Burgas

(19 August)
So it turns out leaving Turkey is all a bit of a process. As it was getting in, but there each desk told us to go to the next desk, so we could follow our noses. Here only the last guy was helpful so we had to keep going back to him to see if we'd got it right this time... The car, we realised, had a visa too, and it needed to be checked out of the country. Anyway, after quite a bit of chasing our tail we worked it out, and having entered Bulgaria once before we knew what to do there, and flew through that.

It still left us somewhat late on the road (particularly us with our famous early starts), and the Bulgarian roads weren't particularly speedy. The horse and carts didn't slow us much (Ben's still disappointed we were moving too fast to get a picture of the cart before the horses), but the potholes did... So we only got as far as Burgas.

Lonely Planet isn't particularly kind to Burgas, despite it evidently being a reasonably popular tourist destination. We can't claim to have made it to the beach on our overnight stop, but the bars and cafes all seemed excellent. And our dinner waiter was a Liverpool fan (he even went out and got his new shirt to show us), so we got on very well...

The other thing we noticed about Burgas (and would notice about Varna) was the sheer number of Real Estate agents aimed at British customers. Presumably the locals aren't as exciting to sell to, but it must be quite a hot market. Somehow we resisted buying our own slice of Bulgarian heaven, as lovely as we're sure it'd be...