Our first slow morning! We arrived in Cetate, Romania and had the opportunity to visit the Cetate Cultural Center, including a wine tasting but we didn’t go. Did we mention that it was at 8:30 in the morning?! The thought of tasting wine (and whatever other nasty brandy/moonshine stuff) that early in the day was NOT appealing!!
We did walk onshore and saw bits and pieces of the Cultural Center. There were very interesting works of art as well as relics of days long, long past. Also saw some of our favorite things – dogs!!!! Oh yeah, and a donkey and a baby donkey. 🙂
Now THIS is a grill… a mobile grill… with one hella’big bellows!
And of course we promised a couple of asses above…
To show you how absolute remote this “port” was… here is the port/dock…
After that excursion we set sail for Vidin, Bulgaria. Upon arrival at Vidin Tim zipped off the boat well ahead of Jay. Yes, Tim actually made it to Bulgaria before Jay did!!!
We took a short bus ride (the ride was short, not the bus) to Baba Vida Castle. For any who know a little Bulgarian / Russian / etc. you probably know that baba is granny, so yes, this is Granny Vida castle (it had a beloved female owner that lived to old age, thus her castle was affectionately called Granny Vida’s castle).
This is one of the few (if not only) intact castles left that didn’t get destroyed by the Ottoman’s.
After checking out the castle we re-boarded the bus for the Belogradchik Rock Formations.
Yes, you heard right, we were going to take a 45 minute to 1 hour drive out to see some rock formations. Rocks are boring you say??? Welllll, we’ll let you decide…
Here was our first look at them.
Yea, admittedly kinda boring at this point.
(We actually heard several bus-mates say “We came all this way to see that?” rather disgustedly.)
But when we got into the parking lot for Belogradchik Fortress, there was actually a front gate to get back to the rocks, so okay, getting a little better at least.
And we can now see that the rocks are in the middle of a large fortress. So that helps a little.
Here’s just inside the gate, with a nice path over towards the rocks.
So of course we follow the path (trying to zip ahead of the rest of the bus loads o’humanity).
Holy crap! Those rocks actually have an inner fortress amongst them…
Holy Cow, there’s an inner gate to defend the inner fortress. And a wicked steep slope / steps up to the inner fortress.
WOW! Just wow. Absolutely spectacular display of nature. This is NOT just a pile of rocks! (Our opinion of course, you can still formulate your own, but wowsers this was an awesome place.)
Roughly 131 steep, uneven steps up to the fortress entrance, but totally worth it!
Quite the view from the battlements looking back over the overall fortress. (next picture is actually only ½ way up the steps)
Yep, tiny peoples… (crazy attackers if that was what they were in the day).
But wait…
We are in the fortress (and Tim’s off taking pictures), but it IS NOT THE TOP.
There’s another 70 steps to get you to the actual top of the fortress (which Jay climbed while Tim was taking pictures).
Not sure the pictures come close to showing the marvelous beauty of these formations but hopefully you’ll enjoy them.
To describe Bulgaria a little, they are divided into districts (basically like states for us), and Vidin is the district seat (kind of like state capital or county seat) and decent size at about 40,000, but all of the smaller towns and villages are suffering a lot of loss of people. Vidin used to be 75,000 back in the communist days, but folks are moving off to the big cities now, so there are a lot of abandoned and unkempt houses, offices, factories, etc.
Here’s a quick view of just some of them both in the countryside as well as on the outskirts of Vidin (because it was kind of sad)…
And of course this isn’t abandon, it was an active residential complex in Vidin… but it is a good example showing many of the remnant buildings from the communist (Soviet) days when they put up fast Soviet style buildings that are still in use.
Tonight was also the captain’s farewell dinner. Nothing spectacular or over the top – normal fare with a lobster tail added in as an extra course.
We were fortunate enough to sit next to our new Midwestern friends – the Johnson’s from Illinois – and had so much fun talking to them that we ended up closing down the restaurant (at 10 pm they were trying to set up for the next morning’s breakfast) and headed up to the lounge for drinks (White Russians were the daily special that we partook of). We finally decided we needed to get to bed around midnight! Very good people, and great company!
Cheers,
Tim & Jay
