Braşov, 5 October 2007

Brasov 5 October 2007

Our hostest ran our baths for us in the morning... well, almost. By the time my turn came I think she'd forgotten. Or was Sally supposed to leave water in the bath for me... we weren't sure. Or did it have something to do with the fact that before the others had got up, our hostest had already got me to fill up our rakia glasses from the day before - several times. Well, not that bad a way to kick-start the day!

We decided that we should sort out the rental car booking first. Unfortunately there was a huge penalty for returning the car in a different city so we went in search of other companies. We were happy when the woman in the first place didn't say I told you so when we went back to her.

We had a quick walk around the old town before picking up the car to check out what Sally had come to Romania for - Dracula's Castle.



The usual medieval square by the church or town-hall. As usual I didn't do a good job with photos. There's a huge church nearby and there's a refreshing tranquility in the square unlike the horrible commercialism of places like Krakow.

It turned out the old town is much bigger than we had originally thought. It really is a whole town rather than just a couple of streets.



We also passed the local tennis club. Superb setting. Must be one of the most pleasant settings imaginable for a tennis court - well that's what everyone says about Hobart without really having anything to compare it to except maybe the Burnie tennis centre.



And... the drinking scene is obviously not neglected either - no beer taps out in the non-existent gazebos in Hobart! Well, true, maybe they don't have a grumpy Canadian in the bar like we do in Hobart.

The castle wasn't too far away and we found it easily enough. But it was surrounded by souvenir stalls and you had to pay money to get anywhere near it. I whiled away my time searching for a good t-shirt in Romanian while the others had a look at and in the castle.

They were back soon enough and declared that sure enough, anything in Europe that is that touristified is bound to be a disappointment.



Actually, on the way to Bran Castle is Rasnov - a really impressive fortification perched on a mountaintop. The sort of place that the whole village below would retreat to while being besieged by marauding barbarians. The'd just sit there, for years if necessary, until the marauders got bored and went home.

Why isn't this really impressive structure famous and crawling with tourists? Ah, I almost forgot, no Hollywood movie has been made about it! The real yardstick apparently of whether something is worth visiting.

Next we headed off to Sinaia where there is another castle - not so famous - but many times more impressive. By the time we had parked - in a town overrun with weekenders from Bucharest - and walked through the woods in the dark, watching out for bears, we couldn't get close to this castle either; but it did look impressive. (Apparently the heir to the throne has applied to the government to have this castle returned to his family - and it's been granted. As a real royal castle that will probably also get the people pouring back in as it did in the old days.)

Somewhere amongst all this we had lunch out in the Romanian countryside. Great food it was too. Something that Europe specializes in - nice isolated restaurants in the middle of nowhere serving up great food in a nice atmosphere.

Braşov, 4 October 2007

Our taxi to Bucharest was waiting for us in the morning, on time. Seemed like a reasonably nice bloke.

We just needed to cross the bridge and we were in Romania. Very straight-forward.

Our driver wanted to drop us in the outskirts somewhere but there must have just been a misunderstanding as he didn't complain when we told him that we wanted to go to the train station. And complain he might have as the traffic was terrible. He did a remarkable job not hitting anything. Even Neil thought he was going to hit a few cars.



Here's Neil thanking him at Bucharest station.

We had a few hours to kill before our train to Brasov. Well we thought we did, but later on in the day the trains took a lot longer so we ended up with about an hour. Oh, Bucharest station dispels the myth that everyone in Europe speaks English. All signs in Romanian and the woman selling tickets didn't seem to know any English at all - just as it should be.

In our hour's wait we still wanted to fit in a trip to the huge governmen building built by Ceauşescu. The second largest building in the world. The first taxi driver we asked said he could get us there and back in time so off we went.



The building certainly is tmpressive though apparently Ceauşescu had a couple of suburbs flattened to make room for it - including several churches.

The driver stopped and pointed out a row of fountains stretching back down in the middle of one of the roads leading off the palace. In fact they stretched as far as the eye could see.

Well, he then got us back to the station in time but not without also having to do some remarkable driving' driving up some narrow street on the wrong side of the road to push in at the intersection, that sort of thing. Extremely aggressive, but anything less aI don't think we would have made it. We also had to push in at the left luggage office. Luckily I knew the Romanian for we don't have any time!

Train to Braşov was pretty uneventful, except we had so much luggage there really wasn't any room for it. Typical, I took too many photos of churches and not enough of what is really interesting! But at the time you don't think of these things when you've got Neil trying to squash some woman's handgag in the luggage rack with his huge suitcase.

We were met at Braşov station by an Esperantist. We had planned to stay at a hotel but she didn't seem to understand the concept. There were five of us but she seemed to have an apartment with no beds and no doors to any of the rooms.

Anyway, she had also cooked us tea and we got straight into the bottle of rakia which we had been given in Polski Trambesh.

But before that I'd gone to the corner shop for some beer. I asked what beer they had and I got the reply închis. I then asked whether it was Romanian beer and I got the same reply - închis. Oh well, I thought, i've never had it before, I'll have 1/2 a dozen of them.



It turned out that închis is Romanian for closed. Here's a recreation of what it must have looked like.

Ruse, 3 October 2007

Market day in Polski Trembesh. We had a bit of a wander around then it was on to Ruse which we had to reach by one in the afternoon to give back our rental car.

With our luck a bridge had collapsed the week before so we had to take a big detour a few kilometers up the road. Luckily we had our Esperantist to warn us... otherwise we would have been pretty confused.

On the way to Ruse we decided to check out some more sights from my map. We made it to Cherven, billed as a medieval city.



We had lunch by the river in a nice cubby house built over the water. But on the road out we missed the turn-off so we didn't actually get to see what it's so famous for... I'm hoping that all the buildings were just ruins...

We made it to Ruse a little late - no car rental people but once we got near the hotel I asked a couple of women for directions - and got my reply in Esperanto! Well, by chance I happened to ask directions from the two Esperantists who had come to meet us.

They rang Sophia for us so we were able to determine that the car rental people were late. (The rental company doesn't actually have an office in Ruse but they sent a couple of blokes up from Sofia to pick up the car.)



Ruse turned out to be a pretty impressive city on the Danube with a nice fin-de-siècle central area. Lots of outside cafés.



There was also a teachers' strike on at the time. If you look carefully at the pic you might also see an Esperanto teacher shaking his fist...



I also liked this rather impressive signage in the shape of a muffler...



It was out the front of a muffler shop... very clever!





This signage however was a little more alarming. It was a gun shop but they also seem to stock balaclavas!

We went to the local market and then on to the bus-station to buy some tickets to Bucharest. Unfortunately all the tickets for the bus we wanted were sold out which only left a train at 3 in the morning - not something we were looking forward to. But as usual in these spots, there was some bloke hanging around who asked us where we were off too. We told him Bucharest and that just seemed to be his speciality! And even better than the bus, he would pick us up from our hotel.

Back in the centre we discovered that they had set up for some concert in the main square. Traditonal Bulgarian music with dancers among the audience. In the end about the only people not dancing was probably us. Very impressive scene.

Polski Trembesh, 2 October 2007

One of the Esperantists finally surfaced. She returned a missed call to her mobile. Probably didn't realise she was dialling Australia.

She took us sight-seeing with superb explanations - all in Esperanto of course. You couldn't possibly have better info from a professional tour-guide.

We went through a house museum - to see how people used to live - that sort of thing. We had the place to ourselves - great. Sat outside in the garden and had rose jam and rose liqueur. And a lecture in Esperanto on how rose oil is produced - soon to feature on youtube.

Then onto (and into) the tomb of Seuthes. Famous for the paintings on the celing. All done about 2,500 years ago. The tomb was discovered during the war when the Bulgarians (allied with the Germans at the time) were digging fortifications. As Svoboda, our Esperantist, put it - even though they were being bombed by the Americans, the officers, being educated and cultured people, recognised that this was a great find and immediately called in the specialists to start work on preserving what had been found.



A quick lunch outside amongst grape vines... and finally the dish we'd been trying to try... what do they look like? Pigs' ears! Bit chewy, but definitely good with beer!



The we went back to Svoboda's place to say hello to Bobby, her dog, and to say saluton to one of her Esperanto students, a young 10 year old boy, who also gave us a couple of tunes on the accordian.



Our young accordianist being presented with his Tasmanian Esperanto cap...

Finally we packed up and headed to Shipka where there is a huge church built to commemorate help from Russia in defeating the Turks about 100 years ago.



Before Shipka there was yet another archeological site - this one less than 20 years old. (The discovery of it, not the contents) Another burial chamber, famous for a gold mask that was found there. Quite a good exhibit too. Ironic that the best buildings in town house the oldest things in town.

Actually the Thracians had a city near Kazanlak but it's now at the bottom of an artificial lake built for hydro power. There is however a plan to build a wall around the ancient city in the lake and pump out the water, thus allowing visitors to take boats over and walk around the city. Apparently there's been interest from Japan in the project but it will, I suspect, take a huge amount of money. If it goes ahead then I think everyone will hear of Kazanlak as whatever they do at the lake will be pretty spectacular.



Huge church at the tiny village at Shipka. The pic doesn't give an indication of scale. It's huge. There were priests inside too, chanting up a storm. Very atmospheric. When, yesterday, I read out the info that in Melnik there used to be 50 or so churches and I said that it would be a great place to come and just sit there for a week in peace and quiet with a book amongst the wine and churches... Sally quipped Yes, reading The God Delusion.

At the pass in Shipka, the Russian and Ukrainian forces held off the Turks so they were able to defeat them at some other city further north and thus change the course of the war... It's amazing what you learn if you know Esperanto!



At Shipka we met up with another Esperantist, so there were many hearty greetings and the good-byes took twice as long.

We'd spotted some huge monument on top of a mountain in the direction we had to travel, but when we got to the top we found that we were staring at some other, older monument and the one that we were keen to see, the one that looks like a huge UFO was on another mountain in the distance. The other monument in the distance was to communism... so maybe they like to ignore it.



This was the monument in the distance, with us standing on the wrong mountain top in from of some other monument. It looks eerie and huge. Have to see it up close next time.



The monument where we ended up. Big but not so original; there's a mini one of these in Hobart, I think.

It was a narrow, winding road through the mountains. We had to climb up over a kilometre. At one stage we came around a corner to be staring at a car trying to overtake, coming straight at us. Being dusk, it was a bit hard at first to know what was happening. And when we did there wasn't even time to scream. As Neil said, he didn't have time to hit the horn, he was just trying to slow down and give him some room. It seems that in Bulgaria, drivers immaginatively find a third lane down the middle. Anyhow, we were all rather stunned by the experience.

We were heading for Ruse, to return the car but decided it was too far. There didn't seem to be any hotels in the small towns we were passing but I did notice that we were coming up to a town in the Esperanto book - i.e. this town contains an Esperantist. I gave him a call and we were set to meet him.



Yes, there was a hotel in town, with the unlikely name of Hotel Esperanto! Well, the writing doesn't really seem to be too legible in the pic... you'll have to take my word for it that this really is Hotel Esperanto...

The two blokes that checked us in were pretty unlikely looking front desk personel to say the least. But the rooms were cheap enough and clean. Except the shower was a bit tricky. Too tricky for Sally anyhow, who couldn't get it off scalding, as the cold tap had been removed. But Neil realised that that was what the thermostat on the mini water heater was for.

Anyhow, we dropped off our luggage and headed off to the Esperanto club - conveniently located on the fourth floor of the hotel! There we had some sausages provided by the Esperantist's wife.



Esperanto class in Polski Trembesh.



We even took time out to lay a wreath... to a local poet I think. Yes, that really was a wreath from the local Esperanto club!



Turns out the Esperantist has some position in the local police force. Sounded like he's sherrif, judge and executioner. So when we went to tea with him, tables suddenly were cleared of people for us.

Food was great and we finished the night at this bloke's second house, sitting outside with some home-made wine and rakia at midnight, listening to his Bulgarian sheep-dog bark his head off.

What a day!

Kazanlak, 1 October 2007

Onwards to Kazanlak. Dospat turned out to be very small - but with a huge jumper shop! Turns out they have a big factory in town and export all over Europe.

Drove past some big lakes on the way to Plovdiv. At Plovdiv we decided to park somewhere and walk or taxi into the city. Somehow we fluked parking just a few block from the centre without actually having any idea where we were.

The main pedestrian street didn't look as nice as when I was there before. And the old town wasn't exactly run over with tourists but there were t-shirt shops every where and the ancient amphitheatre is now roped off with a fee to enter, cafe in front, American pop music blaring, music school now has a bar - no seats for non-drinkers. Whereas before we sat among the students drinking outside, beautifully peaceful; the only sound being the sound of a clarinetist practising wafting down from the music school - but now even in the student coffee shop there is nothing but doof doof music. Commercialism gone crazy. Horrible! I think they think that this is what being westernised means. And having been repressed for so long they now want to do what they couldn't do before. But they don't realise that by commercialising like this (or certainly westernising a basically eastern/ancient tourist attraction), they just turn westerners off (or they should be turned off).

Certainly it's getting to the stage that if you put someone down in any of the more well-known old cities of the world it might take a while to work out which country you are in as backpacker signs in English and Irish pubs aren't much of an indication of where you are.



This is the Bulgarian style of house of the rivivalist period. Looks like a lot or merchants got rich and they decided to build themselves some nice houses. And even back then they realised that this style of house looks pretty good. The entire old city is like this.



There's no doubt that the old town does look pretty good. But I had been there before so wasn't so surprised as when I went there the first time. Back then it was just a random stop by train so I was pretty amazed to find all this.

I suppose I should have taken a photo of the amphitheatre but I probably didn't want to give them the impression that it was worth photographing any more.

Certainly there are travelers like me who like to find new places with character that are untouched by commercialism. But what it means is - they are able to travel so these travelers must have a certain amount of wealth, yet they object to someone else making use of the resources available (something that will attract tourists) to make money for themselves. Seems mean... but what I object to is how these things lose their flavour. It needs to be planned commercialism to stop a few people making a quick buck but destroying things for the future. And this has certainly happened at the amphitheatre.

GPS got us back to the car via another street and direction completely than the one we'd left in. I think we were all rather surprised to see it.

In Kazanlak no answer from my Esperantist. Went in search of the house of the other.

Some woman in the street asked what we were looking for and the next thing you know she started knocking on doors for us and wandering into people's living rooms.

Still no luck but we did eventually find his house. Bit hard to get close with the dog in the front yard. And it was getting pretty late. Might have to go in search of the Esperantist priest in the morning.

Dospat, 30 September 2007

Melnik turned out to be quite a tourist town. That seems to be the main source of income with just about every building being either a restaurant or accommodation or both.



A view from the balcony of our hotel across to the town. It does look superb with it's houses built into the hill.



Pretty interesting building overlooking a street in Melnik. It turned out to be a hotel and we definitely would have tried to stay there but Lonely Planet makes no mention of all the hotels high on the hill and it was a bit confusing in the dark when we arrived.

Had a drink at a wine-cellar dug into the rocks before hitting the road again. Actually these wine cellars get a bit of a write up in Lonely Planet but the only one we found was pretty bloody boring with some bloke at the top just hanging around waiting to make some door sales. We didn't think much of the wine either. There's supposed to be some famous house in town but it looks like it's been converted into a hotel. A strange fate for such a building and Lonely Planet makes no mention of that fact. Bit confusing.

Decided to stop in Sandanski on the way to our next stop. Great, huge town park; very long pedestrian mall. Pleasant stay, though I started to get a bit nervous when Neil (to save confusion I should point out that all references to Neil are to Sally's husband - really big Neil and not to merely Bigg Neil) hit a parked car. Luckily it just turned out to be our mirrors hitting and snapping back. There was a bloke sitting in the parked car. Neil said he could see him shaking his fist as we drove on.

Looking at the map we worked out we were pretty close to Greece so we decided to drive down to Greece for a meal. It was really pleasant.

We drove on through Gotse Delchev to Dospat. Dospat is a tiny place by a lake with what must be the cheapest hotel rooms in the world. $15 for a great room. The old woman who was in there late in the evening when we arrived didn't ask for money or passports.



A view of a bit of the lake at Dospat. Looks like being huge - artificially ceated hydro-lake I think.

We ate in a great restaurant where we had a heap of rakia and had an offer of mushroom picking in the morning.



A pic of Neil with our drinking mates in Dospat. It looks more like Neil's the local having just collared some passing tourists.

Dospat really was tiny with nothing really of interest apart from a pretty big mosque. No wonder so many of the women in town were wearing scarves. It's not to be forgotten that Bulgaria was ruled by Turkey for many, many years.

Actually the fences were pretty intererting. They seemed to consist solely of cleverly stacked firewood. I wonder whether in winter the fences slowly disappear?



I decided to see what would happen if someone decided to take their wood from the bottom of the pile.

Melnik, Saturday 29th

Next stop Melnik. Small town not far from the Greek border; famous for its winery.


Dropped in for a drink at a tiny village on the way though. Here's one of the locals.

On inspection of the pasporta servo book I discovered that there is an Esperantist in a town 35 kilometers away. In the opposite direction to where we were heading... but the others agreed that it would be interesting so that's where we decided to head to after looking around the monastery.

But before we got that far, I'd spotted a sign near our hotel saying that there's a church 30 minutes away in the hills so I suggested we go for a walk. An hour later even after running some of the way, no church and the top of the mountain not even in sight - I gave up. I broke the news to the others who were a bit behind me and we started back down the hill. Hidden behind some branches, on a tree further down was a sign pointing up another mountain - so no doubt we'd taken a wrong turn.



Back near the bottom Sally spotted some horses with wooden saddles. Of course she had to go over for a pat.

Since I was at the monastery last - the number of tourists seems to have increased dramatically. It's also no longer allowed to wander about in the upper floors of the monastery. All in all the scene is still pretty good and late in the day or early in the morning it's probably still pretty peaceful And the setting is still amazing.



It's almost a pity to include a photo of the monastery as it's impossible to capture how impressive it is in a picture. But it is worth including it to save me having to type an extra thousand words on the pocket pc.

So, off to Samokov! Actually, because of the mountains separating us, we had to take an indirect road so the 36 kilometers took something like 2 hours Anyway, we found the village and the address. And we also found an extremely friendly, jovial Esperantist. He has a very nice house and they had actually prepared lunch but with our quest in the mountains we ended up being about 3 hours late. But we still got a meal. A superb meal in fact with a typically Bulgarian cold yogurt and cucumber soup. Our Esperantist turned out to be a huge success as we were treated to some great hospitalty.



Saying good-bye to part of the Esperanto family.



More good-byes.

Then on we pressed to Melnik.

Got there pretty late so straight to find a hotel, something to eat and bed No idea what the place looks like yet.