2025-2026 Central Asia Adventure – Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria
My Huntington’s Disease plug for this post is for ‘Help 4 HD International’, a small yet superb team that strives to educate the world about Huntington’s disease and Juvenile Huntington’s disease. They offer support for patients and families plus do training sessions at conferences and symposiums to educate professionals such as police, EMTs and firefighters about the special needs of HD people they may encounter. I’ve known Katie Jackson, Katrina Hamel and Sharon Thomason for years and am in awe of their energy, resilience and dedication. Read more and make a donation here: https://www.help4hd.org/
Hello from Veliko Tarnovo, the third stop on the trip, still in Bulgaria. This is a new city in Bulgaria for me, the third corner of the triangle trip that Vani planned for us.
We drove out of Plovdiv early and reached a place called “Etar Architectural-Ethnographic Complex”. It’s an open-air museum of culture and historical replicas of the things you would find in a small town in its early industrial era. This is the kind of place schools take kids on field trips to learn about ye-olde blacksmith and ye-olde sawmill. Mikey was right in his element here!
Our timing again was perfect due to the holiday weekend – the place was bustling with music, dancing and ye-olde exhibits plus dozens of tents showing different handicrafts from the region and from across the borders to other nearby countries. Vani discovered her Persian language teacher was there showing how he and his friends make wooden mosaics, truly beautiful stuff. I of course was drawn to the ingenious construction and operation of each ye-olde factory with a water canal on a hill behind each building, tapping off the water which flowed down and turned a water wheel, generating rotational power for whatever needed to be made – from looms to grinding grain to tanning skins to pottery. I’m holding myself back by giving you just a taste of the hundreds of pictures I took there. I really enjoyed it, as did everyone else.
We then drove about an hour to Bozhentsi, a preserved village built in the old Bulgarian style. Accessible only via up and down super twisty mountain roads, sometimes a generous lane-and-a-half wide. In this town any renovation or new construction has to maintain the look of the town – it’s like the strictest HOA you’ve ever lived in. We had a great early dinner of peppers, eggs and cheese, with my first baklava of the trip!
From there we drove to Veliko Tarnovo, the historical and spiritual capital of Bulgaria known as the “City of the Tsars”. The hotel claimed a parking area but they used a lot of poetic license on that, as with any parking area in Europe. This is where I really regretted accepting the large hatchback car rather than a teeny tiny Euro car. It’s like solving a Rubik’s cube of cars, but the front desk lady assured us the car would be fine and someone would call us if it needed to be moved.
Since it’s the national holiday weekend, the main street was blocked off for walking and an outdoor street festival with disco lights and a DJ was going full blast at the bottom of the hill towards the Patriarchal Cathedral. I got some good pictures of the defensive wall along the river and castle lit up at night, but couldn’t get a good shot of the full lunar eclipse. We had a special cocktail in a tequila bar, then ice cream – dinner of champions. I tried to buy some Diet Coke, but the only shops open and selling were about a dozen tobacco shops so I boycotted. I finally found some in an ice cream shop and felt obliged to get two scoops to go.
In the morning we walked down the street for breakfast, I had a pretty terrible Caesar salad but the view of the downtown and across the valley was great. It also kept us away from the smokers.
We hiked down the hill, bought tickets and hiked up to the castle. The outside looks Byzantine but the inside has very modern brutalist style art, murals in greys and blacks that look like street art, jarring and not widely appreciated I hear.
From there we walked along the wall to a pointy cliff at the end where they threw off the condemned to the rocks below. It was usually guys that didn’t share the world-view of those in power, as is usually the case.
We packed up and drove about 10km to a monastery called, and I’m not making this up “Monastery of the Holy Transfiguration of God”. It’s well know for its painting of the Circle of Life, by seasons. There is a great view across the river valley to a long cliff face and nunnery. I wonder if they sent smoke signals back and forth – an early version of social media?
From there we drove home to Sofia. I got fed up with the roads that will haunt my nightmares. A single lane in each direction, backed up with trucks and changing speeds constantly! At one point it went 90-60-70-40 within 50 yards. Insanity. The nature of the roads forced people to take big chances passing long lines to get past the slowpoke at the top of the queue, but the Bulgarian drivers seem to take it in stride. I was terrified. I returned the car to Europcar at the airport. Everything was good – no crashes or fire, and took the metro home, relieved to be alive.
I did a walking tour of Sofia and generally wandered aimlessly around the city on foot and tram for the next couple of days, drinking and eating to my heart’s content. I also went to the Earth and Man National Museum where they had some very cool displays of rocks and minerals and we went to another fancy cocktail place under the stars.
I had convinced Vani to sign up with TimeLeft – a “dinner with strangers” program that I have done a dozen times in Barcelona and really enjoy. I of course was early, then the starting time came and went. Boo for Bulgarian promptness. An American woman showed up, then a Bulgarian guy showed up 30 minutes late who was supposed to be at table 2 but somebody at table 2 was supposed to be at table 1 but wouldn’t switch. Finally another woman showed up an hour late. The Bulgarian guy really hated the restaurant, basically everyone was pissed off by the end of the night. The location is really remote and hard to get to, the food was brought in the wrong order and just dropped randomly on the table. Then at the end the waitress wouldn’t give us our individual prices, then she said they only take cash! After talking to the boss, they let one woman pay her share by card without telling the rest of us. The coup de gras was then the waitress said we didn’t pay enough! After re-calculating from the bill, we discovered she overcharged us by 1 glass of wine and when presented with the evidence just hmpfed and walked away! I gave it a 1* rating and told TimeLeft to drop this place from the program. On top of all of that my table was outside by the front door and some guy walked from his table inside, smoked 6 cigarettes through the night, right next to our table and then went back inside. I was this close… Despite all of this, try out TimeLeft. It’s worth giving it a chance, or another program like it.
Next up – The train from Sofia to Istanbul.
