August 15, 1996

"Where shall we live tonight?" In Bulgaria that's been a frequently asked question that always remains unanswered until the last minute when we stop the van. Point to any camping tepee on the road map and chances are good it doesn't exist anymore. We are falling way behind on our rubber stamps.

The rubber stamp concept is a leftover from the communist mentality. Every visitor to Bulgaria is given a yellow card at customs. Every night must be accounted for by a stamp. The ideas is to insure all us "rich" tourists spend lots of money at Bulgarian hotels. Our only problem is we don't stay at hotels. Campgrounds are suppose to supply the rubber stamp too. But, since we can't find very many (or the ones we do find have no stamp), we're a bit out of luck. We're just going to have to take our chances at border control.

In Veliko Tarnovo we spent over an hour searching out the campground described in the Lonely Planet. We got hopelessly confused; asking for help only led us in circles. So we abandoned operations, headed to the center of town, paid for 24 hour parking in a three-star hotel lot and that was the end of our hunt. Hotel parking works well; we're self contained in the van with no need for amenities from the outside world. We go out for the day, come back when the sun has set, climb in and go to sleep. Can't turn the lights on though, it would give us away.

Too many nights in the same lot would give us away too. We had to find a campground somewhere. And we did, but purely by mistake. On the way to Plovdiv we stopped at a small cafe to switch drivers and there in front of us was a camping sign. For 600 leva (roughly $3) we were handed the keys to a cabin (which we didn't use) and a bathroom. The cabin was badly run down and dirty, but the bathroom had water and, brown or otherwise, it was wet.

Now it is night six for us and we have located another campground - glory be, another stamp. (Nights four and five were spent in the lot of a Plovdiv hotel). We've met two couples here, one from New Zealand and one from Australia, who have had equal trouble finding places to camp. By far, Bulgarian campgrounds rate as the hardest to find. But we've all found this place. The location is good (right below the Rila Monastery with it's enormous domes in the Rila Mountains) and it's relatively clean. So, at least for tonight and tomorrow, the answer to "where shall we live tonight?" has been answered.

Although our yellow cards were short on rubber stamps, they were accepted without question at the Bulgarian border. There were no taxes to pay, no requests for tax receipts, just two exit stamps in our passports. Two more stamps a bit further down the road welcomed us to Greece.