3 days (ways) to get nowhere
This post was started on the day I came back from the trip and finished 7 months later. My humble personal opinion is that it aged well but please be my judge and read on.
All stories need a concept. In this one the initial concept is leisure: add seaside and beaches to a three day biking trip and see what the combination brings you.
It all started with a call in 3 am on a Saturday morning, me on the door with a backpack and a bicycle, rubbing away the 3 hours of sleep that I managed to get.
We have a situation. Of all the cars in the parking, somebody has stopped behind mine and I can’t get out. There is a phone number on the windshield and nobody is answering.
Three in the morning is usually the time to be going home after a good night out, not to be struggling with spatial problems with the help of random junkies from the street. While I was slowly composing a scenario in which we use my 4x4 to drag the Dacia away, Ned did the obvious thing and got the car out with just 50 maneuvers. Twenty minutes later we were on the move.
The plan: put two bikes on the car, drive to Varna, leave the car and bike for three days sleeping on beaches and rocky shores.
The distances: calculations showed distances between 85 and 92 kilometers per day.
The equipment: one road bike with panniers and one cross country bike, lightweight two person tent.
Day 1
Biking for 10 hours straight under the hot sun, preceded by just three hours of sleep and five hours of driving in the night doesn’t sound smart. Funny thing is this has no effect on our story so unfortunately we didn’t learn our lesson.
Getting out of a big city with a bike is always problematic and Varna is no exception. Added to the normal heavy outgoing traffic was the nice surprise of a bicycle lane which suddenly disappears, to be changed with a big patch of broken glass. Urban planning concerning bicycles in this country is very creative so we managed to forget this swiftly and to plough on.
Main idea of a seaside bike trip is to travel along the coast, right? This being our idea also, we had planned our route accordingly and intended to follow through. After climbing up from Varna we immediately went down to the first resort Saints Constantine and Helena. Google Maps was showing a nice beach alley going through it promising nice atmosphere and lack of traffic. What we haven’t accounted for was a new hotel built on this alley which led us for the first and not last time this day to get our bikes in hands and carry them. The stairs that we had to climb were long and then some more and the happy vacationers that we were meeting there definitely thought we were taking part in some cruel competition or maybe reality show.
Biking can be quite boring — just moving your legs in circular motion. Almost like walking but the scenery changes faster. This was going through my head until we reached Albena — a jewel in the crown of the socialist resort-building, it hasn’t changed much since it was build in 1969. And compared to most of the Bulgarian seaside which is suffering from intense over-development this here was unchanged since I saw it for the first time in my childhood.
Albena and the next city on the coast, Balchik, are connected with a beautiful pedestrian road/bicycle lane. This was so obvious on the map that we wanted to make the most of it. We needed to, since the coast from there on was going to be mostly rocky. With high minds and resort-dwelling smiles we approached what was going to be the most easy, pleasant and enjoyable ride of the whole trip.
So when the road suddenly turned into a rocky trail and then hid itself in some high-growing marsh our mindset was especially entrepreneurial (at the end of this post there is a video edit containing the next part but until then I’ll ask you to bear with me and let the words do the job). Joke after joke sparked in the air with cheerful self-irony while pushing our bikes through a marsh turned into carrying our bikes over hot rocky trails. And then our beautiful denial was broken, the trail slowly disappearing into piles of rocks and trees and cutting our way completely. We dutifully continued going through the checklist of the five stages of grief and got angry — at Google Maps for showing us an idyllic coastal road and at the local authorities for not fixing this for years as was apparent by the overgrown marsh. After denial and anger we were ready for the third stage — bargaining. And I must say we have confidence in our bargaining skills.
Scouts were sent, up and down, by land and sea, to find a way of not turning back. The information that they brought us back was deeply discouraging but we were over this kind of emotion already. Ignoring ideas, strategies and common sense we put our bikes on our backs and went into the sea and its rocky shallows. Some wading and zero sea monsters later we were back ashore, bikes mostly dry, and were just discovering that the impassibility was not over.
Not to bore you with details, we discovered a trail that turned into marshes that turned into broken road which in itself turned into the perfect bike alley with a nice new bench every 500 meters. Being heavily adaptive it took us less than 30 seconds to take this for granted and bike into the next village looking for freshly squeezed oranges and some wharf to jump from.
After some jumping in the water and general pointless activities we quickly remembered that we were in the middle of our trip and also the specifics of the situation as illustrated below:
This next part included some suffering, biking with swearing and exhausted lying down in abandoned children’s playgrounds. Suffice it to say that we were OK with not having more peak endurance challenges even before that climb. So after some rest we continued uneventfully on our rout which slowly brought us on some small empty roads between chill villages standing on the cliffs.
The end of the route for the day was at Tyulenovo — a place famous for it’s caves overlooking the sea and the best DWS spots in this part of the world. We arrived there at sunset, pointlessly cruised around for some minutes in order to make 100 kms for the day, took no picture and swiftly went to sleep.
Day 2
I was enthusiastically carrying my climbing shoes all the way from Sofia, dangling on my backpack, with the hope to try for the first time some deep water soloing. The day’s route was lying ahead of us though and the sea was rough in the morning, so sadly I skipped climbing and we got on the road.
As the highly efficient lean entrepreneurs that we are we managed to sneak a visit to the eastern most point of Bulgaria — cape Shabla.
Some days are just better than the other so we managed to find in one of the villages a great bakery in the middle of nothing. While contemplating our luck over some traditional banitsa and trying to stuff our backpacks with as much as possible amazing fresh bread, we went over the plan for the day — cross a border with the bikes for the first time in our lives and then whatever. The second part was something that we are very good at so we got on with checking the first part of the list.
Approaching the Bulgarian-Romanian Black sea border can be really boring and it was. Lucky for us something was happening, there was police and lots of bright stripes everywhere. Riding slowly into this commotion we discovered that the Via Pontica trans-border marathon was happening at this moment. Soon we started passing some very miserable runners at the end of their 42 kms challenge. It really cheers you up to see somebody suffering more than you do and with that mood we hit the border.
In order to understand the change of environment that we experienced when passing this border you will need to know how seaside works in these parts. Bulgaria has some 378 kms of coastline and approximately half of it is beaches. As everybody wants to go to the warmest place (and some other logistic reasons) most of the tourism is focused in the southern Black sea coast. Romania has more coastline but a big part of it is cliffs and the beaches are concentrated on the south of their Black sea coast. Which basically means that we crossed a border from the almost deserted and serene Northern Bulgarian Black sea cost to the frenetic, packed with tourists Southern Romanian Black sea coast.
The first village and our northernmost point was Vama Veche. Strange resort in which you can see at one place expensive dresses and high heels mixed with freedom loving hippies and everything in between. There are luxurious hotels and small tents on the beach. In the tent camp, just in front of the restaurants there was this family with two children that was leisurely operating their grill and covering with smoke half of the heavily populated area.
This got us hungry so before going back to Bulgaria we found a restaurant to recharge.
Going back we realized that we will need to endure the boring flat long approach from the Bulgarian side. This was unacceptable, so after confirming that we are going to be joining some friends at camp Krapets this night we found a seaside route going there. The plan was to stop on the way, lie on the beach and swim and then finish at a campfire for the evening.
Soon after approaching the beach we discovered that:
1. This is the longest beach in Bulgaria
2. Riding a bike in sand is great (if you are stupid and crazy)
Leisure times aside, we pushed on through something that was feeling suspiciously like a desert under the afternoon heat. After some indescribable amount of bike pushing in sand the realization (we are slow at these, we know) that we are not getting close to anything came. We pushed our way back to some asphalt leaving the “shortcut” behind and headed on a final stretch for the day. Quite uneventfully we reached the camp and made use of the beach again.
Day 3
I won’t lie to you — day three was boring. The route was returning us to our car by the main roads which were full of traffic. To cut it short there were three main take outs from this day:
- Watermelon is great
2. Sleeping in a freshly plowed field is serendipity
3. A Coke contains all you need in the middle of long bike trip
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