Varna - Bulgaria

We arrived nice and early at the hostel and were greeted by Dave, the extra friendly owner/manager of Flag Hostel. We told him we were heading to Bucharest next then onto Brasov which he approved of as he said Bucharest was an absolute hole. He advised us to take the overnight train and to get our train tickets early as all the Russian tourists take the train through Bucharest back to Moscow. This proved harder than we thought as the ticket sales office was quite difficult to find. Finally we had our tickets so we headed to the beach. Due to the fact that our bag contained our new train tickets, all our local currency, wallets, credit cards, our passports and we had been warned that the beach was often targeted by thief’s, we took turns to have a swim. The water was much cooler here than down South in Burgas so we were actually able to cool down which was nice.

We headed back to the hostel for showers and got ready for dinner. Dave the owner organizes to take everyone to a local Bulgarian restaurant each night. This was great as it meant we weren’t walking around trying to find somewhere to eat and we had company. The restaurant was in the basement of a building and was decorated with an array of traditional Bulgarian ornaments including deer skulls, stuffed ducks, pigs hoof coat hangers and a huge boars head. After dinner we headed down to the beach to sit in the sand and have a few more beers.

The next day we took advantage of the free bike hire and headed through the park and along the coast. We stopped on the way to buy some pastries’ for lunch at a bakery and then ate these in the park, watching the feral dogs enjoy rolling in the grass. All around Eastern Europe there are heaps of feral cats and dogs that really want to be your best friend, if you have some food. They are not threatening but it always makes me sad that they don’t have a family to look after them properly.
The coast line was lovely with lots of sandy beaches. Dave had told us earlier that morning that the local Mafia had built a road along the beach and controlled many of the bars. You could see that the area was dripping with money. We stopped at one part of the beach with was lovely with lots of beautiful wooden lounges and palm trees full of fruit. The thing about the 50 or so palm trees was they looked too perfect, on closer inspection they were in fact made of plastic!