Letter 11

Half an hour after leaving the Rila mountains, we drove through miles of tobacco fields with whole families working, hoeing the soil and picking the leaves which were being transported to the drying sheds by donkey powered carts.

A peaceful scene, one which must have been going on for decades, if not centuries, but which was broken by the roar of an old bi plane flying so close to the ground that we stopped under a tree, worried that it was going to hit us. It looked as if nobody had told the pilot that WWI was over and we could see him quite clearly in his goggles and leather flying helmet as he turned the plane around and flew across the road so low that he really would have hit us if we'd been in the way. We didn't immediately realise that it was a crop dusting plane but this soon became apparent when its bowels opened up and dumped a great heap of brown powder right on top of two tobacco pickers.

One minute they had been working away picking tobacco and the next, they were covered from head to foot in fertilizer or something equally as nasty and it came down with such a force that it knocked one of the pickers off his feet. The amazing thing about the incident was that neither of the men even bothered to look up. They simply dusted themselves down and carried on working. Almost anywhere in the West it would have been an outrage, something to be featured on the news. The tobacco pickers would have been shouting the odds on TV about birth defects and long term carcinogenic effects but here, it seemed to be all in a days work.

Imagine it in a court in the West!

-I was working away in the fields your honour, when all of a sudden it hit me.

-What hit you?

-Twenty seven tons of pulverized goat shit your honour.

We were on our way to Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria. Plovdiv was supposed to have an old part of town which was worth seeing and true there were a few nice old houses but it wasn't worth going out of our way for. There was nothing in the way of food to buy except the same old Russian canned fish and pickled cauliflower and cucumbers which we'd seen everywhere. The only fresh vegetables to be had were tomatoes, paprika and onions. We saw the odd large supermarket but most of the shelves were empty and they carried no more variety than all the other shops - Sofia market, we soon came to understand, was an exception. We stayed the night at a camp-site just outside the city limits and in the morning, the person who ran the office didn't turn up for work. Of course, nobody else would dream of filling in for him and the office remained shut although people were standing in a queue waiting to get out of the place and get their passports back. The rest of the staff were not at all concerned and all questions put to them were deflected with a shrug of the shoulders - manning the office wasn't in their job specifications, and it wasn't their job to locate the person who was.

Tempers became frayed and the people who had trains to catch, or whose visas were expiring, opened up the office window and pushed their kids through to hunt for their passports. Other people were crowding around the window trying to do deals with the kids parents -I'll give you five dollars if you ask your kid to find my passport. One Belgian guy we were talking to managed to get his daughter through the window and she retrieved the whole family's passports and our own. I asked him what he planned to do at the border when the officials would look for the stamps in their passports to see that they had spent each night in a registered campsite. He said that he didn't care and he was prepared to pay the fines for his family of six because if he waited any longer, their visas would run out before they crossed the border. Over staying ones visa, apparently, can incur much heavier fines. So with our passports in hand, we moved out of Plovdiv wondering how we were going to get somebody at the next stop to put an extra stamp in them to show that we'd stayed at an official camp-site.

There's a contrast in Bulgarian scenery, the mountains are great but the flat country, no matter where one ventures seems to be parched and unattractive. On the flat you see the most ugly grain silos and wheat stores and farm machinery repair shops all rusty with junk around them. There are very few churches in the villages because the state religion is atheism and these villages are dusty disheveled looking places. Graves at the roadside don't have crosses on them and some of them are topped by a red star. Monuments and statues to the glories of communism are widely distributed across the country as in all Soviet satellites but they are more evident in Bulgaria than elsewhere. The odd one has some degree of artistic merit but, in general, they are crass images of Stalin or Lenin.

At the approaches to all towns of any size there are grotesque, elephantine pseudo artistic metal constructions with hordings on them to the glory of the coal miners or the metal workers. Great ugly stone women with heroic breasts, able to crush cannon balls between their buttocks adorn the facades of factories holding, or pointing to slogans or lists of production quotas reached. Every opportunity is taken to show the populace that production is increasing all the time, that production records are being continually broken. In reality, if there's one thing the system is lousy at, it's production. They can't produce anything in large enough quantities to satisfy consumer demand, that's why there are all the queues outside all the shops.

OK, so Plovdiv was a bummer but the next place, Koprivshtitsa (try saying that when you're pissed) was a gas.The village of Koprivshtitsa, south east of Sofia by half a day's slow van drive, is only around 150 years old but it looks much, much older and it's built in what they call Bulgarian National Revival style. All the houses are surrounded by stone walls with large gates in them and all the gates have a roof over the top made of those red terra-cotta Spanish style roof tiles which look like half drainpipes. The gates and their frames are all of heavily carved wood while the walls are built in three or four layers of stone separated by wooden sleepers twelve centimetres thick. One would think that the wood between stones would rot and the walls would come down but they have been standing a long time so far and they are still in good condition.

The walls undulate with the terrain of the earth which gives a sort of child's book, fairy tale appearance. Western thinking seems to dictate that if you don't either excavate or build up from the ground so that the foundation of a wall is level, it will fall down. I'm used to all the courses in brickwork or stonework being level and straight but in this village it's not the case and the result is much more attractive. The walls, which enclose every house and garden, simply follow the lie of the land up hill and down dale in a sort of higgledy piggledy style just like in a naive painting. The houses behind the walls are two storey, the first being of stone and the second in wood with carvings on the beams which protrude over the lower storey. Overhanging balconies are on practically every house in the village and the house wall facing the road is often faced with plaster, painted dark blue, pink or orange and finished off with decorative lines and motifs.

The village is something of a national monument but it's alive with a working population mostly of foresters and there are horses and carts running up and down the main street all day carrying loads of timber. I also saw mules here - another first for me. Again, as in most places in Bulgaria, we couldn't find the camp-site advertised in the tourist guide, a big one this time - suitable for 500 people. It turned out to be the village car-park, no facilities at all except a stand pipe for water, nevertheless it was necessary to book into it and get our papers stamped so as to avoid a fine when we left the country.

We were the only visitors to the village and the parking attendant was lonely - she said that she hadn't seen anybody the previous day either. We asked her in for coffee and she talked to us for almost half an hour in German and we couldn't make out why she seemed to think that we understood her. We understood the next day when we found that she had confused Australia with Austria when she took the numbers of our passports. When she looked inside my passport she was thrilled to discover that she and I were of the same vintage, she had children the same age as mine and we compared lives which in some ways were similar but the main differences were that it was me that was visiting her home ground and she had silver teeth while mine were plastic. Gold and silver teeth in this part of the World are status symbols and some people will have a perfectly good tooth extracted to have it replaced by a gold one.

We awoke the next morning to the sound of sheep bells and horses clip clopping along the road but when I looked outside, there was a heavy mist over the village obscuring all signs of civilization. The sheep slowly emerged from the mist followed by two men on horses and they passed by and became lost from view again like in a scene from a horror movie. While we were having breakfast two fifteen year old girls very shyly approached us and explained that they worked in the local museum and that they would like to give us a guided tour of the place and make us some coffee. They were both delightful but petrified of us and they were very worried when we said that we were going to Turkey. -You must not go there, one of them said. A short conversation on why we shouldn't go to Turkey ensued and it was obvious that they'd undergone a lot of brain-washing at school about their neighbouring country and how the people there were being exploited by nasty capitalists. They thought the same about Greece as well.

We had only intended to pass through, or at least only spend one night in Koprivshtitsa but we spent four days there staying until Sunday morning. We kept saying to each other that this was somewhere special, idyllic, away from all the communistic slogans and we couldn't see why it didn't seem to have been discovered. It wasn't at all like being anywhere else in Bulgaria, the restaurant even had food in it and the public toilets didn't stink. Everything was in such good condition, not only the buildings but the horses and carts - everything. Over the space of an hour on the Friday night our car park suddenly began to fill up with Western cars and on Saturday morning the whole village was buzzing with fat old men and beautiful young women. I asked our car park lady what was happening and she said that it was the same every weekend. Koprivshtitsa is one of the classiest little places in Bulgaria and it's where the high party officials go for dirty weekends with their secretaries.

Some 50 kilometres from Koprivshtitsa on the dry plains heading north east we saw a plum orchard which ran for some five kilometres on both sides of the road and at one point there was a place where the proletariat where loading plums into boxes and as we hadn't seen any plums in the shops I stopped and asked the foreman if we could buy some. It was a confusing encounter because he was saying yes but shaking his head and I didn't know whether to fill my bag or not. It was only by accident that we discovered head nodding and shaking is the exact reverse of that in the west and to say that this can lead to some misunderstandings is an understatement.

The head movements are quite definite, not just mild gestures and what can add to the confusion is that some Bulgarians make allowances for Westerners and reverse their gestures. I once approached a petrol pump attendant to ask if we could have some black market diesel and with all this nodding and shaking in amongst the general pantomime you go through when you can't communicate, I just couldn't make out whether she would let me have any or not. On another occasion we shook our heads to indicate that we didn't want a particular meal at a restaurant and ordered only a glass of water each, only to have the waiter serve the meal to us ten minutes later.

The meal in question was mixed grill with chopska salad and if I ever see that combination again I'll throw up. Chopska salad, which consists of cucumber, tomatoes, olive oil and fetta cheese, is delicious. However, mixed grill and chopska salad were all we could get in the entire country except for the Sofia Sheraton and Black Sea resorts. Some places had more than twenty different dishes on the menu but these only represented what the chef might be capable of cooking had he the ingredients - all they actually had was mixed grill and chopska salad. The stupid thing about nearly all Bulgarian waiters is that they hand you the menu and stand at the table with pencil and paper in hand as if waiting to write down your order when they know they've only got mixed grill and chopska salad. Even more stupid is that they don't tell you up front that they haven't got anything else.

We had great fun in most restaurants pointing at all the different items on the menu, deliberately skipping mixed grill and chopska salad and watching the waiter shake his head. We tried it in upwards of thirty restaurants in the course of a month and only on three or four occasions did the waiter pre-empt the process by telling us that he only had the one item on offer. We saw good things on Bulgarian restaurant menus too - fillet sailors, chicken hunters, Thurkish cuffee and panchakes.

I am aware of the fact that in these pages I have a number of times referred to cities as being "typical communist." I will here describe what I mean by a typical communist city, there are few exceptions in Europe although in places like Angola and Cuba they may well be different.

First, the outskirts. As you approach a communist city, you notice on the horizon, apartment blocks on both sides of the road. Not just a few blocks but small cities of them consisting of 50 to 100 slabs of buildings between five and twenty stories high. As you get nearer, you pass four large hoardings with slogans on them extolling the virtues of communism or hard work or propaganda concerning production quotas. Next you'll see a sizeable green area of gardens fenced in with rusty chain wire fencing. These are the allotments where the occupants of the apartments grow their fruit and vegetables and a few flowers. Most of these allotments have a garden shed where the gardeners keep their tools and sometimes sleep on summer weekends. These little patches of green are usually exceptionally well tended, it's something the state doesn't bother to exert much control over and a place in which a person can express himself.

Another kilometre and you draw alongside the apartments and you see that some are in the construction stage and the ground around them is littered with pieces of steelwork and small mountains of concrete which set before it was used. You'll then see the shoddiness of the completed flats, they are completed but it looks as though the workmen will be back next week to finish them off - you can see that they are finished already because there are curtains in the windows and the balconies (which they all have) are already being used as storage areas. Some of the balconies are already hanging on the buildings at a slight angle even though the blocks are still under construction.

The grass around the blocks is un-mowed and is 50 - 60 centimetres high and there are bare patches in it where the children play and tracks through it from the car-parks to the blocks. There are three wrecked cars in the car-park and there are two more with the wheels missing and oil stains all over the ground. Soon the tram lines start and the road surface deteriorates considerably, holes appear and the tram crossings shake the life out of the car as you cross them.

There is a railway alongside the road now which swings off and goes through the concrete plant and the coal generated electricity station. A little further and pavements start to appear at the sides of the roads with smoke blackened stunted trees growing out of them and all the buildings which front onto the pavements are flat fronted with no features and small windows sometimes with tiles underneath them. Many of these tiles have fallen off the wall but you kind of get the feeling that they fell off ten years ago and they aren't going to be replaced. It's here that it hits you that there's a pervading greyness about the place, perhaps it's the contrast with the green leaves of the trees that makes you realize it. It all looks filthy but in fact it isn't, it's as clean as a Western city but it looks a hundred times dirtier. Probably it's the brickwork exposed by the plaster which has fallen off the walls which gives it this dirty appearance and the fact that the buildings haven't been painted or maintained for years.

There is an almost total absence of colour here, no adverts for petrol or toothpaste, cigarettes or anything. There may be the odd red splash from a flower on a balcony but other than that, the dark blue of street signs at the corners are all the colour you'll see. Now we are approaching the area of small shops and small manufacturing industries. It's dusty, whether it's in a hot country or not, it's still dusty. The tiny shop windows give no indication of what's inside and the window displays, if there are any, have dust on them and the colours are faded. In the lace curtained office windows there is a rubber plant and a monsteria and a pot of some green and white long leaved striped plant, all near dead. You are depressed.

You look at the pavements now and you notice that they are uneven because cars park on them creating indentations, you see people tripping as they walk and there are paving slabs stacked up against a lamp post from some long abandoned repair job - the hole is still there in the pavement and it won't be patched up for years. At the bottom of the lamp posts the electrical inspection plates have been removed and wiring is exposed at the height where kids can touch it. Passing the tram stop, you will see that the weeds that grow all along the tramlines here are missing because of all the people who tread on them in this spot. And you see the queue of prospective passengers all with beaten, resigned, miserable faces but with something in the bottom of their brown, vinyl shopping bags, unlike the people in the queues at the butcher and baker shops whose bags were rolled up under their arms.

Then a long line of cars, maybe 20 maybe 40 including taxis. The drivers all out of their cars, leaning against the doors talking to each other. They are the lucky ones with their own transport and they are queuing for petrol, they'll be there for hours yet. The offices are now starting to appear along with the larger shops. Still the same small windows but more of them and there are more people walking around, each with a shopping bag, looking in the windows at the display which hasn't changed for weeks, maybe months. And the strip lights in the windows flicker but they won't be changed, not until they stop altogether. Next come the uninviting looking restaurants, some with their names in strip lights. The strip lights have letters missing and letters which have come unstuck and are hanging upside down. Gradually the civic buildings start to show. These buildings are set back from the road, they are big rectangular boxes with rectangular windows and a small flight of steps leading up to glass fronted doors.

The forecourts are done in grey concrete paving slabs and in the centre is a flower bed with a stone ledge encircling it. The flowers need water and the weeds are at their highest in the middle around the base of the flagpole. The stone ledge around the edge is chipped. On all sides the building is fenced off with rusty black wrought iron, and in a little hut at the side where the wrought iron gate is, sits a soldier who opens the gate for the officials. There is a soldier standing outside too with a gun, he's expressionless and bored. And then there you are in the city centre with it's palace of culture or revolution square in pride of place slap bang in the middle with a red flag sitting on top. It's ugly too, bloody ugly and designed by someone who obviously hasn't the slightest flair for, or interest in architecture. On all four sides are grotesque statues of men and women either standing, gun in hand, ever vigilant to protect the proletariat, or displaying their ability to work down coal mines for 48 hours at a stretch.

In front of the place is a larger than life statue of Lenin and the streets leading off of the square are named after Marx, Lenin, the first of May, the army and a local revolutionary leader who sided with the Russians at the outbreak of WW2 and later became the puppet party premier. Then there are the standard kiosks, one model throughout probably ten or more countries, selling bus tickets, newspapers, cigarettes and matches and a few other items. Some of the kiosks are closed with no explanation given as to why, or when they are likely to be open.

And the park, there's always a park. The park is scruffy, shabby, worn out, kids swings and slides half of them broken, a dirty sand pit. Two concrete ponds with fountains which haven't worked for years and the hedges have leaves on the top but nothing at the bottom. The grass is high and when it's cut, it's cut with a scythe and someone comes in with a horse and cart to take the grass away to feed his animals. You'll see three or middle aged women wearing headscarves and sandals with socks showing out of them, sweeping the walkways with brooms made of twigs. And all of a sudden you'll say to yourself -what the fuck did I come here for?

The next scheduled stop, and not many were, was at Veliko Turnovo and once again w



Dear reader I'm sorry for the interruption to this narrative but I'd like now to bring you into real time - I.e. what's happening right now, as I type. I'm sitting typing these words in a caravan park on the Black Sea Coast from notes taken over the last three days. Alicja is at the camp shop and I've just had a terrible fright. I was sitting in the back of the van looking at the screen when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye at the back window which was a few centimetres from my head. I turned to see, on the other side of the glass, a bear looking at me. Yes, a bear!

I jumped back and lapsed into involuntary profanity - Aaaaaaaaaagh Fuuuck, I said. I rushed to the side door of the van and slammed it shut and then looked out of the windows. Now, as I type, there's a gypsy out there playing the violin and he's got a bear on a piece of string dancing to the music. Yeah, where was I? Yes, Veliko Turnovo........you know, bears really seem to affect my concentration somehow. I'm having difficulties getting back into this.

Well, Veliko Turnovo is perhaps the most famous place in the country after Nesabar. It's got a famous castle which they've over restored and stuffed up - end of story. Wish we hadn't bothered and nothing will induce me to go there again. Oh Christ, it's leaning against the front of the van now, looking through the windscreen at me. Why's the thing so interested in our van and not the tents next door? Perhaps we've got honey in here or something. It's no use, I just can't type with bears outside. Where's the fags? Perhaps if I give him a dollar he'll piss off.

Over the next few days we wandered the back roads of Bulgaria saw a lot of sights, avoided a lot of mixed grills and chopska salads and enjoyed the experience no end but the bit we were mostly looking forward to now, was the Black Sea coast and that's where we pointed Raelene. The Black Sea coast is Eastern Europe's playground. They come here from all over the place including Russia and to an Eastern European who can't travel outside the Soviet bloc, this is his exotic holiday in the sun. Not only the eastern but also the slightly more adventurous western European holiday makers can get a package holiday to Varna or the Golden Sands at a very reasonable rate compared to Western Europe.

As we drove into Varna we could see western jets circling to land at the airport and we could feel that civilization was only a few minutes drive away. We wanted a swim in the sea, it had been such a long time and the weather has been hot enough to swim for six weeks now. We caught a glimpse of it through the trees, dropped off three fellow travellers to whom we'd given a lift and set off in search of somewhere to park the van for the few remaining days of our visa. The beaches at the Black Sea holiday towns are superb although in season crowded, but privacy can't be expected in season at a resort town anywhere and the Bulgarians have done everything pretty well for a cheap family holiday. Looking down on the beaches from the hills and cliffs, you are struck by all the sunshades, literally thousands of them all in perfectly straight lines like soldiers on parade. When you get in amongst it all, it's not too bad.

You can hire one of these permanently fixed umbrellas for a pittance along with a sun lounger, pair of flippers etc and you've got yourself a spot for the day in the shade that nobody's going to pinch. It's wasn't our cup of tea but families with young children can have a good cheap holiday in Varna and everything they could want is available, sailboard schools and hire, para sailing, restaurants mini golf, entertainment at night, horse riding, little tourist trains running up the streets, organized coach tours. It wasn't that different to a lot of Western European holiday resort towns but far cheaper and not as crowded. The best one of these places we saw was called Sunny Beach which had everything Varna had plus it had nice parks and gardens to walk around and I must say that in all these resort towns there was no litter to be seen and the general standard was good.

The other thing we liked was that you can get a good meal in a decent restaurant, if you don't mind classical violin music, for $5 for two, AND they have everything which they advertise on the menu. There may be shortages in the rest of the country but it wouldn't matter if the rest of the country was at starvation level, the Black Sea coast would still be well supplied because it generates so much foreign currency for the government. The food may have been good, the toilets clean, the hot water supply constant and the plumbing functional but it just wasn't our thing so we drove north up the coast looking for something a little more adventurous near the Romanian border where, according to the guidebook, things were quieter.

Things weren't quieter but they were certainly different and we spent the night at an absolutely ghastly camp-site which caters almost exclusively for Poles. All the signs, menus, everything were in Polish and even the waiters and shop assistants spoke Polish. Now, the Bulgarian government doesn't earn much money out of Poles who earn something like $40 per month and can't pay in hard currency, so it doesn't spend so much on facilities for Poles as it does on Westerners. This was an area on a cliff top which did have potential because of its views but in the many years it's been here not a cent has been spent on improvements. The grass had never been cut and it was half a meter high and dry as tinder and the Bulgarian campers, who earn less than the Poles and couldn't afford any kind of cookers, were lighting fires on the ground to cook with.

One stray spark and three hundred tents would have gone up if there had been any breeze at all. Fortunately, they were all very conscious of it and took great pains to see that it didn't happen but there wasn't so much as a blanket or a water bucket to fight any fire with. The shower and toilet block were fed by a thermal spring which was the only source of water on site and stank of sulphur. After a shower we needed a shower to remove the smell. Even in the restaurant where we ordered Pepsi, in case they made the coffee with this smelly stuff, they served it in glasses which had been washed in it and we couldn't drink it. There was a set of steps down to a salt water swimming pool which I can't imagine had ever been cleaned and it was impossible to see the bottom for green algae - even the Bulgarians avoided it. The beach was covered in rotting seaweed and there were pieces of rusty pipe and lumps of concrete laying around and the sea was a very murky looking brew. Nevertheless we swam in it to get rid of the smell of the water from the showers.

The restaurant where we had the sulphur flavoured Pepsi had a band playing in the evening. Their entire repertoire was in English - they sang songs like Around the World in Eighty Days - and the singer had learned the words from records without speaking the language which we found quite amusing. The Poles and Bulgarians have to watch their pennies and almost never eat out and I felt sorry for the band because the restaurant was nearly empty. After all, they were doing their best and the only audience they had was the two of us, who were killing ourselves laughing, and two others who were filling out their postcards and not listening at all.

We felt guilty at having to leave, and when we left we could still hear them playing to nobody as we walked back to the van, the postcard writers having beaten us to leaving. The Bulgarians staying at the camp-site were, to us, pitifully impoverished but at least they were on holiday, there must have been a lot more that weren't. Their tents were made of canvass and didn't have zippers but eyelets and string and separate groundsheets.

In the morning at five o'clock, it was bitterly cold and the family next to us were running around putting blankets and rags over the outside of their tent in order to keep warm and trying to keep them there with sticks. Later, they were all walking around the bushes looking for sticks to light a fire with. I gave the kids some chewing gum and they were overjoyed with it and brought us some roasted sunflower seeds. I offered the parents our cooker to cook their breakfast on but they were embarrassed and declined. To get away from the crowds and this appalling place, we decided to drive south to within 80 kilometres of the Turkish border where our travel books said it was sparsely populated, much quieter and easier to get a good space in a camp-site.

On the way we stopped off at Nesabar which is a small island, these days connected to the mainland by a causeway. In the 6th century bc. Nesabar was already minting its' own gold currency and the Romans administered it a few hundred years later and it is said to be the place where Bulgarian history most manifests itself. Rubbish - they had a jewel and they messed it up. We were so disappointed because we'd seen a documentary on the place on TV back in Australia in which it looked wonderful but there's scarcely an old building left and the modern buildings are to say the least, shoddy and unfinished. They've built horrible 1950s communist style public buildings in two places on the island and to cap it off, they are rebuilding Roman ruins there in modern building materials with lousy workmanship. They don't deserve the place. In both Bulgaria and Hungary they ruin the appearance of their castles and ancient buildings by filling in gaps in walls with concrete but in Nesabar it's worse than anywhere.

We arrived in the sparsely populated place we were looking for in the late afternoon - it was terribly over crowded. We called into one good looking hotel to see if we could get a room for two nights because we had too much Bulgarian money and we had to find a way to spend it, but they would only let us pay in dollars. At the reception the girl asked us where we were from, and when I told her, she shouted to everyone -they're Australian, they're Australian, and turning to us she said -oh I'm so happy, and she really meant it. She was jumping up and down and clapping her hands together. She said -Krokodill Dund and when I told her that he was my father I thought she was going to wet herself.

So that's why we ended up in the place with the bear on a piece of string, there wasn't anywhere else. Bears on pieces of string wandering around caravan parks with or without their violinist owners, doesn't seem to be the safest of methods for the provision of mass entertainment to me. There were lots of bear breakfast sized kids running about the place and although the bear had a muzzle on it's claws were still long. I'd never given the matter any thought but I suppose there are laws in Western countries to ensure that itinerant violinists tie their bears to the railings outside caravan parks before entering. This camp-site is easily the biggest we've seen. It has about 1,500 people staying in it and is like a penguin rookery but without any organisation whatsoever. You simply pay your money and take a chance that you be able to find a space. The manager, I'm sure, doesn't know to the nearest hundred how many people are staying here.

We went into the shop just after we arrived and saw bottled fruit juice on the back shelf so I asked for it. The assistant said that we couldn't have any because the water melons had been delivered. There wasn't any regulation prohibiting the sale of bottled fruit juice during the water melon season but a physical problem - she couldn't climb over the melons. There were hundreds of them and they'd just thrown them on the floor behind the counter. It was hard for the woman to stand up in the shop but she said that they couldn't put them outside as they'd be stolen in no time. Most of this shop's meagre supplies were behind the melons and nobody could buy anything until they'd been sold. It may sound funny but the people in the tent next door to us actually ran out of food and we gave them some of our foul tasting Jugoslavian tinned fish. Once again Raelene was the only Western vehicle in the whole place but by now we were getting used to being treated as zoo animals and the stares didn't bother us.

Looking around the camp-sites in Poland & Bulgaria and to a lesser extent in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, I noticed that the majority of parked cars didn't have any windscreen wipers. Most people park their cars, remove the wiper blades and lock them in the glove box because windscreen wipers are considered hot property and worth stealing. I don't know why communist bloc windscreen wiper factories can't keep up with demand but they evidently can't. The majority of car owners put a little bit of plastic tubing over the wiper arms to stop them scratching the windscreen if they should accidentally switch the wipers on. But the Hungarians to whom we gave the tinned Jugoslavian fish had small, clip on plastic devices with two tiny wheels which run back and forth across the glass. I thought about this and I just can't work out why Hungarian industry can't provide windscreen wipers when it can provide these

The recipients of the Jugoslavian tinned fish were a nice couple and had friends with them who spoke English and they acted as interpreters one night as a crowd of us sat by a fire drinking and swapping experiences. An East German couple there had come through Romania to get to Bulgaria and in several places came upon small kids standing in the middle of the road in groups. They demanded sweets and if they didn't get them they threw stones at all the glass on the car. The next morning I was shown the car. The windscreen had gone as had one of the front headlights and a side window and there were dents all over it. They were concerned because they had to go back through Romania again on the way home because they are not allowed to go through Jugoslavia.

The next day we were hoping to cross the Turkish border and start a new adventure in the promised land and before we turned in that night we reflected on our month in Bulgaria. It had been good fun, and extremely interesting and we wouldn't mind doing it again. It had also been unbelievably cheap - in four weeks we had only exchanged USD$350 and we still had $40 left!