Even most experienced travelers don’t know much about Bulgaria, even though it’s one of the best—if not the best—values in Europe. It’s also got far more green space than most of the other more crowded EU countries.

This was the third stop on my Eastern European jaunt. (See Why Travel to Slovakia? and A Little Taste of Transylvania for the other round-ups.) As a writer, it’s the one I found most interesting, to the point there will be a story on my trip there in the next issue of Perceptive Travel. That’s because I went in with very few preconceptions and was happily surprised on a daily basis. Sure, it’s rough around the edges, but that’s a big part of the appeal: you don’t share any stretch of sidewalk anywhere with hundreds of package tourists disgorged from a tour bus or river cruise ship. Which leads us to the the first point:

In Bulgaria, you can still feel like an explorer.

When you get settled into a backpacker circuit these days, it’s easy to feel like you’re shuffling along a path so well-worn that it might as well be a moving sidewalk in an airport. Around you are hundreds, maybe thousands of people doing the same things you are, posting the same photos, just like thousands of people did before you got there. In Bulgaria, if there are a dozen foreigners in one restaurant it’s an anomaly. I only remember seeing one tour bus in mid-May, at the deserving UNESCO World Heritage Rila Monastery pictured below. With the strange alphabet, strange language, wide open spaces, and relatively removed geography, Bulgaria just doesn’t get the big crowds. Coming here still feels like an adventure.

Good “Slow Food” for Great Prices.

The newish trend of seeking out “slow food” destinations and “farm to table” restaurants gets a big chuckle here. That’s just the way everyone eats, all the time. Every house has a grape vine trellis and a little garden plot. Supermarkets are far outnumbered by open village markets and roadside veggie stands. People eat what’s in season and can/pickle for the winter, just like they always did. Despite eating a staggering amount of dairy—especially white cheese and yogurt—this is a much healthier looking population than the one I live with in the USA. I’ll do a post later on prices, but take my word for it that you’ll double-check your exchange rate calculations the first few times you see a menu. The wine and beer are consistently good too and rakia (liquor distilled from grapes, plums, or other fruit) is practically free.

One Third of Bulgaria is Protected Green Space

In much of western and central Europe, there’s very little old growth forest left and a lot of woodland has been replaced by an expanding population. In Bulgaria they still complain about the Ottomans cutting down their trees way back when and lament how the Soviets would have cut down more if it hadn’t been so much trouble and distance to transport the logs. I’m used to seeing a lot of deforestation in developing countries, especially where some people still cook over a wood fire, but here the mountains here are a rolling carpet of green and you constantly pass dense forests while on the roadways. This means…

Impressive Hiking Options

I was a guest of Odysseia-In Tour Company in Bulgaria. When you take a look at what’s offered on their Bulgaria Hiking site, it’s hard to believe you can do all this in a country most people can’t even find on a map. There are three major mountain ranges, two of them a short hop from Sofia, and you can do multi-day hikes staying in organized mountain huts with cafes or staying in villages guesthouses. You can hike around glacial lakes, visit painted monasteries, see ancient castles, pass roaring waterfalls, and take in the panoramic vistas. Besides the great experience, reaching nearly 3,000 meters, the prices are excellent. Around $100 per person or less for a guided tour with accommodation and 2 meals a day. Check out this hiking tour as an example. (And yes, you can set up snowshoeing or mountain biking if you’d like. Or a kayaking/rafting trip.)

Veliko Turnovo

The historic town of Plovdiv, with its Roman ruins and interesting architecture, gets more visitors because it’s an easy trip from Sofia. But if I could return to one spot in Bulgaria and linger for a while, it would be Veliko Turnova. Under different conditions, this is the kind of place that normally gets trampled in the blink of an eye. Just from the look and feel, you would expect it to be overrun with hostels and backpacker cafes in the tradition of Chefchaouen, Luang Prabang, Hoi An, San Cristobal de Las Casa, or Hampi. Then the adventurous independent travelers with more money would follow, and it would suddenly get on the radar of the glossy magazines. It would, that is, if more people knew about it and the town weren’t so far off the beaten track. It is on the train line from Istanbul to Bucharest though, so explore that option—just don’t tell everyone yet. Here’s what it costs to stay in a hostel there and my hotel with the great view below, Hotel Gurko, runs 35 to 60 euros double with breakfast.

The Best Ski Deals in Europe

I visited in May, after the ski season ended, but I did spend a little time in one ski village and got a look at prices and the mountain trails. The most expensive walk-up one-day lift ticket in the country is under US$40 and that’s for a place where you can catch a gondola right in the center of town that takes you to the summit. Some are half that amount. I saw full equipment rental signs all over the place for 10 euros a day ($13). Think you can’t afford a ski chalet? Maybe you can here. In Bansko I saw multiple 1BR condos for sale for less than 20,000 euros, many larger ones with a view going for what works out to $60 a square foot. See more info here on Bansko.

***

Yes, there are some drawbacks. It’s not easy being a totally independent traveler here and canvassing the country unless you’ve got both a good phrase book and a good guidebook. There’s usually someone around who speaks English in places that get some tourists, but in others not so much and the alphabet takes some effort to figure out. Like many countries that were behind the iron curtain for decades, you see a fair bit of ugly architecture and buildings falling apart from the “fast and functional” construction. Overall though, Bulgaria is a breath of fresh air—often literally.

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I get start-ups pitching me on all kinds of services that seem to be solutions in search of a problem, but I used to like sending postcards a lot and I’ve sent fewer and fewer of them in the past few years. The ability to e-mail digital photos, post them to social media outlets, or put them on a blog has made the postcard kind of a relic.

That’s a shame though because the humble postcard still has a much bigger impact than something you glance at on a screen for a few seconds and then forget about. The permanence of a photo on a card makes it a grander gesture, in the same way that a  hand-written thank you note is far more thoughtful than a dashed-off e-mail. (When I got married, my wife and I sent the thank-you cards for the gifts as postcards from Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel—that had an impact.)

It’s a hassle though in a foreign country and the postage costs have gotten outrageous in some spots. Expect to pay two dollars or more per card in many countries. Twice now I’ve bought postcards, filled them out, then balked at the postage amount and waited until I got home to mail them.

Which brings us to Postcardly. In the past I’ve tried a few services like HazelMail that were meant to allow you to put your own photo on a card and send it to your recipient. All of them have had their flaws though, from buggy software that would crash in the last step five minutes in or credits you had to pay for that you may or may not use or be able to retrieve months later.

Postcardly takes a different approach that solves both those problems. There’s no software on the user end to mess with. You just make up a “…@postcardly.com” e-mail address for every recipient that’s assigned to their address you fill in. After that, every time you send an e-mail to that person and attach a photo, it gets mailed automatically to that address. You can fill in addresses as you need them or do a bunch at once.

In my tests the postcards came out great. I often think my shots are as good or better than the sun-faded ones in the storefronts, plus I have a connection with the photo. The shots came out beautiful, like something you’d print in a photo shop, but on thicker card stock like a photo. On the back was the exact message I typed in the e-mail, printed out.

The postcard my sister is getting

Now okay, it was a little strange that one sent from Bulgaria had a stamp that said “Aloha” and the postmark was from Seattle, but it’s the price you pay for convenience. If you want the exotic postmark and stamp that nobody can read back home, you have to go old school. But with this Postcardly service, you’ll actually get it done and sent.

There’s no app for this service because there doesn’t need to be to actually use it: you just send an e-mail from your phone and attach the photo. Having said that, it would be nice if there was a way to import a contact while in your phone so you don’t have to enter the address on a tiny screen—especially if you don’t know it by heart. I just did it all from my laptop, so it didn’t matter, but hopefully this will get easier in time. For now, if you’ve got a good enough camera on your phone that you’re going to use that, load up the addresses before you leave.

I did kind of miss the ability to preview what I’m sending: to do that you need to send it to a preview address and they’ll e-mail you a PDF. You can also have this as an option for each one you send out to see what they’re seeing. My cards arrived in just over a week, which is certainly faster than you’ll get from say, Jamaica or Mexico.

As for the pricing, this service is $1 a postcard or less, done on a subscription service (that you can set up to expire automatically) or as a one-shot deal. It costs $5 a month for 5 postcards, $10 a month for 15 postcards, or a one-time charge of $20 for 20 prepaid postcards, for domestic U.S. postcards. International postcards count as two postcards against your monthly limit (or the number of postcards on your account, in the case of a pre-paid plan). Want to give it a test spin first? Right now they’re offering a free 3-postcard trial. So what have you got to lose? Go check it out.

Disclosure: Postcardly gave me a 10-card trial instead of 3 to check this service out. There was no other compensation and I’m just reviewing it here because I feel comfortable recommending it.

Despite using the euro, Slovakia is a good enough value that it’s taking another country’s place for the Europe section of the next edition of The World’s Cheapest Destinations.

I used to think that the Czech Republic and Slovakia split up after the fall of the Soviet Union because of big national pride issues. In reality, it was mostly the politicians that wanted the split. People I’ve met on both sides of the line say had it been put to a referendum, the split would have failed miserably. The citizens of the two countries still think of themselves as one, but this way there were double the number of jobs for the people in power.

Unfortunately for Slovakia, much of the big business money and tourism stayed on the Czech side. There was already more industry there as the Slovak side was more agricultural. And the Czechs had Prague, which was 10 times more interesting to visit than Bratislava. So Slovakia is like the plain sister who is constantly overshadowed by her flashy older one.

Typical wine prices in euros: 2.5 to 6.5

The good news for you is, that makes it a better value for travelers overall. Bratislava has somewhat higher restaurant costs because of it being a river cruise stop and part of some coach tours, but it’s still far less expensive than Prague. The real values are in the lesser-visited but more interesting eastern part of the country, anchored by the beautiful small city of Kosice, pictured at the top. The whole main drag is pedestrian-only all day every day and it’s filled with cafes and restaurants with a view of the opera house and cathedral. From here you can get to dozens of interesting places, including the High Tatras Mountains, in 1-3 hours. Castles, great manor houses, caverns, monasteries, wineries, national parks with good hiking, skiing, rafting, cycling, and lots more.

Everything is priced in euros, but I’m doing the math for my fellow yanks to put it in dollars, at the current rate of 1 euro = $1.30.

Accommodation in Slovakia
Not many backpackers make it here—heck not many travelers from the west period do—so outside of the capital there’s not the bustling backpacker infrastructure you find in the northern Czech Republic or Budapest with dozens of hostels to choose from and day trip tours going out regularly. So lodging tends to be a better deal for mid-range travelers than shoestring ones as almost nothing is over $100 per night. It’s far easier if you’re a couple and not a single as hostels are rare. Camping is easy and cheap though and around the hiking areas you can rent a simple mountain hut for two for under 10 euros/$13.

Camping at Slovakian Paradise national park – $8 one person with tent, $12 two.
Mountain hut here or in High Tatras mountains – $6-$10 per person
Hostel bed in Bratislava – $17 – $25 per person
2- to 4-star hotel or pension – $26 – $70 double, usually incl. breakfast
Apartment for four with kitchen – $69 to $90
Best hotel in Kosice – often $120 standard double (Doubletree by Hilton)

Typical pension prices in Kosice

Food and Drink Prices in Slovakia

This is where the real bargains are. You can eat well and drink well (the wine and beer are both excellent) for a fraction of western Europe prices. This is one of those countries where a soda can cost more than a beer or wine, as can coffee. You can drink the tap water though.
Set meal 3-course lunch $3 to $8
Soups – $1 to $2.50
Main dishes – $1.50 to $6
500ml beer in a bar – $1 (happy hour) to $2.50 (nice place), average in the middle
500ml beer in a store – $0.60 to $1
Good bottle of wine in bar/restaurant – $6 to $12
Good bottle of wine in a store – majority $3.50 to $8, premium $8 to $20
Glass of house wine in a bar/restaurant – $1 to $2.60
Shot of local fruit brandy – $0.60 to $1.60
500ml of local honey – $5 to $7
Kilo (2.2 pounds) of seasonal produce – $0.75 to $2
Local cheese 100 grams – $0.40 to $2
Rolls and baguettes – $0.20 to $0.90

Transportation

There’s not enough demand here for any kind of tourist shuttle system, so bring a phrase book and a map or guidebook to figure out where you’re going. Trains cover most of where you’d want to go, but sometimes you’ll need a bus.
Long train ride (Bratislava to Kosice) – $24 2nd class, $35 1st class, 1/2 price for students
Short train ride (Kosice to High Tatras hiking point) – $8 2nd class, $12 first class
City bus ticket – $0.60 to $1
Short Intercity bus ticket – $2.25 for 40 kms
Long Intercity bus ticket – $22 for 400 kms
Taxi ride – $0.80 to $1.30 per km, Bratislava center to airport $14 to $18

What I got for 2 euros at the supermarket

Other costs in Slovakia

Some attraction places hit you with an extra charge for using your camera, so either leave it in a locker or be stealthy with a phone.
Admission to castles, manors, and castles – $2.60 to $6.50
Admission to monasteries & churches – free to $3.90
This boat trip on the border with Poland – $13
Bike rental in same town – $6.20 half day
One-day ski pass – $17 to $36

For some reason this Euro26 card seems to be more commonly known here than the ISIC card, but either should get you a discount of 50% off most attractions and trains if you’re a student.

This cheap travel blog has been packed with informative posts and photos to make you drool lately, so time for a bit of fun instead. It always gives me great joy to find the English language used as a mere design element rather than to communicate. In most countries it is very difficult to find a t-shirt in the local language. Almost everyone, it seems, thinks it’s better to have a message in English, even if they can’t understand what it says.

Sometimes it’s clear nobody knows what it says, or they wouldn’t be wearing it around. Like this one at the top I found in a storefront in Sofia, Bulgaria. I walked for miles in that city looking for something in the mysterious Cryllic alphabet, but the only thing I could find was ugly tourist shirts just spelling out Bulgaria or with the original alphabet scrawled out by the founder. Neither something any local would wear. Instead you get boob references.

The second one is much like a few I have bought over the years in Korea, Thailand, and Peru. Complete gibberish meant to look like a cool message. Really though, just a bunch of random phrases slapped together. If you can’t read the second one, here’s what it says:

Blog
Old Fashioned Root Beer Floats
Catfish Power
NewYork City
Sports Wear

I’m making my way through the cheaper countries of Europe right now, finding good values all over compared to their neighbors to the west. Next stop, Romania. 

I spent most of my time in Transylvania, which I’ll discuss without mentioning any mythical creatures of the night. This is the area where most travelers gravitate to if they’ve got some time, which they rightfully should. It’s a gorgeous area with well-preserved buildings from the medieval times through Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and more, with a strong Saxon/German influence.

The photo at the very top and the one to the right are from where I arrived on an overnight train headed east: Sighisoara. How can you even say that name without smiling? Yeah, it’s a tourist trap town, but a deserving one. Plus once half the tour buses pull out at the end of the day, it’s a lovely place to hang out and absorb the feeling of living in history.

It costs about $3 to tour the citadel, a couple dollars more for a taxi to the center from the train station, and there are hostels with beds for $10-$12. There’s also a campground outside of town with lots of facilities.

The next shot is from Sibiu, which is not as photogenic or hilly, but feels more like a real city than an open-air museum. There’s a long pedestrian-only street filled with bars, shops, and restaurants and it’s a lively scene at night. This was a European Capital of Culture a few years back. You can sit down and get a half-liter beer for a dollar and you can get 3 covrigs (simits in Turkey) for another dollar, so what’s not to like?

It’s not all about the buildings though. With high mountains in many directions, the scenery alone is often worth stopping for. This is the view from a monastery I visited. If you’ve gotta be a monk, seeing this every day would make it a bit easier. (You can spend the night there for about $16 double.)

I always ask myself when traveling to different places, could I live here? I didn’t really feel a yes anywhere in Romania until I got to Brasov. It’s near multiple ski slopes, it’s an easy train ride to the capital, and has another one of those long pedestrian streets full of fun places to eat and drink. And it’s got mountains right next to it. That’s a pic from a nice spring day above.

More later on prices, a real article later in Perceptive Travel, but for now some images to ponder from Romania. As with Slovakia, this is definitely a destination worth visiting, budget reasons or not. But if you are on a budget, this place is a great value.