Diarios De Una Vida Normal: In the Remote Corners of Bulgaria

What started out as a weekend trip to Varna, ended up as an excursion through some places I had never visited and a return to some places I hadn’t been to in years. The impetus for the trip was to finally visit Lubo (friend from DC, originally from Varna, who has been in Bulgaria for the past 5 months) and to see Varna (where I had last been in 1997); the trip coincided with his birthday, so I really had no reason not to go.

After a 7-hour bus ride, I finally arrived in Varna. Lubo is currently staying at his family’s summer house, which he kept telling me is right on the beach...and he wasn’t exaggerating. You can literally hear the waves before you go to sleep. (For those familiar with Varna and the surrounding area, the house is next to the beach Kabakum at Pisatel.)

Saturday was the day for sightseeing in Varna. Given that I was there last in 1997, I could hardly recognize the city in some regards—lots of new buildings, expensive chains on the pedestrian street, etc. Lubo decided that he had to show me Galata—a suburb (if I can call it that) of Varna that lies across the bay from the city (see map below). Apparently from there, one has a great view of the whole city. So we went. The view was pretty good, although quite industrial…but what saddened us about the whole thing was all the garbage that lay strewn around almost everywhere you looked around the “viewpoint”—from plastic bottles to condom wrappers. I was afraid that if I looked hard enough I would probably see syringes and needles too. Not a pleasant thought.

Next, we decided to do more pleasant things—walk around downtown and to the Sea Garden (Морската Градина)—a beautiful park that runs along the shore. The Garden was by far the best park I have seen in Bulgaria up till this point—far cleaner and better maintained than any of the parks in Sofia. Plus, in some parts I had the feeling that I was in a botanical garden--the variety of vegetation was quite striking. We also had a laugh when we saw a sign “This is a quiet path for mothers with children”—very much in the vein of EU standards, etc. :)

Sunday was when the more interesting part of the trip took place. We decided to head north and drove all the way to Krapets (which is located less than 20 kms from the Bulgarian-Romanian border; see map). It is a pretty uninhabited and wild place—although there is a campground, it is frequented mostly by surfers who go there for the day to take advantage of the wind. It was refreshing to see a beach without all the development around it, as has become the norm along the Black Sea coast. This really seemed like a forgotten place—road filled with potholes, derelict development projects left standing from Communist times, herds of sheep and cows…Upon leaving Krapets, we decided to drive south along the road closer to the coast and stop at Kamen Bryag (literal translation: Stony Shore). I was curious to see whether anything had changed there since 1996 when I spent part of my summer vacation at a friend's house in the village. The landscape driving south was interesting in and of itself—we passed few cars, and around Shabla/Tulenovo, instead of trees or bushes, the landscape was littered with huge cylindrical tanks/cisterns used to hold extracted oil (this is one of the few places with oil and gas reserves in Bulgaria). However, it seemed that most cisterns had been lying there unused for years and had become so much a part of the landscape that it would be hard to imagine the area without them. At Kamen Briag, we stopped and took a walk along the plateau up to the cliffs, checked out the "eternal fire" (a flame that "runs" on natural gas coming up from the ground and, therefore, hardly ever goes out) that gathers everyone vacationing at Kamen Briag during the summer nights for food, drinking, and songs. Nothing much had changed in the village, except perhaps for the construction of a few new houses. The landscape of cliffs and sea amazed me yet again, and I was thankful that this place had not fallen prey to the developers (at least, not yet). A little further south from Kamen Briag lies the archaelogical reserve "Yailata"--home to ancient settlements dug straight into the rock. I had never heard of this place before. It is hard to imagine who and how actually created this settlement, which includes a fortress, facing out to sea.

Upon leaving Kamen Briag, Lubo said that we absolutely had to stop at this mussel farm near Kavarna, called Dulboka. Supposedly, it is the best place to have mussels in the region, which are actually "reared" onsite. A turnoff on the road to Kavarna and a steep road took us down to the shore and the farm and restaurant. We tried 4 different dishes with mussels (including stuffed cabbage leaves with mussels :) ). Needless to say, they were all delicious. We even saw that there was a mussel dessert on the menu as well but decide to skip it in the end. And by the time we were done eating, we already had to rush back to Varna and the bus station so that I could catch my bus back to Sofia. (Which I almost missed since we arrived 5 mins after its departure time; somehow though, as luck would have it, the bus hadn't left yet because they couldn't start the engine. Well, 10 minutes later we were on the road, and made it back to Sofia incident-free. Guess it was my lucky day. As I told Lubo, програмата беше пълна (translation: we had a jam-packed schedule).

Some photos follow below; click on the image for an enlarged view.