Lolomiina: 26.06.2022
Well, the day started off so well. I cycled almost 60 kilometers through the Bulgarian forest from the start. Only one village in 60 Km. The road started off quite bumpy but got better along the way and it was very curvy, but as I've written in other posts, there's always a lot of loose gravel in curves.
There was a lot of police here, including larger transport vans. Later when shopping, I learned from a German-speaking taxi driver that this was border police. This road runs relatively parallel to the Turkish border and is heavily used by smugglers. Through the dense and uncontrollable forests, refugees manage to cross the border again and again. On this road, they are picked up by smugglers and brought to the Serbian border for 4000-6000€ per person.
My ride was supposed to continue along the Black Sea coast to the Romanian border.
After 200 kilometers, I gave up. The road was littered with speed cameras and completely opaque speed limits. Hardly any opportunities to stop and most junctions were dead ends, so you couldn't easily avoid them. The traffic was heavy, and towards the sea there were lots of holiday settlements and huge hotel complexes, but they looked quite nice, not like the concrete blocks you know from Turkey or Spain.
I found a nice little guesthouse and here I will try to find a tour through the mountains to the border with my notebook.