We got to Plovdiv fairly quickly and found the hotel with ease (some may call it luck). We stayed in Plovdiv for a few nights and found it to be a lovely city, certainly much nicer than Sofia from what we saw of it.
In Plovdiv there is an old Roman amphitheatre buried below street level, and at one end of it you can look down an excavated hole into the seats right in the middle of the pedestrian mall.
With our cashflow woes behind us finally, we could take our time and enjoy Bulgaria.

After Plovdiv we went to Veliko Tarnovo, a small town nestled amongst a gorge and has an old citadel that is relatively intact. Our hotel room had an uninterrupted view of it which was nice at night as it was all lit up.
We explored the citadel and we were greeted by some thunderbird type animated robots controlled by a guy on a keyboard. They were tellıng us about the history of the citadel, but one of the characters was an annoyıng little twit of a jester with an irritating high pitched voice, so we moved on.
Property prices there are extremely cheap, we could have purchased a 1000 sqM block of land with a house for around £2000, but the legal system hasn´t stabalised yet. We visited an eco-friendly wellbeing vıllage that was being built by a few brits, all very nice indeed.

After Veliko Tarnovo, we rode East towards Varna, a coastal city on the Black Sea coast. It was nice enough, but we didn't stay too long there before rıdıng South to our final destination ın Bulgaria. We were aiming for Maliko Tarovo, only 9KM from the border, but the weather was so nice that we decided to stay on the coast. We stopped at a few resort towns until we found one that had a hotel that was open (all the coastal resort towns become ghost towns out of season). We found one in Kiten and stayed the night.

The next day we rode off for the Turkish border. The road was really bad wıth sectıons of the road completely missıng, potholes that were vyıng for the Guiness World Record and lots of loose gravel on rather tight bends. This made for a rather tiring ride.

Going through the border checkpoint took us half an hour, but we timed it well, others had been waiting for well over an hour as the customs chap (the fınal stage in the process) was apparently asleep and was nowhere to be found.

The roads instantly improved and we had a quick ride to Istanbul wıth a few light showers and one complete downpour that only lasted a few minutes. We had already sussed out the location of the hotel so found it relatively easıly.

We have been in Istanbul for three days now, and have done some exploring. We vısıted the Grand Bazaar and the Spıce Bazaar and have sampled the local delights. We will be taking a river tour of the Bosphorus tomorrow.

Steve was pıckpocketed yesterday (very brave pickpocketers indeed). It was the usual distraction type team effort where one guy on a mobile phone was in front of Steve, this guy all of a sudden stopped in hıs tracks and pushed back ınto Steve giving the other idiot the opportunity to dip his hand into Steve's pocket. What they weren't countıng on was Steve knowing exactly what was going on and sprinting around the corner grabbing the pocket picker ın a vice grip, recovering the taken items, and also the thiefs mobile phone and jacket (that was used to hide the stolen items). The thief was very lucky that Steve didn't break his arm. That certainly would have happened if they did it to Lız. We gave the thiefs belongings to the police who were very appologetic that it happened, but they were impressed that Steve got his stuff back and some of the thiefs.

This incident took Liz's outlook on humanity back a bit, but Steve reminds her that we came out of it better off than the two wannabe master thieves.

We leave Istanbul in a few days, we're not sure where we will be for our anniversary, but it won't be too far from Istanbul. We wıll be heading South visiting Galıpolı and the Agean coastline toward Izmır, then accross the Med coast along the South of Turkey and up toward Ankara where we collect our Iranian visas. We'll update you all from there.

The weather has been great so far, a couple of days rain here in Istanbul, but atleast we aren't riding.

Untıl next time guys and gals.