International Lampoon's Bulgarian Vacation

Note: Everything I write here is completely true. There is no exaggeration. This is travelling at its extreme. Not for the faint of heart...

Friday 12/29/06 1:15 pm: Chris, our friends Nam and DuWane and I plan to leave the apartment in Chris' car for Bansko, Bulgaria for a long weekend/New Years/welcome Bulgaria to the EU trip

2pm: We leave

2:25 pm: We're on the bridge between Asia and Europe in Istanbul and Chris turns to me and says "I'm having a minor paperwork freak out. I think I need temporary international insurance*" *in addition to regular Turkish insurance. Why, i have no idea. We get off the highway several kilometers from his car paperwork company and sit in traffic for a little while. Finally, we get close and can see the building from the road. Chris says "I am going to go the back way to avoid traffic*" *There is generally tons of traffic in this area and we have had a disastrous experience in the past, so this made sense. About 20 meters onto the "back way" (another small highway) we see construction and realize there is actually no exit to take us where we want to go. We end up turning onto yet another highway and as we do, I see multiple cars backing up off the road. I took this to be a bad sign, but this does tend to happen here quite a bit, so we kept going. Unfortunately this little detour forced us to sit in stopped traffic for about 2 hours.

4:40 pm: We arrive back to the place where we changed to go to the "back way". We decide to do a chinese fire drill so DuWane can drive the car while chris runs to the company, which likely closes at 5.

5:10: In about 20 minutes and over 100$ later, Chris emerges from the building with the "international insurance"

7:30: No more unplanned stops, we're about a mile from the border where get a quick cafeteria-style dinner and visit one of the many horrifying, terrifying bathrooms that plagued us for the trip.

8:15 pm: We're through the first part of the border. Now all we need to do is have Chris stand in line with his car paperwork, including the fancy new insurance for awhile, get a stamp and go through. Keep in mind it is at least freezing, if not below while all of this happens. All of the cars at the border are "lined up" (in a haphazared, rules-free style parking lot) while Chris waits and DuWane and I buy booze at duty-free and start drinking it to stay warm.

8:45 pm: Chris comes back to the car. "There's something wrong with my paperwork. I need to go over there and talk to someone." (points back toward our original border check.) DuWayne and I sip a little more warming liquer.

9:30 pm: Chris walkes back to the car, gets into the back seat, and at this unusual placement, before he even spoke the words "We're f*$ked" I knew something was wrong. Apparently there was a misprint. Not on the new insurance, which I'm not sure they even looked at, but on his original car registration, which I'm sure his paperwork company looked at multiple times without noticing. The end result is, after 7 1/2 hours that we'd never get back, we can't take the car across the border. Chris says the border guards say we could try to hop on a bus going our direction and, nice Turks that they are, tell him of a hotel nearby where he can leave the car. We aren't sure this is going to work but for the sake of the apartment that we've already paid for a week's lodging (even though we have to be back at work in 5 days) we decide to give it a shot.

9:45 pm: Chris leaves us with all our luggage on the side of the border, near the 3 tiny duty free shops and goes to park his car. We are standing with our luggage, freezing (eventually I couldn't feel my fingers and toes) and sneaking into the same 3 duty free shops over and over again with tour bus groups, pretending to be interested in the carts of cigarettes with huge warning labels stating "smokers die younger" and "smoking reduces sperm count" for a few seconds of heat.

11 pm: This is the first time the phrase "Where's Chris" was used on the trip. As far as we knew, he just went to park the car close by so I was starting to get nervous. I called his cell phone, he answered, in a hushed tone and enlightened me to the fact that he was in the office of the head border guard who was attempting to extort first $4,000 from him which was reduced, due to the efforts of the "good cop" in the room to a mere $1,000. After multiple attempts at telling them that he is just a poor "ogretmen" (silent 'g' and it means teacher) they eventually believe him and send him on his way. Meanwhile, I made several lame attempts at finding us a host bus. I was quite proud of my Turkish, which while didn't amount to a ride for us, showed me that I knew how to say "Plovdiv (town we needed to get to in Bulgaria)? Ummm...4 people. OK, UM. Hmmm. Big car problem. I, and 4 friends. We go Plovdiv. But car problem. We go, but no car." then I pointed at him and the bus. And he actually knew what I was saying. But it doesn't help us at all. Finally, Chris gets back, and feeling guilty (though it was not his fault his paperwork had problems) he is determined to get us on a bus.



11:30 pm - 12:30 am: Chris finds us a bus. It is a bunch of Turks going into a part of Bulgaria I didn't know and their tour guide was more than happy to take a bunch of sad "Yabanci"(s) (prounounced Yabahnja's, means foreigners) on as a charity case. Apparently going through a border on a bus is even more of an undertaking than in a car. And don't get me wrong here, I was greatful to these people for bringing us across the border. At an American border, crossing into Canada let's say, if a group of foreign people who don't speak your language (very broken requests for bus access aside) asked for your help in crossing the border, people would likely think you were a terrorist, or a drug mule (oh yes, that's in the story too...we'll get to it later. But I digress...Each person has to get off the bus (please keep in mind the weather I mentioned before. Oh yes, and I wore my thin socks so as to keep my wool ones clean for skiing) and stand at the guard gate so he could flip through each passport. We all have to stand there until the whole bus (these are big Coach-type buses) has had their passports checked. Then we get back on the bus and drive about 3 meters and wait for the customs agent to come by. At this point, we all get back off the bus (ahem, freezing) and stand with all of our bags for the customs agent to check us. At this point (and this isn't the drug mule-ing I'm refering to, I'll come back to that later) I am a little nervous, because the kind lady who let us on the bus handed me a duty free back filled with cigarette cartons and explained to me (I think) that the cigarettes in the bag would be what 3 or 4 people could take across the border, so if I could just hold them and say that they are mine and my friends', well, that would be great. I'm happy to help, but it's been about 10 hours so far, I'm tired and confused and as we get off the bus, I forget the butts. I needn't have worried about that at the moment, because the more pressing concern was the woman attempting the comic Tom and Jerry or Wil E Coyote style tiptoe behind the customs agent, which he OF COURSE saw and which pissed him off to no end. At this point he lined us all up again, started to look through each person's bag again and started pulling people out of line. In the middle of this he gave some sort of speech, of which I understood "Prime Minister" and "cigarettes." The tour lady gave some sort of speech as well, of which I understood "I don't want" and again, the topic of the night "cigarettes." After this, customs man gets back on the bus (this is where I really start feeling freaked out about "my" cigarettes, but I think tour lady might have pulled the stupid foreigner ha-ha card for customs man so I was off the hook) and looked around for awhile. After this we all get back on the bus. Yay! I think, We're free to go! But of course that wouldn't happen! What was explained to me later was this this was likely a group of lower class Turks and the border guards felt like they could bully them (especially as they are now big-shot EU members) so they were taking advantage.



12:30 am - ..... 3:30 am: We sit on the bus. Some people get called off the bus. They come back on the bus. Many, many other buses pass our bus. We pull forward about 10 feet. We sit some more. The aforementioned drug mules come onto the bus. Exchange what was possibly money with the bus driver. They play rintones loudly on their cellphones and chat, also loudly with the driver. People start smoking. On the bus. One man, who had successfully hidden the contraband cigarettes from customs agent, started stuffing many, many packs of them into every part of himself he could find. As Chris and I had seats in the front of the bus, and he was in the entranceway, we got to see it all. And through all of this, the amazing thing is that no one was freaking out. Could you imagine being stuck on the border for hours and hours and not getting upset. They started having SING-ALONGS! and DANCING! on the bus! It was amazing. I had to go into a kind of mental hibernation so as not to freak out myself. Luckily our group of 4 was amazingly calm as well. We were about 1/2 of a kilometer from our car and had been for the past 7 hours. You could really freak out.



FINALLY....The last 'prisoner' was brought back onto the bus and we started lumbering away. After a 1+ hour trip, on which the other passengers began to think of us as mascots or pets, telling us to sit down and relax whenever the bus would stop and we thought it was where we got off (for yes...part 2 of our adventure), we finally arrived in Hravsko (or something like that. All the signs are in cyrillic. It's not helpful.)



5 am: We negotiate with a taxi drive to take us, essentially across the country, for 100 euros (I know this map is tiny, but Hraskovo or whatever is close to where Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria meet and Bansko, is almost at the Macedonian border). We are finally sitting. And thrilled about the prospect of some actual sleep. We pile into the tiny taxi, with our bags, Chris' skis and the 4 of us, lean our heads on the seat-backs and ....sit up with a start when our taxi driver decides that now is the right time to play Tupac's greatest hits. for 3 1/2 hours. OK, fairs fair, he played Tupac for about hours, and then, as the sun was coming up, as we headed into the mountains, he switched to Enigma. It was the perfect end to our travels.


8:45am: Nearly 18 hours after we began, and thanks to Chris' amazing visual memory based on his last visit to Bulgaria, we arrive at our barely marked Aparthotel, the Montblanc apartments. We walk in, a bit punch-drunk, give them our reservation name and await real sleep, finally. However, as we've now actually come to expect, there's a glitch. Our reservation is nowhere to be found. Of course. After attempting the art of patience (quite difficult after our "evening") we decided to go next door and get breakfast, assured the problem will be solved when we return. We had a great breakfast of omlettes and (a special treat when you live in a Muslim country) ham, we found out that the restaurant had rooms available, so we keep that in the back of our minds and head back to the Mont Blanc. We get back and they had done nothing on our reservation, had nothing to do to help us. All we wanted was our money back, but for some reason that was not in their vocabulary. After another hour or so, it is now....

10:30 am: I am laying in the sauna of Mont Blanc to clear up some of my bone-chill and eventually the guys come in to tell me some good news, they are planning to upgrade us to "the best hotel in Bansko" with pool! sauna! steamroom! much nicer than where we are now. Success! Something worked out! Haha ... A driver comes to pick us up and take us to our palace. He's about, ohhhh 85 and has no. idea. where to go. This is a small ski town, granted a new building is going up daily, and shouldn't be that hard. I mean, it shouldn't take 1 HOUR of driving in circles to find our place.

11:45 am: We finally arrive at our destination and find, not the luxurious residence we were described, but a place fully under construction, with zero amenities. No pool. No steam room. No sauna. No internet even, which was ubiquitous in the advertising of the apartments in the town. And the receptionist had never heard of us, or our plight. We were certain the driver had taken us to the wrong place. After I (I fully admit this, felt horrible and apologized to her many times before) yelled at this poor woman, who eventually was kind enough to even offer me her very own bottle of water because I had requested some, she called the hi - i'm working on a blog post now . manager and we found out we WERE in the right place and had been scammed. But ... we could use the amenities of the hotel down the road. For 15 euros. Per person. Per day. I was of the opinion that we shouldn't have even had to pay for our room, let alone anything extra, but luckily Chris got on the phone with the people we originally rented from, and hearing him madder than I ever have, he got us free passes to the spa for the whole time we were there...Finally, a little over an hour later, our room was ready and at

1:30 pm: We finally sat down and had a nap.

More to come but writing this has made me relive it and I'm now exhausted and must sleep!