Moving on swiftly …

Still, Rhys had asked to go to Sofia – Bulgaria being the home of the runner up in the Quidditch World Cup and home to Viktor Krum. Harry Potter, by the way, for those who aren’t parents of anyone under ooh, 30. We drove in. We drove out again pretty sharpish. We found the ring road, and now its time for another rant. If you think the M25 is a nightmare, then you just thank your lucky stars you don’t have to use the blessed route 1 (or 18, or 8, road numbering optional) that circles Bulgaria’s capital. Signs would be good. Some sort of road surface, better. More than one lane, well now I’m just asking for the moon on a stick, evidently. One long, pothole ridden traffic jam that stretched on for hour after long hour. And then, with no choice, signposted turn offs or any other means to know why, I was no long on the ring road but on the way to Belgrade. Capital of Serbia. Wayy too far north, not a clue how, and we had to wind our way down white roads with Joe tearing his hair out navigating and me swearing a lot, castigating the Bulgarians, entirely unreasonably, for everything from their weather to their insistence on Cyrillic-only signs. We had a couple of brushes with authority here in Bulgaria, too, and again were not left smiling. A speed limit changed from 110 to 90 to 60 to 40 within 10 yards, and when the Isuzu failed to break all engineering records for speed braking, Joe who was driving (of course) got pulled over. He got out of the car but the police man came straight up to me. I had to show him through the medium of mime that I had not been driving for, behold, there is no steering wheel on this side of our car. He was not humorous. He lost all authority at this point, but pressed on made Joe produce every document under the sun (very, very pleased with Alex and Hilary for bringing them all!) before telling us off and explaining that the speed limit had been 50. Okayyy … not one we had seen anywhere in the incredibly fast descending sign sequence. Still, the language barrier and foreign idiot thing did avoid a fine, we think. We watched the hapless copper pull the next car over. Guess what? It was Romanian. Funny how he let all the Bulgarian freight lorries flooring it at 130 kph pass without a second glance.

It was on one of the white roads trying desperately to wind our way back to Pernik (remember that there are no signs, and those there are, are in cyrillic) that I got pulled over by the army. Papers, all that … they were probably wondering what on earth we were doing on this tractor track in the middle of nowhere. They were a bit happier when they’d worked out we were stupid English and grudgingly agreed we could get to Pernik this way.

We had intended to visit Rila Monastery to tick off another World Heritage site and stay at the apparently touristy Bansko, but having found the EU actually paid for a good road through to the border with Greece and being thoroughly disgruntled, we just – rather guiltily for not giving the country a shot at redemption – kept on driving. The Kulata checkpoint was like Mecca for us, drawing us ever on for hundreds of kilometres. We were forced to stop by hunger pangs and nightfall just short of the border near Sandanski. Oh how we would have loved to make it all the way into Greece that night, but ended up at the Sweaty Nikola hotel and spa (OK, it was the Sveti Nikola but that aint as funny) for a perfectly OK night surrounded by semi-soft porn pics of the Sweaty girl herself enjoying a variety of treatments.

Oh, before I go, I almost forgot that after 32 degrees and blazing sunshine in Romania, it rained without pause and heavily throughout our Bulgarian misadventure. It was most definitely, and without regret, time for Greece.