We entered Bulgaria with great expectations as a lot of people had said we must visit here or there. The first place we stopped was Blagoevgrad, just over the border. It was a rather busy and rundown city that had a rather soviet feel to it. This probably came from the fact that people were coming up to us to find out where we had been and where we were going, one man pulled up on his 1938 BMW, it was in great condition and obviously his pride and joy. The feel may have also come from the look of the place. From Blagoevgrad we headed to Bulgaria's largest monastery, Rila Monastery. It is located high in the mountains and dates back to the tenth century, but the oldest structure, the tower, dates to the fourteenth century while the remaining buildings date from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. But it was awesome all the same and as we walked into the courtyard we were blown away. We stayed in a nearby camp site for the night and the next day we headed to another camp that had been recommended to us, Eco Camp Batak, situated on Lake Batak. To get there we traveled roads that were reminiscent of Russia with broken or no bitumen in places and at one point we came to a section that was closed for works and as usual there were no detour signs, we did around 80Ks more to get to the camp. Eco Camp Batak is owned and run by a young man educated in America, Chris, and he does what ever he can to make sure his visitors are happy. We spent a day here and looked around the nearby village that has many abandoned or incomplete hotels, a legacy of communism and the GFC, in communist times Russians and East Berliners would come here for holidays, but not as many now. From our Eco camp we headed to another camp that had been recommended to us near the Turkish border in a village called Biser. This camp is owned by an English man that came to the area five years before and set up the camp. The night we arrived he was having a BBQ for his English and Bulgarian friends. We met a number of ex-Brits that had bought houses for around £15,000 five years ago and in hind sight paid too much! Biser had been devastated earlier this year when a dam burst and flooded the village, killing eight people and destroying around fifty homes. The government is now spending money on the village to rebuild the houses, school and medical center. We didn't spend much time in Bulgaria this time as we were heading to Turkey and will be back again after Turkey on our way to Romania.
As a foot note, quite a few people have asked about our trip and I thought I would put some numbers down. On an average we ride five days out of seven, the days we ride we spend around six hours riding and average around 300Ks. When we are not riding we are looking around, writing our blog or journal, or researching where we are headed or planning our route. We can't actually think of any time other than our two months in Italy and our Christmas in England where we have just stopped and done nothing.