Bulgaria - avoid, avoid, avoid !

My wife and I went to Bulgaria for the first time last week. We wanted to check out Golden Sands and Sunny Beach. In addition, as we dream of buying a small seaside holiday apartment at some point, we wanted to look into that. Bulgaria is supposed to mean great fun, excellent beaches, good food, cheap prices, and also good investments.

Here are some highlights from our trip:

1) At one point during the flight, I realized that someone had just been smoking in the toilet and there was a horrible smell. I kindly pointed this out to the hostess. She was extremely rude to me, and told me to mind my own business. As far as I could later gather, the responsible person was one of her colleagues.

2) We arrived in Varna airport around midnight from the UK. There were just two taxis at the airport. We took one, and we were charged 130 euros to Golden Sands. We were indeed cheated, by a driver who pretended that his meter did not work, and then added all sorts of extras for luggage, night extra, etc. We complained but he shouted and shouted, until we paid.

3) The hotel we had booked, Golden Yavor, was full. We had pre-paid it through medhotels.com, but our room was not there, due to a computer error. They were very rude to us, saying they could not help. They called a taxi for us in the end, so we could go and look for another hotel in the middle of the night.

4) Back in the UK, we saw that medhotels.com had already charged us. We complained, and they said their representative was going to find another hotel for us, and it"s our fault that we did not call. I explained that at 2 am I did not feel like trying to contact them, and they may be closed too, but they still refused to refund the money. Fortunately, our credit card later intervened and refunded us.

5) On our first day, we were outside an exchange booth, queueing up to change our money ($ 300). A man approched us and asked if we wanted to change with him, he was very insistent, but we declined - as we knew the kind of tricks involved. Suddenly another man distracted us, and the first one snatched the money from my hand and ran away. I ran after him in the crowd, while a German man and a French family joined in. Meanwhile, the locals just watched, totally uncaring that a foreign tourist had just been robbed.

6) Although we did not catch the thief, we saw that he had entered a hotel, though he had presumably got out in the meantime. We talked to the hotel staff to see if they could help identify the thief, perhaps watch the video-surveillance system (which they had !), etc. They were rude, and said they could not help. We asked if they could call the police for us, and they declined. We sat in the hotel bar and ordered a soft drink, but the waiter refused to serve us without giving a reason.

7) Thanks to a British man who knew the number for the police and spoke some Bulgarian, we called the police. They came. One of them spoke a few words of English, and asked hotel staff to help with the translation. In the end they gave us a paper in Bulgarian and asked us to sign. I said I could not sign something in a language I did not understand. They said then we should go to the police station, and started to be nasty. I just signed, as I was getting quite afraid. I was being treated like I was the thief ! We asked the police if we could have some kind of report of the incident, but they said I had to find a lawyer and translator. They also declined to give me their name. As I took a pen to note down the police car"s plate number, one of them said "no" and had a nasty expression on his face.

8) We tried to forget the incident and enjoy. We went to a restaurant and ordered a seafood salad. It was bad. I think even with canned ingredients, it would be hard to produce such bad food. Then a cat started to bother us, and my wife is allergic. I asked if they could move the cat away and they were rude to me.

9) On the way back home, we saw a quantity of prostitutes I had never seen anywhere else.

10) The next morning we went on a kind of sport, flyign in the sky on a kind of bit kite, while a small motor boat pulls it from the sea - I am sure there is a technical name, but I don"t know it. Very nice experience. However my wife had left her purse on the beach with the boat company, and when she came the purse was there, but her mobile phone and one perfume were gone.

11) We decided suddenly to move to Sunny Beach, so we went back to the hotel and called a taxi. The hotel claimed that I had broken the television and wanted around $ 100, but I declined. While I was getting in the taxi they claimed that I had broken a window and wanted $ 20. Out of desperation, I paid.

12) We got to Sunny Beach quite late, found a hotel and went there. (This time the taxi did not cheat us, wow !)

13) After a night out as we returned to the hotel, the reception informed us that there was a mistake and we had to leave. We looked at them in disbelief. They said that people have to pay in advance. I said I had not paid because they did not ask me. So I pulled out my money and paid and the matter was solved. No big deal really, but strange attitude !

14) The next morning we were having lunch at a restaurant on the beach. A British woman who heard us speak Engish approached us crying, saying her child had been lost, and asking our help. I asked the restaurant owner if he could call the police. He said "why ?" and I explained that the woman could not find her child and was afraid he had been kidnapped. The man replied "it is not my problem".

15) The small child was later found. He had not been kidnapped, but some teenage locals were in fact talking to him in a way that the mother and us did not like. Not sure what they were trying to do, but it was strange.

16) We left the next day by taxi to Sofia, as we had enough. The driver wanted to smoke, which we refused, so he kept stopping and smoking outside. At one point he just dropped us in the middle of the road and let us to continue with a passing bus. He said he could not drive without smoking.

17) At the airport, the police watched our passports like I had never experienced before. They said my photo did not look like me, and wanted a more recent document. Fortunately I had other documents with photos.

As I want to be objective, I can tell you that we flew from Bulgaria to Athens, and we had a great time in Greece.