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After a really long day travelling south along the black sea coast, we expected to be easily able to cross the boarder into turkey. Unfortunately there are very few boarder crossings with Turkey. The crossing that we ended up using meant that we travelled a few hundred kilometres back west so that we could cross just north of Edirne in Turkey.

The scenery on the side of the road heading towards Edirne Turkey

The scenery was beautiful but in the heat of the day it was starting to get too much doing the additional 250km. Eventually we got to the boarder crossing.. Finally leaving the EU and moving onto the next stage of our trip.. We arrived at the boarder crossing at 6.15pm and ended up leaving after 9pm.. only three hours. At least we now have some idea of what to expect when we go through other more serious boarder crossings.

First of all we exited from Bulgaria, yet again our papers all got checked for the bikes, Then we got checked again by Bulgaria for some unknown reason while they let all the cars just drive on past… We then sat in one of about 30 queues to get through to the Turkish Passport control.. There must been at least 2000 other cars in the queue.. Because the queues moved only one car at a time we pushed the bikes for the 500meters from the first gates to the passport control.. This was our “Fitness Program” of the moment. We would think that pushing the bikes may have been embarrassing.. well actually the vast majority of people were pushing their cars too…At Passport control we had to go and organise our visa’s which cost $20US each… Then we went on to Customs where we had to buy local Turkish third party motorcycle insurance which cost $30US for 30 days (per bike).After that we finally had all our stamps that we required to finally enter into Turkey at the third gate. YAY.. we are now in Turkey and its already dark. We hit the motorways heading towards Edirne where we took the exit to look for somewhere to stay. We found a campsite just outside of town on the D100 called “Omur Camping”.

Omur Camping… well lets just say a few things about this “special” campsite.. Its location was perfect for us to be able to go into Edirne and do some bits and pieces like organise accommodation in Istanbul.. It is by far the biggest rip off campsite that we have seen to date. They charge in Euro even though the local currency is now the Turkish Lira.. Not only do they charge for the tent, bikes and people like most campsites they also charge to use all the facilities.. 5euro to go for a swim, 3euro for a dog, 5euro to use the washing machine etc.. It was all very expensive given that we could have used the pools etc for free at all the campsites we have stayed at previously… No suprises that the place was dead quiet and people only stayed the absolute minimum time possible.. The other value added “feature” of the site was that they a huge population of killer mosquitoes just waiting for you in the showers, toilets, bathrooms, tent, outside, anywhere actually come to think of it…

Having a break in the heat.. with out taking your helmet off..

The temperatures are now sitting around 30-36c which is a big increase to what we got used to in Romania and Bulgaria. The roads in Turkey are much more civilized and people are much more aware of what is going on around them so far… Its a nice improvement but riding in these temperatures is definitely not for the faint hearted. We will need to start planning our days around much longer lunch breaks to take advantage of not being in the heat of the day…

Edirne is a beautiful city which we had to stop at not only for our organisational tasks but we had to have our first Turkish Kebab… How could we resist.. especially after such a long day previously getting out of Bulgaria (10am until 11pm).

So after a long day riding from Transylvania down through some beautiful mountain scenery

A Romanian Alpine Dam in Transylvania

and fruit orchards. Where we bought some fruit and vegetables from a few road side farms, we bought 1kg of red cherries for 1lei (about 20p).. Still amazed me, the farms scales only did 1kg so we had more cherries than we could ever eat before they went bad… We ended up finding a hotel in a place called Sloboza. The hotel was excellent with a nice restaurant. Just after we sat down for dinner a huge thunderstorm which had been threatening to hit us while we rode came in. It knocked out all the power in the area including the hotel. This was rather amusing as the restaurant couldn’t give us our bill.. the solution was to have a few more drinks while the electricity came on.. Unfortunately with no electricity and no wind, lots of still water the mosquitoes came out in force…Heather then wanted to go inside where it was all dark.. Unfortunately its not so great to be drinking in the dark.. We ended up moving seats out closer to the open area’s hoping that the mosquito problem wouldn’t be so bad. It

One of the Vallies in Romania where we had a break

was to great amusement of the other customers watching heather trying to keep the mosquitoes from biting. After a long night we managed to do many of our internet and maintenance tasks in the morning. Then we finally left for our final leg of the Journey through to the Black Sea at Constanta. The ride to the coast was more boring flat roads with almost nothing of interest to see. Some of the river crossings and looking at some of the lochs for huge commercial shipping lines to use made for interesting interruptions to absolutely boring scenery… The one constant that we did have was the same friendly Romanian people everywhere we stopped..

In Constanta we found a Supermarket and bought some food for Lunch and dinner, the hope was to find somewhere that we could stay along the coast.. When we stopped at a beach to have lunch the stench of the industrial black sea was horrendous. It was like the sewerage was just brewing for about 150km along the coast. While we looked for accommodation… we kept riding south then all of a sudden we found that we had arrived at the Bulgarian border which was much closer than we had anticipated. This meant it was the end of our Romanian stage of the trip and we entered Bulgaria.. The first boarder crossing where we had to show that we actually owned our bikes. The boarder was rather confusing and it wasn’t so easy to understand how it all worked. Our passports got taken only once and our bike paper work got checked out.. Then they had a stop sign just down the road with a Bulgarian flag.. However there was nobody there.. Odd.. Let us hope that it won’t cause problems with us getting out of Bulgaria and into Turkey.

After crossing the border with Bulgaria you don’t have to buy the Vingette if your on a Motorcycle, however cars and other vehicles are all required to buy the tax. There is a tax stop about 500meters further on from the border. With all the now familiar rip-off exchange shops… We didn’t exchange any money there and ended up riding for about an hour into Bulgaria to find a bank. The police presence that we had in Romania was immediately blitzed by the cops in Bulgaria. It seems that they take road rules very seriously and the speed limits are all over the shop.. Going from 100km to 40 or 30km per hour for no apparent reason. The road quality in Bulgaria has so far been terrible, much worse than Romania and I would recommend anyone to ride with care if they do travel here, they have loads of fine dust on the road which can be like riding on wet glass.

The campsite in Bulgaria.. Finally at the Black Sea

After we got some funds we bought some petrol and went looking for a camp-site or some accommodation for the night. We ended up finding a “camp site”.. well that’s where the fun began. The stench that we could smell at Constanta was actually the water. The campsite was pretty nasty but it was great to go to sleep on the beach with the sounds of the water and the nice cool sea breeze. Unfortunately our stay was to be only one night… At about 4am James was woken with an emergency run to the loo.. The joys of Food poisoning most likely from some dodgy water despite being very careful. Heather was soon to follow with the awful stomach cramps and loo runs.This was what sealed the fate for the campsite. We made a hasty exit to find a hotel where we would have immediate access to clean toilets. As we travelled down the coast to Varna we went through a few resort towns and nothing really caught us despite the desperation of needing to fnd something QUICK!!..

We ended up finding a 4 Star resort that had some availability called the Edelweiss Hotel near “golden sands” on the Bulgarian coast just north of Varna. The hotel room was such a relief.. After finding an ATM and supermarket we stocked up on reserves so we could hibernate while we let the food poisoning pass… A terrible day was had by both of us feeling quiet ill. Every cloud has a silver lining..

One Bulgarian restaurant with "ASDA Price"

After spending a day to get over the first onslaught we managed to go exploring and found the resort and around the town and beaches to be a really nice surprise with loads of great restaurants and shops all along a very nice long beach.

The touts trying to get business into the restaurants have some ingenious ways at their disposal. One of the restaurant touts was a true classic.. She was singing a song “yummie yummie food in your tummie.. go and eat and drink here and get the best food in your tummie that’s really yummie”. It’s funny when the same guys recognise your on a return trip or walking around aimlessly looking for something and try every time despite knowing that your not interested.. I guess no harm in trying. While we walked around the beach area we heard a big crack sound and a whole half side of a tree just fell over.. It was very lucky that nobody was hurt/crushed by the tree coming down so unexpectedly.. It was really unusual, Unfortunately we didn’t have our camera or phone on us to really take in the scene.

If we had raced through Bulgaria like we had planned to after the first two days experience we would never have been able to really appreciate what Bulgaria has to offer. I think that the black sea coast resorts can really offer more for your money with good multi-language skills in absolutely everywhere. I would come back here rather than going to many of the Spanish resort towns…