9th September Plovdiv to Rila (via Belitsa Bear Park)

It seemed Bek had been talking about seeing wild bears since leaving the UK so when Dave mentioned about a bear sanctuary near Rila Monastery it was obviously added to our list of places to visit...and not just in the hope of shutting Bek up lol The drive to the sanctuary took us through several mountains with lovely scenic views however one of the roads was so badly damaged we had to go into 1st gear to tackle the huge potholes and at times our bottoms felt like they were leaping off our seats . The road was stained with oil patches as the potholes had damaged the underside of vehicles previously driving by. We kept hearing crashing and clanking noises from the back of the camper and were hoping it was only going to be a broken mug as opposed to a broken axle. However we made it through the road unscathed (apart from a sore bottom) and said there’s no way we could get a worse road; we spoke too soon however as not long after we turned off the main road to drive to the bear sanctuary and were faced with an even worse one. The road to the bear sanctuary would have been perfect for someone with a 4x4 who was after a challenging drive but not us with a 2L engine in a laden down camper. At one point we had to slam the gear knob into 1st gear to scale a hill but the camper started rolling backwards and the wheels started skidding, after a few screeches and skipped heartbeats we finally made it to the top. Neither of us were impressed as there was no signage or information on the sanctuary’s website as to how poor the 11km of road would be (we kept saying it cant be this bad the whole way). We had to remind ourselves that we were in Bulgaria and also if people knew how poor the road was then the number of visitors to the sanctuary would be greatly reduced. Anyhow we survived once again unscathed and arrived at The Dancing Bears Park Belitsa which is the largest bear protection centre of its kind in Europe. All the bears had been kept previously as dancing bears by the gypsies many had old burn injuries to their feet as they were made to step on hot coals to make them dance, also many had disfigured noses where rings were tied. The park covers 120,000 square metres and the enclosures mimic the bears natural habitat, it was pleasing to see they now had a much better life than when they were carted around the countryside by the Romanian gypsies.
Later that night we slept in a restaurants car park which advertised as a campsite, we were surrounded by the Pirin and Rila mountains and the restaurant had a large trout farm although there was no shower which we were looking forward to after a sweaty day. Bek went to the bathroom and while sat on the toilet a scorpion entered, being typical English she kept saying how it could have been deadly (cue cass’s rolling eyes as everything is deadly to David Attenborough junior!). We have since googled the Pirin scorpion and no it isn’t deadly it just gives a nasty bite so that pleased Bek... and Cass as she wouldn’t have heard the end of it if it turned out to be deadly lol

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.