Day 572: Driving to Kazanluk

Our meetup was over, and after an intense couple of days it would've been nice to have a couple of days off. But that's just not the way we do things! So we were up and out by 9:30 again, picking up someone from the meetup and heading off into Bulgaria.

Destination for the day was the small city of Kazanlak in central Bulgaria, where the second-last WHS was located. We'd agreed to give a lift to Peter, a Swedish man who'd been on the meet-up as he was heading the same way. Although he was in his I'd guess mid to late 50s and we didn't have much in common, he was fairly well travelled and so we got on well enough swapping travel stories and the like. He'd worked in logistics for Scania and Volvo for many years, and had recently taken an early retirement to travel - seems quite common amongst this crowd!

Arrived in Kazanlak by mid afternoon and decided to tackle the WHS immediately since it was only a small site - literally just a tomb. Beehive-shaped, about 2m in diameter and 3m high in the centre, it really was tiny. The interior was covered in well-preserved paintings from the Thracian period, about 300 BC or so. It was quite nice, but again, very small. Almost all of Bulgaria's sites have been quite tiny!

We headed for our hotel which was about three houses from where we'd parked the car (although we didn't realise that at the time). Peter headed off to his hotel in the town centre, so we said our goodbyes. It's a fairly nothing town, so we spent the afternoon and evening just relaxing in the room. Had another Bulgarian dinner in a hotel restaurant a few doors away.Read more