Day 84 - Bucharest to Balchik, Bulgaria

We left Bucharest and we were now in the "home stretch", our plan was to head over to the Black Sea before returning the car to Sofia.

We stopped at the port city of Constanta for lunch and found a nice marina section with some modern cafes, it felt nice to be back on the coast after so much time inland. The Black Sea isn't black at all but the same blue of seas all over the world, apparently it was named the Black Sea because it was inhospitable and difficult to navigate.

The coastal road was very busy and there were lots of parked cars and people coming back and forth from the beaches. It was summer holidays and also a Sunday so it was the same as any coastal strip back home.

At the Romania-Bulgaria border we really couldn't work out what was going on. We only seemed to have to show our papers to exit Romania and the Bulgarian side didn't seem interested in us so we just drove through. Arriving back in Bulgaria meant we were struggling with the language and signs again,. At least Romanian is latin/romance based so between English and Spanish we had some chance of reading things, with Bulgarian its a totally new alphabet.

We checked into our hotel at the beach side town of Balchik where they tried to tell us some story of why they didn't have the matrimonial room we had booked so could only get a twin room. The guy behind the desk seemed to have spent a lot of time watching the discovery channel and had many questions about Australia's scary animals from funnel web spiders to box jelly fish. Australians in this part of the world are apparently a rarity.

There was a small section of beach that actually had some sand and there was a nice promenade with lots of restaurants right on the water.