Alf and Rose Walshaw

Some Notes on a Journey through Bulgaria and Romania in Spring 2004 by Rose And Alf Walshaw, Motorhomers in a Hymer 'A' Class.

We have thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and have felt totally safe. These countries are SO different from the image they have abroad and it's such a shame that they are portrayed so.

Bulgaria- Border crossing from NW Greece to SW Bulgaria. Pleasant helpful officials. The only charges we had to pay were 8€ -not sure what it was for but they asked where we were going after Bulgaria and then said the price! I think it was road tax. And also 4€ for disinfectant charge.

The crossing took us 1hour including buying fags and petrol-no duty free as you experienced- and a map from the petrol station, which was an extremely good buy-2€ . It was only in Cyrillic script, which we found was fantastic as we knew what we were looking for on the road signs-just supposing there was one! They were very very few and far between having been stolen for their scrap metal value. They are only very slowly being replaced by plastic ones.

Our first stop was at the beautiful village of Melnik, which has a super museum, and lovely monasteries perched on top of rocks rather like the Meteora. We parked in the village having been told we would be quite safe and had it not been a Saturday night and the locals party night would have slept peacefully.

The next day we moved on (seeing 2 bee eaters on the minor road going back down to the main one) up to Rila Monastery. The parking attendant (fantastic English language) charged us 4lev (2€ ) but when we asked how long we could stay for that price he said 24 hours. So we stayed there for the night. Beautiful monastery, especially later on and early in the morning when the other tourists have all gone. We had local trout in the restaurant and met a very nice Australian girl who was travelling round Bulgaria and Romania alone and had met no dangers or problems.

After this we moved on to Plovdiv via Dupnitsa, Samokov (stopped to look round a gypsy market), Borovets, and Kostenets.

After this we followed your trail, by and large though we did visit a beautiful place called Tryavna a pretty scooter ride away from Dryanovo – It is the best preserved National Revival period old town in Bulgaria. It is not a museum but a real town but with many houses open to the public.

We stayed at the TIR park at the border for €5 and the best meal we had in Bulgaria.

Our impressions of Bulgaria-VERY VERY friendly, helpful people. We felt safe. We met quite a few other motorhomers, but no other British. They all told us that the Black Sea area was not as safe or relaxed in atmosphere so sadly we decided not to go. We shall have to come back though, as now we have been told so many times about the beauty of the Danube Delta. Also if you took this route Bucharest could be avoided (the worst drive of my life –so far) and could cross the border much more cheaply and quickly into Romania.

We felt that Bulgaria was on the whole ready to join the EEC, most people we met were go-ahead and enthusiastic. The suburbs of the towns need a lot of paint, and the toilet facilities need modernisation

Rose & Alf Walshaw