The first stop was Bansko. I booked us into the Kempinski hotel since my parents were paying and I got to choose the hotels. They actually had a good “Pay for 2 Nights Get the 3rd Night Free” deal so it wasn’t that bad. The key here is we got free use of the spa (pool, hot tub, sauna, etc.). Of course, although the Kempinksi is a 5-Star hotel – regardless of its international reputation – it’s still a 5-Star hotel in Bulgaria. Accordingly, the electricity went out several times. They had a backup generator, but strangely none of the room bathroom lights were hooked up to it. Good thing I wasn’t using the facilities during any of the outages. The lights in the spa, however, were hooked up to the generator so we see where the priorities lie. Also the shower didn’t drain properly and the bathtub drain was broken (there was a seperate tub and shower in the bathroom). In the Kempinski’s defence, the staff fixed the problems when I complained. We used Bansko for the staging area for visiting Southwest Bulgaria.

On the way to Bansko we stopped at Rila Monastary – my 3rd trip there. The next day we went to Melnik which I had never been to. It is a quaint little village which is becoming less and less quaint as more and more building is happening there.

During the Melnik trip we decided to see another monastary about 10 km down the road. We came upon a church which I thought might be the monastary. We got out, looked around and when we got back into the rental car it wouldn’t start. I had rented a diesel VW Polo for the trip. We were on a hill so I tried coasting down and popping the clutch to no avail. We made it down to the small village at the bottom of the hill by coasting. The car would try to turn over, but when I turned the key none of the instrument gauges moved including the gas guage. I thought perhaps the gauge was broken and we had run out of gas. I talked to a local guy in town and he called someone in Melnik to bring some diesel out to the car. An hour later he showed up, I poured in the gas and the results were the same. The car would try to turn, but wouldn’t start and the instrument panel wouln’t light up. At this point the town started to get interested. Before long we had 5 guys all trying to figure out what was wrong with the car. We pushed the car up the hill a couple times to try and pop the clutch – all in vain. Finally I called the rental car company to complain and they said I needed to lock and unlock the car before it would start. Sure enough this was it. If you left the car unlocked for more than a few minutes some kind of security feature would activate that wouldn’t let you start the car until you locked them unlocked the car with the automatic RF lock.

This is the most retarded accessory to a car I have ever seen. How often do I get out of the car to go to the bathroom, get gas, look at something beside of the road, etc. – all things that don’t require me to lock the car. The answer, as I learned, is often. Well, I had to lock the car if I did any of these actions or it wouldn’t start. The entire rest of the trip had me constantly get out and lock and unlock the car before it would start. What happens if the battery in your little keychain lock dies. You’re screwed is the answer. Another example of how technology makes things worse rather than better. Not to vent entirely at VW – of course the rental company didn’t tell me this key piece of information. Of course they didn’t put the car manual in the car. Typical Bulgarian customer service.

We spend one day at Bansko and drove up to the ski area. They are building like crazy all over Bansko. What was once a small town is rapidly turning into a huge resort. Even from when I was there this past winter there are dozens of huge new apartment complexes going up. Up on the resort they were working on new trails and facilities as well.

From Bansko we drove to Plovdiv through an impressive gorge. On the way we must have passed through one of the Muslim regions on Bulgaria because we passed several small towns with mosques.

We spend the afternoon at Plovdiv then drove back to Sofia.

The next day we headed off to Veliko Turnovo. We stayed in the Gurko Hotel which I have heard good things of and all were true. Our room was on the top floor and had a great view of the river.

After VT we headed to Varna for a night. It took us a few minutes to find the hotel, but eventually got there and, again, had a great room with a view of the large Cathedral there. We walked around some of the extensive pedestrian streets of Varna before walking along the Black Sea shore for a while. We managed to see a wedding happening in the Cathedral while we were visiting. Interestingly, they didn’t close the Cathedral to visiters during the wedding so crowds of people were coming and going during the ceremony.

The next stop was Nesebar for a couple hours before continuing on to Sozopol where we were able to stay free in my landlord’s apartment. This was my 4th time to Sozopol, but my first in the off season. The town was nearly a ghost town with almost every shop and restaurant closed. It was very strange to see the town like this. The apartment was near a soccer field and we were able to catch Sozopol play Nesebar. Nesebar had the upper hand in that game.

Finally we drove back to Sofia and spend a day visiting several churches, the art museum, the ethnographic museum and a few shops for my mother to buy misc. Bulgarian stuff.

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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.

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Bansko on Sunday in the snowstorm. The Kempinksi hotel is on the left.

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