Quite honestly, before researching where I wanted to go on this trip around the world I wasn’t sure where Bulgaria was. Now, I can confidently say it’s one of my favorite countries. It has everything you could possibly be looking for! There are beautiful mountain ranges with huts where you can stay overnight while hiking, many lakes, holy monasteries, and endless gorgeous views. The Black Sea is on the east side of the country, and has some beautiful, and peaceful coastal towns. The capital, Sofia, is a metropolitan paradise, with lively streets, delicious food and friendly locals. What’s there not to like? Answer: nothing!

Sofia is also incredibly affordable, which provides another great reason to love the country. The food was one of the main reasons why we wanted to stay an extra few days! Collectively, we decided Little Things was our favorite restaurant of the trip so far. It was absolutely beautiful, located in a three story home, filled with trinkets that made us feel like we were at our hip, trendy grandma’s house. While food in the Balkans is delicious, it’s also very heavy and meat focused, so, being in Bulgaria was a refreshing change of pace with light, but incredibly flavorful food. We had bruschetta and a grilled avocado salad that absolutely blew our minds. We literally both stopped our conversation mid-sentence, sat there in silence and enjoyed every bite. This place is amazing. We followed up our appetizers with mushroom pasta, and a pork cutlet with a creamy anchovy sauce. 10/10.

Another remarkable restaurant was Made in Home, which is right off the major strip of shops and restaurants around the corner from Little Things. It has a very comfortable restaurant, with plush seats and couches and an eccentric, artsy vibe. The ceiling was covered with pages from books, potted plants were on every table, and alternative art lined the walls. We started off with iced pineapple, cinnamon ginger tea (wow!). The food was beyond amazing. We ordered a chicken honey mustard salad, and it was one of the most colorful (and delicious) salads I’ve ever seen. Well worth a visit!

If you’re looking for something sweet, Confetti is your spot. We loved it so much, we went back three times in two days! They’re known for high-quality gelato, with a HUGE selection. They’re very helpful, and since we went when it wasn’t crazy busy, they let us sample 12 different flavors! They have everything from strawberry basil to ricotta & fig. All together, I think we got about 10 scoops of ice cream there, and loved every flavor. You won’t be disappointed.

Sofia is home to many wonderful cafes, and we visited a couple to get some work done while we traveled. 2 Giraffes was one of our favorites, with outlets, spacious seating and superfood smoothies! Another to check out would be Fabrika Daga, providing speciality coffee and delicious homemade pastries, although Cakey Bakey has some of the best baked goods you’ll taste in Sofia. The Tea House is another great tucked-away location that serves over 60 types of tea and offers vegetarian cuisine accompanied by an art gallery and live music.

I especially loved the free graffiti tour of the city! It meets in front of the St. Sofia statue daily at 6:00pm (1800h), and you get to explore the city in a different light. The tour takes you down side streets and underground areas, and by the end you have a much better idea of what graffiti means to the city. The guide showed us some beautiful pieces of art, explained what tags were (and we even made our own!) and provided a wealth of interesting background information on Sofia and the city’s street art scene. We were even taken into a secret graffiti cafe, where an entire house and backyard is dedicated to creating art. It was one of the best tours I’ve been on. Another highly recommended tour is Balkan Bites, a free food tour! You read that right. FREE FOOD. It’s a group tour with it’s own guide, four restaurants, and a two hour tour of the city, all for free. It’s a one of a kind tour, but be there early, because they reach their max group size quick, especially in the summer. It meets daily in front of the head statue at Stefan Stambolov, which is in Crystal Park, at 2:00pm (1400h).

We stayed in Sofia for one night after a five hour bus ride from Skopje, Macedonia. Our plan was to head to the mountains for a couple of days of hiking, before returning to Sofia to rest and recover. Our first stop was hopping on a bus that leaves once daily at 10:20am (1020h) from Sofia to Rila Monastery. It’s a two and a half hour ride, so we arrived around 1:00pm (1300h), and had two hours to explore, before the bus back to town left at 3:00pm (1500h).

Rila Monastery is known as a holy place for spiritual achievement. The “Miracle Worker”, Saint John of Rila, settled down in the Rila Mountains to live there in the late 800’s. He was described as fully dedicated to a life of isolation and prayers to God. “Rocks were his bed and sky his covers,” because he lived 12 years in a cold cave to develop his strong faith and resist the temptation from the devil. Saint John eventually founded Bulgarian monasticism, and through his glorious spiritual achievement, God honored Bulgaria with holy relics, which are a source of healing and power. As a result, the Rila Monastery has become the Bulgarian Jerusalem. There are an abundance of tourists and locals that come to see it, but it wasn’t super busy when we were there, fortunately. I would recommend going during a weekday. The chapel itself is completely covered in colorful depictions of biblical stories that I looked at for an hour. The interior is beautiful with art covering the walls, and a massive golden chandelier suspended in the center of the chapel. It’s a very silent and spiritual place. No pictures are allowed inside the chapel, so be respectful of that. There’s also a couple of small museums that cost a few Bulgarian Lev (less than $5 USD) to get inside, if you want to learn more about the history of the monastery. There are also rooms available for guests to stay overnight for about $24 USD/night, but the monks are in bed around 7:00pm (1900h), so the monastery is very restrictive after that time. Immediately outside the gates of the monastery is a restaurant that serves delicious and traditional Bulgarian food. We enjoyed bean stew, and a traditional cheese dip with a huge loaf of monk bread. The monk bread is handmade by the monks, and it’s light and fluffy. It was delicious, especially paired with the creamy, cheese dip which has egg and sausage mixed in. The roasted rabbit was also delicious, and the perfect meal before getting back on the bus.

We told the bus driver we wanted to go to Dupnica, and he let us know when we needed to transfer to a different mini-bus. That mini-bus dropped us off at a small bus stop at Dupnica that was a 10 minute walk from the bus that would then transfer us to Sapareva Banya. This is the closest town to the beginning of the Seven Rila Lakes trailhead, so it’s a great place to spend the night, so that the hike can be started first thing in the morning. Seven Lakes has become a very popular hike due to the installation of a chairlift, that allows tourists to save an extra couple hours. However, there was a lot of backlash due to the chairlift building because of environmental concerns. In order to build the chairlift, a large stretch of land was deforested, and the extra foot traffic is causing the lakes to become swampy. It’s something to be conscious of. Round trip tickets for the chairlift are about $20 USD, and it’s a 15 minute ride to the top. From there, you can hike for as long as you want. After about 30 minutes of very easy hiking, you can see the first couple of lakes.

The seven lakes appear in this order: The Lower Lake, Fish Lake, Trefoil, Twin, Kidney, Eye & Tear. If you want to get to the main viewpoint where you can see all of them, it’s probably about an hour and half. For the full experience, I would recommend hiking the saddle, it is a loop that allows for the highest views possible. There’s also a Bulgarian flag at the top! I would give yourself four hours for the entirety of the hike, but we took our time, ate lunch, went for a swim in one of the lakes, and stopped for plenty of pictures, so it was easily an all-day event. Honestly, the majority of the hiking is very easy if you’re reasonably fit. The loop was gorgeous, and provides breathtaking views of the seven lakes, the mountain range and grassy plains filled with sheep. We even made friends with a lovable sheepdog we named Buloone. It’s also possible to hike to the Rila Monestary from here, but it’s a six hour hike. Some people choose to camp overnight, but we had plans to hike Masala, the highest mountain in the Balkans, so we headed to Samokov for the night, so we could start hiking again early in the morning! However, after a taxi ride there, a bout of food poisoning prevented us from being able to hike. The next morning, instead of conquering Masala, we hopped on a bus to Sofia to rest and recover (and eat lots of gelato from Confetti).

Sofia is a big transportation hub, so there’s lots of trains and buses going everywhere in the Balkans. We spontaneously decided to take an overnight bus to Istanbul, instead of sticking to our plan of going to Romania! After our incredible time spent in Bulgaria (food poisoning aside), any other country is going to have a hard time topping it, but we’ve been continually more and more impressed with every country we’ve seen. We’ll see if that streak ends!

The adventure continues!

Lexi