V8 goes East - 10
Gordon and Jennifer Hesketh-Jones have been making their way through France and Italy, and have now moved on after attending the MG Italia event in Greece. This report comes from Romania because Gordon was not able to find a computer for an email report whilst in Bulgaria! (19.5.05)

The MG Italia group visited Olympia on the Saturday morning - we stayed for the visits to the museum and the archaelogical site then headed North to continue our tour. I had planned to get as far as Katerini then to peel off the motorway to find a hotel in one of the fishing villages so we pressed on to Thessalonika, a name I remembered from reading Greek mythology (in Latin). Unfortunately this town now looks a bit like Sheffield in the 1950s - dirty and very industrial - so we pressed on. Northern Greece is rather like Wiltshire or Norfolk - a green desert with very few towns and no hotels, despite our searching. The Noble Navigator was becoming rather tense but a petrol station girl told us that there were hotels at Serres, just 25 miles from the border with Bulgaria so on we pressed. By now it was after 9.30pm and frost emanated from the left-hand seat!

It was of course dark and now it was not the time to find that an intermittent fault meant that I only had dipped beam headlights. A somewhat hairy drive brought us to Serres which was incredibly busy at 10.30pm. A young boy on a scooter stopped by and said "Nice Car" so as he had some English, Jennifer asked him for a hotel. He lead us to the Hotel Elida where we were lucky to secure the last room. Why the last room - well on that Saturday night they had motor racing, kart racing and stock cars so the whole county came to town for the fun. The hotel restaurant was closed (and it was only 11.00pm) but there were plenty of other restaurants to choose from and a bottle of good red wine thawed out the Ice Maiden. Later the waiter told me that on race car night they would stay open until 3.30am!

Entering Bulgaria the following morning meant going through seven different stages of officaldom, the first of which was to drive through a trough of disinfectant for which I was charged 3 Euros. Passport and customs were routine, then all of my car documents, and recovery and personal medical insurance certificates were carefully checked and entered onto the computer. The next stage related to the car itself and the Bulgarian computer did not list MG as a manufacturer. After some delay I gritted my teeth and told them that the car was a Rover - just to break the log-jam. At this the car was then photographed by the computer and I could pass to the next stage to buy a vignette (10 Euros) to allow me to drive on Bulgarian roads for 7 days. Finally we were free! The process took some 45 minutes - simply of officaldom. Fortunately we were not queuing behind other cars. We saw however long lines of lorries waiting to pass through in both directions.

Driving into Bulgaria the first thing that struck me was the total absence of fences, hedges or ditches to separate the fields, which could easily be of several square miles in size - so different from the patchwork quilt effect of fields in England. Presumably these huge open fields are a remnant of the Soviet State Farms. Next - a surprising number of horses were being used - to take the workers and tools (eg harrows, scythes and chain saws etc) out to the fields and woods and then in the evening to bring back loads of timber, hay or silage. Very few tractors were in evidence and the ones we saw were all two-wheel drive and smaller than the David Brown 1212 in which I spent many hours on my farm. (In the UK , 95% of tractors now are 4 wheel drive). From all this we could see that Bulgaria was (in agriculture terms) still a peasant economy so this will preent some problems if they join the EU as planned in 2007. Bulgaria is already a full member of NATO and is very proud of its excellent Law & Order reputation!

The road quality was pretty good for our first drive up to Blagoverad (site of an American University) but later we turned off onto minor roads to head for the famous RILA monastery (more comments later). It was at this stage that we found out that (a) the road and village signs away from the main roads were entirely in Cyrrillic (b) where Roman script was used, the spelling was very different from the map and (c) although the map gave road numbers, the signs did not! Jennifer had to do lots of dead-reckoning navigation, but with her experience of 1960s rally navigating coped well.

We had pre-booked our hotels and this Sunday night we were at the Pchelina Inn a few miles from the monastery. So we were approximately 4,000ft above sea level, surrounded by huge snow-capped mountains of up to 8,000ft. We had approached the monastery along a deep river valley and the river was at full spate with the snow melt.

Many years ago I remember hearing on Radio 4 "From our own Correspondent" (also reading first reports by new reporters on their first postings to Moscow etc) how there were never any plugs in the wash basins or baths, but I assumed that since the end of the cold war this would have changed. WRONG. We just had to improvise. The next shock was to find out just how cheap eating in restaurants was. For our evening meal we had cold cuts (a plate of mixed cold meats) to start, then large trout caught less than 100yds away in the river, and a bottle of local "champagne" and coffee. Including VAT at 20%, that came to just under twelve pounds! After the meal I went up to the manager (who spoke some English) to ask if the (local) people on the next table would mind if I smoked a cigar. This