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Bulgaria’s tourist industry is huge, but concentrated in a few locations. The national tourism agency has so low a profile as to be undetectable. So finding good information online can be tricky. One helpful resource, useful for those who might like to have an independent holiday but to have all their reservations and plans made in advance from the US, is Zig Zag Holidays, a travel agency based in Sofia that offers interesting package tours and can book rooms throughout Bulgaria (although they only offer a limited selection of the accomodation options available).

Right now I’m planning the rest of my trip, from Sofia (where I am staying at the very pleasant, centrally located and well-equipped Hotel Sveta Sofia–more on that below). Tomorrow I will make a day trip to the Rila Monastery, south of Sofia, in my rental car–exciting! My next stop will be Plovdiv (ancient Philipopolis, founded by Alexander the Great’s father, Philip of Macedon), then I am going on to the Black Sea coast. I’ll visit Sozopol (ancient Greek Apollonia, Byzantine Sozopolis), Nessebar (Nesebur, Nesebar, etc.–ancient Mesembria) and Varna (ancient Odyssos), where I will drop off my rental car and take a bus to Istanbul. My Rough Guide’s description of the southernmost stretch of the coast is tantalizing, but I don’t really have time to explore the area, nor are there really significant ancient sites (I am supposed to be on a research trip, after all).

The websites of the Varna and Bourgas airports on the Black Sea coast both list departures to Istanbul, but I was unable to find any available flights on kayak.com, sidestep.com or any other websites–they must be charter flights. So, bus it is.

Fortunately, I get to take a Turkish bus. Turkish buses are, of course, the world’s best! (I’ll have to write a paean to Turkish buses for the site some time.) On the Turkey Travel Planner website by Tom Brosnahan, author of the Lonely Planet and Frommer’s Turkey guides, there is a very useful list of buses departing from Istanbul’s main bus station (that link leads to Brosnahan’s page on the Main Bus Station; the station also has its own home page, but it’s only in Turkish and gives far less information, even for those comfortable with Turkish websites, than does Brosnahan’s page).The Turkey Travel Planner Istanbul bus pages include links to bus company websites–the biggest Turkish bus companies all have online booking facilities that even include seat selection–and seems pretty up to date.

I found a daily bus from Varna to Istanbul, departing at 10:30 and arriving at 20:30, with Metro Turizm; there are  other Turkish bus companies that serve this route as well, but Metro has a website, which probably means that it is a more upscale and therefore more comfortable bus company anyway. Plus, the schedule is perfect: leave at a reasonable hour, arrive in time for dinner. I was unable to buy a ticket online, but I’ll call them here in Sofia and see what’s up.

The only obstacle to booking Turkish bus tickets and getting information online is that the English versions of the websites are often not fully functional; you can probably get some information but may not actually be able to book a seat. If you experiment and guess, though, or use a Turkish phrasebook, you can get surprisingly far. It is much easier to interact with a website in an unknown language than with a person!

Despite the lack of centralized, official information, many Bulgarian cities are served by local hotel booking websites which provide a considerable amount of up-to-date information (although I would check anything in writing, by e-mail or fax, with the hotel before arriving: for example, the Sveta Sofia website advertises an on-site garage, but there is nothing of the kind; I had to pay 20 leva, about $15, for overnight parking at a nearby underground garage).

For Sofia, there is hotelsinsofia.com, which lists discounted rates for the Sveta Sofia–I wish I had found this before I booked my room, but I went directly through the hotel’s website instead. The Sveta Sofia in general seems like an excellent mid-price choice for Sofia. The location could not be better, and my room is very comfortable and quiet. My only complaints are that they nickle and dime you for all kinds of things (5 euros per day for internet; 5% extra for credit cards, etc.) and the reception is not very professional–only one receptionist today spoke decent English, and she was often away from the desk, leaving me to contend with the almost-monoglot, and not very helpful (though fetching) Mirena, who had a very hard time helping me get started on the hotel’s internet service. In the end the computer in the basement conference room that they make available to guests was not connecting to the internet, so the hotel staff gave me a key to the office and let me make myself free of it–a great solution to the problem. I am overall favorably impressed with the place.

For Plovdiv, I am trying plovdivhotels.com, which could conceivably be a related website, given some verbatim identical text. Either that or these people are copying each other like bandits! I’ve e-mailed them with requests for information on three hotels in Plovdiv: the somewhat pricey but luxe and atmospheric-looking Hebros (warning: their website has some bad Java script on it, it crashed Explorer on my computer 4 times), the brand new Odeon, and the blander Hotel Bulgaria (I also e-mailed them directly; they have a decent if rather basic website, in English and Bulgarian).

For the Black Sea Coast there’s a surfeit of “information” online, much of it more or less spurious, or at least repetitious. The sleek sozopol.com website is more substantive: it doesn’t book rooms, but has a search service for both private accomodations and hotels, with links to websites for many of the listings. The Hotel Diamanti looks gorgeous, but they don’t have any availability–it’s the first weekend of the high season, so I may have some trouble finding a place (luckily, I will be driving!). The Lola Hotel comes recommended by the Rough Guide, and looks decent too. There are lots of rooms in the new part of Sozopol, so I’m sure I’ll find something.

Nesebar is famous for its picturesque architecture, but the Rough Guide makes it sound miserably crowded. So I’m thinking I’ll just make it a day trip on the way to Varna–the distances are not terribly long on this stretch of the Black Sea coast. There is a varnahotels.com site, clearly a relative of plovdivhotels.com–it’s the same travel agency. 

That’s it for now; I’ll revise this post with the results of my e-mail inquiries.  

I was thinking about taking the bus to Sofia from my next stopping point, Niš, a major transport hub and also the site of the early fourth-century palace built by the Roman emperor Constantine I (”The Great), the first Christian Roman emperor, at Mediana a few km outside the city. But then I read this article from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting on the border hassles that bus passengers often face, and decided that however inconvenient it might be, I should take the train, even though it is much slower and less frequent.

There are two trains a day from Belgrade to Sofia, both stopping in Niš. One stops at 1:50 am, the other at 1:10 pm. I gleaned this information, after a certain amount of coaxing, from the immensely helpful German railway site, www.bahn.de, which covers just about everywhere in Europe and beyond (since the Serbian railway site was not responding).

Since I need to be in Sofia in the morning, I’m going to just stay up until the 1:50 am overnight trains crawls in sometime in the wee hours (supposedly Serbian trains are not always punctual–I’ll update this post to report on that when I get to Sofia). I can’t imagine that the border guards screw around with through trains in the egregious manner documented for buses!

Update: whether I would have faced problems with the bus or not, the train trip was tiring but completely hassle-free. I bought my ticket in the Nis train station, then came back after 1 am. The train was quite late; I think it finally left around 2:30. I purchased a couchette supplement on the train from the conductor for 470 dinars, which helpfully used up all my remaining Bulgarian dinars. The train was not very full, and I got an entire compartment to myself. Reassuringly, there was a sturdy-looking manual latch on the door, which allowed it to open a couple of inches but prevented anyone from entering. I got sheets, a pillow and a blanket, which allowed me to get a pretty decent few hours’ sleep. The passport control both leaving Serbia and entering Bulgaria was extremely slow but completely painless. It took about 3 hours, I think–I don’t remember clearly because by that point I was asleep most of the time. The bathroom stank but was not actually very dirty. No toilet paper, soap, or running water though (but the toilet did flush).

Bottom line: this is a good way to get from Serbia to Bulgaria. The train from Belgrade would probably be even better since it doesn’t leave in the early morning. It’s very slow, but you have a decent chance of arriving in Sofia reasonably rested, and it’s very cheap. I felt completely safe.

You don’t go to the Dalmatian coast for the food. You go there for the history, for the architecture and atmosphere of the towns, for the mountains, above all, to swim in water that looks like this:

Yes, it really does look like that.

But after all that swimming (or hiking, or whitewater rafting, or sea kayaking–I didn’t get to do any of these things, I was busy visiting archeological museums, churches, and various ruins, but they all sound great) you will have worked up a good appetite, and you will need to find something to eat. That’s when the trouble can start.

Menus on the Dalmatian coast seem to have remained unchanged since they were set by some Central Tourist Comissariat for Menu Planning back in the Tito era. After even a day or two, the same list of dishes (Dalmatian prsut, like Italian prosciutto, with local cheese; salads; three or four pasta dishes, almost always including spaghetti alla carbonara; grilled fish and meat) begins to seem almost stomach-turning, even if the food itself is very good (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t). I asked a few waiters and restauranteurs in Croatia why the menus are so repetitious, but the only reasonable-seeming explanation anyone put forward was that it was just easier that way, and a lot of people are lazy. No leads on my theory about former state control of the tourist diet.

One way to deal with this situation is to accept it as a good thing. If you graze on prsut, cheese, and salads, you can save a lot of money (Croatia has become fairly expensive) and probably lose weight as well. A sort of Dalmatian Atkins diet.

Or, you can seek out the few really good, and distinctive, eating spots as often as possible, saving calories and money when there’s nothing really good on offer and splurging for some really amazing meals here and there. I’ll come back to finish this post with a complete list of the best places I found to eat in Dalmatia, from Rijeka to Dubrovnik (and including a bit of Montenegro for good measure).

Traveling from Sarajevo to Serbia is not simple and not obvious. There is an incovenient obstacle in the way: the Republika Srpska, an autonomous region within Bosnia and Hercegovina controlled by Bosnian Serbs. Not to say anything against the Republika Srpska–I am sadly ignorant about it–but it is IN THE WAY.

There is a separate bus station in Serb-controlled Sarajevo, a 15 KM (about $10) taxi ride away, and all the international buses leave from there, including of course those going to Belgrade. The bus to Belgrade takes 9 hours.

It is also possible to get to Serbia by train. However, the route goes from Sarajevo to Banja Luka (in Republika Srpska; 4 hrs) and then from Banja Luka to Belgrade (about 12 hrs). That’s what the Lonely Planet says, anyway, and I have verified the existence of the train from Sarajevo that stops in Banja Luka (at least I think so). However, Banja Luka is far to the west of Sarajevo, while Belgrade is north and east. And there is only one train a day on each route. Finally, the official Serbian Railways site (just one of the many delightfully informative sites linked from this post) does not give information on trains from Banja Luka to Belgrade, which I find somewhat worrisome.

So, I think I am going to cut the Gordian travel tangle created by the Republika Srpska’s inconvenient presence, and fly. JAT Airlines has one daily flight at 6:30 am from Sarajevo Airport (which by the way has an absolutely amazing website, listing all flights and giving real-time information on flight status), and according to kayak.com the ticket is $159. Unfortunately jat.com does not support online booking, but there are plenty of travel agents in this neighborhood.

Finally, it appears that the Belgrade airport (which has an even more amazing website, complete with information on travel from the airport, hotels in Belgrade, and everything else you might want) is only 60 km from the place I want to go next: Sremska Mitrovica, the ancient city of Sirmium. Sremska Mitrovica has an impressive municipal website, linked to above. It even has an attractive and informative Flash animation on the town’s history–and I hate Flash.

On the municipal website, I found a link to the Bela Ruza (White Rose) Restaurant, which has rooms for rent. I’ve e-mailed them and I’ll see what happens. They give three phone numbers: +381 22 640 400, +381 22 640 644, and +381 63 54 11 76. The website gives both Serbian and a rather picturesque English translation, and the rooms look nice.

I had the unfortunate experience of finding out the hard way that my MasterCard debit card is blocked in several Balkan countries, including Bosnia and Hercegovina, Serbia, and Bulgaria (though it worked fine in Croatia and Montenegro).

According to this article by David Breitkopf for American Banker, MasterCard disapproves of such “country blocks” as an anti-fraud tool, but does not actually stop card issuers from imposing them. Visa has a similar policy.

Apparently this is much more common with small local banking institutions, especially credit unions, whose members do not tend to travel extensively overseas. I have e-mailed my credit union to see if they can take the block off, or at least give me a complete list of blocked countries so that I can be prepared in the future.

There is shockingly little information on the web about this practice. The article I linked to above is virtually the only thing I can find. Moral of the story: always have several different ways of getting money when you travel! It’s too bad that travellers’ checks (inconvenient as they often are) are becoming nearly obsolete. I feel unsafe carrying large amounts of cash with me when I travel, but it’s the only way to be absolutely certain you will have money wherever you go. 

Unfortunately, the new pre-paid “travelers’ check” cards carry tons of extra fees with them. For example, an American Express Travelers Cheque Card, if purchased in the US and issued in pounds or euros, imposes a commission of 3% over the current bank rate for changing your money. Then there is a $2.50 charge for each ATM withdrawal (or similar amounts for pound and euro denominated cards), and various other charges as follows (from Amex’s web site): 

This information is buried at the bottom of page 3 of the Terms and Conditions, of course. It doesn’t sound like a very good deal to me.

Finally, you are limited to the network of Express Cash ATMs, which is virtually non-existent in many parts of the world. I searched for ATMs in Bosnia and Hercegovina and the nearest were in Italy, though there is an ATM on every corner in Sarajevo! There are a number of locations in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, and they seem to be plentiful in general in Bulgaria.

On the same topic: when you travel in the former Yugoslav countries, the most convenient currency to carry is the euro. This is already the currency of Montenegro, though that country is a long way off from EU accession, and is the shadow currency of Bosnia and Hercegovina, accepted for most transactions at the current rate of two KM (Konvertibilnih Maraka, or Convertible Marks) to the euro. I had some euro coins with me when I got here and have been using them to pay for small purchases while I waited to figure out what was going wrong with my ATM card.

My cash supply is in Swedish krona (don’t ask!), which I’ve had no trouble changing, but certainly I couldn’t pay for anything with Swedish krona here. And the dollar seems quite obsolete. I had meant to take out a few hundred euros from an ATM in Italy at the beginning of my trip but forgot. Now I wish I had been more on top of things.

A terrific resource for booking rooms in Sarajevo is hostelbookers.com. They list 14 options for Sarajevo, including some of the large hotels, but mostly they really are small pension-type places, and the prices seem very good. I found a room for two nights at the Guesthouse Bašcaršija (hostelkonak@hotmail.com), which was recommended by the Lonely Planet Western Balkans guide (as noted on the booking website) and booked it online in about two minutes. Their confirmation e-mail was particularly informative. Unfortunately in Bosnia and Herzegovinia they only serve Sarajevo and Jahorina.

In Mostar, the place to stay seems to be the Motel Mostar (www.motel-mostar.de), which has a gorgeous website (in four languages) showing their newly constructed buildings, done in the local style rather than in a hideous modern hotel fashion. It looks like the opposite of a “motel” as most would imagine it. Unfortunately they are full for tonight.

Instead we are staying at the Pansion Most (00387 (0)36 552 528; fax 552 660; no e-mail or website as far as I can tell yet), which is also recommended by the LP. They only had two single rooms or a room with a double bed–which the receptionist amusingly referred to as a “French bed”–so we took the two single rooms, for 50 KM each. I hope it will be pleasant. I have had enough hotel room searching for today; it took me about an hour to book these two rooms. So, on to a new topic!

So, on my second trip to Croatia, I have finally made it to Dubrovnik. Let me get one thing out of the way first: this place is a total tourist trap. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as bad.

 Now that that’s been said, I can go on to explore some of the ideas that this city, Ragusa–now called Dubrovnik, but always, before it became a tourist trap, better known under the other name–has set moving in my mind. Because it may be a tourist trap, but it’s one not to be missed.

Ragusa must have been, until its surrender to Napoleon in 1808, the archetypal walled city. Walking its narrow streets today, one can begin to recover, in imagination at least, something of what it might have been to live in such a place. The territory controlled by the Republic of Ragusa, at its largest, covered perhaps a hundred and fifty kilometers of coastline in a narrow strip extending to either side of the city. The city itself is tiny–though impressive by the standards of Dalmatia, it is very much smaller than its greatest rival, Venice, not to mention Constantinople/Istanbul–heavily fortified, and strangely, faces inward. That is to say, its central street/plaza (known interchangeably, and appropriately, as both Plaza and Stradun), sits at the bottom of the city, while the narrow side streets rise steeply to either side towards the walls. The city therefore, looks upon itself, while presenting blank walls to the rest of the world.

What would it have been like to live in such a city, dominated as it was by a small number of families who traced their ascendancy back to the twelfth century and beyond? I’ve been reading Rebecca West, who in many ways is quite horrifying, and who expressed distaste for Dubrovnik. But she’s influenced me in an interesting way as well: prompting me to imagine more vividly, perhaps, the lives people led in the past, and particularly the lives of women. What was it like to be a woman of sixteenth century Ragusa? I can hardly imagine such a self-enclosed, self-referential world. One’s neighbors were, perhaps, only an arm’s length away across a narrow stone street–and they, their grandparents, and their grandparents’ grandparents, had all spent their lives trying to peer into your own and your ancestors’ windows, watching.

It was an absolutely inspired idea, though I didn’t really know it at the time, to start this trip in Venice. The Adriatic was Venice’s world for centuries, despite the efforts of various smaller cities to establish their own independence, and it shows in the architecture, art and culture of Dalmatia. Each of the cities we’ve visited along the Dalmatian coast–Senj, home of the Uskok pirates in the 16th century; Pag, at the foot of an incredible sheltered bay on the island of that name; Nin, a tiny walled town on a little island, once Roman Aenona; Zadar, once the great fortress of Zara; and now Trogir–is in some ways like a mini-Venice, with the great difference that the Serenissima herself never felt the need for walls, while these cities are all fortresses. The series will culminate with Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), the greatest of Dalmatia’s city-states and the only one never to be subjugated to Venice. So, to begin with a night in Venice itself, which felt so familiar finally, was the perfect start to this part of the trip.

Each of these towns–some tiny, some not quite so, Zara (now Zadar) being by far the largest and, on the evidence of its magnificent museum of Christian art, once very rich indeed–has a very similar feel, to the point that the details begin to blur. In a way that’s not such a bad thing, it’s a lesson in itself: this part of the Adriatic, Dalmatia, is a world unto itself, with a coherence of urban form and feeling that unifies the scattered settlements marking the dramatic, largely empty coast. Red tile roofs, white stone walls, narrow, winding streets–the place we stayed in Zadar for two nights was down an alley one could reach across with one arm–and above all, highly defensible sites.

Senj alone is on the mainland, in a tiny valley on the coast, just before the Velebit range rises straight from the water for the next 80 km or so. The town and its tiny port are dominated by the fortress of the Uskoks–at least, that’s who I think built it, I’ll need to check–today it’s the museum of the Uskoks, more or less, since the town is devoted to its pirate heritage, so that was what I came away thinking.

Pag itself is an island, though a large one. We got there on a traget, a ferryboat that goes back and forth between the coast at ?? and the island’s northern end. Note that although this ferry seems to run all day, even on Sunday, and is a service of Jadrolinija, the national ferry company, there was absolutely no information about it obtainable online or in print from the US. It cost us about 90 kuna for a car with two people, and took 11 minutes. The ferry was about to leave when we arrived, and as we crossed to Pag, another ferry was going in the opposite direction.

In fact, I tell a lie: our map, from the German map-maker ??, had the ferry route marked. So, if I had had that map when I planned this trip, I could have planned for the ferry. As it was, we made it without the slightest difficulty, and it made our day much more enjoyable. Not only was it convenient, but there’s something about a boat, even a rather humble ro-ro ferry that just goes back and forth over 11 minutes worth of sapphire Adriatic, that makes life seem more, well, lively.

But I digress. Pag town is not only on an island, but surrounded by water on two sides: its bay to the northwest, and salt pans to the southeast. Zara is on a peninsula that sticks up from the mainland like a tiny thumb on a giant mitten. Nin is perhaps the most perfectly situated so far: on a tiny island in a great, wide bay, with the sea on three sides and a lagoon separating it from the shore. Even today there is only a narrow bridge, one car wide, to link the walled town to land. Trogir, where we are now, is in the oddest spot: on another tiny island, this time between the mainland and another, large island, Čiovo, with a narrow channel on either side. One gets an overwhelming sense that these were cities that needed to defend themselves, again and again, all through the centuries.

It’s almost 6 am, and I’m finally done with all the work I had to finish before leaving for my trip. At 10 I fly to New York, then overnight on KLM to Venice. Kyla arrives there an hour after I do. We’re staying at the Pensione Seguso, and I’ve got a bunch of wonderful-looking restaurant recommendations. Maybe this time I’ll finally feel like I’m doing Venice right.

The tool I enjoyed most while planning this trip is, weirdly, made by Microsoft: Windows Live Local, as it’s moronically (and rather opaquely) titled. The places I was looking up are definitely NOT local to ME! But I had a great time using this tool, and I made a map that covers the first part of our trip in detail. Here it is: Balkans Trip Map