Istanbul or Bust - Bandit Country Revisited

New readers might want to begin here.

The road between the Turkish and Greek border posts felt like proper no-mans land, with armed sentries, barbed wire and a general sense that these two countries might have fallen out with each other at some point. But while the Turkish side felt rather formal, the Greek side couldn't have been much more relaxed. Right at the edge of the village of Καστανιές (that's Kastanies, we've got another new alphabet to play with) it consisted of little more than a hut with two windows, one for us to wave our passports at and another for customs, who wasn't interested in us unless we had something worth declaring. Within seconds we were through and back in the EU. Better than that, we were back in the Eurozone, albeit the most broken part of it, so we could raid the nearest ATM for currency to see us through the rest of the trip.

Why go to Greece? Because it was there.

Right next to the border we found a small petrol station with friendly, English-speaking staff and a well-stocked ice cream cabinet. The Greek economy may be collapsing but they still know how to deal with the basics, and we loitered far longer than necessary before setting off. We were only due to be in Greece for 20 miles or so before looping back into Bulgaria, but we were a bit tired after an early start and in feeling a more than a little peckish.

Kastanies is the least likely border town I've ever seen, a charming, whitewashed little village at the very tip of Greece that looks like not much has happened in a hundred years. Nonsense, of course, as a hundred years ago it was still part of Bulgaria and feeling the brunt of the Balkan wars, but it was a sleepy little place. Riding through the village I spotted what looked like a small taverna and suggested we go back to try and get some lunch. We turned up a side road looking for somewhere to park, only to find a back garden, prompting the people who'd been sat at the front of the building to come out and see what was going on.

This was a chap and his mum, who ran the place. He spoke pretty good English and they seemed more than happy to have us in. I'm not sure they were really open for business, but trade is trade and they couldn't have given us a warmer welcome. After an iced coffee in the shade we asked if there was any chance of some food. He said he'd see what his could be rustled up, and before long we were sitting down to eat a simple meal that was one of the best we had on the entire trip. While we were waiting we had a look around the place and he ran us through the various photos on the walls, mostly of his late father's hunting and fishing exploits. Massive catfish from the nearby river, and a corker of a photo of him as a toddler sitting on the bonnet of a car wearing a chain of bullets. After a quick dose of ouzo at our host's insistence, we were back on the road, feeling glad we'd made yet another unnecessary detour.

A photo of lunch? Anyone would think this was Instagram.

From there we rode the short distance to the border post at Ormenio, where a surly Greek border guard looked at me and asked, baffled, why on earth we wanted to go to Bulgaria. Little did he know, we'd just ridden through it and loved every minute. Steve got some hassle for the video camera on his bike - it wasn't recording, but it was powered on, whereas I'd made a point of turning mine off. They're a bit funny about stuff like this in Greece, and I remembered the plane-spotters who were jailed as spies a few years ago just for taking photos at an airport. No real hassle though, and we were through in no time. The road quickly opened out to a full four-lane dual carriageway for a few hundred yards before the Bulgarian border post. The most pointless bit of tarmac I've ever seen, as the place was almost deserted and I can't imagine it ever having been that busy. A quick wave of our passports and we were through, stopping only to change some of our crisp new Euros into Leva for the day ahead. They do have ATMs in Bulgaria, though we hadn't seen one and the general advice is not to use them. Cards don't get you very far either, as it's still pretty much a cash economy - there might be a Visa sign on the door, but odds are cards won't be accepted.

Bikes resting in the shade

Our destination that day was Eco Camping Batak, a brand new campsite on the shore of Lake Batak just south of Plovdiv. I'd picked this one while doing some research online before the trip, and Nick at the campsite in Veliko Tarnovo had told me he knew the owner. Getting there meant 130 miles of minor roads across Bulgaria in 40-degree heat, relief from which came only when we passed through some heavy rain. While riding through the centre of Plovdiv I'd noticed an odd clunking sound coming from the back of the bike, but I put this down to the chain being excessively slack. We'd done almost 3000 miles in just over a week and one of the chain adjuster lock-nuts had seized solid and there wasn't much I could do about it while travelling.

Bulgaria, I think. It all starts to blend together.

Leaving Plovdiv we picked up the road towards Batak, another absolutely brilliant biking road with a reasonable surface that started winding gently through the countryside before heading up into the mountains. We gained altitude so quickly that the change in air pressure sucked one of my earplugs out and I had to stop to sort it out. I'd not looked too closely at the location for the next campsite, and hadn't noticed that it was a fair way up. By the time we got there it was early evening and the temperature was starting to drop.

Spoilt for choice

When we turned up, the office was deserted, so Steve called the owner as directed by a sign in the window and we went to set up camp. The site seemed pretty basic, with the ground sloping away towards the lake and a small cluster of sheds behind the office for the facilities. It was the only option unless we wanted to pay for a hotel, so the tents went up and after a short while the owner arrived. He sorted us out with beer at sub-Romanian prices, then gave us a quick tour of the place, which was far, far better appointed than first impressions had suggested. The showers and toilets wouldn't have been out of place in a decent hotel and a nearby building turned out to be a decent sized restaurant where we necked more beer and sampled some local dishes. Not the best choices we could have made, but better than brain.

Camping on the shore of Lake Batak

One thing that had caught my eye was the number of flash cars with UK plates, but with drivers who didn't seem to be speaking much English. The paranoia started to creep back, not really abated by a discussion with a local the following morning. I was told that there's very little crime in Bulgaria, but what crime they do have is entirely due to gypsies. The police aren't particularly interested in such things, but there are (and I presume this is a euphemism) private security firms who'll go into the gypsy camps once a year, rough a few people up, and make it clear that any more crime would result in another visit. And that's why there's no crime in Bulgaria. I'll reserve comment, suffice to say that the charm of being in Bulgaria was wearing off a little and I was looking forward to the next country on our list.

Mark had managed to loosen the chain adjuster on my KTM the night before, and I'd finally been able to adjust the slack chain. This had only made the clunking sound worse and, fearing something might be on the verge of failure, I checked my satnav to find the nearest dealer. I'd looked up every KTM dealer east of Austria before we left and entered them all as waypoints, expecting to need to visit one at some point. There aren't many in Bulgaria - three, in fact, only one of which I'd been able to find on Streetview. By sheer chance, that one was about 15 miles away in Pazardzhik, so I set that as our next destination and we went to see if we could get the bike sorted.

Not everyone had bought a new car on finance

Parking on the street outside the dealer, I walked in and asked if anyone spoke any English. The answer was yes, a bit anyway, and within moments the chap from the shop was rolling around in the road next to my bike taking bits off and trying to work out what might be causing the odd noise. After a while he came to the conclusion that the chain was on the verge of failure, and I needed to replace it there and then. The dealer's workshop was some distance away, and happened to be closed that day anyway, but they had the right part in stock so I bought it on the spot. By the time I got back outside, the others already had the bike up on some axle stands Simon had brought along and Steve was brandishing a chain riveting tool which we could use to do the repair in the street. I'd mocked the them for the sheer quantity of tools they'd packed for the trip but I was happy to eat humble pie as they saved my bacon in deepest Bulgaria. It was at this point I realised that the English-speaking chap from the shop didn't work there at all,  but was just another customer who'd spotted we were in a fix and was only too eager to help out. Seriously, Bulgarians, just how bloody friendly can they get? Amazing!

Mark + junior hacksaw = chain off in a jiffy

Before long the chain was replaced and we were ready to hit the road again, this time with no ominous clunking noise from the bike. We were heading for the Serbian border at Dimitrovgrad, a hundred miles away, and we soon picked up the motorway to the Bulgarian capital. Rather than ride through the centre of the city we picked up the ring road which, while slow, was nothing like its Bucharest counterpart. The last bit was rather bumpy, with a lot of construction work going on and huge holes in the tarmac, several inches deep, exposing an old cobbled road over which several layers of tarmac had been laid.

Not knowing whether the price of fuel was going to go up or down when we entered Serbia, but figuring it would be hard for it to be any lower, we stopped for fuel one last time in Bulgaria, then made sure we had our bike paperwork and passports handy before approaching the border itself. Getting out of Bulgaria was quick and easy, and entering Serbia was pretty much the same. We were on the main transit route and nobody was really interested in four bikes passing through. Our passports were given back with a faint entry stamp and a leaflet advising us about police corruption. At last, proper bandit country! We stopped briefly after the border to exchange the last of our Leva and a few Euros for a fistful of Serbian Dinars and after a brief chat with an Italian couple on their way home from Armenia we were on the road again.

Serbia wasn't really a destination as such, just somewhere we were passing through on the way to Montenegro. Our goal for the day was as close to Novi Pazar in the south east of the country as we could get, but the problem with my bike had meant we'd not left Pazardzhik until almost 2pm and we were running late. We pressed on, finding that the Serbs had clearly been in on the deal with the Romanians to corner the market in 50k limit signs. Using the same approach as before I found a local to tag onto and before long we were making decent progress, often at double the limit or more, slowing occasionally when oncoming vehicles flashed their headlights to let us know we were nearing a speed trap.

"Steve, put your gloves on. Mark, no you can't have lunch!"

The road from the border to Niš started out as one side of a motorway - only one carriageway had been completed, the other had clearly been under construction at some point but work seemed to have pretty much halted. The south of Serbia is quite mountainous terrain and before long we were winding through a valley on yet another great biking road, so long as you completely ignore every posted speed limit. As we approached Niš we joined a proper motorway and in no time we'd skirted the city and were back on local roads. It was almost time for a fuel stop and around the usual hundred mile point I pulled in to a garage. Simon protested, on the basis that it only had one pump and would take too long, and as the attendant appeared I shrugged and gestured that we were going elsewhere. He saw my GB plate and asked "where are you going?" I replied "London, eventually." He laughed and gave me a hearty thump on the back, which made me wonder a bit. A few miles later we stopped at a larger garage and I dug out a map to check the route the satnav was trying to take. I mentioned Garmin Specials in an earlier post, those satnav-induced detours off the sensible route to shave a few minutes off the journey, but this was the mother of them all. Kosovo. We were heading for a fucking war zone!

OK, the war's been over a while, but it's still a bit dodgy and none of us had insurance. The border between Serbia and Kosovo is still a little unstable and there can be issues getting in and out, so we did a quick about-turn and headed back to Niš. From there we hit the toll road briefly towards Belgrade before heading for the nearest town. We'd lost more time and the light was starting to fade, but we still had nowhere to stay.. I'd done a fair bit of planning before we left, finding places we could head for at the end of each day wherever we got to, but I'd kind of lost enthusiasm for the return leg and so the preparation had ended early. The nearest big town was Krusevac, not much of a tourist hotspot but we figured it would at least have a hotel.

Anyone for tennis?

Rolling into Krusevac we found a bustling town but nowhere that looked suitable for leaving the bikes overnight. The paranoia was trying to come back, and when Simon mentioned he'd seen a sign for a campsite at the edge of town I was keen for us to head back and check it out. When we got there it seemed deserted, there was nobody around and the lights were off. It was almost dark and the omens weren't good. Steve tried the door and as it opened he found two people sitting in the gloom. Neither spoke any English, and our Serbo-Croat was based mostly on pointing at things, but after some desperate gesticulations we were invited to set up our tents next to the tennis court outside. The soil was too thin for pegs and the mosquitoes were ravenous but before long we were all set up and ready for a drink.

Curry and beer, just like being at home

The venue turned out to be a family-run restaurant, with family consisting of an old chap and his daughter, and her English-speaking son who turned up a bit later. There was one person missing from this picture, and when Simon spotted a photo of a chap in military uniform inside the building I jumped to a few conclusions. They may have been correct - the kid looked about the right age and it was a dangerous part of the world twenty years ago. The kitchen was closed, and there was no shower we could use, but we all had stoves and emergency rations, and wet-wipes work wonders when they're all you've got. As we cooked up outside, our hostess brought out some bread and another round of beers, and we tried to chat as best we could about where we'd come from and where we'd been. It was a few days after the Wimbledon championship, and as the old chap pointed at the tennis court and made refences to the final between Murray and Djokovic (a Serbian) I tried to tell him that Wimbledon was where I lived. I've no idea if he understood, but they seemed happy to have us there and we were glad to have somewhere to stay - the beer and bread was a bonus.

Pure filth

As we packed up in the morning, Steve went in to pay. Camping for four, some twenty large bottles of beer, and a basket of bread, and the bill was less than 25 quid. Clearly we were all still going to have a lot of Dinars when we left the country.. Just as we were ready to leave, our hosts appeared with four small bottles of wine as parting gifts, and posed for photos with us and our bikes, very keen to have a GB plate visible. Mine was absolutely filthy and I had to clean the filth off for the country code to show up, in the process losing the smiley face that somebody in Bulgaria had drawn in the grime. We were well off the tourist trail at this point, and like many places we passed through I got the feeling vehicles with yellow plates were something of a novelty. This kind of thing just made the trip feel all the more worthwhile.

From Krusevac we skirted round Kosovo to Novi Pazar taking in yet another perfectly surfaced biking road that wound its way through a mountain valley. I love this kind of road, a seemingly never-ending series of S-bends where nothing makes more sense than a big bike. Having not seen any other bikes in my mirrors for a while I stopped outside a restaurant and flagged the others down as they caught up. We'd made pretty good time, so I thought I'd treat Mark to lunch. I don't mean I paid for it, I mean I let him have one. Over the meal we chatted, reflecting on how yet another country had blown away our expectations and proved to be nothing like we thought it would be. Well, to a point.

What surprised me about Serbia was that it felt poor. I'd expected it to feel rather more developed, being the biggest and toughest of the former Yuglosav states. But while the basic infrastructure was OK - the road surface was generally good, and it didn't have the same downtrodden feel as parts of Romania - it felt like life was a struggle. Towns looked a bit wild west, with market stalls in front of buildings rather than proper shop-fronts. This included Novi Pazar, which is a fairly sizeable city. Cars were no longer modern, either. I'd always wonders where old cars ended up when they "went to auction". Now I understood - right-hand drive models would end up in Africa, and left-hand drive models would go east. Serbia was full of cars I hadn't seen since I was a kid. Agricultural transport had improved though. Rather than horse and carts, the vogue was for vintage tractors that looked like they'd made a meaningful contribution to a Stalinist five year plan.  It made me wonder, if Serbia looked like this, what on earth would Bosnia be like? We'd have to wait for an answer to that one, as we had another country to go through yet.

Leaving Novi Pazar we followed the road back up into the mountains towards the border with Montenegro. As we pulled up at the Serbian border post, a chap in uniform appeared from the customs office and walked towards me. I expected the worst, but when he saw my GB plate he asked "You are an Englishman?" I was. He smiled. "You have just left Serbia. Have a nice day!"

Read on here.

Istanbul or Bust - Bandit Country

New readers might want to begin here.

We were all a bit wary of Bulgaria, it not being somewhere that any of us had ever really felt a need to visit, but if you want to get to Turkey without taking a boat there are only really two options. One involves Bulgaria, and the other involves a serious detour through Greece, so we were going to Bulgaria.

I'd made the mistake of reading travel advice issued by various governments, and they were full of dire warnings about criminal gangs, corrupt cops, dangerous driving, awful road surfaces and a general sense of doom about the whole country. We'd asked some locals in Romania what we should expect from their neighbours and they pretty much backed up what we'd already heard. Of course they did. Ask the English about the French, or the Dutch about the Germans, and you're unlikely to get anything useful. There's too much history and ingrained prejudice, and unless you're asking someone who's actually been, and otherwise disinterested, all you're going to get is second hand biased information and it's generally bollocks, all of it.

When looking at maps for the trip I'd been surprised to find there were only two places to cross from Romania to Bulgaria without going all the way to the Black Sea first. The reason for this quickly became clear: The river Danube. One of these crossings is a ferry between Călărași and Silistra, which was going to add delays. the other is an enormous Soviet-era Meccano bridge between Giurgiu and Ruse.

Crossing the Danube

Crossing the bridge brought us to the Bulgarian border post, where we were expecting some hassle. As always, our fears were unfounded, and it was quicker and easier than entering Romania. The border guard just looked briefly at our passports, confirmed our first names, and waved us on. We hung around for a bit trying to work out how to buy a vignette (required for all Bulgarian roads outside towns and villages) before a chap came over and told us we didn't need them for bikes. That was a little disappointing, as it meant no reason to collect another sticker, but I wasn't going to get that put me off. The woman at a nearby kiosk booth looked at me like I was some kind of idiot, with some justification, when I insisted on spending five quid's worth of my newly-exchanged Leva on a vignette for the car I wasn't driving.

Riding away from Ruse, we waited for the road surface to deteriorate and the driving to get more erratic. We were almost disappointed to find neither happened - the road perhaps a bit rough, but nothing our bikes couldn't cope with, and the driving was absolutely fine. There were no gangsters in massive saloon cars with blacked out windows, and the few cops we saw paid us no attention whatsoever. Lesson learned yet again: don't believe everything (anything) you read on the Internet.

The journey was punctuated by broken-down trucks and the smell of their burnt-out clutches and brakes, depending whether they'd just gone up or down a hill, of which there were many. After a while we stopped for a rest at a cafe with a big shale parking area just off the main road. Bulgaria, like Romania, had a bit of a problem with stray dogs, and here we found a pack laying in the sun next to the forest. They went absolutely berserk when they heard the bikes, only calming down when Mark walked over and worked some north Wales dog-whisperer voodoo on them. The girl at the cafe spoke better English than my Bulgarian, and we were soon set up with cold drinks, coffees and ice creams to counter the heat. Things were looking up.

It still says beer, whatever the alphabet

A couple of hours' riding saw us pulling up outside our next stop, Къмпинг Вепико Търново, Camping Veliko Tarnovo. Entering Bulgaria brought with it a change to the Cyrillic alphabet, and I got busy trying to learn it from road signs. It shares some characters with the Latin alphabet, some with Greek, and has some wacky ones all of its own, but it's all phonetic. On the main roads, names are shown in both alphabets, so between Sofia and София, and Plovdiv and Пловдив, it's possible to pick things up pretty quickly. Bulgarian has a lot of loan words so once you can transliterate рзсторан as restoran, and нон-стоп as non-stop, you know you stand a good chance of getting a meal.

The hellhole that is northern Bulgaria

The campsite at Veliko Tarnovo was one of very few I could find in Bulgaria, and run by a couple of brit ex-pats.. Being both pretty well appointed and having English-speaking hosts, I thought it would be just what we needed after the culture shock of entering Bulgaria. While setting up our tents, we met our neighbours - two retired yanks who had been on the road for 12 years all over Europe and the Americas, blogging as they went at travelin-tortuga.com. I was rather tickled when they told us they envied us, because we were getting doing our trip on bikes.

It's a hard life, this pan-continental touring

The campsite itself was a world apart from what I'd seen on Google Streetview before we left. Rolling hills, bright blue skies, a busy bar and an immaculate pool, it was just what we needed after a few days of slogging across Europe. After a quick dip in the pool we spent the evening around the bar, with a cheap and tasty meal, a few more beers, and making use of the wifi. As I wrote at the time, "five days, seven countries, almost 3000km, and we're not even halfway yet. We are four very, very happy campers."

This stuff gets addictive

From Veliko Tarnovo we were heading to Burgas. Reaching there would mean we'd ridden the width of continental Europe in five days, and leave us a stone's throw from the Turkish border. We were hoping to get there early enough to go for a dip in the Black Sea, for which we'd need an early night and early start. Cue our hosts producing a bottle of rakia, the Bulgarian equivalent of the grog we'd been drinking the previous two nights in Romania, though at least this time it the label on the bottle matched the contents. Suffice to say, the early night didn't happen, and it was around noon before we finally got away the next day.

Fuel may only be stored in appropriate containers. Or empty beer bottles.

After fifty miles or so we stopped for fuel at a tiny petrol station in the middle of nowhere. Despite being a dinky one-pump garage, they had an espresso machine and free Wifi, so we loitered for a bit to let the caffeine fight off the last of the previous night's rakia. Once the coffee had worked its magic we kitted up and made to leave, but not before Mark accidentally wheeled his bike backwards into a local chap's moped, knocking it over. The paranoia came back for a moment, as I expected this to end in a scrap, but the bloke just picked the moped up, laughed, and shook Mark by the hand. Lovely people.

From there we rode for a couple of hours through the backwoods of Bulgaria, Mark taking the lead for a bit to give me a break from being on point. As we rode through small towns and villages, dodging drain and manhole covers which stood proud of the road surface by a good couple of inches, kids and adults alike would wave at us, make go-faster gestures and just generally make us feel like we were doing something special. The more we experienced of Bulgaria, the more we liked the place and, like Romania, we were eager to go back and explore properly. Everything we'd heard about the country seemed to be wrong. The cars were more modern than we'd been expecting too. Our host at the campsite the night before had told us that a couple of years previously, after Bulgaria joined the EU, getting credit changed from impossible to a doddle overnight, and the first thing everyone did was go out and buy a newer car.

One thing we saw a lot of along the way was animals. In Romania we saw a lot of working horses, and had to dodge dogs in the road. In Bulgaria it was chickens, and in both we saw a lot of cows tethered at the side of the road. The trick seemed to be to tie them to a tree and let them eat the grass at the verge, then move them to another tree where when the grass ran out.

The last stretch before Burgas was a brand new motorway, being built all the way to Plovdiv, Sofia and the Serbian border. Smooth and fast, the only thing missing was services, so we stopped at the first garage we saw when it ended to fill up. As we neared Burgas I noticed the advertisements alongside the road had switched from Cyrillic Bulgarian to English, and arriving at the edge of the city there was a sense of wealth I hadn't felt since Austria. This was tourist territory, with money pouring in, but we were heading elsewhere. Steve had suggested we head for Sinemorets, a seaside village right down near the Turkish border, so we hit the road away from town.

Garmin satnavs have a tendency to pick what I call Garmin Specials - tiny short-cuts which don't really save any time at all, and usually involve small roads covered in gravel and grass. Turning off the main coast road, we were about to experience the first Special of the trip. We headed down a back road with a surface that quickly deteriorated into something that brought back the dire warnings about driving in Bulgaria. The road was more pothole than not, and clearly hadn't been resurfaced for a very long time. It was often easier to ride on the wrong side of the road simply because the surface there was less lethal. At times I had to resort to standing up to let my knees soak up bumps that overwhelmed the suspension, but the KTM was still able to sail along at 60mph or so despite it being one of the roughest roads I'd ever ridden on. A fairly pointless detour, but fun nonetheless, and gave us a taste of Proper Bulgarian Roads.

Not nearly as black as the name might suggest

Eventually we were back on the main road and as we turned a corner, there it was: the Black Sea. I'll quote from a post I wrote nearer the time to sum up how that felt.

Getting to the Black Sea felt like the end of a journey (and indeed it had been the endpoint for the original plan). We felt absolutely elated to get there, and could easily have turned back at that point and felt completely satisified.

After a few photos, and big grins all round, we hit the road again bound for Sinemorets. Entering town, we couldn't find the hotel Steve had picked at all, and it looked pretty rough. The streets had potholes you could drown sheep in, knackered old cars everywhere, and a real sense of a a place crumbling away. As we sat parked on a corner, engines running, discussing what to do, a woman appeared from a nearby building, asking (we gathered) if we could stop making so much noise, and what the hell we thought we were doing.

Private parking

As luck would have it, the building was a guesthouse of sorts, and we were sorely in need of somewhere to stop for the night. As we were shown one of the rooms - more of a suite really, with a double bedroom, a simple bathroom and an area with a couple of sofas - she indicated that if we turned out the sofa beds we could get four people in there. It seemed OK, so we asked the price. €20. Each? No, for the suite. Do you have two? Yes. So for less than a tenner each we had a couple of proper little apartments, albeit in a fairly grim looking town, which would do us for the night. We were told to bring the bikes into the garden, which looked a bit run down, much like the rest of the town, with a scattering of tired looking children's toys and a rusty swing that had seen better days. But at least we had somewhere to park and somewhere to sleep, so we unloaded the bikes and headed off to find the shore so the lads could go for a swim.

There was no sign of a beach, just a rocky, cliff-lined shore with boat huts and rusting slipways into the water. That was enough for them, so while they went to catch tetanus I wandered back to a small bar we'd just passed, sat down with a cold beer and hunted for some free Wifi. I'd not had a mobile connection since we left Hungary, but fortunately everywhere in Bulgaria seemed to offer open Wifi, and if one place didn't, the place next door probably has an open network anyway. After a while the others turned up and we necked a beer each, then headed back to the guesthouse before going to explore the town.

Back at the guesthouse things were looking a bit more lively, with kids playing in the garden and a general bustle of activity. I started to realise that what had looked like a slightly dilapidated, run-down old pile was actually a rather charming, rustic cluster of holiday apartments. Those preconceptions again, six days in and I still hadn't learnt to open my eyes to what was actually there, rather than see what I thought would be there.

Feeling a bit better about the place, we walked into town against a tide of people coming the other way. We walked towards wherever they were coming from, and ended up at a sandy beach, covered in sunbeds and parasols, with jetskis for hire and a cluster of modern hotels. This was a slightly rustic beach resort with all the amenities you'd expect, and anything else was just my brain playing tricks. It was exactly what we were looking for.

When in Bulgaria, eat like a Bulgarian. Flames optional.

Walking back into town we picked a restaurant with some English text outside, figuring that we might have a bit of trouble if faced with a menu in Bulgarian, and sat down for dinner. The waiter clearly saw us coming, as he recommended a local dish of a whole rabbit served with fire, and a bottle of wine which, while good, cost us as much as a night's accommodation for four. Still, it was a pleasant way to round off a lovely day, and as Steve went back to the apartment to get an early night the rest of us went to find a bar for a quick beer. Or two. Or three. Or, well, I'm not sure how many we had, but the last thing I expected to find myself doing in Bulgaria was sitting with a beer outside a bar after midnight, while Dylan and Stones tunes played in the background.

The next morning we made it up reasonably early for once, loaded the bikes, and hit the road. We were heading for Малко Търново, Malko Tarnovo, the last town in Bulgaria before heading up into the mountains to find the Turkish border. Getting there meant doubling back along the coast road and then turning inland. There we found a road which was not only rather worse than the potholed backroad we'd done the day before, but had the added bonus of heavy rain. It absolutely tipped down, making the road absolutely treacherous. Not only was there the surface to deal with, but we could no longer tell which potholes needed to be avoided because they were all full of water, and the deep ones looked just the same as the shallow ones. If they weren't full of water they were full of sand and gravel, and after an hour or so of hard going we were ready for a break.

A rare bit of road, with just the one pothole

A hot coffee and some snacks had us fortified and ready to face the rest of the road. The surface improved quite a bit at this point and it was a fairly easy ride from there to Malko Tarnovo itself, where we stopped for cheap fuel before heading for the border. Fuel prices vary wildly around Europe, and Bulgaria is one of the cheapest at about £1.12 a litre. Funny to think that this felt like a great bargain, when it was only a few years since fuel had crept above the quid-a-litre mark in the UK, but cheap it felt, and once we saw the prices in Turkey we knew we'd made a good call.

90% of all photos taken on the trip were of petrol stations

While paying for the fuel we came across a group of four yanks, which turned out to be a couple on their honeymoon with parents in tow. If that wasn't odd enough, the groom was walking around dressed like an Ottoman sultan. I'd just passed the 2000 mile mark since leaving home, which would have been reasonable mileage for a road trip in itself, and we were still heading away from home.

Target acquired

Once we'd filled up, we headed for the border. Our destination was now in sight: we were going to Turkey.

Read on here.