It is forty years ago that we took a holiday in Bulgaria. The two years before we had been in Hammamet, Tunisia and this was somewhere different and, unusually, a two-centre holiday. In the high-season of July it was £335 per person. (£1,335 adjusted to 2025 prices) We have enjoyed reading Margaret’s copious notes of timings and food eaten. From these 70 pages she extracted 1500 words included below. I have a few pages describing urban and rural scenes. A few anecdotes appear on the “I said I would take you places” website here >
We flew from Gatwick to Bourgas and stayed in Sunny Beach on the Black Sea. From here we visited Nessebar and other places. Secondly, we had a week in Pamporovo and visited Plovdiv and the Rila Monastery before staying in Bourgas and then flying home.
Our recent reflections suggest two details escape these accounts. One was the surprise of a brown bear at Sunny Beach. The other was the search for wild strawberries in the mountains around Pamporovo. Marg noticed them while squatting at ground level as nature called! We have really enjoyed looking back on this visit. Margaret’s account, unedited, starts with some random notes. The images are from contemporaneous leaflets we have retained.
Points to consider including
Thankfully we were not dissuaded from holidaying at Sunny Beach by the fact that it is described as ‘the children’s resort on the Bulgarian riviera’ – although occasionally in evidence, we were not overwhelmed by children at any part of our holiday.
Prior to the holiday we searched the library and bookshop shelves for literature on Bulgaria but were only able to acquire an ancient copy of a Nagle’s guide. The National Tourist Bureau was helpful in supplying a range of brochures which eventually proved very relevant and useful.
We had heard an interview on Radio 4 and read an article in the Times Education Supplement and began to wonder just what to expect of our holiday. Our trepidation was increased while we watched the incoming flight disembark and were met with glum, rather pale faces – until a young lady told us she had enjoyed herself and that the weather was good. Relief!
Roads were cleaned regularly through the day in Sunny Beach and Pamporovo – pedestrians also cleaned! Horses with carriages had canvas bags behind tails to catch droppings.
Waitresses not conversant with English language and rather moody.
Cafes and restaurants do not actually serve everything on the menu which is frustrating and service was always very slow apart from the Hotel Perelik, Pamporovo.
Things I will remember most about Bulgaria
Breakfast: cake, beer, lemonade
10pm ice-cream and coke for kids in café
Horse-bags
Wet roads
Slow service – glum, moody staff
Food – chips! Shopska salad, tomatoes, peaches, pizza, melbas and apple juice
Weighing ice-cream
Black market currency
Kavarma flambé
Female workers on roads, fields etc
Loos
Black coffee, weak tea, pancakes, dry bread
Huge ants in Pamporovo – thwarted picnics
Ski-lifts
Chipped cups and glasses
Pitka bread in Watermill restaurant
Russians, reserved
£1 for two cans of 7Up
Old-fashioned trucks from WW2 era
Lifts at Bourgas – wedding receptions in restaurant
On the beach
The menfolk of the rather loud Yorkshire group occupying the next beach umbrella to us returned from their sortie to find ice-cream for the ladies and could not contain their news –“they weigh the ice-cream in the cornet… here take it, love, before it melts, yes, on a balance! Go and look for yourself!”
My ears pricked up though they needn’t as the conversation was and had been loud enough to entertain most of the beach all day. We had been in Sunny Beach only a couple of days and so far had not partaken of ice-cream but suddenly we were interested, and did, in fact, witness the amazing act of weighing the cornets plus ice-cream later that evening. So began our experience of Bulgarian ice-cream and the people who serve it. We ate ice-cream bought from various street vendors in Sunny Beach, Bourgas, Kazanlik and Plovdiv but were disappointed to find none in Pamporovo where we spent the second week of our two-centre holiday. We were always amazed by the different cones and flavours of ice-cream and the speed with which the ice-cream was weighed. Could the vendors honestly tell if the ice-cream was less than 100g? In contrast the cones were filled at a very slow speed usually with small spoonfuls of ice-cream. Had nobody told the Bulgarians about the ice-cream scoop? One Grizzly Adams character forced the ice-cream in so forcefully he was crushing each cone as he did so!
We also sampled the ice-cream in the form of delicious melbas in the restaurants in Sunny Beach and Pamporovo – always worth the invariably long wait to be served. It was a feature of all restaurants we visited in Bulgaria (and we visited many as most of our meals were taken on a meal voucher system) that service was so slow that one could be forced to spend a few hours over a meal even when in a hurry! It took some getting used to but when sitting in an open air restaurant what did it matter?
Being fond of our food and loving fresh vegetables and fruit we looked forward to sampling traditional Bulgarian cuisine described as “simple but delicious” in the brochure and thus we were more than a little surprised to find chips featured quite prominently on menus everywhere in Sunny Beach. Our courier in Pamporovo explained that this was actually for the tourists but Bulgarians were becoming fond of chips too. Thankfully the kitchen at our hotel at Pamporovo was not yet equipped to cook chips so we were able to enjoy potatoes. With a little observation and careful consideration of menus we were able to avoid chips after the first couple of days and thus enjoyed some more traditional Bulgarian cooking though this was not always easy.
The variety of dishes offered in the restaurants was very limited and often the food on the menu was not actually available when you eventually came to order. Thus, the choosing of a meal became quite a game in Sunny Beach. At Pamporovo we had a set menu and were served quickly and efficiently, probably because our seats were required for the next sitting! It was rather intimidating to have the plate snatched away as soon as the knife and fork was put down after the slow pace we had become accustomed to on the coast. Shopska salad became a firm favourite along with melba, and of course, yoghurt, but I cannot think of anywhere else where beer, cake and lemonade and cold ham have been at breakfast time.
It was late July when we went to Bulgaria when peaches and tomatoes were available at very reasonable prices and, though we didn’t really need to, we ate plenty of both to supplement our meals or for picnics. It took no time to adjust to eating peaches in a less-ripe condition than that to which we are accustomed and we found the huge tomatoes deliciously refreshing on a hot day lying on the beach. Apart from the peaches and tomatoes which were available all over the country we came across only s limited selection of fruit and vegetables and saw only a handful of supermarkets or food stores. We left Bulgaria wondering where the local people bought their provisions and, indeed, any goods at all.
Only Plovdiv seemed to offer a decent shopping centre and there was little elsewhere to tempt anyone to part with their spending money – postcards and souvenirs were uninspiring. Commercialisation has not hit Bulgaria yet, though members of our party of English tourists in Pamporovo were thinking how they could make a fortune by setting up a business selling good quality cards, posters, walking sticks, besoms etc to other tourists.
Why did we go?
We chose Bulgaria because it is comparatively cheap, has sandy beaches, good weather and a two-entre holiday was available to break the monotony of an entire two weeks spent lying on a beach. The brochure told us of the ‘uncrowded, unspoilt country’ that ‘stretched eastwards through the rugged peaks of the Balkan Mountains to the warm sparkling waters of the Black Sea’. We were not disappointed at what we found, though, admittedly, we did wonder how it would be, Bulgaria being behind the Iron Curtain, our stay coinciding exactly with the Olympic boycott by the Eastern countries and very little advance information being available in any guide books.
One brochure suggested Bulgaria ‘for a holiday that’s really different and even more exciting.’ Different to our previous European holidays it was and perhaps we could describe it as exciting too as there always was the unexpected: the absence of a light in our corridor which meant we had to feel the door numbers until we found our room on arrival at 2.15 am; the absence of plugs in the basins which made washing rather amusing; the relief of finding a plug for our bath in our last overnight stop on the way home; the old-fashioned wagons which trundled around the country all owned by Balkantourist; the interest caused by the new Renault Fuego parked outside the café where we were earing pizza at lunchtime; the enormous ants which mean we had picnics standing up (!) nor daring to even put down the rucksack; the squirrels that I met on my early morning jogs; the sight of females dressed in blue overalls and white headscarves working on the roads and in the fields; the way the roads in both Sunny Beach and Pamporovo were washed regularly throughout the day and discovering the reason why there was no ‘evidence’ of the horses who trotted up and down the seafront all day and night pulling carriages – they carried round their waste products in a waterproof bag being hung behind their clipped tails!
We will remember the evenings spent in traditional restaurants, where the local music and wine broke down any barriers that may existed between tourists from East and West on arrival. We danced alongside Russians and East Germans who were on holiday like us anyway. We will not forget the breathtaking views at Pamporovo, the clean air, the pancakes and the apple juice. We promised ourselves we return, perhaps in winter for skiing.
Postscript
Our brief skiing experience is another story, and we have not returned to Bulgaria.
