Extreme Hotel Pamporovo

... simply put, ****ing brilliant. Australia Day 2009 goes down in the books as an absolute, dead set ball-tearer. Around about the early part of February, we were lucky enough to have a couple of visitors, Sharone and Katie, who came for a short stay with the stated intention of learning to snowboard. Doug and I had both accompanied Nas to the airport on separate occasions and between us, we reckoned we could manage to navigate our way back to the hotel from the airport without ...

... ice, and once the cord has been scraped off it's very slippery. That being said, we still had a ball. Even with all the stacks and ouchies, it was great to be back on the snowboards after almost 12months. We were a bit worried we might have forgotten how! Needlessly so, as it turns out. Check out the photo of Dougie's **** if you want to see just how often and how hard he fell on it ;). I fell over too, of course, just not so much on my ****. There's a bruise on my knee, but ...

... walk around. Then I saw the dive shop.. Oops thats where the wallet starts crying. Walked in, talked to this american/british/polish mix of a sort guy who talked me into doing some wreck dives (since there is absolutely nothing else to see in the black sea for diving). Cool. I like wrecks. At this point I was a little bored and thought what the heck lets spend some money. Waste of time. Damnit. Winds were up, seas were rough...so we did a ****** dive in ...

... 1075;радо 74;е. И в двата има и движе 85;ие, но и споко 81;ствие.

... snow and speed, most of which we still haven't picked up. You just sound like a ****** when you use it half-arsedly. It's all about, "shredding", "carving", "working the edges", "cutting a rail in", "bombing the slopes" and so on and so forth. (I feel like a poser any time I use any of these expressions, but it doesn't seem strange at all when Geoff or Bec or Mike spit 'em out). Our first attempts at snowboarding were naturally pretty shaky. If only ...

... the sign and headed off again down a different street, but with the same results. Convinced now, that by simple deductive reasoning, it HAD to be the last street, we forged ahead and found a complete absence of hotel Karov. At this point, we decided to throw pride to the winds and ask for directions. Finding someone to ask though, was slightly more difficult. Eventually though, we found a couple of people at a tiny little service station who spoke no ...

... No deposit no nothing. Wandered down to the local pub where we had a few drinks... till 3 in the morning with the locals. We were supposed to go mushroom picking at 6 in the morning. I slept in but Neil actually got up to see whether the bloke would be back to pick us up!

A very hippy kind of town with a gorgeous old town, and one of the best hostels i have stayed in with the token long term older resident running away from the real world, and the youngens sampling the local wines into the early hours of each morning...

... just a general store with a bounty of homemade concoctions behind the counter - chatting with him and his older friends. Nikolai had once been a history teacher. Each visit consisted of him bring out a new book on the downfall of communism in Bulgaria, or a model of an ancient warship to the table. These were long, exuberant nights that barely seemed to happen. Yoann had a handful of friends visiting from France as well, in addition to a ...

For some reason or other, I always happen to have the most odd entries into a new city. Before in Sofia it was the deal with the trams. In Plovdiv, it was still interesting, but at least there weren't eveil people involved.I decided to walk this time. Perhaps a reflection of my events in Sofia, perhaps not. But anyway I was walking along the pedestrian ways and I was having a great time seeing some new ...