to make breakfast on a drive day, so I may still have been half asleep when Karen suggested leftover chilli from a couple of nights ago on toast for breakfast. It certainly woke me up, and I can highly recommend it if you ever cook too much for dinner. I may keep some back specially in future.
Romanian driver's attitudes to such niceties as queuing, lane displine and giving way tend, on the whole, to be fairly relaxed. Never more so than at traffic jams either side of poorly planned and controlled roadworks at morning peak drivetime. If they were to be somehow teleported to the UK, Romanian drivers would, I'm sure, be totally bewildered by such concepts as Single Alternate Lines of Traffic and, in particular, Merge in Turn.
As we escape the outskirts of Bucharest and head for Bulgaria, the landscape becomes flatter again and has more large-scale agriculture, particularly wheat, maize and great fields of sunflowers lifting their heads to the rising sun. Or at least they would be if it could be seen through the misty grey haze. Never the best weather to experience a new country, but even allowing for that, and understanding that border towns are not necessarily the best examples civic planning, first impressions of Bulgaria are not entirely positive. That said, what we found, as we crossed the border, changed money and bought our morning coffee, was a further example of a country of contrasts: in this case between grey ex-soviet decay and smartly uniformed, well turned out and helpful staff and officials. Once further into the country, we quickly got back to the large fields of various crops as before plus barley, set in a mostly flat, pleasant landscape with hills in the distance.
At about lunchtime, we entered Veliko Turnovo, good sized town that has managed its evolution much better than Ruse, the border town we saw first. We had plenty of time to wander round and appreciate the mix of old (some of it very old) Soviet brutalism and more recent additions, all co-existing quite hapily. We had lunch with Will and Karen, who took us to a restaurant with a balcony terrace overlooking a bend in the steep sided river valley on which the town sits. We enjoyed the views of ancient castles and churches as well as a more recent art museum come gallery next to a really tall soviet monument, as much as we enjoyed our leisurly lunch. So leisurly in fact that we ran out of time to explore all the interesting sites we'd just been admiring. That would have to wait until the next day, for it was soon time to return to the truck and continue on to our Bulgarian campsite.
Nick and Nicky, an English couple who began building their excellent camping facilities in 2005, welcomed us to their site, which seems to be a central meeting point for several ex-pat couples in the area. The loo, shower and laundry block in particular deserves a special mention as beeing better equiped and finished than some people's home facilities. However, the highlight is the swimming pool; just the thing after a hot and sticky day's travelling. Even I was unable to resist.
The next morning, Nicky helped arrange a local taxi to pick us and a fellow traveller, Karina, up and take us, via a post office, to a monestry at (or possibly called) Preobojentsie. (Approximate English translation from Cyrillic.) A twisting turning road took us up to a small site set into a cliff above a wide river valley. On the outside, the place looked almost abandoned, but inside we discovered a treasure trove of centuries old paintings, alter pieces and the most marvelous frescos of saints and stories from the old and new testiments. Afterwards we returned to Veliko Turnovo for lunch at the same spot as the previous day, followed by more wandering before gettting another taxi back to the campsite to upload our photos and enjoy a bar-b-q supper.
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| Sunrise at our Bulgarian campsite |
This morning, after a final shower - gonna miss that campsite - we waved Nick and Nicky goodbye and set off on our final drive day (on some shocking roads, through familiar landscape) out of Bulgaria and the European Union to the Turkish border and the last little bit of the continent of Europe.
We'd been warned that the the border crossing into Turkey could take anything between two hours and, as happened on the last trip, all night: it just depends on who you get, who's supervising them, how much they like paperwork, and, most critically, what sort of mood they're in. Will had been tipped off about a smaller crossing point off their usual route that can be a lot quicker to get through, so he headed for there. When we arrived, Will headed for the Buses lane, but the man in the hat was having none of that and told Will to back up and use one of the Truck and Lorry lanes, so Will did as he was told. Then the man in the hat took a closer look and changed his mind, so Will had to back up again and go back to the Buses lane. Not an auspicious start. However to cut a long story of futher to-ing and through-ing short, in the end everyone was very friendly and we made it through in a new record time, a few seconds short of Angie, our one Australian passenger's optimistic guess of one hour ten and only £10 each lighter. Result! Moments later, we were back on a proper motorway, shortly after that, we saw our first minarettes, then ate delicious, freshly cook food in a service station for under a fiver, and we weren't in Kansas anymore.
Rural Turkey has a completely different feel to farmlands we've passed through previously. Well kept, mainly mechanised and, surprisingly, already harvested. However, as we got closer and closer to Istanbul, the biggest surprise was number of new buildings going up. Not started then abandoned, but active new build projects and in vast numbers. Every town and village we went through had some construction in progress. Closer still to the city and countryside began to gave way to suburbs. Then more and bigger suburbs, and more building work. Not a block flats here or a new shopping mall there, but great clusters of multiple huge blocks of new housing again and again. Istanbul is vast and getting bigger.
One disadvantage of our speedy transit through the border was getting into the centre of the city (eventually) much earlier than expected. Just about the peak of rush hour, in fact. Quite an asault on the senses. Still, it gave us the chance to chat with locals (Well, more shout 'hello' and 'thank you' a lot, really) and hear the call to prayer echoing out from the very many minarets of the city. Our route took us passed the marina, the fish market and along the outside of the old city walls by the Bospherus until one of the two enormous, six lane, transcontinental suspension bridges that join Europe to Asia came into view. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we have three nights and two whole days to see something of this amazing city from our base on the Europe side near the Hagia Sofia and Blue mosques.
More when we've had a chance to explore.
TTFN - N
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