TravelStream™ news feed for member karana on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/karana en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:41:28 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256136901/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256136901/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256136901/tpod.html Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:41:28 -0400 Sue's Jottings

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Athens, Attica, Greece

More of H's Notes
We took a taxi driven by a fellow called Dimitrios to the Athens Central Hotel which is situated right alongside the fruit market and has pictures of fruit covering the glass frontage on the ground floor so as to blend into the environment and make it difficult for tourists to find the entry! Our room was on the seventh floor and the view of the Acropolis from the back of the hotel as well as from the roof was spectacular.
I insisted that Sue have lie down since she was feeling poorly and I had a walk in the light rain around the area, marvelling at the meat and fish markets across the square from the hotel where the noise, smells and jostle were evocative of a former era. There was flower market in the square nearby in front of the Bank of Athens and I wandered through this to Omonia Square where I temporarily lost my way. I asked some policemen the way whilst they were questioning what looked like a Slavic guy who was with a short unattractive woman of similar ethnic origin who had mascara-ed eyelids and could well have been a prostitute for whom he was the pimp. There were some other buxom and scantily dressed ladies sitting at cafes nearby who could well have answered to the same job description! The policeman warned me to be careful but I must admit that I have never felt threatened in this city despite what we read on blogs about Omonia before we came over.
After a bite of lunch we set off for a walk which took us past the National Library and University with its magnificent statues of Athena and Apollo on columns as well as the seated statues of Sophocles and Plato. Eventually we found our way to Kolonaki which was much closer than we had thought when we went up Lykavittos Hill. There we had a coffee at an expensive cafe together with a "wicked" chocolate cake heated up which we shared. It drizzled all afternoon but it didn't dampen the spirits of the young Athenians in cafes around the tiny Kolonaki Square. The shops there have some very expensive name brand gear which we looked at but were not tempted by. There would seem to be a fair amount of money in Athens with its population of 5 million out of a total population for Greece of 11 million, since there was no shortage of prestige cars and people spending money in expensive restaurants and shops. The spectrum weighs heavily in favour of the poorer people though and the cheaper shops and markets are well supported.

On our way back down Odos Stadiou a rat-faced fellow opened a map and asked directions to the Acropolis, and whilst we were in the process of pointing this out on the map a plain-clothes policeman identified himself and asked if there was a problem. He said that lots of Turks and Russians were involved in the drug trade and that being approached as we had been was their modus operandi. He examined the fellow's passport and smelled the money from his pocket. He also had look at Sue’s passport and the money in my pocket before saying we should move on. He seemed to be questioning the fellow for some time after we left. Interesting!
Back at the hotel we looked at photos and then went to have a meal in neighbouring Psiri where we ate at the Paragouraki Tiverna which is housed on two levels in an old stone built building on a corner. I had Souvlaki and Sue enjoyed cabbage rolls. We walked back to the hotel where we took some photos from the roof of the surrounding countryside in perfect conditions with no wind to blur the shots.
We enjoy exploring places on foot and mixing in with local cultures.
SUNDAY 18/10/2009

After a later rise on a fine but not overly hot day we had breakfast in the mezzanine floor of the hotel then we walked to Syntagma where the Sunday changing of the guard took place. There was a good crowd at Syntagma and we took some excellent shots. The soldiers wear a pleated skirt with 400 pleats, each one representing a year of Ottoman occupation. They also wear pompoms on their shoes and march in slow exaggerated leg elevated fashion.
Next we walked to Monostiraki station whence the flea markets stretched as far as Thisio.
Then to the Benaki Museum which is housed where the eponymous Benaki had his home and is a marble structure as regards floors and staircases. It houses the best ethnic costume collection Sue has ever seen as well as artefacts from all of the various eras and foreign occupations of this ancient city and country. It was well worth the visit and case in point for taking the advice of the Lonely Planet tourist guide. We made our way back to the hotel through Kolonaki and then along Panepistimiou (El. Venizelou) before crossing Klafthmonos Square and wandering through the back streets.
In the evening we walked past Agiou Dimitriou church to the restaurant area and had a lovely authentic Greek meal complete with luscious salad in the Boutique Kreation where our remaining cash of 30 euros was enough to pay for the food.

We will be back here since there is much of the city and the rest of Greece and the islands that we would like to see together.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256135803/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256135803/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256135803/tpod.html Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:12:11 -0400 Sue's Jottings

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Cairo, Egypt

H's Notes - again
This was our Egyptian day and it began with an early alarm as we woke to find ourselves berthed in Alexandria. We went up to the Lido for breakfast and then there was a bit of a wait whilst the Egyptian customs officials got the passports sorted out, much less efficiently it would seem than the Israelis did a few days ago. Eventually however we were issued with the passports in the Queen's Lounge and joined the long queue for disembarkation to the waiting buses. Our guide for the day was a liberated 28 year old Egyptian woman called Sarah and our driver was an obese Nasser look-alike by the name of Sayeed whose driving throughout the day was safe and excellent if somewhat impatient with the other traffic. He and other drivers spent a lot of time on their horns in driving conditions which back home would be considered disordered. The weather was fine and the temperature reached 30 degrees by midday. The road wound through the suburbs of Alexandria which has a population of 7 million and seemed rather grubby with lots of litter and many dun coloured residential blocks. We passed through the tollgate on to the desert highway to Cairo and the initial part of the passing countryside had lots of vegetable and other plantations which slowly gave way to frank desert sand the nearer we got to Al Qahirah. We reached Cairo at just after ten o'clock and drove straight to the Pyramids at Giza which is surprisingly adjacent to the city itself. The unfortunate part of the bus trip today was the short time that we were allowed at the various attractions and there was s sense of rush throughout. We stopped at two spots at the Pyramids and once at the Sphinx. At all of the spots we were assailed by aggressive touts, none more so than at the second pyramid stop where we eventually ended up having our photos taken on camels in front of the pyramids and then had a barney with one of the camel owners about the price. We paid US$20 for two camels which was way over the score in any event and he still wanted more. By this stage my blood was beginning to boil and words were exchanged but no more money. At the Sphinx Sue and I parted ways so as to be able to get different photos. It was a dull day with plenty of smog from the nearby city and the shots came out well when we eventually got them on to the laptops.

The Pyramids were overwhelming but yet a little smaller from a distance than we had anticipated. It was only on close inspection that their true grandeur and complexity became obvious. What an immense job it must have been to cart all those huge blocks and then build them so accurately. I read somewhere that the length of the base on all four sides is something like 900 feet and that the maximum discrepancy between all four sides is only 9 inches! What an incredible feat of engineering given the crudity of the instrumentation at that time nearly 5 thousand years ago. The Sphinx was larger than I had been given to believe and the main block is so large that there is no land-based crane in the world that could lift it. We were given 15, 20 and then 25 minutes at the consecutive stops before being driven into the city to a shop for us to be unloaded and led into where we were allowed 30 minutes!?

Admittedly there was some lovely work available in this shop but the commercialism was the overriding and off-putting feature of the day. There is a tackiness about the Egyptian custodianship of one of the wonders of the world which leaves a bad taste.

We had lunch at the Meridien Hotel in a very large dining room where the food was excellent and wine was included. We were then loaded on to the bus again for the slow crawl in heavy traffic across the Nile twice with a built up island intervening and finally to the Museum of Antiquities. We were given whisperers to wear and our guide took us on a very rapid tour of the highlights of this splendid facility with so many priceless and ancient Egyptology treasures. The highlight of course was the death mask of Tutunkhamen made of pure gold and weighing in at over 11kgs. with lapis lazuli inlays. It was truly impressive and more so given the age in which it was fashioned. This has been a recurring theme on the trip with ancient places and artefacts being so expertly made. There were other exhibits which fascinated us in the non-air conditioned museum – kept this way to preserve the artefacts at the temperature which they had survived in for millennia – including large coffins and caskets which fitted into one another in Russian doll fashion, something which we found difficult to envisage when seeing them separately. There was also a section for the mummified remains of animals which were in amazingly recognisable condition after so many years. Once the flock had been gathered it was then on to the bus again for the crawl out of Cairo in the late afternoon traffic and then back to Alexandria on the desert road. For some reason the air conditioning on the bus was jacked up to an ambient temperature of 16-17 degrees which we found quite cold. Sue was beginning to experience the early symptoms of a viral RTI and this cold environment certainly didn’t help matters. The trip seemed to take forever and it was eight o’clock before we finally arrived back at the Rotterdam. There were many people who went to Cairo and the buses drove in convoy with an armed plain clothes guard on each bus. They must still be so concerned about fundamentalist terror threats.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256135699/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256135699/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256135699/tpod.html Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:59:54 -0400 Sue's Jottings

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Ashdod, HaMerkaz, Israel

H's Notes
We awoke as the ship berthed in Ashdod and watched as a seemingly endless procession of buses began to make its way on to the docks. Our passports had been checked by the Israelis on board and we were given them back yesterday with a loose shore embarkation slip in the passport but no stamp since if we were to go to an Arab country we wouldn't be able to enter with an Israeli stamp imprinted.

We took the bus at quarter past seven and out guide was an Israeli born fellow called Yehuda whose parents left Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s. He was interesting to an extent but as the day wore on we found his trenchantly nationalistic views a bit hard to stomach. He seemed to have a very hard attitude towards the Arabs despite the fact that his kids went to school with some of them. He had a hard edged and we found ourselves turning off his commentary, simply seeing the sights and making sure that we didn’t get lost or separated from the group – No. 7 - in the melees at the various sites we visited, so crowded were they. The bus trip from Ashdod to Jerusalem was a bit of a revelation for me since I had no idea of just how hilly the area is. We passed several areas which seemed affluent and which he said were areas where the Arab people lived.
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Kusadasi, Turkish Aegean Coast, Turkey

H's Notes
We woke to find ourselves mooring in Kusadasi. Our tour to Ephesus had been planned for the afternoon so we took ourselves off for a walk along the seafront and out to Pigeon Island which gives Kusadasi its name.
The tour to Ephesus was quite stunning and the ruins were far more extensive than we had ever envisioned. According to our guide Ihsan who was born in Greece but who has lived in this area for over 30 years, only a quarter of the Ephesus complex has been unearthed. He spoke all through the tour about the extensive history of the place with pride and passion.

The ruins are buried under layers of earth and this process whereby a thriving community gets lost over centuries by being interred is a mystery to us really. The quality of the stonework at Ephesus mirrored that we had seen in Greece and the expertise of the stone workers astonished us. Also the extent of the complex with its way down to what used to be the Aegean Sea until the harbour became silted over seemed out of sync with the rest of Europe in its time of immersion in the Dark Ages. So much knowledge was lost or suppressed at that time by those who contributed nothing to the rational and wonderful development of the world. The civilisations that created places such as Ephesus and the Acropolis were so advanced and their writings and thoughts were burned in the large libraries they had created by the pagan ignorant and the Christian destroyers. How sad. We walked up to 2 kilometres in the complex and passed several temples, the treasury and a couple of amphitheatres.

Finally we ran the gauntlet of the souvenir shops at the exit to get to the bus which took us back to Kusadasi which has a population of 60,000 which swells to one million in summer. Remind us never to venture here then! There we were tempted to go to see a demonstration of silk winding and carpet weaving at a carpet shop. It's hard to cedit that a silk worm has one mile of thread in the cocoon and we saw the teasing out of this thread and its spinning into multi-strand threads used for carpet making. The owner had his employees lay out many carpets on the floor for us and we were impressed with the variety of colours and different materials used in their weaving. One type of silk carpet had 650 knots per square inch! We demurred at spending anything on the admittedly splendid carpets so they lost interest in us and we went back to the boat.
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Istanbul, Turkey

H's Notes
We awoke to find ourselves approaching the berth in Istanbul at Karakoy. There was a long line of buses waiting to take the travellers around but we opted to do our own thing and glad we were by the end of the day that we had so decided. After breakfast we took the shuttle bus across the Galata Bridge over the section of the commencement of the Bosphorus called the Golden Horn. The bus dropped us off near the Grand Bazaar where we headed first and were astounded at the variety of the shops, the richness and variety of the goods on sale and the cleanliness of the place. This latter was evident throughout the centre of the city but when we mentioned the fact that we had seen very little graffiti to one of the guides he suggested that things were very different in the suburbs! The displays of jewellery, clothes. lanterns, food, etc in bright colours created a magic kaleidoscope and we found the Turkish folk to be uniformly pleasant and not quite as pushy as we had been led to believe. They often spoke several languages and seem a proud people. This is something that the Australian troops found out at Gallipoli and there has existed a mutual respect since then. I regard Kemel Ataturk as one of the great men of the 20th century in the way he rebuilt his country into a secular Islamic state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire He is revered in his country and pictures of him hang all over the place as well as the Turkish flag. The origin of the flag was apparently related to a soldier whom Ataturk saw dying of a chest wound with lots of blood under crescent moon and a star.

After the Grand Bazaar we walked along the tramway road to the area of the city with the three iconic buildings which we visited in their geographical sequence from west to east. Our first stop was the Blue Mosque with its soaring domes and lapis lazuli mosaics. The fact that it was built all that time ago makes it all the more remarkable in terms of its size and decorative magnificence. There was a solitary Muslim man praying in a side corridor and this symbolised the intensity of the religious feeling for me. As with all the other attractions we visited in the course of the day it was very crowded and managing to get unobstructed views for photos was difficult but not impossible with the right lens. It was constructed by Sultan Ahmet and there are 21,403 azure coloured tiles, 16 balconies on the six minarets – this is how the Blue Mosque is distinguished from the Hagia Sofia from a distance – with each balcony honouring the 16 sultans of the empire. Sue covered her head as a mark of respect and had several photos taken in the women's prayer area.
We walked across the garden divide between the Blue Mosque and the Hagia (Ai ya) Sofia and did a tour there too. It is no less magnificent in its massive construction, which is truly impressive especially when you consider that it was commenced in the 6th century on the orders from the Emperor Justinian and took thousands of workers more than five years to complete. The paintwork is getting a little worn and the Christian symbols are visible underneath the overlaid Islamic work. It was declared a national monument by Ataturk in 1935. The unsupported domes have withstood centuries of earthquakes and war and although they have been repaired several times they have never fallen. The fact that Istanbul lies on a fault line makes this all the more remarkable. We were able to wind up through passages alongside the main building to a balcony overlooking the floor area and in the passage there was sited an exhibition of Christian mosaic images which the Muslim folk were looking at with interest. How crazy is religious conflict when you consider that all the world's major religions have their origins in the same monotheistic propositions of one of the Hebrew elders some 2,500 years before Christ was born. I have been reading a book about the Fourth Crusade in which Constantinople was sacked and it makes even less sense that Christian slaughtered Christian in that reprehensible event. Once again there was a battle for the best photography spots and I even saw a couple of Orthodox priests with their cameras out and clicking!

We found a quiet restaurant just alongside the Hagia Sofia for lunch and then wandered down the back roads to the Topkapi Palace with houses built into the old walls in very attractive fashion. The Topkapi is a sprawling complex with lots of Islamic art and design. We were getting a bit weary of the traipsing and the crowds by this stage so made out way back to the meeting point for the shuttle bus and took the trip through peak hour traffic back to the Rotterdam.

SATURDAY 10/10/2009

Up early for walk across the Galata Bridge with all the fishermen trying their luck along the way. Quite how they don’t tangle their lines is a mystery since there are hundreds of them. We spent time in the Spice Market and Sue found this to be more interesting than the Grand Bazaar. We bought some turkish delight and halva. The ship sailed in the mid-morning and we spent time on deck taking photos of the disappearing shore line as we set course for Kusadasi tomorrow.
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Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Gosh it looks like a dust bowl here! The weather has apparently been shocking while we were away, dust storms, super hot and not a driop of rain for a month. Lucky we brought some back with us and it rained a little the day we arrived, and more expected in the next few days.

H was home for a day and a half before he set off again, for Melbourne this time.
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Dubai, United Arab Emirates


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Sochi, Krasnodarskiy Kray, Russia

Another day and another port with our ship arriving in Sochi and mooring off the coast. Sochi is the longest city in Europe, stretching some 140 kilometres along the Black Sea coast and there were beaches and seaside attractions evident in the area alongside the harbour. After breakfast we waited in the Queen's Lounge for our excursion to be called and were amongst the first off the ship, with the bureaucracy from the port taking time to set up downstairs. It is the usual story with the socialist regimes - lots of officialdom, multilayered processing, lack of grace and politeness and duplication seem to be the order of the day. We were given a guide called Anna, a very attractive young lady of 24 from the Ural area who and wasn’t shy about telling of her personal life when questioned by nosy guests. We took a trip out to the future Winter Olympic site at Krasnaya Polyana in the Caucasus Mountains. The road went through eight tunnels with there being only a single road to the Olympic site. Another road as well as a railway line which will take visitors to the mountain site in 27 minutes is being built by Italian engineers. Our guide Anna was starting work as an interpreter with them the following day. She was telling us how people find money hard to come by in Sochi and need to do two jobs to make ends meet with a single roomed flat costing US$300 per month which is the salary she was receiving when she first arrived in the city.

On our way out of the city it rained lightly and we passed by the new airport building which is not yet completed despite a charade opening for the benefit of the visiting Olympic committee. The overall impression we had of the Olympic preparations is that they are at a very crude nascent stage and that there is a long way to go if they are going to be ready in time for the actual event. We stopped for a look at a valley in the Caucasus Mountains where new road and rail tunnels were in evidence before having a meal of sweet cake and tea at a honey establishment which had a very attractive garden and backdrop. There the lady of the house / business gave an interpreted talk about honey.

Next we went to the actual Olympic site which is currently only a chairlift station and quite few small stalls and shops. There is a crudity and simplicity about the Russia we saw that accords with the written views we have previously come across. Is it something to do with the Russian personality or the regimes they have endured or both? Probably a melange of the two one would think. They are hard, often cruel and cunning, folk and have plodding attitude which shines through in their dealings with others. This latter applies particularly to officialdom of whom we saw examples on the way back to Sochi at one border point with Georgia where the pot-bellied policeman smoked and swaggered and gave hard looks to traffic.

There was a serpentine line of returning passengers waiting to get on the tenders at the harbour as only one tender was allowed on the dock at a time despite there being plenty of room for more, and once we had finally got back to the ship – "Welcome home" was our greeting from an officer.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256065802/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256065802/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1256065802/tpod.html Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:33:26 -0400 Sue's Jottings

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Sevastopol, Crimean Peninsula, Ukraine

In Sevastopol (which they pronounced Sivastopple), we were taken by tender to the quay where we boarded buses for the various excursions. Ours was conducted by a very knowledgeable and attractive guide called Helena who had a throaty laugh and nice sense of humour. She conducts classes in tour guide instruction as well as doing her daytime work as a guide herself. Ukraine separated from Russia

We drove past the harbour which the Russians are renting for $97million per annum along with some buildings which fly the Russian flag after an agreement had been struck with the Russian government once Ukraine received its independence in 1991 Their first president had declared the whole Russian navy present in the harbour to be the property of the Ukraine. Yeltsin allowed this for a while as he was occupied with the split up of the USSR but in 1997 the Russian admirals took the navy back and allocated only 18% of it to Ukraine, so they don't need all the resources in the harbour and rent them back to Russia. Good deal for both apparently.
This was the port for the Russian Black Sea fleet during the Cold War days and its strategic importance was recognised by Catherine the Great all those years ago, since which time it has served as a holiday spot for mostly wealthy Russians and also foreigners as well as being of extreme naval importance.

We passed over some hills from which Lord Raglan supervised the Battle of Balaklava and sent in the Light Brigade on their futile and carnage-filled charge. The road ran along the bottom of the valley and is called the Valley of Death road in commemoration. Nowadays it is surrounded by vineyards and is peaceful. We drove to the south coast of the Crimean Peninsula and this entailed driving over mountains and descending to the coast along a winding and picturesque road. I hadn't realised that this part of the world was so mountainous. The area we went to is called the Crimean Riviera. It is certainly just as beautiful as the similar area in France with less people and a very different history and population demographic. We passed the dacha used by Gorbachov at the time of the collapse of the USSR and where he was effectively kept out of sight for while at a crucial period. Soviet politics is difficult to understand and how a man even a prominent one like Gorbachov escaped the chop while simple folk were hounded by the security orgaisations shows that there was law for one and another law for someone of different status. To that extent they are really no different to rampant capitalism and its cronyism and corruption.

Our first stop was to view the Swallow’s Nest castle which hangs on a rock overlooking the coast and was built by a German who tried to persuade a beautiful ballet dancer to live there with him but she soon tired of the inactivity despite the beauteous charms of the castle. There were the inevitable stalls there selling souvenirs as well as two hustling young fellows with a pair of superb eagles which they attempted to sit on the tourists’ arms and then take photos for a price.

Down the hill we went to Lavardia Palace which was the residence of the Tsar and his family for some five years just prior to WWI, at which time he relocated to St.Petersburg. It was the location for the Yalta Conference in April 1945 when Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill discussed the post-war division of Europe amongst other things. The palace contains many photos and recreations of this event which I had learned about in history at school but never imagined that I would ever be at the site where it all happened.One American lady pointed to the picture of Roosevelt and asked me "Is that Stalin"!

We were allowed some time to walk in the gardens of the palace before being rounded up and taken to the luxurious 2,000 bed Yalta Hotel for lunch in their huge dining room where the meal was served and local band and dancers entertained us. Their costumes were splendid and they changed several times to accompany their different dance routines. There were two singers, a male with a great bass voice and a Lothario-like appearance and soprano. The tour group enthusiastically joined into the singing and even the dancing in the ultimate piece., helped along by the wine and vodka at each place setting! The food was tasty and we are certainly being well looked after gastronomically on this cruise. The trip back to Sevastopol was a somewhat drowsy on for most folk and the commentary was mercifully sparse. The Ukraine is still in its post-communist infancy and the long shadow of the socialist oppression is stiil palpable to a point although they seem to be refreshingly honest and open about their current political set-up and the corruption / veniality of the politicians and those who are immensely wealthy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As usual the rich have the lot and the poor work two jobs to get by.

We were miffed today that the visas we had spent so much money in getting for Ukraine weren’t necessary, even to the point of the customs official smiling when he saw them and saying, "No need!"
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1255881292/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1255881292/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/karana/1/1255881292/tpod.html Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:32:56 -0400 Sue's Jottings

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Varna, Varna, Bulgaria

We woke up to find ourselves moored at the quay in Varna with a long breakwater wall on which people could walk, a Captain Cook office and fish restaurant in a harbour-side building, and quite a few small vessels tied up nearby.
Our first stop was at the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin where there was commerce going on both inside and outside the very ornately decorated building with high walls and domes painted in predominantly blue hues. Outside the church were strategically placed stalls selling souvenirs with several grim-faced stallholders peddling their wares. We boarded the bus again and set off on a drive of an hour and a half into the countryside on the road heading for Sofia. The countryside described by our guide, a tall handsome Slav, as being very beautiful was certainly undulating, fertile and not unattractive but lacked a little something to make it anything special. There were crops planted but we saw only a few cows and sheep with what looked like a shepherd in attendance at one point. Here was the impression of utilitarianism which seems to be the inevitable consequence of being post-communist, an impression reinforced by our travels in Ukraine and even more so in Sochi a few days later. There is a blunting of public joie de vivre and a grimness of public attitude which must reflect the oppressive circumstances under which the newly democratic states must have existed under communism. Those at the top of the political food chain got the perks and those under the heel got on with their lives in a suppressed sort of way, all the while looking over their shoulders to make sure that they were not coming under surveillance or bringing themselves to the notice of the authorities. It must have taken a lot of courage or foolhardiness to have spoken out under such political conditions.

We turned off the main road and headed up into the hills to Madara where the horseman is chiselled in stone on the mountainside at one point and this has become the national symbol. It was voted the most important figure / relic / attraction in Bulgaria and this in itself speaks volumes about the lack of other attractions. It is ancient, dating from approx. 7th century but is hardly impressive enough to warrant such lofty tourist status. We walked up to the horseman on a zigzag path and after a talk at the site and the taking of photos descended by steep stairs. Our lunch was at a nearby home in the village where we were greeted by a fellow playing the accordion and his co-musician on a Bulgarian version of the bagpipes with a pigskin bladder for the air reservoir.
The hosts had a loaf of bread from which we broke pieces at the door and a very adequate meal was set out for us inside their property which was an old and well developed small plot with lots of vegetables, chooks, a rabbit, corn and onions drying on the walls, grapes hanging in ripening clusters, lots of colourful flowers and an all pervasive smell of rural living.
I was amazed to see lamingtons cut into wedges were part of the fare.
Local wine was provided and we were entertained by the musicians as well as an old lady showing us how to make a bacon and egg pie. We enjoyed the ambience of the place and were farewelled by our host from afar as we made our way to the bus.

Varna is the second largest town in Bulgaria with a population of about 1 million after Sofia (2m) which is 400km to west. Bulgaria has a population of 8m It has a well developed tourist industry, business centre and transport hub including an international airport, large seaport and railway station. It was voted best town to live in Bulgaria twice.

Varna has a maritime sea garden which hosts many attractions including a dolphinarium, open air theatre and ballet centre. It is a major university town with 5 higher centres including a Naval Academy

The last king of Bulgaria, King Simeon, in 2001 became PM after spending 50 years in exile in Spain. He is no longer in power.

Real Estate has really boomed in the last 5 years. Varna has the largest shopping centre in Bulgaria. Varna's population has doubled in the last decade. Bulgaria exports clothes, shoes, cosmetics, medicine, and petroleum products. Tourism and wine producing and bottling is also very important', as is agriculture as the soil is very fertile. They grow corn, wheat, barley, oats, beet and veges. There is a major chemical industry not far from Varna (Debni?) with a cement producing plant, and Soda Ash production.

The GDP is amongst the lowest in the EU but it has risen since entering the EU and the standard of living has risen visibly since 2000.
WWII Bulgarian Govt was by necessity in league with Nazi Germany, but plans for Jews to be deported were uncovered and there were major protestsso the plans were abandoned. All the Jews in Bulgaria were saved and there is now a monument in Israel to thank the Bulgarian people.
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