Bulgaria, part two

The itinerary in Bulgaria continues in the southern part of the Black Sea coast close to the Turkish border before the return to Sofia with a stop in the beautiful Koprivishtitsa.

Burgas, the other great port city of the Bulgarian coast is rather insignificant, with great buildings in the old communist style, cold boulevards and fortunately a lot of greenery. The centre is very chaotic with narrow streets and full of cars parked in every corner.In the next days I go even further south towards the Turkish border where I should find beautiful little towns still on a human scale, as confirmed to me this evening by a likeable Polish couple whom I met at the restaurant and who are touring the whole coast by bicycle.Today I will have walked perhaps 20 km in the middle of a forest full of little flies to find the mouth of the river Rapotamo which flows into the sea inside a beautiful nature reserve.

In the end I made it and I found beautiful practically deserted beaches because the Bulgarians are fat and lazy and since you can only get there on foot, it's not for them!Then big feasts of fish and salads.At Golden Sands, the most developed and busy coast in the north, I found accommodation at the house of a fisherman, Marin who had me eat the freshly caught fish.There was even a story with Rosalina his 39-year-old daughter who gave me languid looks. A beautiful dark-haired woman with a girlish figure. Instead I set off again with some regret and many doubts that accompanied me for a few days.Today I arrived at the border with Turkey and I passed the 1,500 km mark of the route which is like going from Milan to Palermo.

I am in a simple little town with a beautiful very long beach outside the town, AHTOPOL and here at last I found an Internet Point, the first I have come across in this strange country.But let's go in order: having left this morning at 7 the beautiful Primorsko, not without some doubt because I had a hotel with a very comfortable sea-facing room equipped with everything for only 10 euros. This morning I covered about forty km and arrived at 8.00 at Ahtopol, a spot recommended by many nature lovers..I was on the beach, very beautiful, all morning, then around 14 the sky turned black.

For me it was an alibi to leave, since here the sky is often very cloudy but then it never rains, as in North Africa.I took the car again and went to discover the last little towns before the Turkish border.Sinemorets about 9 km away, a simple little town on a hill by the sea, but with a park and national reserve of great environmental impact. There is a river that reaches the sea in the middle of a forest and at its mouth there are beaches of white sand and almost deserted. A unique beauty. Then wanting to overdo it I reached another out-of-the-way beach, Sillistar, also this one in the continuation of the huge nature reserve and finally Rezovo, four houses before the border, but there are impressive cliffs like those seen in Ireland and then you glimpse beautiful deserted sandy beaches already in Turkish territory.

On the beach at Sinemovets I met a very likeable Bulgarian girl from Sofia, SVETA, with whom I exchanged friendly information in English, finally a Bulgarian who speaks it well. If I were only 10 years younger, I would have courted her. Just my type, a nature lover and eschewing places in the Las Vegas style, brilliant, likeable and sociable. Then at the bar I meet a group of artist sculptors, average age 25..What sadness, my holiday is about to end!But first I wanted to try the infamous Sunny Beach that is practically the Bulgarian Romagna coast north of Burgas, the great sea port of the country. So I set off early around 6.30 and by 8.30 I was already in the area;I travelled the hill road that crosses it along its whole length, about ten km and I arrived at the end of the coast where I found themed hotels in the Las Vegas style and a luxurious 6-star Spa practically on the beach.

I then returned trying to find a place more to my measure and I found it at Sveti Vlas, a former little village by now swallowed up by hotels and residential complexes with very well-kept lawns and gardens and communal pools.The beach is really beautiful, with almost white and heavy sand that stays on the bottom and the water is clear and transparent while the sea bed is all sandy and you reach deep water after about twenty metres.There was an unleashed volleyball match going on, many couples and families with children.I took a long walk to the little tourist harbour and then on the other side to the interruption of the sandy beach which ends with rocky cliffs before starting again after a small bay.

In front on the other side you glimpse the peninsula of Nessebar, the local Grado and all the other coast that separates it from Sunny Beach, also that one full of big hotels; in short an enormous coast that hosts thousands of tourists, the main Bulgarian seaside hub, loved above all by the young for the nightlife. I spent a beautiful day on the beach and the following morning I set off inland to reach the penultimate destination before the return, that is the beautiful KOPRIVISHTITSA, a little town 100 km from Sofia, very popular and visited because 150 years ago the Bulgarian intellectuals and revolutionaries took refuge there before the uprising against Turkey. The place is delightful, a little town essentially of peasants with beautiful houses with a white stone base and a wooden first floor often coloured and decorated.

There are relaxing spots, hills, green mountains all around, many well-kept gardens and stone bridges over a little river that crosses the town. I met a young couple from Sofia, very cultured and rich with whom I toured the town, visiting the historic houses of the revolutionaries and intellectuals, very well kept and interesting, with period furniture, photos and ornaments and then the beautiful church on the hill.In the evening in the nice restaurant I met Johann, a 42-year-old Luxembourg man in the company of sweet Anna, his 7-year-old little daughter with whom he was doing more or less my Bulgarian tour by rented car.We made friends, they moved me because they reminded me of the holidays I used to take with my daughter before her adolescence.The following day we agreed to take a nice walk in the surrounding hills and so we did a nice trek in a very bucolic landscape, with little woode

n carts pulled by horses, peasants working the fields and then after 6 hours we returned to the town. The goodbye was sad, but I promised myself we would meet again. I then returned quietly by car to Sofia crossing a beautiful very green landscape up to the airport which is practically in the city like Linate in Milan.Here in the long wait for departure I made friends with a 45-year-old from Cusano Milanino, Virgilio full of piercings and tattoos in the company of his sweet Bulgarian fiancée with whom he had spent the holidays at the home of the girl's family.We spent over an hour talking about Bulgaria at the airport and then in the two hours of the quiet flight with Easyjet that brought us back to a hot and sunny Milan from where I returned by train to my cool little house in the mountain village 50 km north of the Milanese metropolis.

This trip is over too, truly a beautiful experience that confirmed to me once again how beautiful, interesting and cheap a holiday in the eastern part of Europe is, which too many people neglect thinking they will find misery and backwardness there while it is quite another thing and in some respects these three countries I visited this summer (Romania, Poland and Bulgaria) are more modern and advanced than ours which anyway constitutes a destination for their emigration for purely work-related reasons and low sal