Saturday 28th August Calafat (Romania) to Sofia via Belogradchik (Bulgaria)

Belogradchik

The ferry border crossing between Calafat and Vidin (in Bulgaria) has to be the most expensive we have ever encountered. They charged us 5 euros to drive into the port area, 11 euros to drive into the ferry area and 52 euros to catch the ferry 1.6km…a crossing we would certainly not recommend to anyone! They wouldn’t even accept card payment and we had spent all of our Romanian money but luckily we managed to just scrape the barrel by negotiating part payment with US dollars which they seemed displeased with. We also had problems at passport control as they hadn’t stamped Cass’s passport when we initially entered Romania (Bek didn’t require a stamp because of her EU passport). To top it off when we arrived in Bulgaria we had to purchase a car tax and also make some other payment , we don’t have a clue what it was for as they didn’t speak English and were now back to the impossible Cyrillic lettering! They wouldn’t accept card payment and we had spent all of our Euros on the ferry crossing so we had to drive to a bank and return to make the payments. After all the palaver (which included a three hour wait for the ferry) we were exhausted but finally arrived at Belogradchik which is an old Roman fortress wall from 3rd century BC with weird rocks formations.
We decided to free camp that night as there were no campsites nearby, we picked a good spot away from the road at the base of a large mountain. At 10.30pm we were just dozing off when we were woken by flashing blue lights and someone knocking on the door yelling “open up”. Yes you guessed it an angry Mr Plod was outside and told us to move on, we were told to drive to a petrol stations carpark where we could sleep for the night... What a welcome to Bulgaria !
We ended up sleeping the night surrounded by trucks in a lorry driver’s carpark 10km from Sofia.