hello hello, and greetings from sunny sofia, in the heart of bulgaria. we had a short but eventful 6 day trip to get here, starting with the last 70km of romania, we hit the border, which took about 2 hours to get across due to the infinite slowness of border officials from both countries. after romania let us out, we cycled over the danube on the 'friendship bridge' over to bulgaria, and halfway over a soldier stopped us, and decided he had to make some enquiries, so he gets on a phone that he has to wind up to make work, and starts shouting down it, and then he says 'you are free to go', and we carry on, to reach the bulgarian check point. once we get to the front of the line, they are pretty speedy and we are on our way. unfortunately by this time it is going dark, so we are heading for an alledged campground in Ruse, and we end up on the motorway,and a guy in a car shouts out, and he stops and helps us find the campsite, then we have a beer with him and he tells us he lives in germany now, but is trying to do business in bulgaria, and that he used to work as a bulgsrian diplomat in new york, and that while all his colleagues are taking bribes and smuggling gold, he didn't so now he his not rich lke they are.
anyway he was really friendly and quite funny, so he took off to sofia and then this american dude comes over and says he is researching for lonely planet, doing the update for the bulgaria section of eastern europe. it then turns out that being a bit of a cowboy he is doing his research a little early so he can move back to america, and upon seeing his copy of lonely planet eastern europe, we discover that he has got the 1997 edition and not the 1999 one, so has been updating the wrong guidebook. being the kind souls that we are, we lent him ours and he dashed off into town to 'xerox' it, and in return he bought us a map of bulgaria.
anway, we hit the roads of bulgaria, which is very very hilly, so we ended up totally knackered. it is a lot more developed than romania, so luckily there was no problem finding restaurants and the like.
the signposting leaves a little to be desired and we took a few wrong turns. aside from the fact that they use the cyrillic alphabet, which turns out to be not that bad to pick up, and now we happily read streetsigns and menus. so we progressed to sofia fairly steadily, until due to no fault of our own we ended up on a big motorway. so we cruise down the hard shoulder trying to find an exit, but there aren't any, and then we end up having to cycle through 1000m long tunnels through the mountains. we stopped by the side of the road, and got harrassed by prostitutes offering 'saxaphones', not the musical instrument i guess, and then to top it all, we emerge from one of these bastard tunnels and theres a cop car there. so the cop strolls casually over, and says something like 'absolutimo forbidimo', and he looks not that pleased that we are cycling down the motorway, and we try to explain that its not something we enjoy, and he should be out putting up proper signposts, and catching the 'real criminals', but he speaks not a word of english, and after whipping out the handy phrasebook, we discover that he is fining us, and he takes our passports and puts a 'special stamp' in them, meaning that when we leave bulgaria we will pay at the border, so we still have that ordeal to go through. anyway, the fine is only 20 leva or 6 pounds 50, so it could have been worse, but then we have to carry our bikes up a practical vertical cliff to get on the 'old road', which is a collection of potholes with tarmac bridges inbetween.
well, anyway we got to sofia, and its quite pleasant, the food is good and cheap, and bulgarians seem to be really friendly and helpful.
so its day 112 and 4200 miles down the line. tomorrow we hit the home straight for istanbul, and reports so far indicate that its ok from the earthquake. the problem then remains that we have to get back somewsy. we've got about 4 days more to cycle in bulgaria and then we hit the turkish border.
have done not a lot in sofia except chill out, and eat in 'goodys', a greek fast food chain, which has the best cakes this side of vienna, (and the other side of vienna actually) well, time to go, istanbul awaits.... paul