Bansko – The Other White Mountain
This past weekend I went to Bansko for a weekend of skiing with a couple aquantices. Bansko is the premier ski resort in Bulgaria (meaning it is about as good as a midsized New England resort). The resort melds into the town of Bansko which has become a tourist town as the ski resort has grown. I left work early on Friday to get a jump on traffic.
It took me a little while longer to get down to Bansko than expected due to several missed turns. Bulgarians aren’t fond of signs indicating directions to different tows. In the US you will have two or three signs several miles before any exit noting which town the exit leads to. In Bulgaria (if you’re lucky enough to have any sign at all) they put it right at, or just past the exit. This means the probably of missing an exit or two is quite high. Anyway, I finally made it down and met Shelly and Kristen at an easy-to-find location – the Kempinski Hotel Grand Arena, one of the newest and the only 5-star hotel in Bansko. You know it is 5-star hotel because they charge you nearly $10 for a Jack and Coke – a price I wouldn’t even pay in the US. Why they named the hotel the “Grand Arena” I have no idea. To me, the name conjures up images of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, not skiing or mountains. The “Grand Lodge” seems more appropriate, but they didn’t ask my opinion when they were naming it.
Once we were all together we had the Kempinski make reservations for us at a local “mehana” (the name for a traditional Bulgarian restaurant). In Bansko nearly every restaurant is a mehana, which is fine with me because traditional Bulgarian food is pretty good. We go to the mehana and there was live Bulgarian folk singing happening – also typical for mehanas. I wasn’t terribly pleased at the start of our dining experience, however. I opened up the menu and had just started looking at it when the waiter pulled it away from me saying he wanted to give me an English menu. This was annoying because a) I could read the first menu because it was in both Bulgarian and English, and b) the new menu had higher prices than the first menu. It is not unheard of for restaurants to have two menus, a higher prices one for foreigners and a regular prices one for locals. I thought about making a big stink about it, but decided against it as everyone was pretty hungry (including me) and figured it wasn’t worth the effort. The good thing about Bulgaria is that even when you get ripped off, you only get ripped off for a few dollars at the most.
After dinner I headed to my apartment. In Bansko there are a large number of official hotels and there are also a large number of residents who turn their houses into mini-hotels and rent them out at prices far lower than the hotels. I stayed in one of these houses. The price was only $15 per night and was perfectly fine – especially considering all I did was sleep there. The hardest part was actually finding the apartment. I had a map of the town and the location of my hotel but almost none of the streets had signs and very few of the houses were numbered. I stopped twice to ask locals to help us but they could only direct us to other people who might be able to help me. Mind you, the town is only 12,000 people so it should have been easy, but it wasn’t. I drove around for about an hour before finally finding the place.
The next morning I woke up at 7am and had French toast cooked by the houses’ owner – an older woman who talked non-stop while we were eating. The best part of breakfast was the homemade blueberry jam – mmm mmm good.
In the past there used to be price disparity between foreigners and local for lift ticket prices (the locals paid only half price), but the Bulgarian government enacted a law making that practice illegal – a requirement for joining the EU. However, Bansko has found a sneaky way around it. They have something called a “frequent visitor” discount of 30%. The trick to getting the discount is to ask for it in Bulgarian and show a lichna carta (Bulgarian national ID card). I was able to pass the test and get my 30% off.
The lift tickets are quite advanced – they have my picture on it (taken at the window with a webcam) and are fitted with RFID. What this means is that the turnstiles I need to pass through to enter the lift can wirelessly read my ticket and let me through. I just left the ticket in my left pocket (the side the sensors at the turnstile was on) and skied through the turnstile with no problem. Occasionally I had to crouch down a bit to get my pocket close to the sensor. I was quite impressed with the technology.
Like all Bulgarian resorts you need to take a gondola a few kilometers to actually get to the base of the part mountain where the ski runs are. I wonder why they don’t just build a parking lot higher up the mountain (or create more ski trails to the base). Most of the equipment at Bansko looked new. The gondola was build within the last couple years. Many lifts were high speed quads. One of them even had a plastic bubble you could pull down to block the wind – something I had only seen once in Colorado.
The first half of the day had fantastic skiing. The trails were well groomed. Unlike other Bulgarian resorts, Bansko has some high tech snow making machines that looked like jet engines. By late afternoon, however, the trails were starting to get pretty icy. I had a nice fall on a particularly icy trail where I slid 25-30 meters down a slope before I was finally able to dig my skis in to stop my decent.
Sunday started out like Saturday except that is started to snow about the time I arrived at the gondola that morning. The snow continued quite heavily all morning and created some tough ski conditions since there was a heavy fog at the top, high winds and the new snow was getting pushed into piles, exposing the ice underneath.
Aat lunch I decided to head out early since the snow showed no signs of letting up. This turned out not to help at all because on the road back to Sofia there was a big accident several kilometers ahead which had traffic stopped for at least 3 hours. Luckily for me, the Finlandia Vodka van was also stuck in traffic. This meant the Finlandia girls were going from car to car giving out free shots of Finlandia vodka. This certainly helped pass some of the time.
It snowed most of the way back to Sofia, but I finally made it – more than 7 hours after we left Bansko (something that is normally a 3 hour drive). I was going to stay up and watch the Superbowl, which started at 1am, but I was too tired to stay up past 10pm.
