Skift hold
—Robert Reid
Fifteen years ago, fresh out of cubicle culture, I made the bold decision to start a travel blog. I felt the journey was about to transform and wanted a URL to reflect the changing times. But I soon discovered that my first choice – newtravel.com – was already taken.
By a travel agency in Bulgaria.
The days before Twitter and Facebook seem as old as the Dewey Decimal System today, but I’m fascinated that Bulgaria was the first to come across the phrase. And shortly after I missed my trip, I started covering Bulgaria for Lonely Planet. Its 19th-century revivalist architecture, cheap local wines sold in empty jugs on street corners, and quiet roads winding through the mountains immediately appealed to me. (The ketchup-on-pizza thing was less convincing.) Eventually, I even ventured into the energetic office of newtravel.com, aka Odysseia-In, which has since changed its site to hiking-bulgaria.com.
Bulgaria, which joined the EU in 2007, will never rank among the top tourist destinations with France, China or the United States. But it has become an anchor of what might be called the hottest part of “New Europe,” the Balkans.
During the period 2005 to 2015, tourist arrivals in Europe increased from 452 million to 605 million, an increase of 33.6 percent (according to WTO reports). Looking at individual country statistics, we see that much of this increase is centered on Balkan Europe – defined here as Bulgaria (where the mountains of the same name flow into the Black Sea) and the countries of former Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia).
The growth of tourism in Bulgaria over these ten years (46.8 percent) doubled that of the United Kingdom and quadrupled that of France. And other Balkan countries are progressing even faster. Croatia grew by 63.8 percent, Slovenia by 74.8 percent, Macedonia by 147 percent, Bosnia and Herzegovina by 212 percent and Albania by 502 percent.
The growth of tourism in this country has created almost half a million jobs, and by 2027, the number… according to WTTC economic forecasts – will increase by 20 percent. Bulgaria will see the largest job creation in the region, with 51 percent more created (around three times the rate of Britain or Germany).
It has been interesting to personally observe this gradual “opening” of the region, as I regularly visit Bulgaria during the same period. During my first visit in 2004, a TV station in the town of Dobrich caught wind of a travel writer covering their country – and couldn’t believe it. A middle-aged reporter with dyed purple hair interviewed me on air skeptically.
“Why,” she kept asking, “why would anyone want to come here?”
Well, she should have known that Bulgaria’s beaches have been attracting for a long time.
The Red Riviera
During the Soviet era, Bulgaria became the “Red Riviera”, a destination of choice for the communist dignitaries with the most medals on their chests. In the years after the collapse of the USSR, former state-run resorts pawned package holidays to Western Europeans (and the number of beds at Sunny Beach increased 100 times in the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s). For most visitors, this overdevelopment has all but destroyed any appeal to the beach.
For me, the best of Bulgaria, as elsewhere in the Balkans, is inland: picturesque villages with 19th-century taverns cooking grilled meats and serving shopska salads of cucumber, tomato, onion and local feta cheese. It is here that even remnants of communism, like paint-splattered monuments or dilapidated hotels, can be seen as windows into a disappearing past. The best is Buzludzhka, a spectacular UFO-shaped communist meeting place at the top of Shipka Pass. It was already closed in 2004 (and vandalized), but secret entrances led to dilapidated mosaics of faded Marxist dreams. (I talked about it recently for my new site, aajaggers.com.)
This side of the Balkans remains the least visited.
The most popular country in the Balkans is Croatia, which welcomed 12.7 million visitors in 2015 (Bulgaria comes in second, with 7.1 million). Croatia’s appeal, however, comes at a price.
This year CNN suggested to avoid its most popular destination, Dubrovnik, overall. Last year, the The British Telegraph said the UNESCO heritage city on the Adriatic had been “in ruins”.
The reason is cruise ships.
The city of 42,000 welcomes nearly a million visitors a year, 80% of whom come for a few hours aboard cruise ships and flock to Dubrovnik’s cobbled streets at numbers of more than 10,000 a day. The situation recently prompted UNESCO director Mechtild Rössler to suggest that this overpopulation could threaten the heritage status of the city. Meanwhile, the sassy Croatia Traveler blog publishes cruise schedules so that savvy travelers can avoid the masses.
Another option is to skip Dubrovnik altogether.
On a road trip from Slovenia to Greece two years ago, Dubrovnik was absolutely my weak point. That’s wonderful. But, despite traveling in low season in early December, my visit coincided with hordes of cruise passengers roaming Dubrovnik’s 16th-century lanes.
Everywhere else, from Ljubljana to Prizren, it was just us and the locals. So we opted for more time in the sublime, historic, once war-torn city of Mostar (a few hours inland) and the magnificent walled city of Kotor, Montenegro (a few hours south) . I found that same intimacy while hiking the snow-covered “Alps” of Kosovo or spending the night on top of a cobblestone hill in Hum, Croatia, which bills itself as the smallest village in the world.
Looking for Bulgarian magazines
All of this is subject to change as travelers venture deeper into this booming region.
A little barometer of change that I continue to think about when it comes to journals. For years, I always looked for locally made journals to record my notes on site. (I remember waiting for a monk to choose a pen in a stationary hut in Battambang to get my little Cambodian notebook in 2002.)
Finding a newspaper made in Bulgaria was difficult, even 14 years ago. After a week, I finally found a pocket-sized yellow spisanie, not in the capital Sofia but in the small town of Shumen. On my two returns to Shumen, I discovered that the store only offered Chinese notebooks – then none. It then became a luxury shoe store selling high-end imports.
The Balkans could constitute a “new Europe”. But the travelers’ secret goes beyond ports or seaside resorts before becoming imported shoes.
Don’t forget to bring your own newspaper.