Bulgaria
August 4th, 2007
By Dan

We are horribly behind schedule. Initially this trip was set to depart on June 15th. When that became unfeasible we pushed it back to July 15th. In fact we left from Zwickau a week later, and since then have been trying to chase down our missing days – a daunting and exhausting exercise. How do you catch time?

Although keen to see parts of Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, we decided that we would rather spend the extra time in Turkey and opted to race the 450km through Bulgaria, driving through the day and into the night.
Thankfully it rained the whole way, leaving no one with much inclination to leave the cars, and a bout of the shits hit the group, only adding to my desire to leave the country. In our tightly packed Trabbis diarrhoea was an unwelcome guest.

The Bulgars were mostly unpleasant and inhospitable, though I don’t mean to sully an entire nation, that was my feeling after 12 hours in the country.
Late on Sunday afternoon, when looking for somewhere to fill up, we realised Gunther had a flat. The petrol station we were in didn’t take credit card, and once again we intelligently didn’t exchange any currency.
On discovering this, the husband and wife owners seemed genuinely appalled that we were in their petrol station with no money to buy gas, despite being clearly unable to leave the place due to one horribly flat tyre.
They gesticulated, shouted and generally looked angry.
Seeing as we are trying to navigate four cars through 15,000 treacherous miles we have attached plenty of spare wheels to the cars.
But we didn’t bring a tyre iron.
If we get through this I'm sure we’ll have disproved Darwins ‘survival of the fittest’ theory. Utter stupidity.
The bastard couple refused to help us – instead waving the international hand gesture for piss off.
After an hour of begging and searching among the few nearby stores open on a quiet Sunday in some long-forgotten path through the Bulgarian hills we came up with a tool and repaired the Merc.
I'm not sure what was said, but when we drove away the owner of the petrol station threw a handful of stones and gravel at us and mimed a couple of uppercuts into the air.
Bulgars.
Later I had the worst chicken soup known to man at a trucker stop. A filthy flea-pit, filled with overweight truckers smoking incessantly and scratching their balls. We ordered form appeared to be a gremlin. He stood behind a counter blankly with a trail of snot running from his nose to his mouth. The soup was covered in a thick film of unshiftable grease and lurking in the bottom were the random odds and ends of a chicken that would be unservable if they weren’t shrouded in the mysterious milky liquid. I limited myself to two spoonfuls and filled my stomach with bread.
A plump, aged prostitute repeatedly tried it on with OJ – after attempting to chat him up, then insisting on serving him food, she danced in what she must have assumed was a seductive manner on a bar stool. She looked agonisingly pathetic, and I couldn’t help but wonder which of the truck drivers in the room were turned on.
We pitched our tents half a kilometre from the Turkish border at around 3am. By that time only Americans were driving – I find driving on the highways more sleep inducing than watching England play, but when I awoke we were ready to cross.