Luckily,
Belfast has a Bulgarian travel agent, Balkan Tours.
The pictures in the brochure looked
good, so I booked a week's package holiday in Zlatni Pjasaci, north of
Varna. The name means "Golden Sands", and that's what English-speaking
people invariably call it. It's a resort of perhaps forty to fifty
hotels, built in wooded hillsides around a good beach. Even though it
was built in less-enlightened times (most of the development seems to
be 60's and 70's), the planners avoided the concrete jungle style of
the Mediterranean. Lots of shady trees remain, and even the coastal
strip looks more natural than the equivalent in Southern Spain. Having
said that, though, it's still very touristy. Because it's a
purpose-built resort, there are no "normal" shops or houses, and
everything is holiday-big-and-bold. The biggest group of foreign tourists are
Russians, and if half of what I hear about the hard times in Russia
today is true, this must look like Fairyland to them. The commercial
objective, of course, is to extract the maximum money from the punters,
and I was told that prices in the resort are much higher than elsewhere
in Bulgaria. This meant that a half-litre of beer cost the equivalent
of 30p to 50p. Extortion.
Zlatni Pjasaci itself was in the eclipse totality zone, with a duration of totality of about a minute and a half. Even so, I was able to get a booking with only two weeks notice, although only in one of the more "basic" hotels. I hoped that when I got there, I'd be able to travel North a bit to maximise my eclipse experience, and it turned out that I'd been lucky again. In the hotel was a group from Astronomy Ireland who'd arranged a bus to take them to Shabla, right on the maximum totality line. I booked a seat on their bus.
Those who could stand the
heat headed for the beach. Others sat in the shade provided by the
hotel -- the only substantial building. It was hot, damned hot, as the
old pith-helmet brigade used to say. Some braved the blasting heat to
queue to look at the sun's image in the biggest telescope at the site,
even though nothing was happening yet. It would still be a couple of
hours until the moon's shadow started to nibble away at the sun's disc.
By the time the crescent had become thin, the camera was having a hard time managing the correct exposure, so the image burned out into the celestial banana in picture 4. It was about ten minutes to totality, and cool in the open now, so I went back to the thronging masses to soak up the atmosphere.
On the way, I noticed the
shimmering crescents created by the shadows of the trees.
As totality ended, light levels rapidly returned to the appearance of normal daylight. The crescent sun would be visible for a couple of hours, but people seemed a bit blase about this. For one thing, they'd seen this crescent thing already today, and for another, what could compare with the total obliteration of the sun?
