Bulgaria has all that tourists may crave

Sofia - Bulgaria has all that tourists may crave - seacoast, ski slopes, old cities and villages, palaces, museums and abundant history - but it has no roads to take them places with reasonable speed and comfort.
'Driving through Bulgaria is very difficult,' says Nikolaj, 55, who recently travelled across the country north-to-south, from Veliko Tarnovo to the spa Velingrad.
The 400-kilometre trip took him through mountains, which range across the entire country east-to-west. With no tunnels to straighten and flatten the course, it takes hours of crawling behind trucks before the three passes and bottlenecks are cleared.
Also the 485-kilometre drive from the capital Sofia to the Black Sea resort Zlatni Pjaseci is a seven-plus-hour agony of slow and dangerous wading through trucks, buses and even horse-pulled wagons.
Similarly slow and difficult is the 400-kilometre trip from Sofia to Burgas on the Black Sea, or in fact to any major tourist destination in the Balkan country.
Not good for a country which has recorded staggeringly quick growth of tourism over the previous five years.
Straddling the Europe-Asia corridor, Bulgaria is on the route of international heavy-duty transport, which mingles with the regular traffic, severely hampering it.
Lumbering truck and the lack of four-lane highways, of which Bulgaria has only 350 kilometres - for instance Switzerland, one- third in size, has more than 1,600 kilometres - are however not the only problems.
Worse on 'easier' and faster sections than on narrow, steep, curvy and slow roads, thousands of potholes large lurk to cause damage to tyre or even the wheel and cause delays and accidents.
The situation is aggravated in the winter, when snow and slush hide the holes and effectively turn them to booby traps for cars bound for the blooming ski centres, Pamporovo and Bansko.
'No exaggeration, somebody there were people changing wheels every few kilometres,' said Sasa, 39, who travelled from Serbia to Bansko with his family last January. 'We would never go with our own car.'
But with membership in the European Union just three months away, the country now hopes to see the light regarding its road infrastructure.
Bulgarian leaders plan to spend 9 billion euros (11.4 billion dollars) - half that money from the EU and the other half to be borrowed - by 2015 in order to double the length of highways and overhaul hundreds of kilometres of lesser roads.
'The development of the infrastructure is the top priority,' Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev said recently, calling on foreign investors to join in and take part in projects along the main transport corridors.

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