Travelling by bus was never my favourite way to surmount distances longer than 200km. You always feel so stuck between the narrow bus seats, that at the moment you stretch your legs by standing up or taking a walk after sitting for ages, you always feel pain in them, and if sitting longer than 10 hours, they are of course swollen. Moreover, it is not as environmental-friendly as the train, which I would always choose even in Bulgaria, where travelling by rail is not always a first class experience.

This time, choosing to take the bus from Sofia to Varna was even more difficult given the fact that one hour before the bus was leaving, my boyfriend and I came back from another bus journey, during which we had spent about 25 hours in another bus, this time going to Serbia for the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert. But that is another story.

The bus from Serbia was late, so we missed the one we had tickets for to the Black Sea, and even though we had called the Etap&Group office in advance to say that we would be late, the company refused to let us on to the next bus using the same tickets, and insisted that we buy new tickets. This too was not my favourite part of the trip, as you may imagine.

However, happily we found a company that even had a 25 per cent discount on the tickets for the same day and we paid 18 instead of 25 leva for a one-way ticket. Something, at least.

The Union Ivkoni bus was fast and the air conditioning was perfect, unlike two of the three films they showed during the travelling, insipid American action-comedies of a kind I always wonder who thinks up.

The good part was that instead of starring at a screen, I could gaze on the areas we were passing through and that I on rare occasions am fortunate to see. The Dobrudzha plateau is not a familiar part of Bulgaria for me, and therefore mysterious and interesting. We passed several small towns and finally the sunset gave way to the full moon shaping its last days, which is always a magical experience for me.

Varna welcomed us as always with the seagulls’ squawks, which always makes me smile and feel an indescribable pleasure inside, probably because I am from faraway Sofia, or because my star sign is a water one. Who knows.

The next step was spending the night at a friend’s place and in the morning, heading afresh north to our final destination - the much talked-about Kamen Bryag (Stony Coast).

Leaving Varna by a city bus in the morning was not as bad, because it took us only few kilometres north to Zlatny Piasutsy (Golden Sands), from where started our hitch-hikers journey, which was to prove full with unexpected circumstances.

It did not take long for the first car to stop and accommodate us cosily on the back seat next to one of the passengers. The driver, a woman of 27, right away shared with us that she had traversed the whole country hitch-hiking, and she had promised herself that, when she bought a car, she would always pick up people hitching a ride. Here she was, on the road just for us.

They were travelling to Kavarna to visit a friend, which is only about 30km on the way to Kamen Bryag. We were even happier to hear that she intended to take us precisely where we were going, no matter that it meant a further 30km! A miracle!

Cape Kaliakra
Twelve kilometres from Kavarna, by no means a large town, is the famous Cape Kaliakra, connected to a local legend. As our driver had also not seen it before, she decided to pass by on the way to Kamen Bryag and take a walk with us and her two friends. Even better for me, Kaliakra was in my to-see-on-this-holiday! list, However, I had wondered how we would succeed, given that we had no car and how to get there by public transport is still a mystery, at least for me.

The entrance fee for the cape area, which also has the remains of an ancient fortress and a cave museum, is three leva (1.5 euro) a person. There are also many old people selling souvenirs of various types and sizes, postcards and hand-knitted articles from the area.

The cape itself proved to be as picturesque and panoramic as I had expected. Or had I been there before, I wondered, maybe my parents had brought me here when I was too young to remember? I had something in my mind about the legend but it was all rather unclear.

It appeared several legends were connected to the place, the most well-known of which is about 40 Bulgarian girls, who braided their hair together and jumped into the sea rather than fall into the hands of Turkish enslavers. The cape has a monument to the memory of the young women.

A surprise and an enchantment, as we followed the road to the cape, was the sight of Black Sea dolphins playing in the dark-blue water.
Now it was time to leave and our kind driver took us to the village we were heading to, to the stony coast.

Kamen Bryag
It was not that hard to find accommodation, even though June 29 and June 30 there were concerts by Hell&Heaven and Motorhead in nearby Kavarna, and fans had spread to the area of Kamen Bryag.

Baba (grandma) Minka from Varna, who lives in a two-storey white triangle house, gave us shelter in one of her second floor cut-roof pleasant white rooms, for 10 leva a person a night. She gave us home-made banitsa for one of the breakfasts, and home-grown cucumbers for salad.

On the day we were leaving, the modest old lady showed us a German newspaper that had a long article about Kamen Bryag; and there was Baba Minka looking out at us from the picture. Apparently, the hospitality of the white-haired grandma had impressed some German travellers as well.

There were also several bungalows for rent in the village, as well as other people giving rooms, even for one night.

Kamen Bryag itself consists of two streets, mostly gravel. There are two shops and two restaurants that we could see, rather empty even in the summer season. Still, they both offered a rich fish menu, as well as fresh salads and vegetables.

The rocky sea beach is only few hundred metres away, reached after crossing a dry grass field, separated from the sea by 30m-high rocks rising above the salty water. The stones there have an unique orange colour, an impressive sight.

There is also the “oguncheto”, an eternal flame fed by a natural gas leak. It is surrounded by small stones arranged to shelter it from the wind. Unfortunately, the place has also seen several young people meet their end falling from the high rocks. A few gravestones were placed at the edge, as well as a symbolic fence around them.

The next few days we spent on the road investigating the nearby villages and beaches to the Romanian border. Hitch-hiking proved not as easy as it had been at the start, probably because my boyfriend’s beginner’s luck had been used up.

First we came across the manager of one of the restaurants who was going to Shabla cape, a bit to the north and the easternmost point of Bulgaria, to supply the restaurant with fresh fish. The fish he took was frozen but still, I guess, not long after it was caught.

The next car kindly took us to the next small beach village of Krapets and the driver offered us to take us back to the south to show us a hidden beach near the neighbouring village, Tylenovo. We had to refuse because our direction was north.

North and more to the north, we finally reached the northernmost Bulgarian beach called Kosmos (Space) thanks to the three kind Romanians who gave us a ride and promised to come back, which they probably did not, because soon the sky covered with clouds and it started raining. The Kosmos beach is a sandy one, very long and outlines the bay. On the other side is the Durankulak lake, which together with its surroundings is a protected area, inhabited by many rare species.

It was time to go back. This time, thanks to our next door neighbours, who apparently had reach Kosmos as well, we came halfway to Tyulenovo (Seal village, where in the past there were seals), this village three km north of Kamen bryag. From here started our July morning journey, full with information on the event and the participants.

July Morning
We were hitch-hiking on the road to Tyulenovo and the people who took us were a nice young couple, ex hippies, rich with hitch-hiking stories from the time the guy didn’t have a car. They told us about the stone niches in the rocks above the sea, all the way from Tyulenovo to Kamen Bryag, describing them in detail for us. There, in the past, monks took shelter when hiding from the Turks, and now many adventure-seeking tourists spend their holidays sleeping in the half-caves above the sea.

The couple also shared with us that on July Morning, the front man of legendary band Uriah Heep, who wrote the song July Morning (that later became the Hippies’ anthem), was to sing and play on the sunrise of July 1 in our village. It was hard to believe, given the desert appearance of Kamen Bryag and its surroundings but instead of arguing, we decided to wait and see.

The couple drove us to Tylenovo (even thought they were also not going exactly there!), gave us the sweet melon that they had received from the Hungarians they had given a lift to before us and wished us a nice time.

The three km we walked over the field to Kamen Bryag gave me one of the most gorgeous, spacious and dreamy experience I ever had. Walking to the south, on the left hand side was the sea (we were walking on the plateau above the rocks, about 30m above the waves), and on the right was the field: dry grass, small thorns, white and orange stones. We found the niches, in the orange rocks, there were many. In them there were straw and many candles. I could imagine the view and the experience there in the night! I wished I could spend a night there; maybe on the next holiday when we are better equipped.

The evening before July Morning transformed 180 degrees (so goes the Bulgarian saying) silent little Kamen Bryag. The fact that John Walden was to sing in the morning brought about 6000 people to the plateau. I was astonished. Three days ago, when we arrived, there were two tents; now there were two km of tents scattered along the coast. Moreover, a stage had been built.

It seemed that every fan who had visited the two concerts in Kavarna that day and the day before had come down to Kamen Bryag to await the first July sun and sing July Morning with Walden.

I met some friends I had not been expecting to see, and we spent the July 1 night with them in the picturesque place where they had pitched their tents, on the rocks down by the sea, silently watched over by the full moon. The view was splendid.

Waiting for the sun was not that easy, so we went to sleep at about 3am, setting the alarm for 5am to listen to Walden. Yeah, next time! No one heard the alarm or the song that was sung by all the people just few hundred metres from our window. But the cars were many, just like the people and their voices.

The next morning was time to leave for Sofia, stopping for few hours at Aladzha Monastery, the monastery carved in the rocks 15km north of Varna. It is a must-see place, created in 12-13th century but abandoned somewhere in the 18th century. The monks had sought sanctuary in the rocks; the monastery takes its name from the Turkish word aladja, which means colourful because of the colourful wall painting.

We had a few more hours before the bus back to Sofia, so we decided to spend them at the beach of Sveti Konstantin i Elena, a special place with hot mineral water pouring on the border between the sand and the salty water. A perfect place to finish our active holiday!

This visit to Varna was marked for me with passing over the “bridge of wishes”, to be found in the Morskata Gradina (Sea Garden) - ask the locals how to find the bridge, make a wish, close your eyes and walk over it. They say the wishes come true.

Entering the bus at 1am I fell asleep the moment I sat down, and awoke only when the bus entered Sofia.