Saturday – Varna, Bulgaria

It was going to be a relatively short visit, with guests asked to be back on board ship by 3pm, so to maximise on our time, we decided to purchase a couple of shuttle bus tickets to take us into the centre of the city. At £5 each, these don’t come cheap; we could have walked it given more time, but we were unsure about what to expect, so this seemed the logical option. As we we boarding the bus, several passengers we getting off it, having already been to the city centre; a fact noticed by several people, who remarked that they didn’t appear to have spent very long there….

When we got there, it soon became apparent why…

The bus dropped us off outside their Cathedral. At this point, I should point out that I was a right Mr Grumpy, having realised that we’d come without our Varna map, and I’d come out without my video camera. It wasn’t the end of the world, as I had my still camera, which takes video, and I also had my mobile phone, which takes quite reasonable video footage – but I wasn’t happy – I’m very attached to my new video camera…

As it turns out, there wasn’t a huge amount to film. The Cathedral was okay, and quite ornate inside, but it didn’t feel the most welcoming of places. Other than that, there were shops, but we weren’t in a buying mood, and an interesting fountain which kept turning itself off and on again, but each time it started up, it had a different confiiguration of jets… all quite entertaining, sort of… then we ran out of things to do and queued to get back on to the bus, having spent less than an hour there.

Back at the ship, we started again. This time, we remembered the map, and I remembered my precious video camera. Desperate not to let the disappointment of the city centre spoil what was, for both of us, our first trip to Bulgaria, we went in search of some Roman remains, easily wallkable from the quayside. There were two on the map; the first was another huge disappointment – in fact, if it wasn’t for our map telling us what it was we were looking at, you could easily be forgiven for thinking the pile of decaying, and overgrown, rubble in the open square before us was just that – our thought was that the Bulgarians didn’t seem to take preservation of ancient artiffacts very seriously….  that was until we came to the second Roman remains….

Now this was more like it…

The remains of a Roman baths, which in its day would have been the 2nd largest in the world. At first, we wandered into the grounds, thinking that it was free, only to be informed by a lady there that there was an entrance fee of 4 Bulgarian Leva (about 2 euros). It turns out, though, that money is a bit of an issue here in Bulgaria, for visitors, as they will take Euros, but they’ll only give you change in the foreign currency. I only had 20 euro notes on me, and we didn’t fancy ending up with 15 euros worth of Bulgarian money that we wouldn’t be able to spend anywhere else. We decided, initially, then, not to bother, but as we looked through the railings at the site, we realised that this was Bulgaria’s big opportunity to redeem itself – the site looked really quite interesting! So Tracey went in search of a cashpoint in order to obtain a smaller amount of Leva, and we paid to look around.

It was the best thing we’d seen all day. Not only were the ruins well preserved, but they’d gone to a lot of trouble to enhance the visitor experience by providing us with information boards and images showing how the baths would have looked in Roman times… the Romans, it seems, really took their bathing seriously!

Happy with our visit to the Roman remains, we headed back towards the seafront and went for a swim in the Black Sea. It was cold at first (definitely not the Caribbean), but once we got used to it, it was a great way to spend our remaining hour before returning to The Black Watch.