The holidays come to an end - on Sunny Beach

The holidays come to an end - on Sunny Beach, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

Well, here we are 50 hours later on the road back to Varna, this time in a taxi driven by a man who HAS shaved his legs and arms, he being from a younger generation and not having worked on ships.

So, two days of high impact tourism in Nessebar and neighbouring Sunny Beach.

Nessebar, on a promontary jutting out into the sea is full of old Byzantine era churches and delightful old wooden houses has given itself up for small hotels and guest houses, restaurants, cafes and street after street of souvenir shops, covering every inch of street. Busloadsof tourists come over during the day, wandering behind their tour leaders. And then in the evening, the volume is turned right up so that evry street and every restaurant is full of the tourists who had sent their day on Sunny Beach. Restaurants everywhere yet difficult to get a seat. Amazing! Good to see for the Bulgarian economy.

Sunny Beach is exactly that, a long expanse of white sand in a wide bay, Nessebar to the south. The bach is fringed by trendy beach bars and backed by streets of modern economy-style hotels, many with pools, catering for the masses who have booked a cheap summer holiday in Bulgaria.

We spent our mornings wandering around the old town and snoozing in air-conditioned comfort in our Royal Palace Hotel before making our way to the beaches of Sunny Bay at around 3, after the strongest rays of the sun had dimmed, staying until the beaches were emptying at around 8'ish. With no umbrella and not all too much sun tan cream, we thankfully avoided any sunburn.
We ended up meeting some chaps from Greece and Bulgaria, who were visiting with their friends from Austria and Poland and rhey took us out for dinner back in Sunny Beach last night. 11 pm and still impossible to get a table without waiting, the retaurant was still receiving customers at 2 in the morning. By now though, most of the bars were shut, apart from some go-go bars and late night drinking bars for the Brits, Dutch and their Bulgarian imitators. All safe, all good fun, nice fir us to experience for a night, nice for them to enjoy their week or two!

A nice way to end the holiday, especially as we didn't have to get up until midday today.