Beautiful Serbian national park, scary moments, crazy Romania, friendly people Belgrade - Black Sea When i left Belgrade my next couchsurfing invite was in Bulgaria ~ 400km from Belgrade so i had to camp somewhere. I wanted to speed up to get to Bulgaria quickly and just when i left Belgrade there were two french retired guys from Marseille who were also going to the black sea. We went on together but they couldnt talk much english and their approach didnt fit to mine. They didnt stop at nice places/cities, had a hostel/camping spot each night and didnt get in contact with the locals. When they went to their hotel i decided to go on. It was still nice to have some company. The day after on Wednesday 23.7. I met a French guy, Florent, and a French family, who are cycling around the world: Fred and Sonia with their children Selie and Olivia. There has been heavy rain and thunders for some nights so some parts of the bicycle road were pretty wet. At one point there was even a small rain water river that we had to cross. We had a great time riding through the very beautiful serbian djerdab national park along the danube. One day later i split up with the french family again, because Florent and me wanted to go a little faster. Together we went to Romania, were chased by several dogs and got to know the romanian way of life pretty well by just biking through many villages. Southern Romania and Northern Bulgaria are considered the poorest area of Europe. Just when we crossed the Serbian-Romanian border there were many, many dogs on the streets, the houses looked very old and barely renovated. The people are very friendly though. At a camping site the owners let us put up our tent for free, offered us dinner and made coffee for us. In every village people were cheering, children gave us high five and some came along for some meters on their bicycles. In this area there are almost as many horse and donkey driven wagons as cars. The people often tried to communicate with us, but they didnt know any language we could understand like french, spanish, english, german, polish or swedish. We crossed the border so Bulgaria because i got a couchsurfing invite by an engineer, Deyan, in Kozloduy. On Florents map Kozloduy was signed as a very small village just as all the others. Actually in Kozloduy there is the only Bulgarian nuclear power plant, which generates more than half of the Bulgarian energy and that is where Deyan is working. 5000 people are working there, its by far the biggest employer in the area and thats why Kozloduy is growing very much these days. Deyan is living in one of the houses, that are especially built for people working in the nuclear power plant and unfortunately there was just space for one more person. When we were sitting in a café, a french-bulgarian couple came to us and after a few minutes they offered Florent to stay at their parents place. When we met Iliyana and Wilfried again they said they couldnt offer their parents place any more but they paid a hotel room for Florent. We went to a restaurant with the French family, Deyan and one of his friends and we had a very good meal there. The french family was from Lyon, which i will pass by on my tour. I hope to see them again. Back on the romanian side of the danube there were lots of good looking but not really completed houses. Thats because there is a diffrent tax on houses that either finished or under construction. Even though the average salary is just 200€ some Romanians build nice houses but they dont complete so they have to pay less taxes. On tuesday 29.7. When we were looking for a place to camp there was a little rain so we waited a little to have a short time without rain so we could put up the tents. Unfortunately is was getting much worse and there was a huge thunderstorm. Florent saw a tiny house at the end of a little mud road a few hundred meters back. We decided to go back there to wait until the thunderstorm stops. It didnt stop and we didnt know what to do because we saw that there were people in that house recently so they would probabaly get back to work the next morning. At like 11pm there was a car entering that mud road and it stopped after a few meters. Two people were getting out of the car and they came towards us. I will never forget this scene. We were in a tiny, dirty house by absolute darkness in a poor country, those car lights were pointing at us, the dark silhouettes of these people were getting bigger combined with heavy rain and lightnings. Finally it was the farmer having a look at his plantation and when he saw us he offered us to sleep in his little house. Our 7th and last day together we went 150km to Giurgiu, Romania, and we took a hotel room there because the camping site shown in Florents map was not existing and it was raining again. From now on Florent went to Bukarest and i left the danube in direction of Varna, Bulgaria, at the black sea. It was very nice to have such great company. I enjoyed the time with Florent a lot! After 6 weeks and more than 3100km i reached Varna at the black sea. I went to a small hostel close to black sea in a village next to Varna and the first night i was the only guest there. The owner offered me food and we drank lots of tasty home made Rakija.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 09:53:17 +0000
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