Bulgaria is back on the tourist network with a post-Bloom
bang. For £68 you can now buy a return air ticket to Sofia, hire a car for a week and have another week in a Black Sea resort. The hotel bills during your week's motoring are paid by you: 30s. a day all-in. You can leave the car in Varna and fly home from there.
Balkantourist (represented in London by Anglo-Bulgarian Travel, 7 Dering Street, London, WI) has contrived to arrange for car-hirers to drive into Rumania, Greece and Turkey, which gives them an unprecedented chance to see the Balkans from within, and not just fleetingly. Bulgaria is not a large country (though I used to think that it was because of the 'big Bulgarian problem' that cropped up in history texts), but it is very beautiful, and in many ways strikingly different in character, even from its neighbours.
Varna struck me as calmly Edwardian. Turnovo, ignoring the traffic and the occasional tank or armoured car, as a fairy city, perched above the winding Yantra, serenaded by night- ingales. Plovdiv also feels pre-First World War, relaxed, cheerful, not rich but enjoying life. Only Sofia, with its quasi-Parisian boulevards, seems close to this half of the century and the grim concept of the Iron Curtain, perhaps because of the Dimitrov mausoleum, perhaps because of Western prejudice aroused by the presence of, for example, the state department store Zum, a shabby imitation of Moscow's Gum, the cur- rency control. But these are small matters in the shadow of the Vitosha mountains, on holiday.
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