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  • Day 570

    Day 571: World Heritage Meet Day 2

    September 8, 2018 in Bulgaria ⋅ ⛅ 24 °C

    Another early start, where we went first to the Rock Hewn Churches of Ivanovo. These are 13th century churches, well, hewn out of the rock. Only one of them is open so we went inside that - it's actually about a hundred metres up a cliff and basically hangs out over the car park, so that was a bit exciting! The interior is heavily painted too, just like an orthodox church and was in great condition, all up I really enjoyed the site.

    Back to the cars where we headed next for Srebana Nature Reserve, an important bird nesting area and migration point. This had a certain level of infamy as it had the poorest rating of every World Heritage site by the community. Unfortunately our visit isn't going to change anything - the infrastructure was really poor and we couldn't see any birds at all! The lake was a long distance away and almost nothing was visible. It didn't help that we were there in the middle of the day and it was quite hot, so all the birds were hiding!

    Finally our last stop was just nearby in a small town whose name I've forgotten. It was an old Roman tomb from about the third century AD, so an early Christian work. The interior was brightly painted and decorated, though the tomb itself was never actually used. We had a guided tour and were generously allowed to snap some photos which was quite nice! This one's only a tentative site though, so I didn't have to worry about doing a video. The other videos I've managed to work around the group, though the sites have generally been quite small and I'll do some voiceovers to cover the gaps.

    And with that, our meet up was basically done! We all shook hands and went our separate ways, though we gave a couple of people a lift back to Varna. One of them was an older English guy who'd visited about 850 world heritage sites and is ranked #2 for sites visited, while the other was a Swiss gent who had visited every country in the world and about 750 World Heritage sites. Was good to chat with them and swap stories; also a little humbling as well since it reminds us how far we have to go!

    Exhausted we arrived back at our lovely apartment in Varna. We'd booked it for four nights including the night we stayed in Ruse, though we brought all of our luggage with us. Very tired, we couldn't manage anything more than frozen pizzas for dinner!
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