Into Bulgaria

 Tue - Wed 17th - 18th Oct

It’s been three days since we left Stoupa and we have covered 607 miles in 15 hours of ignition-on driving. I’m finding more and more statistics in the vehicle tracker app.

These motorways are lovely to drive. There’s relatively little traffic and for a Land Rover 110 driver it is blissfully easy. Get up to speed, engage overdrive, hear and feel the engine revs. reduce by 28% and then accelerate with that extra ‘capacity’ and sit at 65-70 mph.

Just when you are happily cruising, up pops another “Toll Post” sign and you have a few hundred metres to disengage overdrive, drop a few gears and then slow to the booth. Here the manned cabin attendants issue a fixed charge for a specific length of road. How these were worked out, I don’t know, obviously. They are a standard charge, based on vehicle type with the additional complication of height. This is ‘a problem’, as we are higher than the normal cars but clearly we aren’t the vans and light trucks that the signs say. One or two unhelpful attendants have charged the higher amount, literally.

You don’t have a ticket to show where you started your motorway journey, or how far you have driven. Nothing that straightforward. In Greece the system is that they charge you for every section of just a few kms. In some cases this can be a few euro and in others a few cents.

Yes, we have been charged as little as €0.30 at one booth and every car that passed would have been charged that. It wasn’t as if it is a quaint English stone bridge, where tolls have been collected since 1256 and a bylaw states that they still have to charge 2 scrots or whatever. This is a modern motorway and I’m sure things could be different.

In France you join a chargeable section and collect a ticket. Minutes or hours of driving later, you handover that ticket and a clever computer calculates the toll. Then you move on, back into overdrive. In Greece it’s almost as if any advantage of speed on the carriageway, is countered by the number of toll posts. Today, over less than 200 miles, we paid a toll at nine places. As the woman in the motor home in Stoupa would have exclaimed, FFS!

We had to cross the Corinth Canal. There is no doubt when you are there. Suddenly there’s vehicles everywhere, with buses and people and tour guides holding up lollipop signs so that the tourists know where to walk. It isn’t difficult. You walk over a rusty road bridge and look over.

 Wow! It’s pretty good. What a crazy thing. Even better for us, there was a vessel passing through. It came towards us and then underneath, out of sight. We were the only people that thought to run back to the end and then across to the other side for another view. The lollipop holders have missed a trick there. 

It is a good sight but I recommend you go when a boat is passing through.

We have a spare day and the CPO decided that a visit to the Pelion would be good. This is a peninsula on the east coast. We were slightly wondering what we might find, as we heard that they have had some extreme weather, in September and then just a week or so ago.

As we passed through the large town of Volos, we started to see piles of debris and dried mud along the side of the road. This looked a bit weird but it got worse. At Agria, a town just before the designated campsite Camping Sikia, it looked as if the world had ended. Mud, stone, rocks, debris, floodwater, it was all there. Piles of it, along with branches, trees, twisted metal. Total carnage. We drove over a bridge and the debris was higher than the road.

Later we were told that they had five days of incessant intense rain in September. They are still sorting out.Obviously it wouldn’t be raining again there when we arrived…

So we had a wet night. The rain and the temperature were like what you would call “a disappointing day weather-wise”, when you are on holiday in the UK. We cooked inside, slept well with the comfort of the rain drops and then got up, showered in the nice facilities, had breakfast and decided to use our spare day in Bulgaria instead.

Apart from the Toll Posts, which was, after all only a joking matter, we had a great cruise north. This is the first trip since its rebuild, where the Roamerdrive (overdrive) has been used a lot and it is perfect. It is a sixth gear and makes the motorway a pleasure.

Once we got past the huge sprawl of Thessaloniki and left it to our east, we were on the last few kms towards the border crossing. This is an EU - EU border so we were not expecting any issues but were a bit surprised when, a km or two out, we came up behind lorries parked slightly on the hard shoulder and realised that this was the back of a queue. We slowed and as there were no cars, just trundled along the side of them. There were hundreds. The Greece equivalent of ‘Operation Stack’, or just a normal day at the Greece - Bulgaria border?

We only had a short queue ourselves, with all cars spread across three or four checkpoints. The interesting thing is that the Greece ‘out’ and Bulgaria ’in’ windows are next to each other. That saves on buildings. Normally it’s a few hundred yards between them. They do make you get out of the vehicle though, not a problem for the agile co-driver.