@ Bulgarian Border & Varna (Варна)

We left Romania to travel along the coast to Bulgaria, making a couple of interesting stops before we reached a lovely seaside resort.

NON StOP COFFE @ the border

When we left our camping at Mamaia north of Constanta, the weather made it easy to leave and travel on, in the hope of more sunshine in the south.

Rush hour at Constanta

Free chassis washing 😉

Impossible to overlook that we reached the border

We made it into Bulgaria!

Cyrillic writing from now on

We passed a couple of small oil pumps ..

… and many of this tanks

Some abandoned buildings lured us to make a detour

Nice coastline near Kaliakra

Kaliakra is a long and narrow headland at the northern Bulgarian Black Sea coast and a nature reserve. It sits on the Via Pontica, an ancient Roman road and at a major bird migration route from Africa into Eastern and Northern Europe.

The Ushakow monument commemorates the victory in the naval battle of Kaliakra in 1791 during the Russo-Turkish War in which a Turkish fleet was defeated by Russian warships under Admiral Fedor Ushakow. Each bell stands for one ship of the fleet.

Since antiquity there was a fortress at Cape Kaliakra. It was called by the Thracians Tirisis, under the Romans Akra and under the Byzantines Akres Kastelum. In the Middle Ages, the strategically important fortress was called Kaliakra. It became the capital of a Bulgarian kingdom in the 13th century under the despot Dobrotitsa.

In Balchik, we stopped at the palace and beautiful gardens of Queen Marie of Romania. It was constructed on her request between 1926 and 1937 directly at the sea outside Balchik. The official name of the palace was “Quiet Nest Palace”. It consists of a number of residential villas, a smoking hall, a wine cellar, a power station, a monastery, a holy spring, a chapel and many other buildings, all of them situated in a park that is today a botanical garden.

Lovely interior

Another visitor to the garden

Jasmine flower

Our next stop was at a place we had spotted on the map, called “Petrified forest”. We looked it up and decided we had to see it.

Numerous theories and hypotheses still fail to offer a satisfactory explanation of how this “forest” was created. The prevailing opinion is that 50 million years ago there was a vast sea whose waves washed the foothills of the Alps. When the waters receded, the deposits were exposed to erosion. The rains washed away the loose earth and the solid parts, which the winds rounded in the course of millennia, remained upright giant desert stalactites that one sees today.