DAY THIRTY-FIVE: 3,000 KILOMETRES, 400 SHEEP, 4 DAYS LEFT, 2 HALVES OF BULGARIA, 1 PREMIERSHIP

Day Thirty-Four (Levski to Veliko Tarnovo) Daily Distance: 68.57 kms

Day Thirty-Five (Veliko Tarnovo to Sliven) Daily Distance: 110.71 kms

Total Distance: 3235.66 kms

As previously mentioned, our departure from Levski was delayed so that I could watch the AFL Grand Final. Well, THE SYDNEY SWANS WON THE 2012 PREMIERSHIP! THE SYDNEY SWANS WON THE 2012 PREMIERSHIP! THE SYDNEY SWANS WON THE 2012 PREMIERSHIP! THE SYDNEY SWANS WON THE 2012 PREMIERSHIP! THE SYDNEY SWANS WON THE 2012 PREMIERSHIP! THE SYDNEY SWANS WON THE 2012 PREMIERSHIP! THE SYDNEY SWANS WON THE 2012 PREMIERSHIP!

Oh and some cycling occurred as well ... we had a short riding day to Veliko Tarnovo. Again it was in searing heat – at 6pm well after our arrival it was still 37◦C! But these are all trivial matters, and I can’t remember the ride anyway, as I was situated somewhere between Cloud 9 and heaven for the entire day. A fifth premiership for the mighty bloods! (I think even the Bulgarians celebrated the big win – the following day on arrival into our hotel the towels were arranged nicely in the shapes of swans, truly!)

On top of the big footy win, I also happened to have the best meal of the trip so far: tender chicken breast fillets in a cheese and mushroom sauce on a Bulgarian hot plate, followed by an amazing white choc / caramel cake thing, plus some mojitos to celebrate!! Naturally, after dinner I watched a replay of the Grand Final to compensate for not being able to celebrate with the masses at home.

If Day Twenty-Eight provided the cycling highlight of the trip so far, then Day Thirty-Five was the opposite. After gradually climbing for three hours – and forty kilometres – we reached the summit of ‘Stara Planina’, one of the highest peaks of the Balkan Mountains. It wasn’t a bad morning actually, but what followed easily claimed the prize as most disappointing part of the ride: gale force winds into our face as we descended for 22km from the peak, meaning that instead of coasting at 30-40km/hr, we had to pedal hard to even travel at 20km/hr! Not happy. To rationalise it, I remembered a quote that used to hang on my sisters wall when we were younger, “You can despair because the rose bush has thorns, or rejoice because the thorn bush has roses”, which helped lots and made me thankful that we didn’t face winds like that on one of the previous flat days! L

Stara Planina - obviously this was taken before I realised the disappointment that would follow...!

It was just another example of how tough Bulgaria has been to cycle across. By far the trickiest country on this trip, Bulgaria is huge, at some points being flat and windy and at others steep and bumpy, with relatively unexciting scenery. For us it has also been dry and scorching hot which hasn’t really helped our cause given we’ve had to cross about 500kms of the country! Also not helping was that Day Thirty-Five gave me my first puncture of the trip, although it was made less painful and even entertaining because of the hundreds of sheep and lambs that swallowed me up as I tried to fix the tyre!

We realised early on that this country displays a distinct two-tiered economy, with horse / donkey and carts seen everywhere carting small amounts of corn or wheat, but being regularly overtaken by enormous trucks carrying tonnes of corn or wheat, clearly owned by large, multi-national companies. The towns are very small, usually with one main street that is badly paved, and several smaller side streets that are not paved at all. Families appear to live with their extended family members in individual houses that probably have electricity and possibly water mains, but locals don’t often appear to be doing much at all but sitting in front of their houses wondering what four MAMLs (middle-aged men in lycra – thanks to Paul Wilde for that one!) are doing passing them.

I didn’t see many buildings that might act as a school, which could either be the cause of or consequence of there being WAY too many school-aged children wandering the streets during the day. With expansive, albeit dry, land everywhere that seems ready for farming, we wondered why the locals weren’t doing just that, until we realised that probably they don’t own the land and so can’t do anything but comb the empty, already harvested corn fields for uncollected corn cobs that they can then use or sell to make a Bulgarian Lev or two.

I found this interesting enough to research: basically Bulgaria went from being predominantly reliant on agriculture to, under Russian leadership and with Eastern Bloc and other large world socialist state economies to rely on for income, one mainly focussed on technological and scientific research (which having seen what I have, I find very hard to believe). At the collapse of the USSR, though, they gained competitors much more advanced than them, and so lost those huge markets which led to an economic collapse in 1997.  Now, the average wage in Bulgaria is €385 per month, which is just 45% of the EU average. Given that that average includes the huge city of Sofia, I wouldn’t be surprised if the average where we have ridden is less than half of that.

In saying all of this, as we have crossed the country it has changed quite considerably. Roads have become newer and less pothole-ridden, roadside rubbish less prolific, and these poorer towns I describe less frequent, replaced with slightly larger and more financially gifted ones. Think of it like Germany or Italy but with a richer East, rather than West or North as in those countries.

The short of this is that Bulgaria is clearly not a country that is dealing with the transition from Communism very well – a minor surprise to me who, having visited Bulgaria many times previously, didn’t realise this since my visits have always been to the much wealthier capital, Sofia.

This may sound a negative summary of this country, but in fact it has been utterly fascinating every day. I won’t miss the heat or the dodgy roads though, and to be fair since our next country is the last on this adventure, with only four days to go, I say: bring on Turkey!