I spent the week of spring break exploring some of the country I’ve called home for the past seven months. Bulgaria is beautiful. It has craggy snow-capped mountains, rolling wooded hills, historic cities, expanses of agricultural land, and a seacoast. I dipped my feet in the Black Sea, though it was too cold in March to swim.
There’s a narrow-gauge rail line that runs through the mountains southeast of Blagoevgrad. The train ride is slow and scenic. My friend Tom, an American who’s lived here for years but had never ridden this train, offered to accompany me, and also offered to drive to the train station in Bansko, about 50 kilometers from Blagoevgrad.
He later said that if he had thought it through, he would have left his car at home and joined me on the bus from Blagoevgrad to Bansko, which would have gotten us there in plenty of time for the train. But it’s hard to shake the American mindset of driving as the first, best option. More on this later.
Tom’s plan was to accompany me as far as Plovdiv, and then take a bus back to Bansko the next day to pick up his car, while I continued my trip to the Black Sea coast. We changed to a regular train in the town of Septemvri, and arrived in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second-largest city, in time to check in to a hotel and see the sun set over the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. He told me about a place on the Black Sea called Nessebar, an old fortress built on a peninsula that is now a tourist resort. He suggested that March might be a good time to see it, as it would be uncrowded. The next day he went back to Blagoevgrad, and the day after that, I boarded a bus bound for the coast.
One remarkable thing about Bulgaria is that you can take a bus just about anywhere. The major cities are connected by rail, but even the most rural towns have regular bus service. The buses are more modern than the trains. Several bus companies run routes all over the country and into the neighboring countries. It’s easy to get from place to place without a car.
I spent a night and a day in Nessebar, walking the narrow stone streets and looking at the boats, most of which were not yet in the water. Most of the restaurants were not yet open for the season, but people were out in the sun, working on both boats and land properties. It reminded me of a tourist town in Maine stretching its arms after a long winter slumber.
At four in the afternoon, I took a bus back to Burgas, the port city on the Black Sea. There, I walked the beach, took in a public art exhibit called “Fishlove” (which featured photos of naked people posing with fish), had dinner, and boarded an overnight train to Sofia. A bus to Blagoevgrad left an hour after the train pulled in, and by nine o’clock Friday morning, I was back in my apartment drinking coffee.
The entire trip, back from a small town on the coast to a mid-sized city on the opposite side of the country, cost me 40 leva, or about $24. And it got me to thinking that if you can be a tourist in Bulgaria without a car, why can’t you do it in Maine? Instead of building parking lots, why can’t tourist towns like Stonington and Port Clyde and Southwest Harbor have daily bus service, even in the off-season? These are small towns, but so is Nessebar. And yet there’s an hourly bus to Burgas, with stops in a series of small towns, and people use it.
I talked with a few of my students about the American car-first mentality, and I observed that in Bulgaria it isn’t unusual not to own a car. The societal pressure to own one doesn’t seem to exist. But they said it does in Sofia, which, despite a modern subway system built in the last ten years, is choked with cars.
That’s a shame, because one of the worst things America has exported to the rest of the world is the idea of driving as a way of life. Maine does not have comprehensive public transportation, because most public officials own cars, and they consider the cost of bus service before the convenience. I’d like to invite them to Bulgaria and let them see that it can be otherwise.
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