Black Sea road trip
Travel writer Adrian Mourby and his American buddy Roger get behind the wheel for a tour of Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, cementing their friendship over freshly caught fish, ripe tomatoes and a few bottles of the local firewater
words by Adrian Mourby
Pary One
Wasting away in margaritaville
The Happy Duck Cocktail Bar in Sunny Beach seemed as good a place as any in which to plan our Bulgarian road trip. We had the choice of bingo downstairs, Sky TV upstairs or panoramic views of the tranquil Black Sea through every window.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Roger, his nose pressed to the glass.
I wasn’t going to argue. The coast of Bulgaria stretches for 450km, all the way from Turkey to Romania. It has a history that goes back way beyond the classical Greeks and Romans. The rulers of the Ottoman Empire built their holiday homes here and so did Romanian princesses. There was more to see than Sunny Beach. After my co-driver had tossed back his plastic margarita, we hit the road.
The coastal route starts slowly. At first we ran parallel to the Black Sea, winding our way behind dunes, holiday homes and salt lakes. Ravda shot by in a blur as we homed in on Nessebar, my first target on this quest for Black Sea delight.
I knew my American buddy would enjoy Nessebar, an island the size of some of the shopping malls he’d frequented back home, boasting 41 churches, many of them dating back to the Byzantine Empire. Across the causeway we found ourselves in an ecclesiastical theme park devoted to saints neither of us had heard of. What did Todor, Aliturgetos and Paraskeva do to get themselves canonised? We’d no idea, but their churches were all very pretty: brick and stone structures with Romanesque arches and bright mosaics among the dust and decay.
Nessebar fell into ruin after the Ottoman Turks displaced the Byzantines’ Empire. This neglect kept its ancient street plan preserved until the early 20th century, when people began building hotels in what had by then dwindled to a fishing village. Even today, with Nessebar fast becoming a top tourist destination, the old town still has more churches per head of population than anywhere else in the world.
We had a late lunch at Andromeda, in Ivan Alexander Street, which boasts three terraces overlooking the old harbour. Roger tried to order black sea bass, something he’d eaten in the Florida Keys. Evidently it’s a sea bass that is black and native to America and nothing to do with the sea in front of us. We ate the catch of the day instead (carp), then headed north again hoping to reach Cape Emona by sunset.
There are two good reasons not to do this. One is that Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast faces uniformly east and the best place to catch a beach sunset is on a small peninsula in the far north near Balcik. The other is that all the roads now led us steadily and steeply inland.
At one point we glimpsed a sandy beach hugging the shore. According to Roger’s GPS, Cape Emona was only 10 miles further along the coast but no, we were definitely heading back inland, toiling up a narrow valley, hemmed in by increasingly dark trees, in a car that was starting to smell of burning clutch oil.
“Ah hell, who wants to see Emona Point anyway?” said Roger, who had just worked out that our dreams of a Black Sea sunset were nothing more than dreams. So we took a road over the top through Obzor and Shkorpilovtsi.
Stopping briefly to buy some big pink Bulgarian tomatoes, a packet of feta and some Targovishte white wine, we headed down through some empty dunes to the beach. Here we sat and let the sun go down behind us while I listened to Roger talk about all the great sunsets he hadn’t missed on the coastline of the Pacific Northwest.
PART TWO
Getting spooked in Varna
We intended to make Varna by nightfall. This is the third largest city in Bulgaria and notorious because it was from here that Dracula shipped out in a coffin filled with Transylvanian soil in search of Lucy. The place seemed huge and unexpectedly urban with its boulevards lit by neon light. A hundred years ago the king of Bulgaria built a summer home here to be near his navy. The entire Bulgarian middle class followed suit and opera houses and museums sprang up around them in Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles.
We booked into the Alekta Hotel, not far from the Sea Garden, and went in search of supper. On Osmi Primorski Boulevard we found Hashove, which was offering a threecourse meal for 12 leva (€6) and beer at 0.99 leva (€.50).
It was all a bit folksy, with Bulgarian wagon-wheel décor and waitresses in embroidered peasant blouses, but amiable and good fun nevertheless. Afterwards we walked back to our hotel through the Sea Gardens, where we spotted the old aquarium and 1960s planetarium.
On the beach below were a series of improvised eateries, loud music pumping out from their loudspeakers. Roger wanted to party. I left him to it and have no memory of him stumbling in at 5am, much the worse for rakia (a vicious brandy known locally as Bulgarian Viagra).
The next day we gave ourselves an hour or so to take in the Archeological Museum, located in what used to be a rather monumental girls’ school not far from the cathedral. The amount of gold in the Eneolithic exhibition hall was stunning. Burial chambers discovered inland showed a sophisticated and wealthy culture that pre-dated the Greeks. Every artefact, fastening and ornament was solid gold.
part three
Escape from Albena
Our next port of call was Golden Sands, an 18km stretch of glorious beach that was named Ouzounkoum (Long Sands) by the Turks. In the days of Communism, the party faithful had a private casino on this wooded shore. The drive out there was charming, with little inlets to our right and an increasingly dramatic, hilly landscape on our left.
This was our first real resort: coloured beach umbrellas seven deep as far as the eye could see, offering token shade to bronzed bodies beneath. I’d had it in mind to eat lunch here. There was a great mock pirate ship-cum-restaurant on the quayside that appealed to me, but Roger wasn’t ready for food. So we continued north and had an argument about whether or not to turn inland and find the Aladzha rock monastery, a series of 12th-century caves carved into the rock-face with a frescoed chapel below. I wanted to; he didn’t. Roger won as an acute need for food was suddenly upon him.
We weaved down through Kranevo and out to the resort of Albena. Golden Sands had been glorious so I had high hopes of this resort, too, but it was awful – a place from the 1960s where the labouring proletariat would be rewarded with their annual two weeks by the sea. It consisted of tower blocks and assembly areas the size of Potsdamer Platz.
“Absolutely not,” I protested, reversing the car at top speed.
Part Four
Knocking it back in Balcik
Balcik was an altogether different kettle of fish. We had to snake inland a little to get there but, as we came through a rock cutting above the town, I immediately knew that this was the place for lunch. We found the perfect spot at Bialata Kashta (White House) in Geo Milev Street, where white tablecloths fluttered in the breeze on the terrace and the proprietor reintroduced the hungover Roger to the idea of keeping food down with the help of his delicious fish soup recipe.
Then we toured the town, originally a Greek trading port known as Dionysopolis and named after the god of wine. Unlike Albena, Balcik had prospered under the Turks and later became fashionable during Romania’s occupation of northern Bulgaria (1913 to 1940). During this time Queen Marie built a summer home here, Tenha Yuva (The Quiet Nest), for her family and, so rumour went, her various lovers.
We walked down there and paid 5 leva (€2.50) to gain access to its parkland. Marie was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and employed an Italian architect to construct her hideaway with a number of villas overlooking the sea, one for each of her children. In one of these, the former home of Prince Nicolai, we were delighted to discover that some local entrepreneurs had opened the Queen’s Winery House, where you can taste Bulgarian wines and brandies with no obligation to buy.
Forewarned about Bulgarian Viagra, I went in (alone) and came out with a few bottles of Targovishte to help us watch the sunset, which we finally saw this time at the end of a pretty perfect day.
Don’t miss…
• Catching some rays on the 3.5km stretch of white sand at Golden Sands, where the average summer water temperature is a bath-like 25-28ºC.
• The Archaeological Museum in Varna. Keep your shades on if you want to avoid being dazzled by the stunning Gold of Varna, a cache of Chalcolithic burial chamber artifacts which constitute the oldest gold treasure in the world.
• The Bialata Kashta (White House) restaurant on Geo Milev Street in the seaside town of Balcik, 31km north of Varna. Stretch your legs on the terrace and then sit down to the catch of the day (the fish soup makes a good hangover cure).
Avoid…
• The bingo, televised football matches and chips in Sunny Beach. You can get those at home.
• Albena. The beach might be clean and the water crystal clear, but this purpose-built resort, with its uniform 1960s tower-block architecture, is nothing to shout about.
• Trying to ride off into the sunset on the Black Sea coast, which faces uniformly east. If you’re determined to catch a beach sunset, head for the best vantage point: a small peninsula in the far north near Balcik.
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